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that the sense of having both hands would result in greater freedom of movement.
We were using hand movement mimetically and practically rather than symbolically
or gesturally. These turn out to be important in fi rst-personness in VR worlds.
Anyway, while musing over my failure to come up with a clear “UI” for crow
fl ight, I heard some crows goofi ng around in the sky above me. I looked up and saw
my solution. People may fl y differently in their dreams, but everybody knows what
fl a p p i n g m e a n s .
Now all we had to do was to fi gure out how the system could understand a
“fl ap.” First, it would require a memory of your actions, at least long enough to no-
tice that both arms had been low and were then high and low again, more or less
in synch and within a certain interval. The program would take your “ground” loca-
tion and set you back in the same place, not letting you fall through the bottom of
the simulation. When the code was written, I got to test it. First test: three strong
fl aps got me about three feet off the “fl oor.” Second test: three strong fl aps took me
about a “mile” above the whole simulation—I could see it glimmering below me like
a marble. And so we tested and tested until we got it right. And I got very strong
armpit muscles.
force—capturing what is essential in the most effective and economic way.
A good line-drawn animation can sometimes do a better job of capturing
the movements of a cat than a motion picture, and no photograph will ever
capture the essence of light in quite the same way as the paintings of Monet.
The point is that fi rst-person sensory and cognitive elements are essential
to human-computer activity. There is a huge difference between an elegant,
