Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte

Author:Nicholas Negroponte
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101911822
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-20T14:00:00+00:00

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

The quality of a display is literally more than meets the eye. It is a viewing experience that typically engages other senses. The collective sensation as a whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.

In the early days of HDTV, social scientist Russ Neuman, then at the Media Lab, conducted a landmark experiment on audience response to display quality. He set up two absolutely identical high-quality TVs and top-of-the-line VCRs, playing the exact same high-quality videocassettes. However, in the one setup (A), he used the normal sound quality of the VCR and the TV set’s tiny speakers. In the other (B), he used better-than-CD-quality sound with excellent loudspeakers.

The result was astonishing. Many subjects reported seeing a much better picture in B. The picture quality was in fact the same. But the viewing experience was considerably better. We tend to judge our experiences as a sensory whole, not by the parts. This important observation is sometimes missed in the design of VR systems.

In the design of military tank trainers, considerable effort was made to have the highest achievable display quality (at almost any cost), so that looking at the display was as close to looking out the small window of a tank as possible. Fine. Only after painstaking endeavors to keep increasing the number of scan lines did the designers think to introduce an inexpensive motion platform that vibrated a little. By further including some additional sensory effects—tank motor and tread sounds—so much “realism” was achieved that the designers were then able to reduce the number of scan lines; they nonetheless exceeded the requirement that the system look and feel real.

I am constantly asked why I wear my reading glasses when I eat, because I obviously do not need glasses to see my food or fork. My answer is simply that the food tastes better when I wear glasses. Seeing the food clearly is part of a meal’s quality. Looking and feeling add to each other.

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