He, my "flamebait" section was meant as... well "flamebait"... Hence
I only provided "conclusions". I think there is several aspects of
"VR as drug".
1. The most important is that immersive technology will
seal you completely of from the surroundings. Notice how you act
in your spare time. I suppose you seldom can ignore interruptions,
at least when you are living with other people. Like, how are
you going to have an eye on that little baby walking around while
"living" in an immersive world? Are the wives (women seems to be
more sceptical when it comes to useless technology) going to accept
that their husbands "hide" from them? Etc.
2. Then you have the addictiveness, that we even see in textbased MUDS.
When the virtual world is both easier and more rewarding/interesting than
the real world and the problems that are there, will you be able to
resist the VE when real world problems are building up. Right now
most VEs are not more rewarding than the real world in the long run,
still I don't think we know enough about how the stimulating of
senses, richer worlds and the private sphere that immeriveness creates
will affect addictivity.
3. Then you have trigging of "supressed" instincts and creation of
virtual trauma with real life impact. Think about this, children
sometimes has difficulty to separate the real world and fantasy worlds.
I don't know enough about child psychology, I suppose part of this is
not related to adult "cognition", but I think the vivid imagination that
children possess is part of the reason for this. Now, if adults has
less vivid imagination, then what happens when you "move" the fantasy
world towards our conception of the real world, will we cross the
threshold? I say we will, and then you are in trouble. At least when
it comes to what happens in your subconsciousness, the neural network
that we do not control. Will we be able to create real world traumas
that people get in wars etc? Will we be able to train killer instincts?
> 2D is better than 3D for orientation.
>
> "For many tasks." Question: what are the tasks at which 3d is better
> for orientation? If we understand that, then we probably know how
> Collaborative VR can be effective.
This is not based on research, but how I percieve human orientation,
both when it comes to real life as well as computergames. So I claim
that we do not orient in the full 3D space, at most in "2.5D", but
more likely in a "hiearchy" or "mesh" of planes and lines. An example:
Let's say that you are going to a warehouse to buy a specific item,
like a Lego toy. The first you have to decide is which floor, that is
obviously 1D. When you get to the floor with shops targeted at children,
you swap to a planar map (2D) you walk around, or turn around 360
degrees to look for signs of the toy shop, then you move in this 2D
plane and enter the shop. Then you create a new 2D map of the shop,
perhaps mapping out areas of interest, move to the area of interest,
the shelf with Lego. Then you swap to a new planar map (2D) of the
vertical surface of the shelf. etc.. I guess the "orientation"-theme
is closely related to goal-satisfaction, as we are more likely to
"map" artifacts that could lead to satisfaction. Of course there is
no easy way to an explanation of "orientation" as we use many cues,
but I still think that my mental maps are mostly layers of 2D maps.
> VR/3D/photorealism
> is only a small subset of a larger set of expressions/canvases, I
> think it is far too limiting for efficient communication.
> depends on the tasks. If you can identify the tasks that 3d is
> appropriate for, then you probably have the makings of a good CVR.
That's true. So the problem with my statement isn't the definition of
"efficient" but my definition of "communication". I meant, communication
in personal computing situations.
Ola.