Well these points were to illustrate the breadth of awareness that
might be required. The actor must pay attention to (or poll) all
worlds simultaneously, whilst ncftp beeping is an interupt. There is a
whole range of notification levels in between (I'm thinking that these
things map nicely onto the aura/focus/nimbus model.)
> Some of the interesting issues will be how you reconcile multiple
> views into one coherent (immersive?) environment.
>
> Or more importantly, why are you designing a system to do that?
Many reasons. At one level desktops having been doing this for years
since you might consider each window as a subjective view onto a
different world. Even mail your mail received icon is just a
subjective view of your mail box.
For an immersive environment you might want to create a subjective
view that overlays several worlds (the standard example of building
with pipes only visible to plumbers might exist in two separate
worlds) or you might consider the visor to be another world only you
can see.
> Since these
> environments are excluding, how do you indicate what is interesting in
> another environment (do you get a virtual phone call? a door appears
> and a ghost of you other self comes to get you? you find yourself
> suddenly caught in a virtual spotlight when your presence is required
> in an another story?).
>
> As the Apple folks say, "the user is in charge." If you chose not
> to subscribe to that philosophy, then I have difficulty imagining
> how a user would get anything done, as you'd be constantly annoying
> them with context switches.
Well that breaks down as soon as you get to a modal dialogue, but the
none of the examples I gave is a context switch. Their analogies in
desktop interfaces might respectively be alert boxes, icon flags (I'm
thinking of the ghost acting like a butler and waiting until you
notice him) and visual bells.
In a virtual environment the sort of context switching I think you
mean involves completely leaving one environment and entering
another. Certainly we'd agree this is bad and my group's work on
presence supports this. However you might want aspects of another
environment present in this world, Pausch's Worlds in Minature
metaphor could be one way of doing this, picture in picture type
displays (paintings on the wall/on the visor) another. If you do need
to physically context switch then there is the rooms metaphor or our
own stacking environments (donning/removing virtual HMDS) metaphor.
Anthony
-----------------------------------------------------------
Anthony Steed A.Steed@cs.ucl.ac.uk