92.03.10
========


From: nvuxr!mf@uunet.UU.NET (26217-fusco)
Subject: Re: CULTURE: Lawnmower Man
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 92 03:53:04 GMT
Organization: On the Road



Hi,
        I wouldn't recommend this movie - at least not for
insight to VR. I went with a nontechnical friend whom I have 
explained (a little) what VR is about (knowledge from Rheingold's 
book) and he came away with what I think is a perverted view of
the technology. I didn't like the relationship to 'covert' 
government work and the link with the drugs. The movie does
suffer from lack of a plot and doesn't really establish
the benefits of VR. Sure, the graphics were cool but so was
Tron.

Besides, it wasn't scary at all!

Marc




From: cyberoid@u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson)
Subject: Re: CULTURE: Lawnmower Man
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 03:31:03 GMT
Organization: HIT Lab, Seattle



Fully expecting that I would have to answer to the sponsors of virtual
worlds developments in which I am participating, I went to see Lawnmower
Man.  Fortunately, the movie is insignificant, it will probably not retard
progress, and it might even produce a few yucks to enjoy in a couple of years.

Lawnmower Man draws is highly unoriginal.  Starting with the ultra
leaden quote, "While its advocates say that there may be millions of
positive applications of virtual reality, others wonder whether it may
become another form of mind control...." (Orwell said it better, about
TV), LM derives its themes from at least 10 other films:

        FORBIDDEN PLANET:  The concept of the "brain boost," and
        the unhappy effects of too much time online.

        CHARLIe:  Chemically induced hyperintelligence leads to
        sadness and despair when some evolutionary apogee is
        reached and exceeded.

        TRON:  Jobe's cybersuit was copied from TRON.  So was 
        the firey hell of the maddened mainframe.

        STAR TREK, THE NEXT GENERATION, "The Game":  If the
        director-writers didn't see this, they really are tele-
        pathic.  The theme: Virtual reality technology as 
        entrapment.

        THE SHINING:  Alternate realities lead to madness and
        mayhem.

        COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT:  Cyberintelligence sets
        out to save Humanity by eliminating human freedom;
        also, the network gone bonkers.

        DRACULA:  The forbidden kiss!  One taste of this elixer
        and all knowledge is yours, at the price of your sanity
        and your soul.

        DONOVAN'S BRAIN:  Mind control as the result of tamper-
        ing with normal human consciousness; being dissolved 
        into the infinite Mind of another.

        TOTAL RECALL:  Building better worlds through Science.

        BRAINSTORM:  Virtual sex was never this good.

        and finally,

        FRANKENSTEIN:  L.M. is a pale and sickly grandchild.

While we're on creativity, I found the graphics and the sound to be
totally pedestrian and almost wholly unrelated to what was going on
in the movie.  There was no Ah-hah! to any of the special effects,
with the possible (and, for me, completely unexpected) cleverness of
the virtual sex scene.  Two lovers melding into a draconfly was a
stroke of genius.  Unfortunately, it was the only one.

Others have already commented on the sad state of the dialogue and
the acting; I will just say that L.M., for me, was the three D's:
dark, demonic, and dumb.

Watching this film, realizing that it was the first exposure most
people would have to our work, I thought of that familiar scene in
Alice in Wonderland where the Duchess tosses her baby to Alice:

        The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously
        into its face to see what was the matter with it.  There
        could be no doubt that it had a *very* turn-up nose, 
        much more like a snout than a real nose:  also, its eyes
        were getting extremely small for a baby:  altogether
        Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. "But
        perhaps it was only sobbing," she thought, and looked 
        into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.

        No, there were no tears.  "If you're going to turn 
        into a pig, my dear," said Alice, seriously, "I'll
        have nothing more to do with you.  Mind now!"  The poor
        little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossi-
        ble to say which), and they went on for some while in
        silence.

        Alice was just beginning to think to herself, "Now,
        what am I to do with this creature, when I get home?"
        when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked
        down into its face with some alarm.  This time there
        could be *no* mistake about it:  it was neither more
        nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be
        quite absurd for her to carry it further.

        So she set the little creature down, and felt quite
        relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood.
        "If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would
        have made a dreadfully ugly child:  but it makes 
        rather a handsome pig, I think." ...


