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archive:computers:lrplan

Taken from the public information file LONG_RANGE_PLAN.DOC on the University of Pittsburgh's VAX Cluster system. This document details PITT's long range plan in regards to computing at the University of Pittsburgh. Of special note are the references to Virtual Reality, as it could be used within the Academic environment.

Some selected extracts include:

in a longer view than five years, but well within existing technology,
digitized sound together with the availability of digital audio tape decks
should make possible compendiums of sound archives of everything from tribal
music to bird calls to sound effects to language dialects to speech therapy
analysis.
With the adoption of digital high-resolution television standards within
the next few years, film and video clips and stills should eventually become
available in digital form. This will open extraordinary opportunities in
education. Imagine a lecture that intersperses brief clips from Nova or
Infinite Voyage television archives to help illustrate difficult concepts in
a science class, or a lecture on Shakespeare that compares elements of
style with clips from several of his plays. Or the introduction of
"virtual realities" into the classroom, in which field trips may be taken
that are either impractical or impossible in ordinary reality.
These are only a very few of the possibilities. We predict that the next
ten years will see a genuine revolution in the way information is
accessed in our society due to the accessibility of networked distributed
databases.
Fortunately, the University of Pittsburgh is in an advantageous position
to capitalize on these developments as they occur. The presence of
high-speed fiber-optic backbone network trunk lines, coupled with
ethernet port capabilities in most campus buildings, provides us with the
minimum essential connectivity needed to take advantage of the developing
networking capabilities.

. . .

On the subject of whether or not a faculty member's personal computer would be the responsibilty of the faculty or department:

Another example: A physics lab might be constructed around a "virtual
reality" in which all frictional forces are absent and the gravity field
may be changed at will. While the individual student machines may reside
in a physics laboratory room, the actual computing power may well reside
elsewhere (or even in several places) on the network. Or the physics lab
may be carried out on any suitable machine connected to the network,
either in a public computing lab or even in a student's dorm room! How
much of the physics lab is "central", and how much is the responsibility
of the "end-user"?

And from the document's glossary:

Virtual reality - The digital construction and display of an artificial
environment, such as in a flight simulator.
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