第2章
i. This passage is from Gaston Bacheland, The Poetics of Space.
ii. My description of this work borrows liberally from descriptions by Davis and Wettheim. See Eric Davis, "Osmose," and Margaret Wet- theim, “Out of this World."
iii. It does, however, have an especially high profile for a virtual reality artwork, having been (together with Davies' later environment, Ephemère) experienced by a total of 35, 000 individuals as of the last exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, in 2004. Davies has also informed me that both works, destined to run on Silicon Graphics machines, were reengineered to run on a PC. Email to the author, 9/20/05.
iv. Psychasthenia can be schematically defined as a disturbance in the relation between the self and the surrounding environment. See Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia. 3
v. As far as is possible, I try in what follows to refrain from evaluating Gibson' s substantive claim regarding perçeptual invariants, reserv- ing my commentary to how Gibson’ s work has been appropriated by VR researchers.
vi. Rheingold mentions the influence of Gibson on two central pioneers of VR: Scott Fisher and Michael McGreevy. See Rheingold, Virtual Reality, 143–144.
vii. Though this correlation is especially explicit in Gibson' s The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), where it forms the very topic of investigation, his early work, The Perception of the Visual" World (1950), and his final work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), include extensive discussions of locomotion and haptic processes. See especially Chapter 13 of the latter work. Page numbers will be cited in the text.
viii. See Hillis, 125: “Texture gradients are seen as a way to overcome the vast storage and computational difficulties in modeling geometric form in VEs…" In this regard, Hillis mentions the ongoing research project of the Department of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill, aptly entitled “Virtual Backdrops: Replacing Geometry with Textures.
ix. In a related body of research, work on telepresence has linked the richness of tele-embodiment to success at getting tecnology “to support the body' s role in face-to-face interaction." Thus, teleembodiment functions neither via visual simulation nor through illusion, but by the functional duplication of the body' s capacities in a variant environment. As John Canny and Eric Paulos note, "..we can best interact with others at a distance by recreating the
Notes
266