Virtual Worlds Forum

The 'Thunder Run' in Elizabethan theatres must have been a great thing to experience; sitting watching 'The Tempest' as cannonballs were rolled down a chute above the heads of the audience by stagehands to simulate the storm. The Freak Shows of Victorian Britain, early photographs of men and women spewing ectoplasm and the recent spate of haunted house programmes in the UK all show how we like to exercise our imagination. There is a long and noble tradition of presenting something as real which we know isn't 'there', and we have a great appetite for it. The Metaverse Roadmap usefully segments virtual worlds from mirror worlds; one being an opportunity for us to augment our existing world with other more fantastical worlds, and the other representing our world as we know it. But what happens at that point or place where the real and virtual meet? A friend of mine, Spencer Kelly, who presents the BBC technology programme 'Click', went to interview makers of avatars for a feature for the programme. He was told by Ruth Aylett, Professor of intelligent virtual environments at the University of Salford that a Japanese researcher had "discovered that people's reactions to [avatars] improved quite nicely until they were almost naturalistic, and then there was a really sudden drop...the explanation for this was that you develop expectations about the character, that it is actually human, that it is actually real. Then suddenly those expectations are violated by something thats slightly wrong in the voice, or the face, or the way it moves, and it gives you a horrible feeling that is not real." Ruth Aylett went on to say how her colleagues expressed this moment when an avatar becomes too real as being the moment when they entered 'the zombie zone'. These 'too real' avatars were rejected by users, why? I remember going to see the film 'Earthquake' in sensurround in the 70's, the seats of my local cinema were wired up to shake during the scene where Los Angeles is destroyed. I loved it because I knew it wasn't real. When I was a kid I used to watch the TV series 'Dr Who' through my fingers believing my hands would protect me in some way from the Daleks. One Chistmas, in a toy shop, a 'life size' Dalek poked me in the back. For a split second I believed that Dalek was real, and it scared the life out of me.