Piet's Summary
On Monday, I gave a
lecture in a
virtual reality, for the first time in my life. The topic was `ways of
knowing'
and I talked about the relationships between science and religion, and
the use
of the working hypothesis in exploring reality, as we have been doing
here. It
was a strange experience. I was sitting in front of a very green
screen, while
my lecture was being filmed, so that the software could filter out the
green color,
and retain only the video stream of me talking. That stream was then
added back
into a virtual reality world, called videoranch (you can find it on the
web
under http://www.videoranch.com).
So there I
was, amidst a number
of avatars representing others who were online at the time, listening
to me. My
image was displayed at the same size as the avatars, and in a way, I
blended
right in. After I talked for twenty minutes or so, there was about half
an hour
of questions that avatars in the audience asked me, through a type of
text
messaging. I responded to the questions by talking within the video
stream.
It was a
strange experience,
because I was lacking the clues that normally accompany giving a talk:
I could
not see the audience face to face, I could not `read' their body
language, I
could not `sense' the atmosphere in the virtual room. In retrospect,
that made
me a bit more tense than I would normally have been, giving such a
lecture. The
same was true during the questions and responses session, although
already
somewhat less so.
Later,
reflecting on the
situation, I realized that I could have viewed the lecture, at least,
more as a
form of writing poetry than lecturing. When writing a line of poetry,
you can't
see your audience either, yet you can convey a lived and felt sense for
the
topic under consideration. And during the give and take of the
conversation
with the audience, it may well be possible to open up for new ways to
establish
a bond. I'm looking forward to the next opportunity, later next month,
to
explore this dynamic further. And it will be fun to bring online those
of you
interested in this kind of adventure.
Throughout
the week, playing my
role as normal avatar each evening, I felt my way around in this (for
me) new
world. I can see significant drawbacks (lack of direct contact with
nature,
others, objects) as well as significant advantages (freedom to move
around and
to reach people that are geographically far away in a rather direct
way). The
whole experience quickly appeared in my dreams as well as in the way I
started
looking at the every-day world. I am very curious how this type of life
in a
virtual world will jibe with our exploration of the working hypothesis.