wwp@yahoogroups.com:
the rest of the story
G. Donald Bain 2006-Jul-05 18:41:00
Thanks to everyone who has written to wish me well. I really am just
about back to normal already after my wild weekend.
So here's the extra bit that I think might be of interest. Right at
the beginning of the medical emergency the doctor gave me a shot of
morphine. Less than an hour later the next doctor did likewise. Then
once I was all "tubed up" they hung a sack of it up and let it drip
all night.
Despite my long hair and having lived in San Francisco and Berkeley
in the 60's I have never been a recreational drug user (except
beer...), so this was new territory for me. I was also strung out
from lack of sleep and days of pain.
The WWP was on my mind, because I had been just about to get started
on final editing, and Landis didn't even know I was MIA. I had been
taking a lot of city street panos in San Francisco the weekend before
and working on them, plus my gardens efforts, during the week. So I
was in a VR frame of mind when I was suddenly catapulted into this
"experience".
The first weird thing I remember was lying in the hospital bed late
that night and checking out the WWP prep server to see how Gardens
was doing - but I was viewing it on the palm of my hand, like a
little flat screen implant under the skin. It seemed reasonable at
the time, but later I remember having trouble deleting files (from my
hand). Maybe this was tied into all the tubes plugged into my arm.
For all I know there was a nurse there restraining me as I tried to
shake those darn VR files off my hand, though they didn't mention it
to me.
The hospital was in Walnut Creek, a leafy sunny suburb 20 miles (30
km) east of San Francisco, and I was on the third floor. Yet somehow
I almost immediately got the settled impression that I was in a
windowless underground facility on Mission Street (near Moscone
Center) in San Francisco. There is always noise in the hallways of a
hospital, and I interpreted this as evidence that a team of French
photojournalists were based there while they were shooting VR
panoramas in San Francisco. They stopped by and visited me - no,
nobody I recognized.
The photojournalists were posting each day's new work on their web
site, which I was watching on a huge computer screen in my hospital
room (no such screen existed in reality). Good panos, very good work.
There was a check box on each window I could click to say I liked it,
which I used several times.
Sometime later, after being awake and lucid, I fell asleep again and
this delusion came back. Some German photojournalists had shown up
now also, something to do with the World Cup, and they were posting
more new panos. I was getting frustrated because I couldn't get away
from it, new windows were popping up constantly, burying my main
browser window. Then I had a sudden realization, that they had
tricked me, and that each time I had indicated approval of a pano it
was being put into my shopping cart. I went to the check-out screen
and found $10,000 on order, but was able to cancel it.
Then the scary part. I started closing all the pop-up windows, one by
one, to get back to my home window, or maybe it was the desktop. I
had to get free from their virtual reality and find my own true
reality. I realized that my home window/desktop view was that
reality, and closed the windows carefully, slower and slower,
terrified that I might accidentally close my own reality. And then
where would I be? Dead?
I succeeded in getting control again, then woke up. It took me an
hour of being fully awake to sort through these vivid illusions and
convince myself that it could not possibly have happened. But the
idea that I was really in San Francisco persisted almost until I left
the hospital, after 48 hours.
There was one more thing. At some point in that jumbled mental time I
perfected a technique for stitching and spinning panoramas - all in
my head, no computer - and played them back on my hand, of course.
(Maybe I should speak to Aldo and Ken about the feasibility of that.)
So that's my true statement, as I remember it, the ravings of the
thoroughly VR obsessed.
Don