| nettime@desk.nl on Tue, 9 Jun 1998 07:36:27 +0200 (MET DST) |
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| <nettime> Michael Heim: Virtual Realism |
[From <http://mheim.com/rio>, forwarded with permission; see the site
for links embedded in the text.]
Abstract: "Virtual Realism"
Contemporary culture exhibits an increasingly polarized spectrum of
attitudes toward virtualization. On one side are
network idealists, who dream of uploading everything local and
physical to global networks. On the other side are naive realists
-- from the Unabomber to a host of neo-Luddite critics, who reject
computers. These two social forces appear headed for a collision as
computer evolution unfolds.
Virtual Realism is a strategy for balancing these two forces.
Virtual Realism includes several imperatives:
* Clarify the language of virtual reality
* Create a feedback loop between engineers and public
* Observe current shifts in telepresence (technalysis)
* Cultivate pre-modern (somatic) body awareness (Tai Chi)
* Develop appropriate design models for virtual worlds
This last component will be the focus of the presentation. The
presentation will demonstrate models of online worlds designed
according to virtual realism, and then a
contrast with be made with more naively realistic worlds. The models
come from the author's recent work with graduate students at the Art
Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
This paper (no footnotes) is available with full-color illustrations
on the Internet at
http://www.mheim.com/rio
Virtual Realism
By Michael Heim
Introduction
Contemporary life bristles with attitudes toward virtualization. As
computers emerge in all areas of life, some critics attack virtual
reality as an extension of shallow television. Others hail global
networks as the advent of new communities that transform economics and
social life. In my book Virtual Realism, I analyze the spectrum of
attitudes from "Naïve Realism" to "Network Idealism" and I suggest a
pragmatic balance called "Virtual Realism." For the purposes of this
paper, I will sketch the opposing attitudes in simple terms: first,
the Teilhardian optimism of network idealists, and then the naïve
realism of the Luddite critics sometimes associated with the
Unabomber. I then condense the strategy of virtual realism into four
main points while highlighting the design strategy based on its
principles. The design strategy offers guidelines for constructing
online, 3-D, real-time virtual worlds that harmonize conflicting
attitudes. The presentation concludes by showing video samples of
current online virtual world construction done by graduate students at
the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where I
teach Virtual Worlds Theory and Virtual Worlds Design.
Network Idealists
The idealist sees planet Earth converging. Computer networks foster
virtual communities that cut across geographies and time zones.
Virtual communities seem to heal isolated people locked in metal boxes
on urban freeways. Through computer networks, the population can
socialize while shopping, learning, and business are only a mouse
click away. The telephone and the television seem to have been mere
beginnings of a more powerful, multi-sensory, interactive
telepresence. "Virtual communities" recall McLuhan's "global village"
and Teilhard's "Omega Point."
Network idealists advance a philosophy of convergence. The convergence
ranges from the auto-poetic systems of Principia Cybernetica to the
political activism of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. One way to
grasp the idealist roots of this philosophy is to consider the
Teilhardian thought current underlying mid-twentieth-century thinking.
At the heart of network idealism pulses a thought most clearly
articulated by the French Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin.
Teilhard de Chardin envisioned the convergence of human beings into a
single massive "noosphere" or "mind sphere." This giant network would
surround Earth to control the planet's resources and shepherd a world
unified by Love. Teilhard's catholic vision ranged from evolutionary
physics to world religion. (His views received more suspicion than
support from Vatican orthodoxy.) He saw in the physical world an inner
drive for all substances to converge into increasingly complex units.
Material atoms merge to create higher-level units. Matter eventually
converges to form organisms. The convergence of organic life in turn
produces higher-level complexities. The most complex units establish a
new qualitative dimension where consciousness emerges. On the
conscious level, the mind - and then the networking of minds - gives
birth to a new stage of spirit. As in Hegel's nineteenth-century
philosophy, Teilhard sees expanding spirit as the inner meaning or
cosmic purpose of the preceding evolution. Convergence toward greater
complexity, even on the sub-atomic level, exemplifies the Love
principle (agapic rather than erotic). Only later, with the dawn of
intelligence, does Love come into full self-awareness. For Teilhard,
this is the Christ principle guiding the universe. "In the beginning
was the Logos." Only at its culminating point does history reveal its
full meaning as the mental sphere assumes dominance. Teilhardians see
ultimate convergence as the Omega or End-Point of time, the equivalent
of the Final Coming of Christ.