Bob Jacobson



From: hayes@unicorn.cis.ohio-state.edu (Patrick Hayes)
Subject: Re: CULTURE: Lawnmower Man  and  Max Headroom
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 00:00:34 GMT
Organization: Ohio State Computer Science



   [MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Tom Shales of the WASHINGTON POST compared L.M.
   as "better than HOOK":  "Where HOOK was deadly toxics, LAWNMOWER MAN
   is merely a whiff of nitrous oxide.  It gives you the giggles, and
   in these times giggles are not to be laughed at."  More comments?
   I like the MAX HEADROOM reminder. -- Bob Jacobson]

NPR's film critic, don't know his name, called LM a "brain twinkie" -
tastes good, but no nutritional value. Thought that pretty much summed
up the movie. He, incidently, also made a similar comparison to Hook.

---PCH


[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Shales is the NPR film critic. NEW YORK TIMES film
critic Vincent Canby, a little less kindly, noted the film in passing and
said that "the graphics are many and the sound quite loud, which produces
a kind of torpor that is in itself quite relaxing." -- Bob Jacobson]




From: bkuo@phakt.usc.edu (Benjamin Kuo)
Subject: Re: CULTURE: Lawnmower Man
Date: 10 Mar 1992 22:09:18 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA



Well, the feared deluge of CULTURE: Lawnmower Man messages has appeared. Now,
to add to it:

I haven't seen the movie yet, but around bookstores, movie theaters, etc.,
there are suddenly a rash of self-proclaimed "VR" experts. General mis-
conceptions I've heard:  That everything in the movie is realizable technology,
ie you can walk to local secret government lab and they're using them; VR
is already at the state portrayed in the movie; a lot of blabbering about
the importance of cyberspace, etc. In general, every two-bit "tech" expert
is touting their personal connection to Virtual Reality, and how they're
developing great new additions to this "cyberspace".

Benjamin Kuo


[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Ah, but can they say they genuinely inhabit...






                        sci.virtual-worlds?!!! 




                                                          -- Bob Jacobson]



From: dream!Ray_Hines@bikini.cis.ufl.edu (Ray Hines)
Subject: Re: CULTURE: More "Lawnmower Man" Madness
Date: 10 Mar 92 21:13:14 GMT
Organization: DreamStates BBS & CyberNet HQ in G'ville, FL   1-904-331-4317



I saw Lawnmower Man a couple weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida with
several friends.  While the movie may not seem like it has an entirely good
plot, it apparently struck most of the folk's fancy in the movie theatre. 
They seem to be really intrigued by the concept of virtual reality and the
movie piqued their interest in it.  A possible problem, as someone pointed
out here earlier, is how the movie portrayed VR in a possibly negative
sense (power, manipulations, etc) but it seems most of the folks weren't
too worried about it.  Above all, they walked out of there agreeing they
had seen a good movie.

-- Via DLG Pro v0.985b

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From: cmcl2!panix.com!entropy@uunet.UU.NET (Daniel Gross)
Subject: Re: PHIL: Are we in a virtual world now?
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 19:01:56 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC



Consider the following thought experiment.

We have great difficulty with the terms "real" and "virtual." Their
juxtaposition in the expression "virtual reality" has fostered an
outbreak of rethinking on the ratio of the objectively tangible
to the human-ly construed. We are hurtling back to the dark age
of Kant, nay, Berkeley. Pundits range from "hard-matter" types
(most of modern press and media) to big advocates of the "It's
all, and has always been all, consensual hallucination" (e.g. Tim
Leary in his new cyberspace prosletyser costume).

When Mandelbrot came up with a geometry which comfortably supported
the concept of fractional dimensionality, some mathematicians freaked.
Never mind. In applied math, we're very happy to have fractals.

Let's consider this notion of fractionalizing, or rather, fractalizing,
reality. Fractal systems have this wonderful property of somehow
floating between the world of whole numbers, where you jump stolidly
from 1, to 2, and so on, ignoring the chasms between integers, and
the world of real numbers, where betwixt any two you can always fit
another.

