Experiential Space

Each person defines the experiential space perspective differently. The perspective evolves from a person’s encounters with the surrounding environment. Each person views conditions or situations in a diverse manner. For instance, a high cliff may appear adventurous to a rock climber or dangerous to an acrophobic. According to Taut (1977), the structuring of worlds calls for intelligence (p. 10). The intelligence to which he speaks refers to the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, etc. Although, it is much more. An architectural environment appeals to sight, but it lacks the sense of smell, sound, and taste. All senses must combine in order to complete the encounter or experiential space for the individual. The experiential space creates memories, passions, and bias. Each individual interprets the event in unique manners which are based upon the accumulation of experiences.

Some individuals struggle to manage their experiential space in real life and that’s all they can handle. While, others decide to experience virtual worlds. Virtual worlds simulate experiential space perspectives from the real world. However, this is difficult to do properly. Virtual worlds lack smell, taste, and touch. Visual designs and sounds must trigger an individual past experiences in the real world to allow them to image they are in the virtual world. Yet, virtual worlds provide opportunities that the real world can’t. For instance, avatars can fly without the aid of plane and amazing buildings can be constructed in hours/days instead of months/years. To create the positive experiential perspective, designers must analyze every aspect of the build, so the meaning can be intrinsically interpreted by the user.

As we interpret the experiential space, we may also consider the meaning of this in terms of machines and explore the dynamics of virtual machines. In the real world our experiential space perspective of a computer should be fairly similar. Yes, there will be arguments on which brand performs best along with a specific definition of a computer (desktop, laptop, netbook, tablet, phone, etc). However, when someone mentions computer, we have some type of an image in our head. As we examine, virtual machines our images will increase in variety. The reason cultivates from a similar origin as virtual worlds experiential space perspective. Virtual machines cannot be described with all of our senses. We cannot touch a virtual machine and we cannot see the virtual machine (we can see the GUI, but not the actual machine). Virtual machines are bound within physical machines, sharing resources such as hard drive space, CPU processing and memory. The issue arises that the physical machines could be spread around the world, so where do the virtual machines exist? The relative location of virtual machines lives, adapts and moves within physical constructs of machines, networks, and storage arrays.

An example of virtual machine moving from physical box to physical box involves replication of the virtual machine. Bose, Brock, Skeoch, and Rao (2011) explain the phenomena of virtual machines replicating across a WAN stretching continents. They solve a specific issue involving latency and how to improve the efficiency of moving virtual machines across a network. From this sense, the virtual machines live in the Internet and move from data center to data center. This cloud spider as they refer to it gives life to a virtual machine, a machine within a machine.

References
Bose, S. K., Brock, S., Skeoch, R., & Rao, S. (2011). CloudSpider: Combining Replication with Scheduling for Optimizing Live Migration of Virtual Machines across Wide Area Networks. In Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid), 2011 11th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on (pp. 13-22). IEEE.

Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.