From: david@c-cat.UUCP (Dave)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: John P. Barlow Article in Microtimes Magazine Pt. 3 of 5
Date: 24 Jan 93 23:33:28 GMT
Organization: Intergalactic Rest Area For Weary Travellers


There some practical reasons for the settlement of cyberspace.  They 
aren't as much fun to think about as the impractical ones, but they 
exist.  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.  
The thin alphanumeric stream which drips from our fingertips and 
into the computer is a pale reflection of the thoughts which produce it, 
arriving before the CPU at a pace absurdly mis-matched to its 
chewing/spitting capacities.

Then there is the screen itself.  While a vast improvement on the 
flickering LED's 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 can't pile it, 
as most of us tend to do in real life.  We have to file it.  And this is not 
the way the mind stores information.  One doesn't remember the 
names of his friends alphabetically.  When looking for a phase in a 
book, you are more likely to look for its spatial position on the page 
than it's 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.       

Nicholas Negroponte recreated a modest version of Aquinas' castle in 
the 70's.  He came up with a virtual office, represented in cartoon form 
on the screen.  One could mouse around to the "piles" of  "paper" 
stacked on the "desk" or "filing cabinet," leafing through them not by 
the first letter of their subject name but by their archaeological layer of 
deposition.  

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.  In two dimensions, the image of 
desktop seemed a lot more natural than the image of the desk.  Thence 
the Macintosh. 

I used to think that the only way around these narrow I/O apertures 
lay in such heroic solutions as brain implants.  I think I was about 14 
when it occurred to me that this was the answer.  Brain surgery 
seemed a minor nuisance if it left one with the ability to remember 
everything.  

I suppose I'd still be willing to put a Cray in my cranium, but my faith 
in technology has moderated since early adolescence.  I'm more 
comfortable with the possibility of an interface which fills the gap 
between keyboarding and neurological hardwiring and involves no 
cortical knife-play.  Virtual Reality is almost certainly that.

And indeed, Virtual Reality may be so close to the implant side of the 
continuum that, as Randy Walser of Autodesk insists, it's not even 
appropriate to call it an interface.  It more a place...kind of like Fibber 
McGee's Ultimate Closet...than the semi-permeable information 
membrane to which we're accustomed.

Whatever you want to call it, Autodesk's John Walker puts it this way, 
"If cyberspace truly represents the next generation of human 
interaction with computers, it will represent the most profound change 
since the development of the personal computer."  Right.

But that still doesn't tell us what it's good for besides extending human 
quirkiness to the storage of immaterial stuff.  After all, most of what 
humans do with computers is merely an improvement over what they 
did with other keyboard-bound devices, whether typewriters or 
calculators.  Word processing and numerical analysis will be no easier 
"inside" the machine than it was outside.   

But let's quit being giddy for a moment.  We're talking bucks here.  
Right now a good working platform costs almost as much as a CAT 
scanner.  Who's going to buy one without something like Blue Cross 
footing the bill?  And why?

Alright, there is a reason why Autodesk is involved in this enterprise 
besides some daydream of the Ultimate Hack.  Whatever adventures 
they might entertain they afford by selling AutoCAD, the Dbase III of 
architecture.  How many architects have dreamed of the ability to take 
their clients on a walk inside their drawings before their 
miscommunications were sealed in mortar?

Virtual Reality has already been put to such use at the University of 
North Carolina.  There Sitterman Hall, the new $10 million home of 
UNC's computer science department, was designed by virtual means.

Using a head-mounted display along with a handlebar-steerable 
treadmill, the building's future users "walked through" it, discovering, 
among other things, a discomforting misplacement of a major interior 
wall in the lobby.  At the point of the discovery, moving the wall out 
was cheap.  A retrofit following the first "real" walk-through would 
have cost more by several orders of magnitude.  Thus, one can imagine 
retrofit savings from other such examples which could start to make 
DataSuits as common a form of architectural apparel as chinos and 
tweed.  

Given the fact that AutoCAD is already generating about  a hundred 
seventy million dollars a year even without such pricy appurtenances 
as cyberspace design tools, it isn't hard to imagine a scenario in which 
developing workstations for virtual architecture comes to look like 
very shrewd business.

Then there is the burgeoning scientific market.  Computers are the new 
microscopes.  Increasingly, they allow us to see into worlds which are 
not only too small but too weird to bring to human scale before.   For 
example, they are showing us the infinitely detailed order of chaos, 
never before observable, in a form which makes it possible to 
appreciate its simplicity as well as its complexity.

Virtual Reality promises the ability to not only see but to "touch" 
forbidden realms.  Again at UNC, work is already quite advanced in 
which one can assemble complex molecules like Tinkertoys, the 
attraction or repulsion between individual atoms in the assembly 
modelled to the scale of human tactile perceptions.  The drug industry 
alone could have uses for such capacity sufficient to sustain a lot of 
CyberBiz.  

One can imagine a lot of heretofore inaccessible "places" in which 
one's presence might be scientifically illuminating.  A Fantastic Voyage 
through the circulatory system will become possible (with or without 
Raquel Welch).  Or travel to alien worlds.  (Thanks to JPL, I have 
already taken an extremely convincing helicopter ride down the Vallis 
Marinaris on Mars.)

Then there all the places which have never before had physical 
existence on any scale: the rolling plains of mathematical topologies, 
the humming lattice of quantum states, cloud chambers in which mu 
mesons are the size of basketballs and decay over weeks rather than 
picoseconds.           

The possibility for less sober uses seems equally fertile.  One can 
imagine VR salons, video game parlors for big kids with Gold Cards, 
in which a central supercomputer provides the opportunity for a score 
of people to be Ms. Pacman.  Or whatever.  Nolan Bushnell, the 
founder of Atari and something of an expert on the subject of video 
games, is already at work on something like this.   

The list of possibilities is literally bounded only by the imagination.  
Working bodies for the damaged.  Teleconferencing with body 
language.  Virtual surgery.  Hey, this is a practical thing to do!        

And yet I suspect that something else altogether, something not so 
practical,  is at the root of these yearnings.  Why do we really want to 
develop Virtual Reality?  There seems to be a flavor of longing here 
which I associate with the desire to converse with aliens or dolphins or 
the never-born.  

On some level, I think we can now see the potential for technology, 
long about the business of making the metaphorical literal, of reversing 
the process and re-infecting ordinary reality with luminous magic.  

Or maybe this is just another expression of what may be the third 
oldest human urge, the desire of have visions.  Maybe we want to get 
high. 

      

Drugs, Sex, & Rock Tn' Roll
Boot Up, Jack In, Get Virtual

Technology is the new drug.