Perhaps what we choose to define as "real" is a by-product of the values
and principles with which we process the stream of information which
falls upon us. Just as the coast of Spain is not a simple equation,
e.g. Coast-of-Spain = z X unit-kilometer, but actually a two-variable
equation, i.e. Coast = y X unit-of-measure, where Coast varies with
*both* y and unit..., so too perhaps reality is *NOT* a constant
waiting for discovery, but a variable, and what we "know" is actually
a series of samples, empirically confirmed values of an elusive function
in Aleph[1] unknowns. Those values hint at the shape of the curve,
but between any two known values another sample may reveal a wild
turn away from the plotted points established thus far. And so we
press on endlessly in our search of a greater number of samples, and
an ever-higher sampling frequency.

Yo, like i said, this is just a thought-experiment. I still expect
the sidewalk to be there with every step I take :-)....

Daniel.

-- 
  Daniel Gross              \  My opinions ALWAYS
  FLOW Research, Inc.       |  reflect those of my company.
  entropy@panix.com         |  If yours don't, consider quitting.




From: cmcl2!panix.com!entropy@uunet.UU.NET (Daniel Gross)
Subject: Re: TECH: Collision detection -- a possible new approach
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 18:50:33 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC



Perhaps useless, but.... PV-Ray (and just about every other CSG-based
ray-tracer I know) allows CSG primitives to be defined as the bounding
shapes of CSG complexes (unions, diff's, etc.). The ray-trace compares
against the simpler bounding shape (almost invariably sphere, cylinder,
or set of planes) and evaluates complex-CSG intersection iff the bounding-
shape test completes. The other advantage of this approach applied to
collision-detect would be that at a specified difference from POV, you
could consider the bounding-shape test to be conclusive.

Another trick for speed would be to specify CSG primitive bounding shapes
in fixed-point (i.e. int) math. Depending on your hardware, and certainly
in the case of the 486, this would give you some advantages from instruction
pipelining (in the case of multiple-object tests, you could actually begin
the integer bounding-shape test on another object before the floating-point
test on the previous complex-CSG object completes).

Is this do-able, or rather, how committed are you (in lines of code) to
the poly-line method at this point?

"La critique est facile, l'Art difficile..."


-- 
  Daniel Gross              \  My opinions ALWAYS
  FLOW Research, Inc.       |  reflect those of my company.
  entropy@panix.com         |  If yours don't, consider quitting.




From: wex@pws.ma30.bull.com (Member, Redheads Anonymous)
Subject: Re: SOC: First VR writer
Date: 10 Mar 92 20:52:38 GMT
Organization: Bull Worldwide Information Systems Inc.



Oh, for pete's sake.  I've had this same argument on sf-lovers and
alt.cyberpunk.  Those who don't care to hear it again, can hit 'n' now.

In article <1992Mar10.025047.25380@u.washington.edu>
tolman%asylum@hellgate.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:

> The first REAL cyberpunk literature was written and conceived of by
> Vernon Vinge in 1979- "True Names" published in Analog.  It now is
> in a book format as the second story of a book by the same name.

Wrong on several counts.  Vinge's work involved inhabiting fantasy worlds.
It was neither cyber nor punk.

> Gibson had this annoying habit of having "decks" with keyboards.  Lets
> face it- no one will use a keyboard in the future.

Yeah, right.  As with any technology in wide and growing use, it's possible
that keyboards will disappear, but not in any short amount of time.  If you
can give a rational case for this assertion, I'd be interested to see it.

> Also Gibson portrays cyberspace in glowing lines like in Tron, Vernon
> Vinge blows away this poor concept YEARS BEFORE Gibson even wrote.

Gibson portrays (and names, if we're counting authorship points) cyberspace
in terms of the consensual hallucination of an abstract landscape.  Vinge
talks about fantasy concepts like castles, dragons, monsters, etc.  I fail
to see how one concept is inherently better.  Each serves the genre in which
the author wrote.

> Vinge also establishes a number of major themes borrowed by Gibson

WRONG!  Jeez, Louise, get your facts straight before you start making
accusations.  It's well known that Gibson did not read Vinge until years
after NEUROMANCER et al were published.  Gibson freely acknowledges those
people he borrowed from (W. S. Burroughs, the film noire genre, J.G.
Ballard, among others).

> In short, Gibson gets a heck of a lot of credit he does not deserve, for
> the genre existed in various formats before he even got there.  He SHOULD
> be credited for popularizing it.

