IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

62 Chapter 3
room that blends physical with virtual objects that can be manipulated. A
tracker, composed of markers worn on the body, is used to record the position
of the users. One company developed 3-D whole-body scanners that
took hundreds of thousands of measurements of the human body in just a
few seconds. In Europe, a project called Populate planned to develop a service,
using this technology, in which likenesses of people—avatars—would
represent people in ‘‘inhabited information spaces.’’ The idea was that
your humanoid avatars would be captured in avatar booths, similar to
the way you can get your passport photo taken in booths in railway stations
today. Having digitized your whole body, you would be able to send
it out onto the Internet on your behalf, where it would meet and hang out
with other avatars. The project was nicknamed ‘‘Immortality ’R Us’’ by fellow
researchers.
Hiroshi Ishii at MIT’s Media Lab is a leading critic of ‘‘being there’’–ness
as a strategic aim of telcos. Ishii points out that the human eye has something
like forty million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to
be found in our ears, up our noses, in our skin, and on our tongues. (There
are dense clusters of receptors elsewhere on the body, too—but this book
has a family readership, so I will not dwell on those.) Even if you could capture
the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitize them, and send
them down a wire, you’d still never get near the sensation of ‘‘being there.’’
Why? Because we humans are not so dumb. Our minds and our bodies are
one intelligence.
Tele-Hugs Won’t Do It
‘‘Most of what we experience, we can never tell each other about,’’ says the
Danish science writer Tor Norretranders. ‘‘During any given second, we
consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information
that our senses pass on to our brains [see table 3.1]. Subliminal perception—perception
that occurs without conscious awareness—is not an
anomaly, but the norm. Most of what we perceive in the world comes not
from conscious observation, but from a continuous process of unconscious
scanning, our senses having been censored so that our lives can flow more
easily. In other words, the conscious part of us receives much less information
than the unconscious part of us. We experience millions of bits a
second but can tell each other about only a few dozen.’’ Humans, says