In a discussion today about the future of virtual and augmented reality experiences, Alan Kay told me that what the medium really needs is the equivalent of classical music. It took me a few minutes more of conversion to work through the thought and understand the full dimensions of what he was suggesting.<\/p>\n
Basically, he was positing that things will really get interesting when the audience of works created in such media are literate, in the way that audiences for classical music tend to be literate. It is not sufficient that audiences just think “this is cool”. They need to understand the language of what is going on well enough to appreciate why<\/i> something is working.<\/p>\n
Of course this sort of expectation of audience literacy is not limited to classical music. It is found in other genres, including various types of jazz, theater, poetry and computer games.<\/p>\n
I was struck by how similar Alan’s observation was to something Marvin Minsky told me in 2003. When I raised the subject of the potential benefits of everybody learning to program — and computer languages that might make such a project easier — he said: “Computer programming doesn’t need a shared grammar. It needs a shared literature.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a discussion today about the future of virtual and augmented reality experiences, Alan Kay told me that what the medium really needs is the equivalent of classical music. It took me a few minutes more of conversion to work through the thought and understand the full dimensions of what he was suggesting. Basically, he … Continue reading “The literate audience”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15160"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15161,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15160\/revisions\/15161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}