What "genre" do you think he popularized but did not create?  I think it's
quite clear that he and other authors emerging at roughly the same time
(Shiner, Sterling, Cadigan, Shirley, Maddox, etc.) made up the vanguard of a
self-identified literary movement which explicitly rejected the 50s-pulp
utopias of most of SF (the Asimov/Clarke school), the baseless depressive
dystopias of the New Wave (Moorcock/Ellison), and the libertarian fantasists
(Niven/Pournell and Vinge among them).

Their brand of hyperreal technophilic fiction drew heavily on traditions
existing outside the SF community (compare, for example, Ballard's
introduction to CRASH and Sterling's introduction to MIRRORSHADES).

> And to slam him again, Gibson has visions of the future which are behind
> other visionaries (notably Vinge).

"Behind" in what ways?  Gibson's visions are more likely to see real
implementation before Vinge's.  Or did you mean "behind" in some other
sense?

> Vinge reads a little like Dick, lots of good ideas with a writing style of
> a Piers Anthony.

You gotta be kidding me, right?  One of the premier American visionary
surrealists/dystopians (in his day) and one of the greatest hacks ever to
set fingers to word processor.  Vinge, to his credit, reads nothing like
either of them.

   [MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Whoa.  We are getting beyond mere citations of illus-
   trative material into criticism of cyberpunk literature, which should
   properly be posted to alt.cyberspace.  Thanks. -- Bob Jacobson]

Yeah, I know.  But grant me the space to correct at least the factual
errors.

--
--Alan Wexelblat                        phone: (508)294-6120
Bull Worldwide Information Systems      internet: wex@pws.bull.com
Billerica, MA                                     wexelblat.chi@xerox.com

Politics is like coaching a football team.  you have to be smart enough
to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.




From: wex@pws.ma30.bull.com (Member, Redheads Anonymous)
Subject: Re: CULTURE: Lawnmower Man
Date: 10 Mar 92 20:25:15 GMT
Organization: Bull Worldwide Information Systems Inc.



One of the people I saw it with summed up LAWNMOWER MAN thus:
        "Not Virtual Reality, Real Shit."

The audience was laughing at all the wrong places.  Another wit remarked
that this film was to VR what WAR GAMES was to AI.

Sadly, it did have glimmers of interest -- it might have been a good movie
at some point.  The use and placement of VR rigs into different settings was
interesting.  Some of their gestural interfaces were quite good.  There were
at least six or seven good lines in the script.

The rest was putrid.  This one is a $1.99 rental.

--Alan Wexelblat                        phone: (508)294-6120
Bull Worldwide Information Systems      internet: wex@pws.bull.com
Billerica, MA                                     wexelblat.chi@xerox.com

Politics is like coaching a football team.  you have to be smart enough
to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.




From: Murry Christensen <71521.2515@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: SCI: SIRDS
Date: 10 Mar 92 14:33:04 EST



From: schmidtg@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com:

>Now a question, does anyone have any information on this technique or on
>sirds in general?  I would be interested in knowing the algorithm used to
>generate these as I would like to create some more complex ones.

I believe random dot stereograms were originated (or at least given
wide currency) by Bela Julesz (sp?) in the 60's. There has been a fair bit
published in Scientific American the  articles always include "For
Further Reading" references.
 
WH Freeman (publisher of Scientific American books)  also publishes a
book called "The Mind's Eye" that contains info on these
visual illusions, as well as others you might find interesting.




From: Murry Christensen <71521.2515@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: TECH: Request for info: alternative music interactive media
Date: 10 Mar 92 14:32:59 EST



>Areas that I'm having difficulty finding information on include
>Theramin (sp?) (performance technique used by Sun Ra in the 60's).

Actually a "theremin" is an instrument. It creates sound by sensing the
position of the performer's hands in relation to an
electrically-conductive metal rod...which is the sole interface to the
instrument if I remember correctly. The theremin was invented in Europe
(?) in the 30's and, along with something called an "ondes martinot,"
represents the first generation of electronic music instruments. Musical
Heritage Society (the home of weird records) used to have a recording that
featured these two.

(cyber)"Space Is The Place"  -Sun Ra (Tone Scientist)




From: Murry Christensen <71521.2515@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: APPS: Game Design
Date: 10 Mar 92 14:32:54 EST



> He outlines the staggering implications of a world full of
>people who are all aware (as no previous world has been) of how free
>they are to choose their worldviews.

