Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

It's not social to send HTML mails to this mailing list.
I don't like your typesetting.

On 4/1/16, Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> wrote:
> While funny in it's visionary shape, I'm seriously scared about this
> matter.
>
> Take for example Google's material design: any software that successfully
> mimic the physical world (paper layers in particular) is going to bland our
> perception of its "virtuality". Our mind is going to accept it as a
> physical tool. Now, we "know that a programmable computer is no more and no
> less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism
> without changing a single wire", but are we sure we really want to remove
> the awareness of the wires?
>
> Google glasses scare me even more: we are going to look the world through
> some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
> virtual baloons like the other physical entities that really exists.
>
> We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> feed us.
>
>
>
> Giacomo
>
>
>
> 2016-04-01 22:00 GMT+02:00 <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>:
>
>> lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:
>>
>> > I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
>> > back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,
>>
>> > Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
>> > social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have
>>
>> > For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
>> > perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose
>>
>> Very interesting.  I was envisioning a system which would (at least on
>> its GUI side) present information in the form of a Web page, like
>> Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I hadn't thought of abandoning the Web page,
>> altogether, for some other kind of "social space" browser.  I wonder
>> what that might be like.
>>
>> [Disclaimer: This is NOT a formal or serious proposal for a new Plan 9
>> file system.  (Not yet, at least.)  It's just an exploration of some
>> potentially possible possibilities.]
>>
>> For a social network to be useful, it must provide some intuitive
>> mapping between information in the virtual world and its real-life
>> referents.  (In contemporary social networks, these take the form of
>> person/place names, mugshots, and interactive maps with balloon icons.)
>> The space which humans are most familiar with navigating, of course, is
>> meatspace - the physical, brick-and-mortar world.  It makes sense, then,
>> that the most intuitive interface would offer some kind of three-
>> dimensional virtual reality.  The simplest, most intuitive mapping
>> between virtual space and meatspace would probably be to visually
>> "overlay" information from the virtual space onto meatspace.  Technology
>> (mostly in the form of various head-mounted glasses or goggles) already
>> exists which allows a person to see what's around them, while projecting
>> information ontop of what they see.  A device such as this has generally
>> been called an "eye tap".  But it has a problem: when you turn your
>> head, the display turns with it.  In order for the UI to be as intuitive
>> as the physical world, it would have to maintain orientation with its
>> physical environment.  Tracking motion of the user's head could be done
>> using accellerometers, a la Oculus Rift.  Imagine a Rift with two video
>> cameras on its front (to provide a binocular view on the physical world)
>> that overlays a digital world ontop of the real world you see.  Virtual
>> arrows could guide you where you need to go without needing directions.
>> When you get near your favorite Chinese restaurant, a balloon could
>> appear in your view, giving you access to information about it.  When
>> GPS magic detects that a friend of yours is nearby, an friendly-looking
>> arrow appears, indicating the general direction and approximate distance
>> to him or her.
>>
>> In order for a virtual world to be useful, however, simply mimicking the
>> physical world won't do; its physics must differ from the physics of the
>> real world in some useful way.  If your favorite restaurant is two miles
>> from your present location, for example, you won't want to walk two
>> miles to find its virtual balloon.  :) Navigating the virtual space
>> would require some way to stretch/pan space and time, allowing the user
>> to "fly" about and move forward/backward in time within the virtual
>> world, before restoring the overlay to match normal space/time.  You
>> would, for example, be able to hike the trail I hiked yesterday, even
>> after I got back from hiking it.  If I recorded GPS waypoints and/or
>> stereoscopic video along the way, you could hike right along with me,
>> having a conversation with my avatar about your favorite edible plants.
>> Then, I could "rewind" time and watch your hike & conversation as well
>> (assuming that you decided to share it with me).
>>
>> An ability to stretch/shrink distances in virtual space enables use of
>> non-Euclidean volumes, as well.  Imagine "dimension compression"
>> technology as seen in the (sci-fi) movie Ultraviolet, or in the TARDIS
>> of Dr. Who.  ("It's bigger on the inside!")  You could stuff as many
>> files as you want into a single filing cabinet, have a filing cabinet
>> with a potentially infinite number of drawers, or stuff as many filing
>> cabinets as you want into a police call box which shrinks down and stows
>> neatly inside a virtual watch that you wear on your virtual wrist.  Want
>> to send a FAX?  Press a button on your virtual watch, and out pops your
>> personal TARDIS.  Reach inside it, grab your virtual FAX machine, grab
>> the document you want to send, and feed it through.  (You can fast-
>> forward time, if you like, so you don't have to wait for each page to
>> scan.)  When you're done, just hit the "poof" button on your virtual
>> watch, and everything neatly folds itself back inside.
>>
>> Such a non-Euclidean 4-dimensional space full of nested objects could
>> certainly be represented as a file system.  Omero and Olive
>> (technically, o/mero and o/live) from the Octopus project over at LSUB
>> already allow one to represent a two-dimensional GUI as a file system.
>> (All or part of a GUI on one machine can be tar(1)ed up and untarred on
>> another machine, reproducing the same GUI.)  It stands to reason that
>> such an approach could be extended to allow representation of a greater
>> number of widgets, with real-life social signifigance, in a space with
>> more than two dimensions.
>>
>> In a sense, social networking Web pages could be considered flattened,
>> stripped-down projections of such an n-dimensional social space into the
>> medium of the 2D document.
>>
>> > Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
>> > information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
>> > as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is
>>
>> I'm not sure if we will become entirely virtual.  That would require us
>> to give up sex.  :) I don't think we humans will give up such things so
>> easily.
>>
>> --
>> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>> |           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
>> |Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
>> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>>
>>
>