💾 Archived View for spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › computers › CYBERSPACE › walsercy.ber captured on 2023-07-10 at 19:12:29.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Note: Randy Walser has given me permission to distribute his paper in electronic form. It is fairly short -- 1000 lines -- but I will break it up into 4 parts for posting. Randy will be joining the newsgroup shortly. His email address is acad!randoid@well.sf.ca.us Here is Part One: ELEMENTS OF A CYBERSPACE PLAYHOUSE Randal Walser Autodesk Research Lab Autodesk, Inc. 2320 Marinship Way Sausalito, CA 94965 January 31, 1990 Forthcoming in Proceedings of National Computer Graphics Association '90 Annaheim, March 19-22, 1990 ABSTRACT Until recently, computer interface designers have regarded human beings as "users" of computers, and computers have been regarded as tools for the human mind. That view is now being challenged by an emerging paradigm that redefines the relationship between humans and computers. One manifestation of the new paradigm is an exciting new medium, called cyberspace, that provides people with virtual bodies in virtual realities that emerge from simulations of three dimensional worlds. Building on a conception of cyberspace as a form of theater, I sketch out the elements of a cyberspace playhouse, a new kind of social gathering place where people go to participate in three dimensional simulations. As a specific example, I consider how a playhouse might be organized for sports and fitness. INTRODUCTION Cyberspace is a medium that gives people the feeling they have been transported, bodily, from the ordinary physical world to worlds purely of imagination. Although artists can use any medium to evoke imaginary worlds, cyberspace carries the worlds themselves. It has a lot in common with film and stage, but is unique in the amount of power it yields to its audience. Film yields little power, as it provides no way for its audience to alter film images. Stage grants more power than film, as stage actors can "play off" audience reactions, but still the course of the action is basically determined by a playwright's script. Cyberspace grants ultimate power, as it enables its audience not merely to observe a reality, but to enter it and experience it as if it were real. No one can know what will happen from one moment to the next in a cyberspace, not even the spacemaker. Every moment gives every participant an opportunity to create the next event. Whereas film is used to show a reality to an au Currently cyberspace is the subject of much discussion and excitement, and not only for academic reasons. Just as industries grew up around radio, telephony, film, television, and computers, an industry is likely to grow up around cyberspace. Understanding its nature and envisioning its applications can have significant practical consequences. The trouble is, the technology of cyberspace is immature, the art scarcely exists, and the economics are problematical. While it is easy to see that something important is taking shape, it is too early to tell quite what to make of it (for a discussion of some possibilities see [19]). The premise underlying this paper is that cyberspace is fundamentally a theatrical medium, in the broad sense that it, like traditional theater, enables people to invent, communicate, and comprehend realities by "acting them out." This point of view has been expressed beautifully by Brenda Laurel [8]. Acting, under this view, is not just a form of expression, but a fundamental way of knowing. To act is to become someone else, in another set of circumstances, and thereby to know and experience a different reality. By giving his body over to a character, an actor enters a character's reality, and he can be said to embody (that is, provide a body for) the character. The character lives through the actor but so, too, does the actor live through the character. An actor in cyberspace is no different, except that the body she gives to her character is not her physical body, but rather her virtual one. She embodies the character but she, personally, is embodied by cyberspace. A group of people is the first ingredient of theater, so some way must be provided for cyberspace patrons to gather in one place. Of course, in principle there is no need for patrons to assemble in the same physical space, as high speed data communication channels can be used to bring them together in imaginary places. The day may come when people can enter cyberspace from their own homes, or perhaps from any location at all (just as it is now possible to place a phone call from any vehicle within a cellular phone grid). Meanwhile, the infrastructure of cyberspace is bulky and expensive enough to warrant a physical gathering place. In this paper I sketch out some possible elements of such a place, a new kind of social center, called a cyberspace playhouse, where people go to play roles in simulations. While I expect that playhouses will be used for many purposes, including drama, design, education, business, fitness, and fun, here I describe a playhouse which emphasizes sports and physical conditioning. I have focused on sport because I think it epitomizes the application areas for which cyberspace will turn out to be best suited; namely, social activities that engage not just the mind but the whole body and the whole spirit. Cyberspace has barely begun to evolve as a medium, and of course no one can hope to understand it fully until it has fully matured. Yet we can try to imagine what it might become, and