Transcending Mimesis

On my commute this evening, I stopped at a light and saw a car with faux-wood paneling. The funny thing is that it wasn't a 1970's Oldsmobuick driven by an old man with thick spectacles and a hat with earflaps, but a relatively recent model - a PT Cruiser. It was the goofiest thing I'd seen lately, risible yet confounding: why would they do that?

I expect that wood paneling on cars was done back in the early days: the automobile was a newfangled contraption, and adding wood paneling made it look more like the horse-drawn carriages that people of that time found more familiar and comforting. Though it was patently unnecessary, inefficient, and just plain bad design, I suppose it made the transition a bit more comfortable for consumers.

But it's just not needed anymore, and seems rather silly. I'm sure that I'm not the only person for whom the sight of wood paneling seems ridiculous. But before you snicker, take a look at your rims ... don't they look a lot like chrome-plated wagon wheels? Are those thick spokes even necessary anymore? Aren't they aerodynamically inefficient?

And for that matter, do they really need to look like wagon wheels? It's doubtful that anyone living today has ever had to travel by horse-drawn wagon, so I don't expect it has the same psychological effect as wood paneling, nor is it needed. It's a vestigial tail that evolution hasn't quite transcended.

This put me in mind of the design principles of the early Internet, back in the mid-nineties when the "population" of the Internet was doubling every six months ... which meant that 50% of your user base was brand-new to the Internet, and presumably found it to be a weird, unfamiliar, and scary place.

The design guidance to overcome this was to try to make Web sites mimetic of real-world interactions. The goal for an e-commerce site was to resemble a real-store experience to make users more comfortable with this newfangled way of shopping. Fortunately, the limitations of bandwidth and the primitive state of interactive animation at the time prevented this from being achieved.

I say "fortunately" because the store experience, while familiar, is anything but efficient. It involves a lot of time and effort that, in a real-world environment, doesn't seem as much a burden as it would in the virtual world of the computer. You don't mind a two-minute walk to the back of the store to get the items there, though on the Internet, spending two minutes scrolling through a labyrinth of 3D virtual aisles would be intolerable.

And as a result, consumers have come to accept and appreciate the unique qualities of the Web - it's new and different, not at all like the real-worked experience of shopping a store or finding a book in a library - and we accept that as a Good Thing. I don't think that anyone would have appreciated a cell phone with a rotary dial, no matter how much it mimed the "real" telephones of the time. (My guess is that "there's an app for that" - though it's probably not very popular.)

But at the same time, there are vestigial tails in the most modern of devices. A good example is the "bookshelf" on the iPod - in which material is displayed in a rack, just like "real" books. There are even animation effects when you turn the pages. But why should an e-book have pages? It's as unnecessary, inefficient, preposterous, and stupid as wood paneling on a car ... and yet, there it is.

So in the end, we still have a way to go toward transcending mimesis and accepting that technology is a thing unto itself, that doesn't need to mimic obsolete technologies, but which can happily "just be itself" and exploit the capabilities of the medium, with no regret for the passing of the old.

The Mimesis of Depth

I was reading a chapter in a collection of academic papers about the computer-generated 3D models, and my brain went on a tangent (as it's prone to do) about the value we seem to automatically attribute to the quality of mimesis.

Specific to 3D modeling, it's generally accepted that the computer-generated model of a 3D environment that is depicted on a "flat" monitor screen is a very poor imitation of a real-life environment., and the author's point was that much improvement (and special equipment) is needed before we can realistically depict an immersive environment to the user.

What struck me is the degree to which the user is able to accept a "fake" 3D environment, and I'd suggest it's not because we are applying the perceptual skills learned in the real world, but are transferring the cognitive interpretations learned from similar two-dimensional media: paintings, photographs, and television screens.

The artist learns tricks to "fool" the mind into accepting a flat representation as a three-dimensional one: an object that is smaller is further away, as is a one that lies further along diagonal lines that converges at a horizon. A closer object throws a more distinctive shadow, and an object further away isn't as clearly discernable. If an object overlaps another, it is nearer to us.

We learn these visual cues of "closeness" and "farness" specifically to the two-dimensional representation of depth - such that when we see a highly mimetic painting of an apple, we remark that we could almost reach into the painting and pick it up. I posit that the "almost" is because, in spite of all the visual trickery, there is still a quality that is missing that cues us that what we are viewing is, in fact, a clever forgery of depth rather than actual depth.

So, in the end, the question with which I'm grappling is whether, when we see a "3d" image on a flat screen, we are recognizing it as being three-dimensional from our experiences in the physical world, or because we recognize the conventions that are used to depict depth in a two-dimensional medium.

I tend to think that it's the latter, which may explain the reason why, in spite of all the advances in 3D presentation technology, we find ourselves unsatisfied with even the most detailed and attentive imitations. No matter the degree of effort the presenter undertakes to "fool" us, we recognize the tricks, and cannot accept the mimicry, though it might delight us, for a time, to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief.

An analogy comes to mind - the distortions to the sense of taste. In this culture, and at this time, it is probably reasonable to assume that more people have tasted artificially lime-flavored candy than have tasted actual limes. So a person who recognizes the lime flavor of candy is borrowing upon his sense memory of lime-flavored candy in the past, not from his memory of ever having tasted an actual lime. In fact, if you gave him a piece candy that tasted like a real lime, he might not be able to accurately identify the flavor. Such is the problem with mimesis in the virtual medium.

I generally accept, albeit with some degree of reservations, that a good approach to design in the online media is to mimic "real world" phenomena. The reservations I have is that the online medium has significantly different capabilities and qualities than the real-world medium.

An early example I recall was a video player that attempted to use an interface that was similar to a television remote control, to enable to user to "click" through video presentations in the same way that they surfed channels. This was well before a on-screen programming guides that allowed users to scroll through lists of programs by name, and even view descriptions before making a selection.

In that instance, mimesis has worked in reverse: the television medium, which was presumed to be more familiar to users, has actually adopted navigation controls from the online medium, rather than the other way around - for no other reason than it was easier to use, and just made sense.

It also occurs to me that I have never seen a cell phone interface with a rotary dial - which was at one time the most familiar paradigm for operating a telephone. And the reason is that a rotary dial, while necessary to a physical telephone until about twenty years ago, simply didn't make sense. Like the analogy to artificial "lime" flavoring, a person presented with a rotary dial would have no idea what it was, or how to use it.

And so after that long meander, I return to the notion of creating realistic 3D environments for the Web. Is it really more convenient? Does it really make sense? For the longest time, the answer seemed a self-evident "yes" ... but the more I think about it, the less plausible it seems.