Are there sports and athletics in Second Life? Never having visited that online virtual world, I couldn’t even venture a guess. But it would be hard to even imagine much more movement than tapping on the keyboard or wiggling the mouse around on your desktop.
Whole body interactions with a desktop computer seems an unlikely topic for almost any discussion. But Jaron Lanier writes a whole column about it in this month’s Discover magazine. Lanier puts it so beautifully at the beginning of the piece:
Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can: a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality to bring the whole body into computing.
Lanier goes on to talk about earlier work on stiff like data gloves, and he sings the praises of the Nintendo Wii, even going as far to say it heralds the beginning of the haptic revolution. But in the end, Moore’s Law hasn’t multiplied enough times to give us the stuff we need for real virtual reality. But instead of virtual worlds, I find it fascinating to think about applying the limited bits of the technology to interacting with the physical world, right now. Especially in sports and athletic coaching.
I mentioned the Ultimate Balance trainer in an earlier post as an example of something that could help orient athletes with the field of gravity and help improve balance and stability.
And it’s not so much that the functions such technology supplies haven’t been around for a while. You could always just use a t square or level, or whatever, which would give you the same information, but it would take a lot of time, probably be cumbersome and impractical, and you’d have to know how to use those things.
The advantage of stuff like Ultimate Balance technology is that it can get the functions portable enough, fast enough and small enough to be useful as we’re performing the actions where we need the feedback to improve balance and stability.
I can see how things like motion detectors and accelerometers can provide important cues much as an accurate vestibular system might. And, hopefully, the accelerometer’s sense of movement in three planes doesn’t get compromised by habit and faulty perception like ours do sometimes.
On the one hand, such technology gives an objective picture of how we are relative to the geometry of effective movement (whatever that is). But on the other hand, it doesn’t learn for us, either. It can only give us feedback that our nervous system either learns or it doesn’t.
But it’s better than nothing. And it works with more than your fingertips, too.