Teilhard, like Karl Marx before him, inherited evolutionary dynamics
from Hegel, the father of German Idealism. Hegel applied the Christian
notion of Divine Providence to the recorded events of civilized
history in order to show a rational progression. Hegel's elaborate
encyclopedias and multi-volume histories of Western civilization
affirm a hidden evolutionary will driving purposely towards a single
culmination. The fulfillment of history, according to Hegel, is a
spiritual unity harmonized in diversity, a oneness which subseqsuent
interpreters describ as a "classless society" (Marx) or as "social
progress" (the American Hegelians).
Hegel saw a divine Idea unfold in the material world of historical
events - even to the point of squeezing all recorded history into a
Procrustean logic of progress. The motor that powered the movement of
history was a series of internal civil wars, each bringing the entire
society a little closer to perfection. The culmination of all
revolutions, for Hegel, produced Western constitutional democracies
where the individual and the individual's rights are recognized by the
social collective. Just what this heavenly harmony looks like in
practice appeared differently to the various proponents of Hegelian
idealism. While Marx's advocates dressed in the worker's garb of
political economy or in revolutionary guerrilla fatigues, Teilhard's
vision blended synthetic physics with Christian communitarianism. It
is especially the communitarianism that attracts network idealists.
Connecting the communitarian impulse with the cult of technology may
seem incongruous at first glance, but we must not forget that the
organized, enduring community is itself a co-product of agricultural
technology, of the development of machines. For millennia, machines
functioned as stand-alone tools under supervision of a single human
operator -- the hoe, the plow. With larger-scale projects and
manufacturing, machines increasingly functioned in an ensemble -- the
mill, the boatyard. The shift from machinery of isolated work tools to
larger systems becomes one of the defining characteristics of the
industrial era, with railroads, fuel distribution, and highway systems
being obvious examples. The interconnection of one machine to another
extended into the sphere of human society and cultural production with
networks: first radio, then television, and now computers. The
contemporary convergence of all three media has created a situation in
which a vast variety of machines plug into seemingly limitless
networks, all with the computer as the control switch.
The network idealist builds collective bee-hives. The world-wide
networks that cover the planet create a global bee-hive where
civilization shakes off individual controls and electronic life steps
out on its own. The idealist sees the next century as an enormous
communitarian buzz. In that networked world, information circulates
freely through the planetary nervous system, and intellectual property
vanishes as a concept. Individuals give and take freely. Compensation
is automated for the heavenly, disembodied life. Electronic angels
distribute credit. Private territory and material possessions no
longer divide people. The battle of the books recedes through digital
mediation, and proprietary ideas give way to voluntary barter.
Cooperative intelligence vanquishes private minds. Extropian idealists
(who define themselves as the enemies of entropy) encourage their
members to entrust their deceased bodies to cryonic storage until
scientists one day either revive the repaired body or upload the
brain-encased mind into silicon chips. The Teilhardian Internet is
optimism gone ballistic.
Naïve Realists
Realists remain unimpressed. They are uneasy with the idealists who
celebrate electronic collectives. I know people in rural communities
who hear wishful thinking in the phrase "virtual community." It sticks
in their throat. For many, real community means a difficult,
never-resolved struggle. It is a sharing that cannot be virtual
because its reality arises from the public places that people share
physically -- not the artificial configurations you choose but the
spaces that fate allots, complete with the idiosyncrasies of local
weather and a mixed bag of family, friends, and neighbors. For many,
the "as-if community" lacks the rough interdependence of life shared.
And here is where the naive realist draws the line. The direct,
unmediated spaces we perceive with our senses create the places where
we mature physically, morally, and socially. Even if modern life
shrinks public spaces by building freeways, and even if the
"collective mind" still offers much interaction among individuals
through computers, the traditional meeting places still foster social
bonds built on patience and on the trust of time spent together. Here
is the bottom line for realists.
No surprise, then, for realists when they hear that the Internet
Liberation Front is bringing down the Internet's Pipeline for six
hours, when Anti-Semitic hate groups pop up on Prodigy, when Wired
magazine gets letter-bombed, or when Neo-Nazis work their way into the
German Thule Network. The utopian communitas exists as an imagined
community, as the Mystical Body. Real community exists, on the
contrary, where people throw their lot together and stand in
face-to-face ethical proximity. Computer hardware may eventually allow
us to transport our cyberbodies, but we are just learning to
appreciate the tradeoffs between primary and virtual identities. Put
the New Jerusalem on hold until we phone security!
The naive realist feels fearful about virtual reality. There is fear
of abandoning local community values as we move into a cyberspace of
global communities. There is fear of diminishing physical closeness
and mutual interdependence as electronic networks mediate more and
more activities. There is fear of crushing the spirit by replacing
bodily movement with smart objects and robotic machines. There is fear
of losing the autonomy of our private bodies as we depend increasingly
on chip-based implants. There is fear of compromising integrity of
mind as we habitually plug into networks. There is fear that our own
human regenerative process is slipping away as genetics transmutes
organic life into manageable strings of information. There is fear of
the sweeping changes in the workplace and in public life as we have
known it. There is fear of the empty human absence that comes with
increased telepresence. There is fear that the same power elite who
formerly "moved atoms" as they pursued a science without conscience
will now "move bits" that govern the computerized world.
