Broadband for our brains

Hadyn Shaughnessy is analyzing IBM latest moves in the virtual world of Second Life -

"Roo Reynolds the IBM metaverse evangelist told me that the surprise of Second Life is the rapid discovery that work is not engaging the professional passions of IBMers until you put them in an intellectual environment where much remains to be built -where in fact all is frontier. That brings out the philosopher, artist, painter, thinker, and of course do-er..... A sad fact of the computer age is we’ve become too literal. The virtual might be the kind of liberator that delivers a Picasso instead of more Hirsts and Emins."

This ties in very much with what  Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, said in an interview at CNET's Second Life offices -

"Virtual reality connects directly with the human mind.... There is something very human about visual interfaces. I almost think of text-based interfaces, including browsers, as 'narrowband' into our brains, whereas visual interfaces are 'broadband' into our brains."

Now that the wiimote hackers have already got Nintendo's revolutionary 3D controller working with PC games like Half-Life 2 it's only a matter of days until it can be used to navigate Second Life. Broadband for our brains, haptics for our hands.

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