Much of the later output of Samuel R. Delaney (especially "Dhalgren") is
about precisely this point. In his case it extends worldview to gender
orientation, sex assignment, and radical cosmetic surgery.

It's along a cleavage line (to use Persig's metaphor) like this that much
of the current tension between modernism and fundamentalism is apparent.
People who talk about things like "natural order" and "the scheme of
things" (not to mention any statement that includes God or a simulacrim
thereof) are on the side that would find the ability to choose one's
worldview disquieting. This conflict ain't going to go away soon.




From: brucec@phoebus.labs.tek.com (Bruce Cohen)
Subject: Re: APPS: Game Design
Date: 10 Mar 92 19:28:24 GMT
Organization: Software Technology Research Laboratory, Tektronix Inc.



In article <1992Mar10.023633.23640@u.washington.edu>
autodesk!robertj@uunet.uu.net (Young Rob Jellinghaus) writes:

> ... deleted ...
> By now all the techies have probably stopped reading.  Well, here's a
> technical question: has there been any work done on architectures for
> wide-area shared cyberspaces?  The problems are clearly legion,
> ranging from end-to-end throughput for immediate feedback between
> different actors in the same space, to persistent representations of
> world state that must be kept consistent, to anomalous physics
> (consider a room in a building which suddenly gets expanded to be
> larger than the building itself).  Is there any interest in talking
> about these issues, or is everyone focused on the more immediately
> relevant problems of getting systems that don't cause eyestrain after
> fifteen minutes?

Well, I'm interested, even if no one else is.  I suspect that the
overall system architecture of a widely distributed cyberspace will do
more to constrain the kinds of worlds we can create and inhabit than the
kind of HUD or gloves we use.  Here's a beginning on one issue.

Several of the problems you mention resolve to the question of caching:
in the face of real-time end-to-end interaction, just how much
information can you keep at the ends, so as to reduce both communication
bandwidth and feedback latency time?  The question is made further
difficult by the requirement for some behind-the-scenes actors to manage
interactions with parts of the physical aspects of cyberspace: I expect
that the person standing in front of me may take a beat or two to react
to what I say because I see the possibility of a communication delay; I
don't expect communication delays between me and the chair I'm sitting
down in.  Although that does give me an idea for a world design: the
Pratfall Universe (tm), where everyone's a bozo :-).

We can't simple cache all objects in the immediate vicinity, since two
or more inhabitants may be moving or otherwise modifying an object at
the same time.  By the same token, simply locking access to an object
won't produce a very realistic world: in the Real World couches rarely
announce to you that you will have to wait to sit down because someone
else is already sitting on them.

One strategy would be a RequestUse protocol for requesting access to an
object, which does 2 things: it gives the requestor a copy of the object
containing as much cached information as is practical for the current
situation (number of users of the object, amount of cache on the local
deck, etc.) and quarantees to tell the caching software whenever the
situation changes, i.e., when a new user appears, an old user
disappears, or a current user modifies the public aspect of the object.

This protocol makes cache coherency a matter of writing changes to the
object out of the cache whenever an event occurs on the object at some
other location.  The problem of course is that any change may be
predicated on the current attributes of the object, which may be
inconsistent between the deck making the change, and some other deck.
So some sort of negotiation would be required to resolve
inconsistencies, requiring at least one round-trip between negotiators.

I think the interaction time problem can be stated as the need to
implement a global clock for a cyberspace, with some guarantees about
clock time propagation given some minimal amount of interaction.  There
has been quite a lot of work done in this area in distributed systems
research; I'v read enough to have a rough overview of the problem but
not of the details of the solutions as they apply here.  Anybody know more?

--
"The end cause ... is too often handed off as an afterthought to harried
interface designers who follow programmers around with virtual brooms
and pails." - Brenda Laurel in "Computers as Theatre"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker-to-managers, aka
Bruce Cohen, Software Technology Research Lab   email: brucec@strl.labs.tek.com
Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc.         phone: (503)627-5241
M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR  97077




From: donahue@ra.csc.ti.com (Dan Donahue)
Subject: CULTURE: LAWNMOWER MAN review: POSSIBLE SPOILERS
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 18:46:33 GMT
Organization: Texas Instruments



POSSIBLE SPOILERS....

