A number of years back I was giving a demo of a technology we had come up with in our lab — a new and improved form of autostereoscopic display. That’s a kind of display that lets you see in 3D stereo without the glasses.
Unlike previous ways to do this, our display let you be any distance away from the screen, and showed things with very high quality, without the visual artifacts that usually accompany autostereo displays. We were very proud of it.
I was just at the point in the demo where I was explaining how a sufficiently advance autostereoscopic display might obviate the need to travel to conferences. “Just think,” I said, “people won’t need to deal with the bother and exhaustion of getting on airplanes and traveling long distances, just to have a high quality face to face interaction.”
But as it turned out, I was wrong. And I only know this for the following reason.
One of the people in the room was Ben Shneiderman, a pioneer in the field of human/computer interfaces. When I got to this point in the demo, he spoke up.
“Ken, people don’t get on those airplanes and travel thousands of miles to conferences just so they can have a face to face conversation.”
“Then why,” I asked, “do they do it?”
“They do it,” he explained, putting his hand on my shoulder, “because of the danger that they might touch each other.”
How true.
🙂