The critics of fear often assume a philosophy of "naïve realism."
Naïve realists take reality for what is experienced immediately.
Reality, they assert, is the physical phenomena we perceive with our
bodily senses, what we see directly with our eyes, smell with our
noses, hear with our ears, taste with our tongues, and touch with our
skin. From the standpoint of this empirically perceived sensuous
world, the computer system is at best a tool, at worst a mirage
distracting us from the real world. The elaborate data systems we are
developing exist outside our primary sensory world. The systems do not
belong to reality but constitute instead, in the eyes of the naive
realist, a suppression of reality. The suppression comes through "the
media," which is seen to function as vast, hegemonic corporate
structures that systematically collect, edit, and broadcast packaged
experience. The media infiltrate and distort non-mediated experience,
compromising and confounding the immediacy of experience. Computers
accelerate the process of data gathering, and threaten further, in the
eyes of the naïve realist, what little remains of pure, immediate
experience. The naïve realist believes that genuine, natural
experience is as endangered as clean air and unpolluted water. The
naïve realist aligns computers with the corporate polluters who dump
on the terrain of unmediated experience.
The supposed purity of immediate experience was defended by the New
England Transcendentalists in nineteenth-century America. Thinkers
like Henry David Thoreau, backed by the publicity skills of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, proclaimed a return to pure, unmediated experience.
Thoreau left city life to spend weeks in a rustic cabin in the woods
at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts so he could "confront the
essential facts of life." Far from the social and industrial hubbub,
Thoreau spent two years contemplating the evils of railroads and
industrialization. Although railroad tracks and freeways now
circumscribe Walden Pond, many contemporary critics, like Wendell
Berry, seek to revive the Thoreauvian back-to-nature ethic and take up
the cause represented by his Walden retreat.
In the eyes of the naive realist, computer networks add unnecessary
frills to the real world while draining blood from real life. The
mountains, rivers, and great planet beneath our feet existed long
before computers, and the naive realist sees in the computer an alien
intruder defiling God's pristine earth. The computer, say the naive
realists, should remain a carefully guarded tool, if indeed we allow
computers to exist at all. The computer is a subordinate device that
tends to withdraw us from the primary world. We can and should, if the
computer enervates us, pull the plug or even destroy the computer.
By voicing such fears, the naive realist sounds alarms that many
people have come to connect with the Unabomber.
Unabomber Manifesto
The Unabomber is an important figure for understanding naïve realism.
The Unabomber's extremism cannot be understood in isolation from the
one-sided commercial euphoria that sells millions of computers each
year. The Unabomber's attack on computers became clear to the public
in September, 1995 when the Washington Post published a 56-page,
35,000-word manifesto on "Industrial Society and Its Future." Under
the pressure of bomb threats against airline passengers, the newspaper
carried the Umabomber Manifesto in its morning edition. By evening on
the East Coast, you could not find a single copy of the Post with its
8-page manifesto insert. The next day, however, the 200-kilobyte text
of the manifesto turned up on the Internet. It appeared on a
World-Wide Web site sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Unabomber had his own "home page," illustrated with wanted posters
and maps pinpointing the series of explosions he had caused, all in a
high-tech, Web format.
Search the Unabomber Manifesto and you find the word "computer"
mentioned frequently in conjunction with "control" and "technology."
The serial bomber blames technology, especially computers, for a
variety of societal ills: the invasion of privacy, genetic
engineering, and "environmental degradation through excessive economic
growth." The Unabomber Manifesto borrows heavily from an older school
of social critics who follow the French writer Jacques Ellul. The book
by Ellul, Technological Society, a bible in the 1960s, demonized an
all-pervasive technology monster lurking beneath the
"technological-industrial system." Ellul took a snapshot of technology
in the 1960s, and he then projected and expanded that single frozen
moment in time onto a future where he envisioned widespread social
destruction. Ellul's approach -- what economists call "linear trend
extrapolation" -- takes into account neither social evolution nor
economic transformation. Ellul did not include the possibility that
economies of scale would arise to redistribute technological power,
allowing individuals, for instance, to run personal computers from
home and publish content on an equal footing with large corporations.
