From mconway@microsoft.com Wed May 20 15:22:33 1998 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu (root@burdell.cc.gatech.edu [130.207.3.207]) by lennon.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id PAA17066 for ; Wed, 20 May 1998 15:21:50 -0400 (EDT) Received: from wheaten.hitl.washington.edu ([128.95.73.60]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id PAA29280 for ; Wed, 20 May 1998 15:21:49 -0400 (EDT) Received: from mail4-b.microsoft.com (mail4-b.microsoft.com [131.107.3.122]) by wheaten.hitl.washington.edu (8.8.8/8.6.12) with ESMTP id MAA04659 for <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>; Wed, 20 May 1998 12:21:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: by mail4-b.microsoft.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2217.0) id ; Wed, 20 May 1998 12:21:35 -0700 Message-ID: <4FD6422BE942D111908D00805F3158DF05B26706@red-msg-52.dns.microsoft.com> From: Matt Conway To: "3D UI List (E-mail)" <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu> Subject: RE: "flying" in VEs Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 12:21:33 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2217.0) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Status: RO Doug asked for a reference to the paper I talked about - here it is, complete with commentary. Smith, R. B. (1987). Experiences with the Alternate Reality Kit: An Example of the Tension between Literalism and Magic. Proceedings of ACM CHI+GI'87 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface: 61-67. This paper presents an overview of the Alternate Reality Kit (ARK), an animated environment for creating interactive simulations. ARK is built upon a physical-world metaphor: all objects have an image, a position, a velocity, and can experience forces. Users manipulate objects with a mouse-operated "hand" which enables them to carry and throw objects, to press buttons, and to operate sliders. The interface features are discussed in light of a general user interface tension between literalism and magic. Literal features are defined to be those that are true to the interface's metaphor. Literal features enhance an interface's learnability. Magical features are defined to be those capabilities that deliberately violate the metaphor in order to provide enhanced functionality. Discussion of each ARK feature includes informal observations of early ARK users, an assessment of the feature's learnability, of its usefulness, and of its position on the magical-literal axis. Even though ARK includes magical features, applications-level users have be trained in a few minutes. Although this paper is about ARK, the tension between literalism and magic raises some interesting questions on its own. Some of these questions are presented briefly in the conclusion. -----Original Message----- From: bowman@cc.gatech.edu [mailto:bowman@cc.gatech.edu] Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 1998 12:12 PM To: Matt Conway Subject: Re: "flying" in VEs A while back, Matt Conway wrote: > Ah, the ever-present tension between magic and realism (Randy Smith has a > great paper on the subject. Required reading...) Matt, do you have a reference for this? Never heard of it, but it sounds like something Randy Pausch would like... :) Thanks for your other comments and references to similar techniques previously done. This is one that I'm just keeping in the vault for now... Doug -- Doug Bowman, Ph.D. Candidate College of Computing, GVU Center, Georgia Tech Room 388 CRB, (404) 894-5104 bowman@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Phd/Doug.Bowman/