Immersive Systems

Abstract

In recent years, a great deal of hype has been generated around the term “virtual reality”. The news media jumped onto the bandwagon and raised the expectations of the general public, and even members of the scientific community, well beyond reason. Despite the fact that this area of endeavor has failed to deliver what was projected after the initial advances, some interesting concepts have been developed which show promise. Thus a book on pictures in human-computer interaction would not be complete without at least a brief look into this area. We will do so without claiming any kind of completeness; for a detailed analysis, books devoted entirely to the subject are recommended (for example, Rheingold 1991; Bryson 1992; and Earnshaw, Gigante, and Jones 1993). We will survey aspects we consider particularly relevant to the part of the interaction pertaining to pictures and language, following and extending the nomenclature of Henry and Furness (1993). We will argue for a certain amount of language to augment pictures in immersive systems.