Lag: A Point of View
Today’s empyre list (empyre Digest, Vol 18, Issue 14) arrived with a date 1/3/70 and therefore slipped to the bottom my email and probably that of a number of others.
But read it… After Andreas Horbelt?s remarks:
“If somebody stops writing in a textbased surrounding, he stops existing, no matter if he just takes a dramatic pause, if he is laged or if his computer is crashed… In graphical systems, you might still be there (as a visible avatar), but you also might already be gone (if you are lagged or your computer has crashed). So in the end, you’re just alive while typing, and every new sentence is a rebirth.”
Melinda Rackham, in her empyre post (which is about games) speaks of the Pause or Gap as “our portal into difference” — a positive take on a similar occurrence. An opening for the unexpected.
helen
jo
peter
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3 Responses
The comment about non-existence in a text-based environment suggests yet another difference between (the metaphors of) visual space and acoustic space: In visual space, there is no possibility of an echo.
In the acoustic space of the ‘net, it is entirely interesting to meditate on, and suggest, what comprise the various forms of “echo” that we experience here (and now!)
“Many people see virtual reality as an attempt to reproduce reality…But there are some fundamental probems with this. For example, network delays between different participants in a shared virtual world cannot be avoided and will always introduce certain limitations or inconsistencies into your experience of a world. Rather than seeing these as problems or errors, it might be better to see them as a natural phenomenon–a characteristic of the medium. Participants could be made aware of them (for example, we might see regions of uncertainty around positions of delayed objects in the virtual world). Perhaps, we might feel less let down by technologies if designers deliberately revealed their inherent limitations and frailties.” Steve Benford, Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University
i commented on this a while back but on another thread (in the avatar theatre archive). i agree with jo, that things like lag are not problems but characteristics of the medium, & can be integrated into the performance. i have found that technical glitches help the audience to appreciate just how live & raw our work is. for example, avatar body collision gave a performance at the virtual minds congress earlier this year that was technically flawless, & the audience had trouble believing that the online performers were not prerecorded.
h : )