The dark future portrayed by Ellul appears throughout the Unabomber
Manifesto, but the Unabomber goes further by linking the technology
threat explicitly to computers. The killer critic sees computers as
instruments of control to oppress human beings either by putting them
out of work or by altering how they work. The Manifesto states:
It is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new
physical and social environment radically different from the
spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted
the human race physically and psychologically. If man does not
adjust to this new environment by being artificially
re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and
painful process of natural selection. The former is far more
likely that the latter.
The dilemma outlined by the Unabomber can be found in other extremist
critics. Many share the Unabomber's views without harboring his
pathological desperation. The no-win dilemma they see is either to
permit evolution to wreck millions of lives or to use technology to
forcibly re-engineer the population. Laissez-faire evolution or
artificial engineering seem the sole options: Either manipulate humans
to fit technology, or watch technology bulldoze the population until
all that remains is a techno-humanoid species of mutants. The Ellul
school of criticism posits a monolithic steamroller "technology" that
flattens every activity, and the Ellulian view allows only a static
fit between technology and society. This school of thought sometimes
puts a national face on the alien technology monster, calling it
"Americanization."
Naïve realism and network idealism are two sides of the same coin. The
computer's impact on culture and the economy turned from a celebration
into a backlash against cyberspace. A cultural pendulum swings back
and forth, both feeding off and being fed to a sensation-hungry media.
The media grabs onto hype and overstatement, culled from marketers and
true believers. When the media assesses the techno-culture, a trend
climbs in six months from obscurity to one of the Five Big Things --
complete with magazine covers, front page coverage in newspapers, and
those few minutes on television which now constitute the ultimate in
mass appeal. After the build-up, the backlash begins. The process is
as follows: (1) simplify an issue; (2) exaggerate what was simplified;
(3) attack the inadequacies of the simplification. Cyberspace was no
exception, and the reverse swing against cyberspace was inevitable.
The backlash is not simply the product of a fevered media economy. It
taps into people's real attitudes towards an ever more technologized
culture. This runs from those who are frustrated by the frequent need
to upgrade software to those who experience "future shock" as a
personal, existential jolt. While futurologists Alvin and Heidi
Toffler preach "global trends" from an economist's overview, the
individual suffers painful personal changes in the work and
marketplaces. Waves of future shock may intrigue forward-looking
policy makers, but those same swells look scary to someone scanning
the horizon from a plastic board adrift in the Ocean. The big picture
of evolutionary trends often overwhelms and silences the personal pain
of living people. Those people will eventually find their voices in a
backlash against the confident soothsayers in business suits.
A streak of the Unabomber's Luddite passion weaves through the
cyberspace backlash. The titles of several books published in the past
few years give a glimpse of the breadth of the backlash. The books
include: Resisting the Virtual; Rebels Against the Future: The
Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution; Media Virus; Data
Trash;
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway; The Age
of Missing Information; The Gutenberg Elegies; War of the Worlds:
Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality; and The Future Does
Not Compute. Obviously, these books show infinitely more grace than
the Unabomber's crude, coercive manifestos. But they all reject, to
varying degrees, the movement of life into electronic environments.
Some American critics have embraced the title "neo-Luddite."
Kirkpatrick Sales, for instance, felt compelled to distance himself
from the Unabomber Manifesto because he in fact uses many of the same
arguments to reject technology and he shares with the Unabomber some
common critical sources like Ellul. While agreeing in principle with
what the Unabomber says, critics like Sales wish to maintain distance
from terrorist practices. Such critics grew in numbers during the
early 1990s when information technology extended into every area of
life, spawning a multimedia industry and virtual reality companies.
Virtual Realism: A Pragmatic Balance
Naive realism and network idealism belong together in the cyberspace
continuum. They are binary brothers. One launches forth with
unreserved optimism; the other lashes back with a plea to ground
ourselves outside technology in primary reality. Hegel would have
appreciated their mutual opposition while betting on an eventual
synthesis. Unfortunately, no synthesis is in sight. A collision is
more likely. Even if we were to subscribe to an idealist synthesis, we
would only subsume individual pain under collective social forces.
We need instead to treat the conflict as an existential matter. Rather
than conjure a solution with a wave of dialectic, I suggest we look
toward a pragmatic balance. We need to find within ourselves both the
Unabomber and the Teilhardian technologist, and rather than allow them
to argue in the abstract, we need to have them work together,
side-by-side in our current evolution. There is a delicate balance
that sways between the idealism of unstoppable Progress and the
Luddite resistance to virtual life. The Luddite falls out of sync with
the powerful affirmative human energies promoting rationality for
three centuries and now blossoming into the next century. But the
idealist slips into the progress of tools without content, of
productivity without satisfaction, of ethereal connections without
corporeal discipline. Both inclinations -- naive realism and futurist
idealism -- belong to our destiny. We are each part Unabomber, part
Teilhardian.