try to make it as grand as we can imagine. Sport is an ideal area in which to sharpen our vision. Sport is related to theater in that both are refined forms of play. Whereas theater evolved out of the human impulse to pretend, and thus to plan, sport evolved from the human impulse to assert one's self, and thus to survive. Actors perform in order to be someone else. Athletes act in NEW PARADIGM If one were to dissect the elements of cyberspace technology it might appear that cyberspace offers nothing really new. Indeed, many of the key elements, most notably computer graphics, have been around a long time. What is new about cyberspace is not so much the technologies that underly it, but the way the technologies are packaged and applied. Cyberspace is a medium that is emerging out of a new way of thinking about computers and their relationship to human experience. Under the old way of looking at things computers were regarded as tools for the mind, where the mind was regarded as a disembodied intellect. Under the new paradigm, computers are regarded as engines for new worlds of experience, and the body is regarded as inseparable from the mind. The new perspective on human/computer interaction is due in part to recent advances in computer graphics and simulation, and in part to reductions in the cost of key user interface technologies. The new perspective was precipitated, though, by the growing realization in the scientific community that the basis of rationality is not in the world, as had been supposed, but in the human body. The essence of this new view is expressed eloquently in five words, in the title of Mark Johnson's book, THE BODY IN THE MIND. In the introduction, Johnson lays out the fundamental tenets of the emerging paradigm, as follows: "We human beings have bodies. We are 'RATIONAL animals,' but we are also 'rational ANIMALS,' which means that our rationality is embodied. The centrality of human embodiment directly influences what and how things can be meaningful for us, the ways in which these meanings can be developed and articulated, the ways we are able to comprehend and reason about our experience, and the actions we take. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interaction with objects. It is never merely a matter of abstract conceptualizations and propositional judgments. [5]" In another time or in another society, Johnson's comments might seem obvious, even trivial. But in a society built on a philosophical and scientific tradition that elevates mind over body, his point of view is heresy of the highest order, for it challenges the presupposition that the world is inherently rational, the basis for the very notion of a mind apart from a body. Under the classical scientific view there is no need to give a place to the human body in any account of human reason because the classical view presupposes the existence of an objective reality with a rational structure. Reason is treated as a purely abstract system for converging step by step on the one correct description of the world. Under the new view, however, the world is not assumed to have a rational structure, and there is no sense in trying to find one. Instead, there are many possible worlds, as many as sentient beings can invent and experience. Nothing, under the new view, is meaningful until it has been experienced, either by the body, or by the "body in the mind" (that is, the body-related "schemata," in the mind, that organize and guide behavior). DEFINITION OF CYBERSPACE Until now I have spoken of cyberspace as a medium, but there is another sense of it. There is cyberspace the communications medium, and then there is cyberspace the phenomenon. Cyberspace the phenomenon is analogous to physical space. Just as physical space is filled with real stuff (so we normally suppose), cyberspace is filled with virtual stuff. Cyberspace, the medium, enables humans to gather in virtual spaces. It is a type of interactive simulation, called a CYBERNETIC SIMULATION, which gives every user a sense that he or she, personally, has a body in a virtual space. Just as a cybernetic simulation is a special kind of interactive simulation, a CYBERSPACE, the phenomenon, is a special kind of virtual space, one that is populated by people with virtual bodies. Roots Visionaries have discussed and promoted the essential aspects of cyberspace, under various names, since the sixties. The roots of the field are generally traced to Ivan Sutherland and his seminal work on "Sketchpad," the first widely known interactive computer graphics system [15]. Sutherland described a head-mounted three dimensional display as early as 1968 [16]. Another evolutionary line can be traced to the same period, to Douglas Engelbart and his efforts to augment human intellect [2]. Much later, Papert spoke of "microworlds," Krueger of "artifical reality," Brooks of "virtual worlds," Fisher and McGreevy of "virtual environments," Nelson of "virtuality," and Walker of "the world in a can" [12,7,1,3,11,18]. Indeed, the notion of projecting one's self into a virtual space is familiar to hackers throughout computerdom, from Unix masters who "move" deftly around the Unix file hierarchy, to adventure gamers who "fight" the forces of evil in imaginary worlds. The term "cyberspace" was f Today the emerging field is variously referred to as cyberspace, artificial reality, and "virtual reality," the term favored by Jaron Lanier, one of the most visible of the field's advocates [6]. Whereas Lanier would use "virtual reality" to refer both to a virtual spa