From bardian@usadatanet.net Mon Nov 08 07:06:22 2004
Subject:Re: Why did Hammond get the virtual B3 right?

Here's a metaphor as I see it. Let's say you were riding on a bus and you were looking out a digital window at a computer generated 'virtual landscape.' If the scene were sampled, it would be a section of real landscape that had been filmed and looped. Eventually, you would see the exact same things over and over again. How quickly this happened would depend on the length of the loop. There are parts of the scenery you would never see because they fall outside the loop, but what you did see would be completely real looking. If the scene were modeled, you would never see anything that really existed, but the computer would have exhaustively analyzed what the real scenery would be and would continually be generating something that could be amazingly close (depending on the accuracy of the model) to what you would actually see out a real window. The advantage is that it would always change and you would never see the same place 'twice'.

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