topical media & game development
research directions -- augmented virtuality
Given an information space, there is a duality
between information and presentation.
For an audience or user to be able to digest
a presentation, the amount of information must be limited.
Effective presentation, moreover, requires the use of proper
rethorics (which may be transcoded as
ways of presenting)
that belong to the medium.
Using VR, which is (even in its desktop format)
a powerful presentation vehicle,
one should always beware of the question
what is it good for?
Generally one may ask, what is the added value of using VR?
In an abstract fashion the answer should be,
to bridge the gap between information content and presentation.
Or, in other words, to resolve the duality between
information and presentation!
Let's look at an example, a site about archeology,
announced as a site
offering Virtual Archeology.
Perhaps it is good to bring to your attention that the
virtual, in Computer Science, means nothing but another
level of indirection to allow for a (more) flexible usage
of entities or objects.
See [OO], section
1.2.
virtual archeology
- variety of archeological sites
- various paths through individual site
- reconstruction of 'lost' elements
- 'discovery' of new material
- glossary -- general background knowledge
For a site about archeology, virtual means the
ability to present the information in a number of ways,
for example as paths through a particular site,
with the possibility to explore the reconstruction of lost
or perished material, and (for students) to discover new perspectives
on the material.
In addition, for didactic reasons there may also be
a glossary to explain concepts from archeology.
Now, how would you construct such a site
about virtual archeology?
As a collection of HTML pages and links?
It seems that we can do better, using VR and rich
interaction mechanisms!
So, what is meant by augmented virtuality?
Nothing that hasn't been expressed by the notion
of augmented virtual reality, of
which an example has been given in this section.
The phrase augmented virtuality itself is just
one of those potentially meaningless fancy phrases.
It was introduced simply to draw your attention
to the duality between information and presentation,
and to invite you to think about possible ways to
resolve this duality.
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
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