Between these two extremes swings the tight rope of virtual realism.
This long thin rope stretches across the chasm of change and permits
no return. Indifferent standstill is even more dangerous. The
challenge is not to end the oscillation between realism and idealism
but to find the path that goes through them. It is not a synthesis in
the Hegelian sense of a result achieved through logic. Rather, virtual
realism is an existential process of criticism, practice, and
conscious communication. Virtual realism produces an uneasy balance:
to balance the idealist's enthusiasm for computerized life with the
need to ground ourselves more deeply in the felt earth affirmed by the
realist as our primary reality.
How do we cultivate virtual realism in ourselves? The answer is not a
simple one, nor one to which we can subscribe once and for all and
then put away in a convenient box of ready answers. For the sake of
this paper, though, I will condense some main tasks of virtual realism
as outlined in my book of that title:
1. Clarify the language of virtual reality.
2. Create a feedback loop between engineers and public
3. Observe current shifts in telepresence (technalysis)
4. Cultivate pre-modern (somatic) body awareness (Tai Chi)
5. Develop appropriate design models for virtual worlds
Let me devote a paragraph to each of these five points and then I will
dwell on the last point, which will introduce the computer video
portion of this presentation.
1. Clarify the language of virtual reality.
Fiction writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson were
useful in the early stage of cyberspace development, but they
wrote without actually experiencing VR technology. Their fiction
was fine for stoking imaginations. Now, however, we are in the
early phase of actual experiments. Fiction and commercial
advertising distort the meaning of virtual reality, conceiving it
as a nebulous state-of-mind or attenuating its meaning so much as
to lose the essential features of VR: immersion, interactivity,
and information intensity. Each of these features has a specific
technical description, and VR is first and foremost a technology,
not simply a subjective state of mind or a metaphor for whatever
goes into computers. Keeping a close watch on the language we use
supports the next point.
2. Create a feedback loop between engineers and public
. In a democratic society, lay citizens can influence technical
systems. It is not easy for citizens to participate in the
evolution of technology, but it is possible. I have seen this
happen myself in the early 1990s as VR technology became the focus
of national conferences in the United States. The path of virtual
realism requires bridges spanning an informed population and a
socially alert community of engineers. One of the important
outgrowths of this loop is InfoEcology, the use of virtual reality
to enhance environmental cleanup. (See Chapter 5 in Virtual
Realism.)
3. Observe and describe in detail current shifts in telepresence
(technalysis).
Art works and interactive art installations indicate how
technology shifts the pragmatic landscape of work and play. A
phenomenology of daily computer usage can help us gauge changes in
tempo and reality scope. Tempo and reality scope belong to the
ontological shift introduced by virtual reality. The user
phenomenology of specific practices - what I call "technalysis" --
contributes to the cautious pathway of virtual realism. One
example of technalysis I offer is Electric Language, which
analyzes the shift of reading and writing from print to electronic
text.
4. Cultivate pre-modern (somatic) body awareness (Tai Chi).
Because high-end VR telepresence (with head-mounted displays and
CAVE environments) signals dangers like AWS (Alternate World
Syndrome) and other psycho-somatic disorders, we need to promote
the retrieval of pre-modern dimensions of bodily awareness. Help
for this effort can be found, among other places, in the Asian
view of mind / body as a harmony to be cultivated rather than a
duality to be exploited. Computerization needs to go hand-in-hand
with sensitivity to the subtle energetic components of human
experience. Taoist martial arts and practices provide key examples
of integration that help balance computer culture.
5. Develop appropriate design models for virtual worlds
. This strategic point parallels the strategy for appropriate
language (number one above). The design goal of virtual realism is
to form a middle path between shocking with the new ("future
shock") and denouncing computers as a distraction. The design of
virtual realism avoids environments of complete fantasy that
remain unrelated to pragmatic purposes. It also eschews the
attempt to re-present the primary world. We can no more escape the
primary world through virtual worlds than we can upload reality to
the computer.
This last point can help make virtual realism intuitive. We can better
understand virtual realism when we view it as a style of virtual
worlds design. Over the past year, my research in virtual worlds
design has developed a non-representative but (potentially) pragmatic
design for virtual worlds. My classes in Virtual Worlds Design and
Virtual Worlds Theory in the graduate school at the Art Center College
of Design in Pasadena, California, have produced samples of world
building that convey the style of virtual realism as I conceive it.
Design Principles for Virtual Realism
By the year 2015, our daily lives will doubtless have assimilated
high-end Virtual Reality with its immersive head-mounted displays or
light-weight goggles. By then we will also enter full-surround
environments where work and play migrate to electronic landscapes.
