Integrating Perceptual and Symbolic Information in VR

Abstract

Inside or outside the lab, most current VR aims at reproducing perceptual experience. The goal is to give the user the sensation that he or she is walking along a hallway in a building, flying over a city, or riding in a vehicle. However, if virtual reality is ever going to "break out" into general purpose computing, then it has to provide more than a perceptual experience. It has to reproduce the capabilities of current computers to manipulate symbols as well. Symbol manipulation is an essential part of what computers do in applications ranging from numerical analysis to database management to word processing and communication.