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| | | | --- | --- | | Red Rock Eater Digest | Most Recent Article: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 |
the devil in virtual reality
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Date: Tue, 17 May 94 16:17:17 PDT
From: John Batali
...from the net...
Today (5/17) on Pat Robertson's show The_700_Club they ran a segment on virtual reality. This was not the segment run some months ago. It was a new one.
Today's segment focussed on the work of Joseph Bates at CMU. He's invented a computer animation system in which the characters are driven by their own simulated emotions and goals.
The characters look like colored balls with eyes. They're called "woggles" or "wobbles" or something. One character can be controlled from the keyboard, so a user can interact with the world of the woggles. As Pat said, "it's bringing characters with person- ality and traits and emotions to the television screen".
Bates said, "those emotions affect what they [woggles] do" and "there's about 60 or 70 goals and sub-goals". And, referring to a sad woggle "I'm not sure why he's so sad" and described how sending the user-controlled woggle over to the sad woggle might cheer him up.
He talked about how this sort of interactive world could get the viewer more involved, and how it could be a more effective medium for artists to get across whatever message they're trying to send.
Then, CBN showed clips from recent movies involving VR and computer animation, and saying that this technique would allow you to be a character in these movies.
Anti-porn crusader Robert Showers was interviewed. He said $10 to $12 billion in income comes from porn and it has connection to organized crime. He said the biggest consumers are teenage boys 12-17 both for porn and video violence. He talked about how we see rapes by 12-year-olds of 4-year-olds because of this.
Author Tal Brooks was interviewed. He said, "90% of your movies are evil" and "I'm not so naive to believe that virtual reality won't be the same thing".
Wrapping things up, Pat compared virtual reality to television in the 1930's. He repeated the point that there's still time "to control some of these things so they don't get out of hand" and referring to video video games said "the things that are done, the violence, the obscenity of evil, is beyond comprehension". And speaking directly to the viewer, "we've got to do something to bring people into awareness of what the problem is". Then he repeated the $12 billion figure and reminded the viewer what you can do to oppose that. (If you don't know, you can call 804 420 0700 and they'll be delighted to offer some suggestions.) ```
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