miriam_e | here I sit...

Here I sit in darkened room, facing a glowing screen and surrounded by trance thud and sparkle... aaaah, beautiful music energises the core of my being.

Here I sit, groping my way toward a glorious future borne on the backs of those geniuses who labor for love of knowledge... better beings than I, by far. Here I sit trying to help in some small way... here in my darkened room before a glowing portal immersed in cascades of trance... beautiful music.

Here I sit, illuminating, painfully and slowly, corners of the wondrous architecture, intricate and self-evolving under clever hands guided by many scintillating minds. Surely it is not far now... will I see? Will I feel? Will I live? and live... and live... and live? and grow... and learn... and love? Will this be the time? So many ones, better than I, have passed before, the gift denied. Will we be the ones who hold it? Born to us in the hands of those shining ones -- those who labor for love of knowledge.

Here I sit in dark comfort, daylight outside, but here I sit in my enfolding burrow... words dribble from crawling cursor. Here I sit. I wait... building and learning while I wait, hoping I have time. Having tasted the pale shadow of godlike realities in the worlds I visit while I sit here... here I sit wanting more... the hunger... the ache... appalled at the thought that it could be snatched away at the last moment... like so many before... many before... better people than I. They could not even hope. At least I can have the hope. So here I sit in my warm dark room, hoping, bathed in music and the glow from the strange window before me -- window to many worlds.

Here I sit... hoping that soon I'll not be here, nor sitting, not in light or dark... hoping to be a god among gods with endless worlds of my own creating... with endless time for my living... endless knowledge for my exploring...

Here I sit... learning... creating... feeling... hoping... waiting...

Here I sit

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What do you mean by 'ceased'?

Each night we go through cycles about every 20 minutes of surfacing to consciousness, then dipping down to unconsciousness, then into dream-state, and back up to consciousness. Your consciousness ceases many times every night. The feeling of continuity of self is an illusion. We deceive ourselves because we are always speaking from the point of view of someone with an apparently continuous memory. Naturally it doesn't look discontinuous because we judge from the memory itself.

...there'll always be a market for a 'passive' story experience...

Definitely! The cool thing about VR fiction is that it can be interactive or not as you choose. You get to choose... and you can choose at any time during the show. A little while back I wrote a piece to explain VR fiction to someone who had no understanding of the potential of computers. Here is a bit of it:

You are seated in front of a screen. You have selected the latest episode of your favorite new series. You settle back to watch it with the remote control in hand. You could use a mouse and keyboard, or a joystick, but you prefer the remote because it is easy to use while relaxing in your armchair. You are watching this episode a second time as you are curious about one of the characters in the story. You are going to direct the "camera" to follow this character instead of settling for the standard view. You can look at the scene from any position by pressing the up and down arrows to move the viewpoint forward and back, or the left and right arrows to turn the viewpoint left or right, just as if you were moving a mobile camera inside the story. But of course there is no actual camera. The story is in a virtual world — a moving, computer-generated, 2D image of an imaginary 3D world — and you are controlling your viewpoint within it. Last time you watched this episode you felt lazy and just let the director's camera show you the story. It was like the old days of vegeing out and watching a movie on video... except at one point in the story when you moved the "camera" over to a suspicious shape in the shadows. You suspect the writer put the shady character in there as a joke, knowing that many people could not resist the lure. Smiling, you settle back to enjoy yourself for the next 20 minutes.

What I didn't mention is that you can have multiple directors' cameras that you can attach yourself to, and can jump into various characters to view things passively through their eyes if wished. There are few limits in what can be done. This is the beauty of it. The user can wander freely or elect to bind to preset viewpoints, and they can do this repeatedly and at any stage in the story.

Hell, [computer games] already are VR fiction in most respects

Kinda... they explore one or two aspects of VR fiction, but it is actually an incredibly diverse story form. You can make single or multiple thread, linear or nonlinear, deterministic or nondeterministic stories. But these are not simple categories; each of these is a spectrum of possibilities.

(more in the next reply... won't let me post it all in one go)

Wow, the VR stuff sounds pretty cool. Actually, it sounds like a lot of that stuff is already on the way to being employed with DVD. You already get a whole lot of menus containing extra stuff, but alternate camera angles and whatnot are already being used in *ahem* porn.

It also sounds like it'll multiply the writer's workload by several orders of magnitude.

One of the problems of trying to do this with conventional film is that 2 camera angles doubles the size of the files. Multiple preset viewpoints can be implemented in VR with almost no increase in filesize. It is better than that though. In VR the user is free to wander at will and even record their own viewpoints.

In fact I expect this will be a source of outlet for aficionados of VR shows. I can imagine that people will post online their own viewpoint camera angles of particular shows, and that some particularly skilled people will become so good at it that they will become recognised as especially brilliant directors, eventually gaining employment in future productions.

This discussion has prompted me to post online most of the piece from which I cut that example paragraph earlier about sitting back and watching a VR story.

oops... didn't give the link: http://werple.net.au/~miriam/VR-fiction2.html

here I sit...

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