The first time I ran into that phrase, my children were young and there were magazine stories about hoods that could be worn to project 3-D images of another scene. The hood-wearer would be able to interact with that world and it would feel real. Pretty far out.
My first husband worked in the airline industry and one very special summer day there was an open house at McDonnell Douglas and we were able to see a flight simulator. It was huge but seemed to me to be visually primitive – the wall of a room was painted with a scene of farmland as seen from the sky. Part of an airplane cockpit was there with its instruments. There were a pair of metal poles (which I learned later held a camera) that the pilot would “fly”. Knowing nothing about flying other than my experience on commercial flights, I had no idea how this could present a life-like experience.
Then virtual reality started to mean gaming situations: the Sims, Second Life, Microsoft Flight Simulator, etc.
Any of us who make a living with computers is working in a virtual world. But until recently I had the comforting if naive belief that what I was working on was at least physically on the other side of my keyboard, in my own computer, waiting to be used, printed, sent, or whatever. I could still put my hands on it, so to speak.
No more. My physical computer is far less important than where the work is actually done – and much of it is done “in the cloud” where economies of size and realities of on-demand use (and charges) make for a very different world of software development and deployment.
Content meant to be deployed can be put in the Amazon Cloud Front. Virtual machines can be instantiated when needed (for instance, my only Windows machine is a virtual machine) and then turned “off”. Content is backed up outside my workplace routinely and kept secure in ways I could not have imagined in the days when backing things up to tape in special air-conditioned rooms was the norm.
As new ways of creating, storing, and delivering content continue to arise, we can find new opportunities to rethink how we work and what parts really need to be kept close at hand.
