Interactive Media

• Purpose
• Short of a direct brain-to-computer connection, the potentially richest human-machine interface approach is through Interactive Metaphoric Virtual Worlds.


• Interaction
• Interactive media that adapts to user interaction, within spacial, physical, and temporal reality constraints, with (spacial and temporal) proximity detection, for example, can provide very rich communication support for users and can let users determine the effective scenarios. As well, just has user learn from interaction, so must the applications and systems. Serious knowledge sharing systems need to improve as they operate, especially since their complexity prevents easy replacement, but probably more importantly, for the quality, depth, and value of the user experience, as well as of the whole virtual world proposition.


• Detection
• Proximity (collision) detection provides software alarms that notify as resources get close to each other so that, for example, a rapidly approaching car, to a brick wall, could be automatically reported, triggering next, the animation that shows the exploding car, for example, or maybe more interestingly, users opening doors, drawers, picking-up objects, interacting.

• Solid 3D
• Knowledge sharing virtual worlds are best built in solid, volume-based 3D graphics where reality is better and more easily represented and managed. While sometime, the required geometric processing can be non-trivial, the action processing and efficient management is rarely trivial. Together, they offer interesting challenges for designers and developers.


• Interactive Virtual Reality
• Together also, they can provide an optimal interface between users and systems, the interactive virtual reality infrastructure, a fundamental component for virtual worlds.