Leaving it to your imagination

by Sean McGrath

December 6, 2007 —

As time goes by, computers get better and better at faking the physical world.
Monochrome gave way to color on our screens and then, later, on our printers.
Blocky character-only displays gave way to bitmap displays which lead to everything
from WYSIWYG document editors to virtual reality simulators.

Throw huge amounts of CPU power into the mix and you end up with early 21st
century animated movies. Movies which are getting incredibly close to the holy
grail of making the real and the fake very difficult to differentiate.

Then there are the worlds of photography and audio. Again, both reaching the
point where fidelity with old-world analog technology is no longer a gap that
needs to be bridged. Indeed, we are reaching the point where digital methods
are the norm - they are the reality - for audio and video creation and processing.
We are no longer using computers to, as it were, "fake it". Computers
are the standard way to do it. The real world is out there but digital media
are becoming our primary way of interacting with it from afar.

There is a snag though. At least I think there is a snag. You may well disagree.
We will see. The snag I see relates to imagination. When you have a medium to
work with that has only limited ability to express reality, you have to imagine
new ways of doing things. Take web browsers for example. Imagine if, prior to
the invention (discovery?) of the web, computer screen sizes had reached a point
where book-sized pages could easily be displayed and read online looking and
feeling like they do on paper? We would have had a way of taking reality (books)
and turning them into digital forms that mirrored reality very closely.

As you know, that didn't happen. Screen sizes had limitations. Machines and
communications links had capacity limitations. The problem required imagination.
The imagination lead to a lightweight concept of "page" in the form
of HTML and lightweight hyper-linked document flows in the form of HTTP.

My point is that the limitations present at the time necessitated new imaginings.
They necessitated looking past simple emulations of the real world. They necessitated
harnessing imagination so as to invent completely new ideas. Of course, with
the feedback loops that exist all over this industry, those new imaginings have
become part of accepted "reality" and are themselves, subject to attempted
emulation. For example, how long do you think it will be before someone embeds
a web browser in something like Second Life? Will that happen to an acceptable
level of quality before somebody imagines a completely different and better
way of working around the limitations of 3-D emulations? Does it matter which
happens first? I think so.

I find myself strangely thankful for the limitations in our technologies. The
limitations have a way of forcing us to think past the norms, the obvious, the
"reality" that is out there. We think beyond mere emulation and invent
new things.

Three cheers for technology limitations!

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