Lance Birch wrote:

> Not trying to put a damper on this and please don't flame me, but does
> anyone else get the feeling that soon we're going to have too much power and
> we as humans just won't be able to handle it?

To answer seriously for a moment, I believe that a few of the
newer capabilities of computers are going to make a fundamental
change in us as human beings.  Within a short time, it will be
possible to sketch in 3D.

Why does that matter?

For thousands of years our species was restricted to narrative,
a one-dimensional medium.  2D, though it was there in prehistoric
times, only became a part of our way of organizing the world
logically (as opposed to emotively) in the past couple of centuries.
Only with 2D plus animation (as in television) have we as a
culture become more visual than literate.

Immersive, animated 3D, where we have control of the viewpoint,
is going to greatly increase the complexity of systems we can think
about, and reorganize our way of thinking every bit as much as
television has.  We can approach it now through VRML and raytracing,
but it's far too crude on the one hand and too slow on the other.

Let me just give one example.  I was responsible for the website
for the VRML 98 conference in Monterey, and one of the things my
team did was build a Monterey world using GIS data and landsat
maps: http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/vrml98/vrml/monterey.wrl

I got to Monterey a day early, and because the net was down, I
had nothing to do but relax in my room.  As I looked out my window
on the bay, I got this strange feeling -- I've *been* here.  Of
course, it was the hours I spent in that 3D world playing with
it and debugging it.  Never have I looked at a map or read a
narrative about a place and got the same feeling.  This will
soon become part of our everyday experience.

Or another example: I was once a biology major, and one of our
favorite little buggies was phage T4.  Until I saw, and got to
examine an animated 3D model of that phage a couple of years
ago, I didn't really understand how it worked.  Likewise for
molecules.  What does a carbonate really look like?  What do
the electrons do during a chemical reaction?  Today, that's
on the web and you can see it with your own eyes.

And because what we'll see and examine and animate in 3D isn't
(or shouldn't be) limited to what you can see in reality (the
3D map, for instance, could show the restaurants and their
specials and health ratings, what movies are playing at the
theater, and the crime in various districts), we'll be truly
doing something new.

Jim Blinn in last year's SIGGRAPH keynote had as one of his
great unsolved problems of computer graphics "finding a use
for real time 3D."  That's the challenge.  It's all well and
good (and necessary) to render a photorealistic scene, but
what can we create with this great tool of ours that *can't*
be seen with normal eyes?

When we answer that question, we'll be making a fundamental
change in the way human minds work.
--
Bob Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net
What we're looking for: destinations.
What we end up getting: journeys.

Post a reply to this message