The next great nexus is the union of Internet resources and library systems, and the focus of that convergence is the library catalog – a newly integrated catalog which, in response to a userÕs query, both delivers an array of potentially relevant information sources regardless of their format or manner of access and allows direct connection to them.
Interactivity is not about obscuring the game with layers of statistics or talking pictures of grandpa. Rather, it’s about pulling the audience out of the armchair and pushing them into the baseball park. It’s about flying around the stadium and becoming a player in the game. These more subtle forms of interaction-based on simulation and spatial metaphor – hold much greater promise … It is this vision of interactivity that will sell new media technology in the long run.
Whether or not VR becomes a major new medium of commercial entertainment, or some vital new mode of artistic expression, it still will be of enormous use to the military. Thriving civilian VR will probably make military VR expand even faster; giving the virtual battlefield better and glossier set designs.
This is the start of the personal news service.
For now, creating electronic shopping assistants isn’t a top priority. What’s needed first is software to keep people from drowning as they sift through a sea of information to find exactly what they want. Every day, that sea grows deeper.
This paradigm shift will transform every facet of science, engineering, and mathematics, starting with the fundamental nature of education. Every home will have an unlimited laboratory in which to conduct experiments.
High-performance computers will enable wide use of digital images and image processing, transforming a broad variety of disciplines, such as radiology, forecasting, urban geography and military intelligence.
In image-processing and animation, traditional filmmaking techniques could be replaced by realistic computer-generated scenes. Real actors would be computed and placed in real scenes.
By decade’s end, we will look back at 1992 and wonder how a video of police beating a citizen could move Los Angeles to riot. The age of camcorder innocence will evaporate as teenage morphers routinely manipulate the most prosaic of images into vivid, convincing fictions. We will no longer trust our eyes when observing video-mediated reality. Text will emerge as a primary indicator of trustworthiness, and images will transit the Net as multimedia surrounded by a bodyguard of words, just as medieval scholars routinely added textual glosses in the margins of their tomes.
Severed from unreliable paper, text has become all but inextinguishable … paper may be on the skids, but text is eternal. Immortality may be the least of the surprises that this new medium of electronic text will deliver. Video enthusiasts are quick to argue that images are intrinsically more compelling than words, but they ignore a quality unique to text. While video is received by the eyes, text resonates in the mind. Text invites our minds to complete the word-based images it serves up, while video excludes such mental extensions. Until physical brain-to-machine links become a reality, text will offer the most direct of paths between the mind and the external world.