Today, however, we are experimenting with Internet systems that
deliver slow but real-time (synchronous), interactive 3-D worlds to
the desktop. These current "worlds-through-the-window" create
psychological rather than sensory immersion. In other words, we
participate in these virtual worlds through monitors, keyboards, and
mouse buttons, and it is our active building inside these worlds and
the recognition of other builders that makes us feel immersed in the
virtual world. These worlds are the psychological predecessors of full
sensory immersive VR.
Virtual worlds seek to engage our dwelling rather than our passive
contemplation. Instead of working like broadcast media, these worlds
invite user participation and customization. By identifying with an
avatar (an animated token of one's self) and actively navigating
through a 3-D environment, the user becomes part of virtual events.
Through active building, users achieve psychological immersion, which
is why one software universe is called "Active Worlds." To effect
psychological immersion, the 3-D graphics of the online world must run
smoothly over a modem; the worlds must provide avatars for user
identity and real-time chat; and the objects in the world must allow
interactive participation rather than passive viewing. Such
requirements rule out, in my mind, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling
Language) or VRML-based worlds. To date, VRML is clunky and slow. To
meet psychological requirements, I have chosen the ActiveWorlds
universe, which employs RenderWare as its underlying script. The
ActiveWorlds (AW) RenderWare universe permits the full ontology needed
for psychological immersion: world backgrounds for atmosphere;
embedded sounds in regions or in objects; interactive objects to build
or modify; avatars to represent users in real-time with chat
capability; and animated sequences that convey bodily gestures through
the avatars. Admittedly, AW is rudimentary and limited, but it is
constantly improving. AW seems to me the best 3-D experience on the
Internet, and it signals the dawn of a larger transformation by which
the Internet evolves into a three-dimensional, multi-user,
participatory universe.
Our experimental world is one of nearly two hundred evolving virtual
worlds in the AW universe. Each of the two hundred worlds receives
hundreds of visitors every day, and many of the visitors build by
using objects already inside the worlds. Besides these additive
builders, there are also authoring builders, who do not depend on
pre-given objects or avatars but who create the objects and avatars
for a world. In most cases, the authoring builders consist of teams
rather than individuals. These authorial teams create and host the
worlds, which then attract visitors and accommodate additive builders.
Our "accd" world is authored and hosted by a team of students at Art
Center College of Design (hence the name "accd world").
A distinguishing characteristic of accd world is its central location
on the spectrum between photo-realism and fantasy. Most virtual worlds
in AW are based on real-world topology. Many attempt to represent flat
land, mountains on a single horizon, and a planetary topology as
recognizable as Earth or Mars. By contrast, accd world has no single
flat land but only local regions of gravity. It contains layers of
development up and down the Y-axis, spread out in discrete regions.
Instead of a single geography, accd world contains many disconnected
but related areas of construction.
The construction mode parallels the principles of virtual realism.
Virtual worlds do not re-present the primary world. In virtual worlds
we need not believe we are in a re-presented natural world. Worlds are
not realistic in the sense of photo-realism. Each virtual world is a
functional whole intended to parallel, not re-present or absorb the
primary world we inhabit. Treating artificial worlds as distractions
from the real world is just as off-balance as wanting to dissolve the
primary world into cyberspace. Realism in virtuality should seek
neither photo-realistic illusions nor representations. Realism, in the
sense of virtual realism, means a pragmatic functioning in which work
and play fashion new kinds of entities. VR transubstantiates but does
not imitate life. VR technology is about entering worlds and
environments, and worlds arise from humans adapting things through
pragmatic functioning.
Virtual realism arises from habitation, livability, and dwelling, much
more than from any calculating realism that strives to get every
detail "correct." Not correctness but function establishes the
genuineness of a world. The social transition to cyberspace is,
therefore, as important as any computer engineering research. A
virtual world can achieve a functional isomorphism with the primary
world but its does so not by re-presenting the primary world. The
virtual world needs only to foster a similar livability. It must have
a home space for orientation, means of transport through virtual
space, ways to store information, and tools for interacting with
fellow avatars. Most important, the virtual world must use the right
amount of fantasy to make the world attractive and "virtual" (having
less gravity than primary being). The virtual world must have that
"something extra" that transforms routine activities through fun and
playfulness. A touch of whimsy can be compatible with efficiency and
accomplishment, especially where users can choose the degree of
playfulness in the world's teleology. At its current stage of
development, accd world does not yet offer visitors the full pragmatic
dwelling for which it eventually aims, but at present accd world seeks
the right note of balance between fantasy and representational (naïve)
realism. In coming months, accd world aims to offer online tools for
building art objects as well as opportunities for criticism by
professional artists and art school faculty. These latter activities
will support greater habitation, livability, and dwelling.
