Re: From multi-user to collaborative environments
Chris Greenhalgh (c.greenhalgh@Cs.Nott.AC.UK)
Fri, 07 Jun 1996 16:20:23 +0100
In message <31B82ECF.237C@ubilab.ubs.ch>you write:
> > I forget whose work it was (anyone?) but one approach to designing
> > (graphical) virtual worlds was to use a pair of worlds: "heaven" and
> > "earth". <...>
>
> Isn't this just the more general technique of Computational Reflection?
> Paul Dourish at EuroPARC has some stuff on meta-object protocols for
> CSCW, but perhaps more for viedo-based systems than for VRs.
Yes. Profound, though, isn't it. What you thought were different in
kind can become the same. Consider window managers, or scrolled windows
or any kind of affordance, really.
But sometimes it causes its own problems, e.g. if I'm browsing a
rendered database, does moving a representation of a database item
indicate a request to change that item in the database, or a request
to change the parameters of the visualisation (a meta-operation)?
Chris