Why use text-based environments in an age of images?

The Internet offers enormous potential to overcome the barriers of space and time among human beings bringing the potential to maximize the economical use of people's time and material in activities ranging from manufacturing to training and education.

• Provides access to scarce or specialized resources
• Permits an economic way to provide enriched experiences and contacts
• Enables institutions and corporations to share diverse strengths
• Facilitating real-time contact and communication among people working on distributed endeavors.

However, while the Internet has succeeded in providing the basic connectivity to achieve these goals it lacks an effective means to interface institutions, resources, faculties, decision-makers, students, and workers in a shared, multi-person, real-time experience.

The essential aspects of real-time cooperative effort are difficult to capture at a distance, even when that distance is bridged by the vast information-carrying capacity of the Internet. Even the powerful, new capabilities of affordable, desktop video conferencing can't adequately mediate the full range of social, intellectual, and physical dynamics required to represent and transfer knowledge within an institution.

The Lanning Hybrid Environment takes an inclusive, holistic approach to media integration creating an environment that - beyond replicating physical space - augments or extends it by bringing tools and capabilities which simply are not available in physical time/space interactions.

These tools and capabilities include:

• Time Shifting
• Space Shifting
• Choice of media
• Low Cost

HOW?

One obvious approach to such a goal would be to use virtual reality technology for the interface. Virtual reality is a highly popular topic recently, and if it could achieve its claimed potential it could inject the participants seamlessly into remote working environments. Popular discussions of virtual reality typically refer to graphics-based virtual environments - systems that provide an excellent interface for some purposes.

They are, however, very costly; are oriented towards a single user; and don't provide the opportunity for multiple remote users to interactively examine and control the environment. In contrast, the Learning Organization (be it business, military, or educational) require interfaces which support multiple, interacting users in real time, and which can be accessed through low-cost, PC-based, dial-up systems.

An alternative form of virtual environment known as text-based virtual reality (TBVR) can fulfill both of these requirements for many kinds of applications. In text-based virtual reality systems, the remote environment contains locations which have properties and appearances, objects which can be looked at, picked up, carried about and passed between virtually-present persons, and which can interact with them in appropriate ways.

It is inhabited by multiple virtual personae who are the manifestation in the environment of real people at remote locations, and who can talk, gesture, carry on group conversations or whisper privately to one another, move about at will, examine things, and in general behave as they would in the real world and interact richly with the virtual world in which they find themselves.

The great advantages of this approach in cost, simplicity of hardware requirements, and in applicability to large numbers of simultaneous interacting participants are due to the use of text rather than graphics to convey the occurrence, appearance, and real-time behavior of events in the virtual world. One 'sees' the world with the mind's eye much as one does while reading a novel, only here the novel is alive, the reader is a participant, and the 'plot' develops based on the actions and interactions of the persons present.

In many ways such text-based systems provide a richer view of reality than graphical systems. Most of what may be seen may be described, but much information which is invisible to the eye may also be given. Because the interface technology is simpler, the user can have much more control of the environment, and of materials and objects in it, than is the case with current graphics-based approaches.

With What?

In most applications, the use of TBVR will need to be easily accessible to large numbers of users with diverse backgrounds, levels of experience, and abilities. This mandates human-interface properties oriented towards simple, natural-language operation in interactions with the system itself, and supportive of natural formats for communication among simultaneous human users of the system. A TBVR technology which has evolved to support such demands exists in a variety of forms of real-time, multi-user, game-playing systems currently found in significant numbers at many sites on the Internet.

These systems possess the technology to interface multiple, remote users to one another and to a remote virtual environment over standard Internet connections. In greater or lesser degree, the virtual environments implemented on these systems achieve the goals of natural-language operation and natural formats for inter-user communication and interaction. Such systems come in generic types commonly known by acronyms such as MUD, MUSH, MOO, MUSE, MUCK, etc., and often generically referred to as MU**.

Although such systems have until now most frequently been employed for the development of game-playing systems, they are adaptable to serious non-recreational purposes. A number of none-game applications already exist, including several academic applications. It is interesting to note in this context that the high-technology field of graphics-based virtual reality similarly had its origins in games, in video-arcade applications.

All of the problems of ease of use, system comprehensibility, and ease of interaction which will be faced by designers of non-recreational applications have been encountered in the established base of MU** game-playing systems. The approaches to such problems developed at these sites have typically evolved by trial and error, but have the benefit of having collectively been put to the test by hundreds of thousands of users over a time span of several years.

Typically sites which do not successfully provide the users with ease-of-use and an accommodating environment find the users migrating to sites which do. The lessons learned in this application, and the solutions implemented can therefore be of great value to us as designers of similar applications of this technology to non-recreational uses.

The Lanning Group excels at building on the base of MU** software currently in operation. We have the knowledge and contacts with expertise necessary to build text-based virtual environments tailored to the needs of any application, including the ability to functionally extend the basic operation of MU** as required. Let us discuss with you the ways in which we can provide low-cost, effective environments to tie together your distributed operations and maximize your use of resources and personnel.

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