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

[Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it>]

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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.|
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>

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