The current avatars in accd world mix fantasy with function. Two major
kinds of avatars - humanoid and winged - populate accd world. The
winged avatars, including giant colorful birds and exotic flying
insects, work well in the open spaces of the world. Because accd world
contains discrete regions of construction in vertical layers, the
flying avatars provide the thrill of navigating unhindered through
wide-open virtual spaces. Flying avatars like Neckbird and the Insect
series also display deformations that distinguish their anatomy from
common sense forms. The noticeable deformations distinguish accd-world
avatars from the typical prosaic avatars seen in AW humanoids. The
Chairboy anatomy, for instance, comes attached to a large chair,
making him permanently sedentary. The Greenman avatar wears clothing
that does not match. Deliberate deformations play with the prose of
virtual identity.
Contrasting World Designs
To clarify the style of virtual realism, I conclude by contrasting
accd world with two other virtual worlds that purport to create a
"learning environment": AW School and AlphaU. My contrast is
illustrated by images captured from the three worlds. While captured
images may help illuminate the contrast of the three worlds, a full
contrast comes into focus only for people who actually enter the
virtual worlds and engage them through real-time interactivity.
Besides six illustrations, I will also show movies captured directly
from the moving screens of AW. As such, the movies translate
first-person free navigation into a series of passive, linear,
cinema-like sequences. Like all linear media, the cinema brings its
viewers into a mode of passive viewing. Passive viewing characterizes
all broadcast media, while the most characteristic feature of the new
media is their inaccessibility to passive contemplation. Truly
interactive experience requires at least twenty minutes of direct,
360-degree navigation, which is usually sufficient to induce a certain
degree of psychological immersion. Cinema cannot substitute for
interactive experience. What I show here, nevertheless, provides some
clues about what I mean by the design style of virtual realism.
The movies show selections from live online navigations captured from
different perspectives and using different viewpoints. Users can
switch between two main viewpoints. With the third-person viewpoint,
the user sees the navigating avatar as if from a "god's eye view." The
first-person viewpoint shows the world at the eye level at the avatar
(though you cannot see the tip of your avatar's nose). The user
chooses between these viewpoints depending on the activity. When in a
chat situation, users often adopt the third-person viewpoint so the
social distances between the avatars can appear. When in a world- or
object-oriented situation, as when building or exploring, users often
adopt the first-person viewpoint so the objects at hand can appear
more directly. The user determines which viewpoint to use from moment
to moment, and either of the two viewpoints occurs only in a
particular user's window on the world. In other words, two users might
choose not only different perspectives on things but also different
viewpoints on themselves. These choices do not appear in the movies
except as ex post facto decisions.
Because virtual worlds occur in real-time on the Internet and because
they run on simple, off-the-shelf personal computers, they deliver a
relatively slow frame rate of between two to five frames per second,
usually through a 28k- or 56k-bps modem. The resultant images appear
crude and choppy as video, especially compared to the broadcast media
to which we are all so accustomed. Cinema and television use 30 or
more frames per second. The virtual worlds' meager frame rate
corresponds to low-end hardware and to the Internet's current
connectivity. To offset these limitations, virtual worlds contain
relatively simple models made of a minimal number of polygons so that
they will run smoothly. (The simplicity of their structure should not
be confused with the ease of their production. The models are
inherently difficult to create and mount.) The virtual objects
consequently appear blocky and cartoon-like, especially to someone
viewing them passively as movies. In their native interactive
environment, these virtual worlds can be highly engaging. As the
underlying technology improves, higher resolution models will soon
become available.
One of the postulates of virtual realism is that whatever goes online
undergoes transformation. The real can no more be reproduced online
than it can be replaced by fantasy. Reality is transformed by entering
the virtual. Virtual worlds need not suggest a replacement of the
primary world, nor should they be so fantastic as to terrify common
sense. Virtual world design should aim at a harmony between
photo-realism and fantasy.
Transformation is the theme of the six figures I have taken from
videos to convey the issues of designing for virtual realism. Consider
Figure 1, which shows the entrance to AlphaU. When we look at the
design strategy of AlphaU, we see an ontological nostalgia for the
physical 3-D world. AlphaU attempts to re-present the 3-D gravity
found in the primary world, including the adornments of flowerpots and
the geometry of academic monumentality. Despite the nostalgia,
however, a closer inspection reveals that the "pillars" of this
academic monument are not at all Ionic columns but are in fact
"teleport" booths. Teleport booths are ubiquitous in AW and their
design was probably inspired by the Tardis telephone booth of
television's "Dr. Who." Teleport booths allow avatars to "warp"
instantaneously to another destination in virtual space. These
"pillars" in AlphaU demonstrate that virtual worlds transform even
where they try to re-present. Still more nostalgic are the various
signs at the entrance of AlphaU. Figure 1 shows the sign for the
Humanities Division, which signals one of the departments of academic
disciplines divided according to the current university curriculum.
