I recently had the occasion to present a talk on "virtual environments and knowledge production." This got me thinking about just how virtual environments can help with the important tasks of enhancing both individual and collective human creativity. My talk tries to highlight some of what has been accomplished and some of the challenges that lie ahead. (However, as I continue to strive to remove words from slides [recalling Beckett's admonition that "every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness"], the slides themselves may not make much sense!) I mentioned the following as some of issues that must be addressed for virtual worlds (a subset of virtual environments) to be useful for "knowledge production":
- Integration with the physical world, e.g., sensors and instrumentation
- Integration with the rest of the cyberworld
- Integration with simulation
- Security and trust, in their many forms
- Abstractions, metaphors, interfaces
- Scale (data volumes, simulation fidelity)
During my reading, I came across a nice article by Gary Olson and Judith Olson, Distance Matters, which included a delightful quote from Arthur Mee:
If, as it is said to be not unlikely in the near future, the principle of sight is applied to the telephone as well as that of sound, earth will be in truth a paradise, and distance will lose its enchantment by being abolished altogether.
(Arthur Mee was best known for his Children's Encylopedia, but here he is writing in 1898 about the impact of the telephone.)
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