anselm hook on the failed promise of VR, and the dangers of AR / 3D geo

capturing ‘appearance’ rather than ‘behavior’ was the death knell. very good post: My own sense has been that VR is something of a tar-pit and that Augmented Reality to close to VR for comfort. Having watched VRML ensnare and sink so many ventures I wonder if the same thing would happen with an intersection between cartography and visualization. I used to write video games and quite a few that were immersive 3D. In that role I used to hang out with the VRML community, watching them go through their contortions as they tried to define the VRML spec (and the atrocity that is now X3D). Oddly, the geo enthusiast get togethers we see today are in fact almost a perfect mirror of the kinds of VRML get-togethers that used to happen back in the late 90’s; a variety of participants some backed by ventures, other by passion, absorbed in the possibilities of a technology…. but all mostly really just contributing to the heat death of the universe. In the last go-round VR failed to succeed on the web for a variety of reasons, competition, lack of cohesion, internecine wars over a ideologically starved space, but perhaps mostly because the enthusiasts went after the lowest hanging fruit: capturing ‘appearance’ rather than ‘behavior’. You can see this in the way the VRML grammar has most of its emphasis on static geometry as opposed to parametric or procedural geometry and in the way it has very little emphasis on constraints over time or on simulation at all. One would have imagined a very rich physical dynamics model for VRML defining many kinds of joint and contact constraints – but in fact is is impoverished in that regard. What they wanted was to upload themselves into a furry wonderland, and what they got was a simple grammar for defining buckets of vertices and polygons… A form versus function argument. Insofar as a geo 3d interest group; it seems like such a group should focus on modeling the behavior of systems; with the trite ideas such as decorating 3d space with post-it notes or drawing static geometry on 3d space being treated as something that is taken for granted; yes needed but aspirational no. Basically (IMHO) if you want to build something truly durable, then you have to dig deep into the heart of where value is. I don’t see a lot of value in just doing the world in 3d; it’s been articulated for years as a thesis, there’s a huge amount of expertise that should have done this already and the digital landscape is riddled with half-hearted attempts to do just that; whose developers walked away eventually out of sheer boredom. But there is value in simulating the world; its behavior over time and the rules that drive the construction of the artifacts that we see in it. The difference is that in the former you are manually plunking down a bunch of buildings and calling it a city and in the latter you are building a time machine. In the former you have buckets of points and polygons and in the latter you have scripts that can grow buildings and can be used to graph interactions between different phenomena. The poignancy of our planet, its urban landscape, its beauty, was drawn home to me while flying out of OAK on this last friday just as the sun was setting. Looking down through rifts of cloud at trails of light and the shadows of buildings illuminated by the evening dusk one really did have a sense of being a god over a next-generation video game. As the sun faded one was left only with an abstract sketch of human habitat in halogen and phosphor. At that moment I happened to be reading ‘In the Absence of the Sacred‘ which talks about how quickly our urban culture has colonized the world. …and I could see what he was referring to directly by just looking out the window. It would have been wonderful to have a smart window showing not just the digital facts (who was where, what was where) but of how it came to be there; its flow over time, and where it was going. To see not just the present but to see through the layers of time as well… I did like this earlier, appropriate, comment cited by Kevin Kelly regarding situational awareness

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