With ZhenHouseZhenBonkwave I've been focused on VR. So wikipedia
tells me, VR refers to when computer displays are placed basically
covering one's eyes. I guess this idea is an appealing shortcut to
cyberspace. If you block out all your vision that is not your computer
screen, our visual processing will just be working upon the computer
screen: Then we can appeal to the sorts of things our brain's vision
processing does for verisimilitude.
VR which simply involves travelling to another world gets other
mnemonic names such as desktop VR (imagine an MMO roleplaying game or
the lambdaMOOverse) and our perception of uncomputerised space gets
called real life, which seems pretty clearly to be a virtual reality,
if a relatively poor one (why is my view of a low resolution LCD
display of an unpleasant bill notice so high resolution, who is it
that made this implementation decision).
Cyberia, which I've been reading, is interested in VR: But the focus
is often on the headset and gesture controls, and a rather unappealing
and male discussion of Having Sex With The Machine.
There's the well-known illusion that people perceive themselves as
being the driver of a body-mecha, sitting in a cockpit and looking out
through the eyes-windscreen. On one hand this seems insightful, that
one is interfacing with a complex and oft times unreliable machine one
has very incomplete control over or access to: Reality being a virtual
reality game.
On the other hand, this seems to lend itself to a category error:
Imagining that if we build a prosthetic body, attach a video feed from
its eyes to our body's eyes, and flail its arms using our arms'
gestures as a control, this means in some different way that we are in
a VR. This seems like a wild and disappointing misapprehension of VR.
My attraction to lambdaMOO shows a little of what is important about
and for VR: The ability to @dig a room, @desc here as "my room, @dig
nw,northwest to a-hallway ... The power of @createion at each of ours'
fingertips. I guess there isn't a great way to monetise people getting
to share and delight in their own art, and others': I think this is
the underlying struggle through World of Warcraft style online games,
and MEAT corporation's virtualisation of chaining employees to their
desks and selling their eyes to capitalist ne'er-do-wells.
This description counterintuitively implies that emacs is first and
foremost a VR: rmoo/lambdaMOO providing a domain specific language for
an internetworked physical creation shared with others over decades of
time. A running lisp image is a VR: But on its own not as
sophisticated as emacs. The MIT CADR or interlisp are much better VRs,
reaping the returns of holism. Common lisp with McCLIM clim2 starts
to do well.
Starting out with a sophisticated 3D game world filled with
gopher-browsing terminals, jns' Eternal game engine takes the
highlights of VR development since the 80s: To this I think accessible
programmability, with an emphasis on building and sharing physical
surroundings with and for sharing with others is the defining power of
VR. One idea I have is to write an Eternal backend to clim2.
(Aside, the way the clim2 standard works has two parts: The lisp
user's experience of it, which is translated to the middleware, and
the middleware's connection onto different backends).
