Comment by bradgranath
7 days ago
MS Bob didn’t invent those things. It just grafted them onto a crude gui metaphor that tech companies are still trying to find a buyer for: “What if the UX was as close as possible to the physical world?”
You don’t open a file, you “walk” to a “filing cabinet”, “pull the drawer out”, and “reach in and pull out a specific piece of ‘paper’”.
You don’t make a phone call, you sit in virtual meeting space with virtual bodies while wearing a mocap suit.
Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
You misunderstand what I was saying, not that the Bob program transformed into what we now know as AR like the one Meta is designing.
Rather that these metaphors were very present in 2000s Windows and Office programs, and were very successful in getting regular users to understand computers and bringing about the Personal Computer revolution.
Virtual reality people are still trying to deliver this "vison". I remember first cringe idea of how a web shopping would work by rendering physical supermarket shelves with VRML and users having to walk the aisles full of 3d modeled products. I think it was by Walmart? and they didnt stop with that one demo, here another try from 2017 https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2022/1/5/22868323/walmart-meta...
Oh wow, I just realized that the following VR parody might have been inspired by Microsoft Bob :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ
(2015, so 4 years before Zuckerberg committed to the Metaverse enough to rename the whole company, and still 1 year before the first commercial new generation VR headset : Oculus Rift released.)
> Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
Uhhhh, to play videogames?
(That was the Beavis 'n Butthead voice.)