Also known as ''virtual reality,'' cyberspace is the ''space'' that exists only as data inside a computer. After spending the s forcing people to act like computers, says Tom Furness, director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory HITL and an engineering professor at the UW, it is time to make computers act more like humans. The way to do that is to put people ''inside'' computers with all that data, where they can touch it and control it directly, in the same way people deal with the real world, using all their senses.
Computer users enter ''virtual worlds'' using special devices such as stereoscopic goggles, 3-D sound headphones and motion-sensing gloves. Such gear creates the illusion of moving through a three-dimensional space, or virtual reality, by generating an image of the wearer moving inside the computer.
In virtual reality, the computer images are as real as you are. The Geographical Review welcomes authoritative, original, ably illustrated, and well-written manuscripts on any topic of geographical importance.
We encourage empirical studies that are grounded in theory, innovative syntheses that offer a deeper understanding of a phenomenon, and research that leads to potential policy prescriptions. The writing in the Geographical Review has always been of a high quality, interesting and accessible to both specialists and nonspecialists. Authors are encouraged to write articles that they themselves would enjoy reading. The Geographical Review also includes special features, forum articles, and special review articles commissioned by the editor.
Each issue includes reviews of recent books, monographs, and atlases in geography and related fields. The first phase was started in the 14th 15th century through Leonardo da Vinci, the father of modern Science and Technology as well as of modern Painting, the second phase was established through the second half of the 18th century, the third one came about during the first half of the 20th century.
It will be made clear that, and how, Mankind is involved in a global and general education process during the past years, aimed at developing higher or refined senses, or faculties of perception, following a learning procedure of finding and maintaining an inner equilibrium. The present and future perspectives will be addressed. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. Rent this article via DeepDyve. Genuys ed. Google Scholar. WEDDE ed. Download references. Like the Union Pacific Railroad awaiting the fact of empire, they prefer to let the rag-tag pioneers die all over the frontier before they come out to claim it.
Actually, they are not the first to make virtual landfall. They are only the first at financial risk. Unlike the first automobiles or telephones their commercial fledglings had the advantage of long incubation by government and Academia.
Virtual Reality, as a concept, found first form at the University of Utah over twenty years ago in the fecund cranium of Ivan E. Sutherland, the godfather of computer graphics and the originator of about every Big Computer Idea not originated by Alan Kay or Doug Englebart. In , he produced the first head-mounted display. This was the critical element in VR hardware, but it was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling… at some peril to its wearer.
Damocles was mentioned. So Virtual Reality passed a generation waiting for the equipment to arrive. I hardly need to detail what happened to CPU horsepower during that period. By , graphics engines of appropriate juice were almost within financial range of entities not involved in the defense of our nation.
They were less persuaded by the attractions of unreal places. The Air Force was also conducting research at Wright-Patterson under the direction of Tom Furness, but most of this was directed at the usual dismal purpose, simplifying the annihilation of non-virtual humans. Heads up displays and looks that kill were their speciality. VPL was on the case. Jaron had only gotten into computers after concluding that musical composition was not a reliable day job.
And his ownership of more than musical instruments might indicate, if nothing else, a probing dissatisfaction with the limits of each one. The commercial colonization of cyberspace was beginning. Young Harvill wrote it as a tool to create an artificial reality quickly and easily on Mac before integrating it into Body Electric and sending it over the twin Silicon Graphics CPUs which blow it up to full size.
Air Force. Meanwhile, back in the real world, things were getting complicated. Part of the problem was the scale of possibilities it invoked. They seemed to be endless and yet none of them was anywhere near ready to bring returns on an investment. Virtual Reality induces a perception of huge potency underlying featureless ambiguity.
There is a natural tendency to fill this gap between power and definition with ideology. And the presence of such unclaimed vastness seems to elicit territorial impulses from psychic regions too old to recognize the true infinity of this new frontier.
Disputes appeared like toadstools in the rich new soil of cyberspace. Get it? Without, they found themselves increasingly tangled in legal hassles. They were in court with AGE a group of New York toy developers who are not just in it for their health , trying to protect their rights to the PowerGlove. Still, everyone realized that a baby this size would be bound to occasion some labor pains.
As the general media began to pick up on Virtual Reality, its midwives were preparing themselves for interesting times. It would be worth it. But why? To the people who will actually make the future, such a question is beside the point.
Sort of. There some practical reasons for the settlement of cyberspace. First among them is that this is the next logical step in the quest to eliminate the interface…the mind-machine information barrier. Over the last twenty years, our relations with these magic boxes have become intimate at a rate matched only by the accelerating speed of their processors.
From the brutal austerity of batch-processed punch-cards to the snuggly Macintosh, the interface has become far less cryptic and far more interactive.
There have remained some apparently unbreachable barriers between us and the CPU. One of them was the keyboard, which even with the graphical interface and the accompanying infestation of mice, remained the principal thoroughfare from human perception to RAM.
While a vast improvement on the flickering LEDs of the Altair or even the amber text of DOS, the metaphorical desktop remains flat as paper. There is none of the depth or actual spatiality of experience. After we get past what few documents we can keep on the screen at one time, we are back to the alphabetized hierarchy.
We have to file it. And this is not the way the mind stores information. When looking for a phrase in a book, you are more likely to look for its spatial position on the page than its intellectual position in context. The actual operation of human memory works on a model more like the one Saint Thomas Aquinas used.
Aquinas, who carried around in his head almost all the established knowledge of his simpler world, is said to have imagined a mind-castle with many different rooms in which varying kinds of ideas dwelled. The floor plan increased with his knowledge. He came up with a virtual office, represented in cartoon form on the screen.
The problem was the screen. Negroponte created a flat picture of an office rather than something more like the real thing because that was all one could display on a screen.
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