Where once the academy sprang from the psychological "faculties" of
the human mind, the virtual world here irrelevantly mirrors the
departments of the primary world campus - a dubious legacy for
Web-based education.
A similar nostalgia for campus architecture appears in the samples
from AW School. Figure 2 shows the AW School main building, which is,
again, laid out as if it were red brick and monumental stone. The
ephemeral, flickering virtual school seeks to replicate the solid
structures of uppercase Education. Moving inside AW School, we find
even more representational absurdity. In Figure 3, we see the wooden
chair, desks, and blackboards of the conventional schoolroom. What
more do we need? Virtual chalk?
Neither AlphaU nor AW School finds the middle ground of virtual
realism. These worlds lean toward the apparent security of a realism
that actually threatens to stifle everything virtual by burdening it
with pointless replication.
There is far less reality replication in accd world. The challenge for
accd world - seen in Figures 4 and 5 - is, on the contrary, to develop
pragmatic functionality. In its current stage of development, accd
world leans toward fantasy, as can be seen in the first view at Ground
Zero (the entrance portal of a virtual world).
Ground Zero (Figure 4) of accd world shows several ghost-like
silhouettes strewn across the virtual landscape. These are indeed
ghosts. They are remnants of avatars. If you look closely, you can see
that these models are former avatars recycled to become
semi-transparent statues. With their wispy veils and long gowns, they
resemble bride statues, or faded brides. And they are in fact modified
bride avatars. The original models, on which the accd bride statues
are based, come from the first Internet-hosted wedding ever held
inside a multi-user graphical virtual world. On May 8, 1996, at 9 p.m.
Central Standard Time, history was made when Tomas Landhaus, 27, and
Janka Stanhope, 31, were married in real life inside AW. Tomas and
Janka came dressed in avatars specially designed for the occasion.
After the AW ceremony, the real-life groom drove 3,100 miles from San
Antonio, Texas to Tacoma, Washington to kiss his bride. In 1998, the
designers of accd world borrowed the bride avatar and fashioned out of
it a poetic fantasy to stand statue-like at the gates of accd world.
The faded avatar models are relics of relics of real presence.
In the background of Figure 4, you can see the fantasy architecture
developed by accd world builders. The rainbow architecture projects
exotic lines and colors. Turrets and sacred flames top the buildings.
The horizon blurs the flat-earth plane by repeating an abstract
pattern. Figure 5 shows a different section of exotic architecture.
And from this perspective, you can see the horizontal plane give way
to a deeper layer. Another floor of the building appears through the
ground plane. From this view, you can see the multi-layered design
strategy, but you cannot see the many islands of tiered development
that extend throughout various sections of accd world. Sometimes the
ground plane exists for miles and miles of virtual space. At other
times, the ground plane vanishes into black virtual space as far as
the eye can see. The architecture shown in Figure 5 will one day
become part of the gallery space used later to display artwork made by
visitors.
Figure 6
shows an entirely different section of accd world. This section
contains huge slabs of rectangular panels. The white and blue panels
float like Mondrianesque abstractions in virtual space. The avatar
birds of accd world -- Tweak and Squawk - flit thrillingly through
these spaces.
Conclusion
These six figures illustrate, to a limited extent, two contrasting
strategies for the design of virtual worlds. They show the current
struggle for the right metaphors to shape cyberspace. The right
metaphors, I suggest, are those that strike a balance. The balance
arises between the need to extend ourselves more deeply into 3-D
computer space and at the same time to ground ourselves more deeply in
primary reality. We do not achieve such harmony by seeking to
replicate the primary world in cyberspace, nor do we achieve harmony
by substituting a pointless fantasy for the real world. Harmony arises
from attention to both tendencies within - to the realist and the
idealist in us. I would like to believe that accd world takes a tiny
step down the pragmatic path of virtual realism.
The computer video I bring provides a cinematic tour of these worlds
in all their differences. The best tour, however, comes from entering
the worlds live, in real time on a computer. If you wish, my avatar
and I would be happy to take you on a tour of AW and especially of
accd world.
The journey to virtuality launches us onto an open field. Whichever
way we choose to travel makes a big difference. The route of virtual
realism is not an easy one. Nor can it be traveled once and for all.
It is a continual balancing act, one that has already begun and that
requires ongoing attention.
Thank you for joining me this far on the journey.
Redondo Beach, California
April, 1998
Email: mike@mheim.com
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