For 100,000 years, nature gave you a great kinesthetic sense; you didn’t think about a problem, you lived through it … If we’re successful, … the computer will vanish, the screen will disappear, and you will live in a rich information world.’
Predictor: Maples, Creve
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Richard Rappaport travels to Sandia National Laboratories – a 27.8-square-mile plot on the southeast edge of Albuquerque – to report on the most recent developments there. Rappaport writes: ”‘I hate the term “virtual reality,”‘ says Creve Maples, the developer of MuSE, Sandia’s multisensory, 3-D learning engine. “‘It has no definition anyone can agree on.’ Maples prefers his own term – anthropo-cybersynchronicity – ‘the coming together of human and machine.’ … We are inside a hot, windowless computer room at Sandia Labs’s Advanced Manufacturing Facility, ready to view a demonstration of MuSE – short for Multidimensional User-oriented Synthetic Environment – which Maples’s oversized personality transforms into a spectacle somewhere between The Wizard of Oz and Fantastic Voyage … ‘The keyboard is an attempt to adapt people to computers, not vice versa,’ he insists. ‘Pull-down menus are only a little more humanistic.’ MuSE’s breakthrough, Maples explains, pertains to the subcognitive ways people take in information, including pattern recognition, trend analysis, and anomaly detection. ‘The disadvantage of cognitive learning is that it is linear and sequential,” Maples suggests. “Experiential learning is delightfully parallel.’ By contrast, Maples says, in real life ‘we take in vast amounts of sensory information and absorb only 1 percent of it.’ MuSE, he adds, is constructed around the fact that ‘what that 1 percent is constantly changes.’ With its ability to vary stimuli in tactile ways, MuSE helps the mind unconsciously sort through the dross of vast amounts of sensory input and pull out the nuggets. ‘For 100,000 years, nature gave you a great kinesthetic sense; you didn’t think about a problem, you lived through it,’ Maples postulates. MuSE, he suggests, ‘is a means of traveling through any space and providing sensory tools to interact with that space. If we’re successful, … the computer will vanish, the screen will disappear, and you will live in a rich information world.'”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Playground of Big Science: Sandia Labs Used to be the ‘Conscience’ of the Cold War. Now That it’s Over, the $4 Billion Question is Whether These Specialists in Everything from Astrophysics to Virtual Reality Can Create a New Mission – and Find a New Market – Before Congress Pulls the Plug
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/sandia_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney