[02] Environmental Technology: Making the Real World Virtual (Krueger – 1993)

Current Mood: suave

Blogs I Commented On:

• Katie Dahmen
• Aaron Wolin
• Josh Peschel

Rant:
We need more 1-2 page-long papers.

Summary:
There are three types of technologies where computer penetrate our everyday lives: the already existing portable, the media-wide touted wearable, and the paper’s focus of environmental. The last one concerns the ultimate computer interface involving the human body and its senses, which would perceive the users instead of receiving input from them. The author rejects Sutherland’s head-mounted display model for being uncomfortable, and strives more for a “come as you are” interface.

In a computer-controlled responsive environment, the framework is the space that people see or hear in response to their actions. The author strives towards such an environment with his 1970 VIDEOSPACE application, a video projection of computer-graphic images to create a telecommunication space, where two geographically separated individuals are able to interact with each other as if though they were there in-person. For over a decade and a half, various applications he created were developed for teleconferencing and cooperated by geographically remote individuals.

Discussion:
While this paper is more about VR than haptics, the paper expressed the use of hands for interactivity within the scope of a virtual environment. While such an application is nothing spectacular today, it’s pretty amazing that a functioning application was made possible almost forty years ago, especially since the author didn’t have the luxury of modern internet broadband capabilities. I don’t think this particular paper makes much of a contribution to our class at a technical level, but it does give us a historical perspective on the potential use of hands as an input tool to interface with the computer. Beyond that, I still think the author has a long way to explain the public of preferring this kind of system over what they already use.