Real To Virtual And Back To Real

Prof. Sowmyanarayanan

Sadagopan, is with iim Bangalore ss@iimb.ernet.in

A simple pendulum is an

interesting object. It seems to swing back and forth, and yet remains steady.

hspace="0" width="178" height="221">It seemingly speeds up when climbing down and slows

down as it climbs up. Still it measures even seconds so accurately, for days together.

What the simple pendulum measures, namely time, is interesting too. The clock can be set

back but time cannot; it continues to tick. Looking into the future is always difficult,

but the past seems to be reappearing many times in future. Predicting the future is far

more complicated in the high-technology area. Yet the fastest changing high-technology

area, namely, Information Technology also seems to go back and forth. Let me this

illustrate through an example.

The gossip going round the corridors of

IITs is the death of the mainframe computer. Yet, the mainframes seem to come back with a

bang in its new avatar called server. While we hope to throw away the VT 100 terminals, we

seem to welcome many Windows NT terminals through the main door! We keep predicting the

demise of the Cobol programming language on the one hand; and on the other hand, we are

all busy signing MoU with SAP for a strikingly similar language called ABAP IV programming

language!

Everyone disliked IBM for leasing machines

in the sixties. In the nineties, we started doing the same thing in the name of

outsourcing. The consultants used to dominate the computing scene in the sixties and we

are back to the same in the form of ERP consultants in the nineties. The past is

reappearing in so many different ways. If it is not old wine in the new bottle, it is

probably old bottle with new wine!

What does it mean for the future? Much of

the twentieth century saw the accumulation of various gadgets in the individual homes. The

need for comfortable climate forced people in cold countries like the United States to

remain indoors with the warmth of the heaters. In hot countries like India it was the

other way round, with people getting away from heat into the comfortable climate provided

by room air-conditioners. Once inside the house, the human being started looking for ways

and means to keep himself busy. Instead of looking at the great mountains and the

beautiful flowers, he started looking at the pictures on the screen of the idiot box. With

less time and inclination for social ties with people, human beings started a virtual

socialization through soap opera.

Even an average Indian, be a Bengali or a

Madrasi, stopped taking part in real theater but started identifying himself with the

virtual theater through the teleserials on Doordarshan TV channel. The real fun of music

season slowly gave way to the virtual home theater equipment, be it a cassette player, a

radio, or a CD player. Attending to religious discourse was replaced by the virtual

listening-through reading of the column in the next day edition of The Hindu.

The real experience of the fire was

replaced by the virtual experience of microwave-oven heating. The discernible shift from

real to virtual continued unabated through the several other gadgetry including

photocopying, typewriting etc. Even traditional outdoor activities moved from real to less

real, if not virtual, by way of swimming pools, personal aquarium, planetarium, museum,

home-exercising etc.

The arrival of the personal computer added

a new dimension to the shift from the real to the virtual. Thanks to word processing, real

writing is replaced by the virtual typewriting. Thanks to the computer network, the real

mail is replaced by the virtual electronic mail.

Thanks to the graphic editors, the real

brush is replaced by virtual Paintbrush! Thanks to presentation software, a real powerful

presentation can be replaced reasonably well, by a virtual PowerPoint presentation! Thanks

to the Internet, we may soon do virtual banking, virtual shopping, virtual cinema, virtual

classroom, and even virtual Sunday Mass!

The technology of Virtual Reality is

promising to change the very nature of human-computer interaction with audio, visual, and

tactile control and interaction. The immersing environments are so attractive that Virtual

Reality is the most exciting area of computing today. Applications to medicine, education,

training and entertainment using Virtual Reality (VR) promise amazing results. Virtual

Reality Modeling Languages (VRML) and VR 'Plug-ins' are under intense development at many

research labs around the world.

Going by the analogy of the swinging

pendulum, a couple of decades from now, human beings will start moving from the virtual to

the real. Tired of hundreds of email, one would long for a personalized but beautifully

handwritten letters. Tired of staring at the screen for hours together, the human eyes

would long for a peep into the blue skies and the beautiful flowers. Tired of the

sophisticated homes full of intelligent gadgets, one would long to get into the

countryside and keep off the telephone tag. The bombardment of multimedia would force

human beings to look for handcrafted items, paintings, and tapestry. The overaddiction to

the machine would be replaced by socialization and force the human beings to look out of

the homes into the streets. Instead of chatting to someone across the continent over

Internet Relay Chat (IRC), one would start discovering the melody of one's own voice

chatting with the neighbor!

These would have profound impact on the

society as a whole. It does not mean a return back to the caves, but a mature return back

to a higher level of consciousness, to use Sri Aurobindo's words. In a sense we will come

to similar but not the same point, as if we are climbing a spiral ladder!