                            LAWNMOWER MAN

                            Kind of a review
                            by Dan Donahue



I SAID POSSIBLE SPOILERS....

Two words about LAWNMOWER MAN: Good grief. I have included
below some random comments about my impressions of the
recently released, and much anticipated (at least on my
part) LAWNMOWER MAN - the first movie to explicitly deal
with the new and exciting technology of VR. Each comment
is conveniently separate from the others for easy
cutting into your own response (or flame, more realistically.)

Let me just say that some of these comments really don't
address LAWNMOWER MAN specifically. Rather, they can be
said of any movie where little things like plot, exposition,
and character development don't get in the way of some 
visionless director's flashy on-screen technology or FX.

As fas as the depiction of VR in any real or believable
sense goes, I think whoever was the technical advisor
on this film should be taken out and beaten over the
head with William Gibson's Neuromancer. (Hardback.)

Now for the fun parts...

   What is it about a new, promising technology like VR that
   forces Hollywood to portray it as some evil menace to
   mankind? Though I'm no fan of big government or the
   sinister, clandestine dealings of the CIA, why is it that
   the crux of every sci-fi flick dealing with new technology
   is some evil government agency running amok trying to
   find the ultimate death machine? Aren't there ANY new ideas
   in Hollywood?

   What is this nameless evil agency, anyway? And is it really
   the case that the only way the moviegoer can tell that the
   "head" is evil is if his entire pock-marked face fills the
   wall-sized televideo screen every time he gets on the phone?

   So, if this evil agency has so much power and clout, why
   can't they afford light bulbs for their ultra-modern research
   facility? Has anybody, anywhere, ever been to a hi-tech
   research facility housed in a damp, dark, concrete tomb?
   Jeez, somebody buy a lamp; get a humidifier.

   By the way, where was this stupid place anyway? By the accents,
   I first thought the omnipotent Irish government was running the
   show. But then old evil big-head was in Washington. This global
   community thing is really getting confusing.

   I hadn't realized how important hair was in the grand scheme
   of things. Ratty/unkempt implies innocent. Moussed implies
   intelligent. Oily/wet/sweatty implies untamed evil. Go figure.
   Hmmmm, where's that mousse?  [MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Bald means
   sinister or naive. -- B.J.]

   Nice suit. I wouldn't have been able to tell Job was doing
   all of these evil things if his little mood suit hadn't started 
   glowing.

   What a juicy part the wife had, eh? Can't you just see the casting
   director? "Lessee, we need someone to play the neglected, bitter
   wife. Oh yeah, she had better have nice breasts cuz she sure
   isn't here to move the plot forward." ("Plot? What plot?")

   I thought most priests of that ilk had been weeded out with the
   Spanish Inquisition. Although, by the end of the movie, I was
   hoping he'd come back to life and beat the tar out of Job again.

   Would someone please tell Hollywood to stop picking on the
   mentally retarded people and quit using them in psychological
   experiments?

   So which was doing the actual transformation of Job into
    the sexy, hot, killing machine that he was? The serums or
    the VR? What would his hair end up like if he only did one
    or the other?

    Spiral votices must be big in mind-altered states. Apparently
    that is the only representation of mind-melding and information
    overloading that the creative minds on this project could come up
    with.  (Excepting the occasional brain-with-the-hot-spot image, of
    course.)

    I won't even mention the acting except to ask: "How on earth
    did they manage to keep a straight face during this thing?" The
    bit (actually bits, since there were more than one) where Pierce
    is trying to hide his thoughts from the probing psychic powers
    of Job were a riot. Somehow the genius technical advisers on the set
    convinced the director that the best way to protect your inner-
    most thoughts is to scrunch up one side of your face and beat
    yourself silly with a spasmodic hand until your glasses fly off.
    (If I was Job, I'd follow Pierce around all the time and try
     to read his mind, just for the comedic relief.)

    The graphics were the only redeeming part of this movie, but 
    for the most part they showed no great imaginative vision of what 
    VR does or will look like. If you want great graphics mixed with a good
    story, watch Beauty and the Beast. At least the acting is better.


    It seems to me that a simple linear search through the list of 
    I/O ports would have taken, maybe, a few seconds -- even for
    a big gold electronic deity. CyberChrist? More like VaporHead.

