It sometimes seems that virtual reality is mainly used for fun at the moment. Do you think virtual reality can also be used as a way of communicating?
David Kolb -I think so. It is a bit like writing personal Web pages. Imagine at some future date I have all sorts of computer-related tools, and sufficient bandwidth. I could create a little mini-world, not a textual page, but a sort of mini-world like a room which you could enter, in which there would be symbols and images which I though were me or perhaps were my view on a certain matter. I could send that to you and you could enter it.
And then you could comment on it by altering some things in it or perhaps linking it to other things, creating a second room. So it might be possible to have a mode of communication which was in a sense the creation of small simulated environments, and then a mode of commentary which was the alteration of those environments. Presumably, you’d want to have both the original and the altered version available, as in a hypertext where you can link things, you do not ever have to erase anything. You can substitute something for it but the original remains linked there. You could imagine virtual reality being used as a medium of expression and communication, perhaps not so immediately as a method of argumentation but as a method of presentation.
I think it is important to go beyond thinking of virtual reality as a commercial product which will be simply something you absorb - you go into a Disney virtual reality or a Hardrock Café virtual reality and you are completely dominated by what they want to sell - and think of virtual reality rather as the possibility of having personalised worlds which are not ways of escape but ways of communication.
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