From watsonb@cs.ualberta.ca Wed May 19 10:05:19 1999 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu (root@burdell.cc.gatech.edu [130.207.3.207]) by lennon.cc.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id KAA19212 for ; Wed, 19 May 1999 10:05:16 -0400 (EDT) From: watsonb@cs.ualberta.ca Received: from asbestos.hitl.washington.edu (hitl-new.hitl.washington.edu [128.95.73.60]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id KAA03934; Wed, 19 May 1999 10:05:12 -0400 (EDT) Received: from scapa.cs.ualberta.ca (root@scapa.cs.ualberta.ca [129.128.4.44]) by asbestos.hitl.washington.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA09452 for <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>; Wed, 19 May 1999 07:04:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (user: 'watsonb' uid#105 fake: innisfree.cs.ualberta.ca) by scapa.cs.ualberta.ca id <13344-10100>; Wed, 19 May 1999 08:03:59 -0600 Subject: virtual vs. real To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu (g 3D user interfaces) Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 08:03:58 -0600 (MDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <19990519140410Z13344-10100+86@scapa.cs.ualberta.ca> Status: RO Hi all, (Doug, break a leg!) I agree with Matt that is important to note that some virtual worlds are meant to be used only in the virtual domain, while others are meant to impart a skill transferable to the real world. Both are quite important: witness viz apps vs. sim apps, for instance. Having said that, we have to think about the comparison you've proposed. Certainly the skill of block stacking is not something we should be training for in VR, giving the current state of haptic display. On the other hand, block stacking may be part of a higher level task that is quite appropriate for VR training, e.g. some sort of assembly task. The key difference here is that the transferable skill is assembly order, not stacking. So for virtual to real transfer, I would argue that a "non-realistic" method (e.g. snapping, or other higher level assists) would suffice. The same would be true for purely virtual apps. Thus the interaction would boil down to: select block 1, select block 2, tell the computer to attach them. Would this be faster than real world stacking? Probably not at this stage, though it would begin to approach real world speed. A more interesting question is: do we care if it's faster? As long as we have "reasonable" speed, I don't think so. Generally speaking, we don't do virtual reps unless reality just isn't there yet (prototyping), or reality isn't human-friendly (Chernobyl). So we don't do it in VR because it's faster at this small level. Still, it's usually better to be faster, and real vs. virtual comparisons are a good benchmarking process. I would simply contend that this sort of benchmark is not a good way of showing VR's raison d'etre. Back to CHI, Ben. -- Benjamin Watson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Computing Science 615 General Services Building Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2H1 tel: +1 780 492 9918 fax: +1 780 492 1071 email: benjamin.watson@ualberta.ca URL: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~watsonb