eneral

sychology

Describe and give examples of the four generations of artificial environments described in class.

For approximately one hundred and twenty years, scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated artificial environments.  The phonograph, radio, cinema, and television were the pioneering technologies in this endeavor.  These devices place the user in the position of an observer.  People can hear and watch events that they were never a part of.  Electronic advancements enabled ordinary people to listen to Caruso in their dens, hear the 1933 Inaugural Address, and watch the tanks roll into Tienanmin Square.  These technologies made the extraordinary a part of our daily lives, but contained a severe limitation.  First generation artificial environments do not let the user interact with events.  You cannot talk to Caruso after the concert, you never really met President Roosevelt, and you cannot stop those tanks.

The second generation of artificial environments took the user beyond observer status and allowed interactions with the environment.  Teaching machines were an early example of a technology that broke the boundary of one-way communication and let users influence future events.  Computers are a magnification of this trend and in many ways mimic human communication.  Although people interrelate with computers, the differences between interacting with a computer and nonsynthetic environments are readily apparent.

Most computer monitors take up only a small part of the visual field.  Also, the image on the screen does not change as the user moves.  Sound, especially the ability to process the user's verbal response, is usually rudimentary or nonexistent.  Few computers can present olfactory or tactile stimuli.

Why not make human-computer interaction more lifelike?  Expand the monitor to cover the entire visual field.  Make the visual world shift as the body turns.  Build computers that you can converse with as if it were a colleague.  Step into an artificial environment and  smell the coming of dawn.  Enter a synthetic world and feel a hand on your shoulder.  That is the ideal of virtual reality (VR) and is the third generation artificial environments.

There is no obvious technological obstacle that will prevent the close approximation of this ideal.  Some artificial environments (e.g., plane simulators) are already very similar to the natural environments they represent.  When the synthetic and actual environments become almost indistinguishable, only the memory of entering a synthetic world will separate the experience of living in an artificial and real environment.  Preventing the formation or activation of that memory will bring about the fourth generation of artificial environments.  In only a few years, our species must debate whether we should step into the fourth generation. 
 
 

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