Real Time

When things happen in real time, visualisation, computational process, communication, streaming,

live television, live web, when we no long need to wait for a process, or we don't want to wait, what will happen to our society? To our live? In architectural visualisation, we usually need to wait for a rendered idea from the computer. We anticipate the result and modify it to polish it. When the computer can generate a real time rendering, it means that we see the imagined result immediately, and we can press a button or adjust a setting and see the tuning and changes immediately, this has very important implication. First for the designer, the iteration of design process changes and increases many fold, different versions of the design and possibilities can be explored, at some point, there may even be the danger of too many ideas to explore and the initial idea get off course and detoured. Just like a painting or a musical composition, the artist doesn't know where and when to stop, there seems to be many possibilities and the results are just as satisfactory. When the process becomes instance, what may be lost when the process takes time? The formation of ideas takes time in the mind, what if the result formation is constantly updated in real time? In architectural visualisation, the image created is close to physical reality, we call it photorealism. When one image is created it is one photo, when the changes in the digital scene is reflected in numerous photos, we see an animated change takes place. Animation and instance resulted of the animated clip can be generated, and these film strips contains degree of realism that is matching our physical reality. The principle also applies to a virtual reality experience, when a person navigates in the virtual world or high resolution game world, the virtual space he/she is experiencing is basically generated by a high succession of individual frames of the scene the person is moving into. The higher the frame rate, the sensation of being in that reality becomes higher and that's one of the factor of being immersive into that world. Cinema had been using the similar principle except that the audience is sitting in a chair seeing the screen, the body is motionless, and the frame rate is about 24 frames per second or 30 frames per second, with the advance graphic engine of computer game, the frame rate goes up to 60 per second or even 120 per second as gamers demand higher and higher fidelity of a reality in virtual mode. In effect as computing power increase, extremely high frame rate will be generated in virtual reality and at some point a sense of real time experience of the virtual world can be achieved, at least in terms of the visuals, other sensation such as the haptic and tactile sense will follow as the technology mature and in effect an alternative reality can be fabricated apart from our physical reality. This get me thinking, is our life in general a series of movies lived?