The annual SIGGRAPH Conferences have seemed for years an accurate simu- lation of what virtual reality will probably look like once we get enough rendering capacity and channels. Thousands of monitors, projection screens, amplified models (human and polygonal) and way-too surround audio scream at your eyes and ears from every direction. 30,000 people come to experience SIGGRAPH every year; many come to see the future of computing. This year, the screens were proclaiming the coming ubiquity of the flight simulation paradigm. We are surely going to be immersed in our computing, an event that first requires defenestration.
Fenestration is the architectural term for the laying out of windows on the facade of a building. Defenestration, therefore, is the opposite-- removing windows, and there was a defenestration movement in London in which protesters bricked up windows to avoid a new tax imposed on them. The dic- tionary also defines defenestration as the act of being thrown out of a win- dow, not relevant here, except in certain virtual reality contexts one could imagine.
Flight simulation is the real-time display of terrain and occasional other aircraft, tanks and explosions as viewed through the windshield. Given that one does not typically alter the geometry of the scene with the aircraft, the rendering is simplified considerably, but the capability to move at will in all directions at any speed in 3D is as significant a leap, arguably, as the bit-mapped display's 2D icons were over the teletype's 1D interface. Flight simulation firmware, the product of 40 years of govern- ment funding and a decade of video game progress, turns out to be the ena- bling technology for immersion, or Virtual Reality (VR) as many call it.
Windows, in the desktop computer metaphor, became the dominant post- teletype interface because windows look like the tops of desks, on which people lay out paper and file folders. Many people still print out e-mail and word processing documents and file them in physical filing cabinets out of habit, one would presume, but such practice is fading, finally. The paper conglomerates are worried, but we can be free to consider other inter- faces now. Will the post-literate computer interface be a defenestrated one? Arguments will be presented and comments welcomed!