Word: tele
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...standard virtual-reality experience, you may recall, involves donning a head-mounted display or special glasses--or, in principle, contact lenses--and thus entering a computer-generated fantasy world. As you turn your head or walk around, the computer adjusts your perspective accordingly. Tele-immersion is to videoconferencing as virtual reality is to Pac-Man. If it works, it will give you the visual experience of being in the same room with a person who is actually in another city...
...what's the killer app for tele-immersion? "It's not so much a matter of particular applications," says Lanier. "It will just become part of life. It will be used by teenage girls to gossip, by business people to cut deals, by doctors to consult." And presumably by people who want to do long-distance lunch. Of course, there won't be any point in saying "Pass the squash," but otherwise it will be a normal mealtime conversation. Eating online...
...wherever he or she may be. (And no more annoying collisions with opponent, walls or ball, since all three will be illusions.) In fact, using standard virtual-reality technology, people have already played tennis remotely, Lanier says. But each looked to the other like a cartoon character--an "avatar." Tele-immersion will let you see the agony of defeat on the face of your vanquished foe. A big advance...
...even though hiking may remain reality-based, it will have its online elements. People are already finding new hiking buddies over the Internet. Here lies the biggest import of the expanding online experience. Even if tele-immersion is still crude in 2025, cyberspace will have reshaped life because it will have kept doing what it has been doing--nourishing shared enthusiasms. Even before most Americans had heard of e-mail, there were chat groups with names like alt.fetish.foot and some environmentalists were mobilizing online. But the more people online, the easier it is to find your own special interest...
...bandwidth grows, more of these narrow interests--recreational, political, cerebral--can be pursued online. In 2025, the League of Women Who Find Gilligan More Attractive Than the Skipper and the Professor can not only form online; it can tele-convene and watch reruns! More and more, obsessions will be online obsessions...