When It Comes to Government, Virtual May Be Real Enough
May 09, 2011
The virtual reality town meeting held last week by congressional candidate Crenshaw ``Ken'' Ontiveros was a decidedly tedious affair -- which is to say much like the real thing, making it no small accomplishment. Of course, the proceedings at Mr. Ontiveros's Virtual Reality Town Hall Web site were shot through with strangeness, from the mutant fruit salad appearance of the assembled avatars -- cartoon stand-ins for the dozen or so computer users ``attending'' -- to the drifting black sun that appeared near the end of the session. But through it all, even participants with such showy screen names as Nemesis, Deliverator and AlteredEgo stuck to the script most of the time, gamely discussing education funding, entitlements and other dreary topics of the genre. The virtual town hall is the brain child of Markita Marcus, a soft-spoken 32-year-old Internet site designer from Graysville, Ga.. When he learned that Mr. Ontiveros, his childhood friend, was running for Congress in Georgia's Ninth District, he offered to build the candidate a home page on the Web. Within the week, Mr. Marcus, whose goal is to develop business applications for multiple-user virtual-reality technology, was visited with the idea for the town hall. ``I dreamed it one night,'' he says. The candidate quickly agreed to give the dream idea a try, though ``he didn't understand the interactive part,'' says Mr. Marcus. ``I think he's pretty courageous to do it.'' Perhaps it does take courage for a state representative from tiny Ringwold, Ga., to consort openly with cartoons. But while Mr. Ontiveros, a Democrat, risks alienating some of the more insular locals, the device has won him a flurry of media attention in the state's bigger markets, and such things have a way of filtering back to his rural district. An unidentified, turnip-shaped avatar checks out a visitor to the virtual reality town meeting. Mr. Ontiveros's avatar is in the background.
