Okay, well as another session wraps to a close….
This session was also extremely interesting and had some great point to think of when creating/thinking of ILS (immersive learning simulations), but in the end was a commercial. The software tool being toted here by Chris Crawford was Storytron. It does seem promising but is still being developed. It is centred around social interaction but is text based with no graphics.
Interesting points that were mentioned is that social interaction software should include:
- a personality model – this should be simplified personalities ie:nasty_nice
- an interaction engine – this is basically the what happens ie: person A bumps into person B
- “artificial personality” – estimates human behaviour
- language of interaction – this is the programs part of it all
Through several examples it was neat to see that a program can be described by the verbs it uses. First example was a word processor. It copies, saves, edits, deletes, etc. A web browser jumps to a hyperlink, go back to previous, jump to bookmark. The relation to the social interaction topic was that Microsoft Word has about 350 verbs and social interaction software has 100++++ verbs.
The last thing that I noted was the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that was mentioned. It had to deal with the fact that language mirrors perceptual reality. An example for this is read these two statements:
- You don’t know!
- You don’t know?
The both have the same words but as you read them the first feels like a yell or surprise, the second can conjure up feelings of empathy or even pity. This hypothesis was pointed out to show how natural language in a computing world is virtually impossible. Reality is too big.
I don’t think I have any use now or in the near future for this, but it was an interesting topic and Chris certainly was an extremely enthusiastic speaker.