    And Pierce, what's with this virus thing? Just unplug the danged
    thing, use a hatchet. If you're going to blow the place up,
    anyway, just DO IT.
    
   The best acting was at the very beginning when they stole Letterman's
   monkey-cam. Was that a real monkey? Hard to tell. Best hair of
   the group, though. I wonder if  Late Nite will strike back and use 
   the Lawnmower-cam on Larry Bud? 

In summary, if you want to see a movie with actual interesting ideas
about the power (and potential abuses) of the mind, rent Altered
States or Brainstorms: no goofy haircuts, no funny suits, and real
actors. If you simply must see Lawnmower Man, wait til it comes
out on video, then let a friend rent it.

Flame away!


Dan Donahue

----------------------
The opinions expressed here are mine. They do not reflect in any
way the opinions of my employer in this or any other reality, real
or imagined.




From: rwzobel@eos.ncsu.edu (RICHARD W ZOBEL)
Subject: Re: APPS: Game Design
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 18:29:47 GMT
Organization: North Carolina State University



In article <1992Mar10.023633.23640@u.washington.edu>, autodesk!robertj@uunet.
uu.net (Young Rob Jellinghaus) writes:

|><...stuff deleted...>
|> 
|> By now all the techies have probably stopped reading.  Well, here's a
|> technical question: has there been any work done on architectures for
|> wide-area shared cyberspaces?  The problems are clearly legion,
|> ranging from end-to-end throughput for immediate feedback between
|> different actors in the same space, to persistent representations of
|> world state that must be kept consistent, to anomalous physics
|> (consider a room in a building which suddenly gets expanded to be
|> larger than the building itself).  Is there any interest in talking
|> about these issues, or is everyone focused on the more immediately
|> relevant problems of getting systems that don't cause eyestrain after
|> fifteen minutes?

Well, I will comment on the last of your concerns, anomalous physics.

The actual case you described of the room becoming bigger than the
building that encloses it, sounds more like a scale modification
than a physical paradox. Suppose that as an additional attribute
to a virtual space (beyond shape, color, size, etc.), you included
a scaling factor for those that inhabit that space. It is similar
to Alice growing and shrinking in and around "Wonderland". As you
cross through the entrance to the space, you immediately are
scaled to the defined percentage. Thus if the scaling factor were
50%, the room, which looked very small from the outside (if indeed
you could see in) would look twice that size when you entered. Or,
exclusively the x and y dimensions could be scaled while the z
remained the same, allowing for a long, wide room, but not changing
the ceiling height. For the room you described, perhaps the scaling
factor can be inversely proportional to the number of virtual
people occupying the space...  Something to ponder about in any
case :-)

As an addendum to this: is there one scale to virtual worlds, or
is there just a reference scale to base your position on? To 
clarify this (with another question), is it possible to add
scale as a dimension to allow logical movement in? If I were at the
0% reference scale, should it be possible to "move" in scale to
say .0001%, and find rooms, spaces, or entire worlds making up the
"matter" of the reference scale world. This would mean that rather
than virtual atoms making up the reference world, that other worlds
have the potential to make up the world ad-inifinitum...  "Take a
left at the lamp post, shrink 10,000 times, go two blocks
virtual North, and shrink 1,000 times. You can't miss it."

Richard Zobel
NCSU School of Design
Architecture Department




From: stgprao@xing.unocal.com (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: Re: PHIL: Are we in a virtual world now?
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 15:23:01 GMT
Organization: Unocal Corporation, Anaheim, California



Yes.  I consider cities and culture to be a different form of reality even if
it isn't the electronic kind.  I often experience mild dissociation after
returning from a long camping / backpacking trip.  Artificial lights at night
seem strange.  Buildings are artificial mountains and caves.  Living in the
wilderness has a different kind of reality, what human beings experienced and
adapted to for their first 95-99% of existance.

Although architecture, philosophy, and entertainment have been artificial
realities for a long time, I believe the focus of this bulletin board is on
computer and electronic mediated artificial realities.



From: lmeyer@well.sf.ca.us (Lhary Meyer)
Subject: Re: TECH: LCD Help, please.
Date: 10 Mar 92 06:50:38 GMT
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA



If anyone needs a referral to Kaiser and the "HUD" helmet, email me and I'll
provide the name/number.

Lhary Meyer // StereoGraphics


