Digital Reality

What do we mean by a “digital reality”?

Let’s think about some computer programs you have interacted with. Take a word processor, for example. Within this, you can create documents, that contain paragraphs, sentences, words, images, and other resources. None of these things exist within the computer, but we accept this reality. We can input values from the keyboard and use a mouse, touchscreen, or trackpad to interact with parts of a document. We can see documents on a screen, and print documents to paper to see them in the real world. This is the digital reality created by word processing software.

We can also think about things like banking. Banks run large financial systems, which operate within each bank’s computer systems. We can see our accounts that contain our money, and although there is no money within any computer we accept this reality. We also interact with it by transferring to, or accepting funds from, others. These actions change values within these digital realities (programs), but no actual money moves in this process. We can use an ATM to withdraw money, and the computer will power motors within the machine to release actual money in response to changes within the digital reality. This demonstrates how these digital realities exist in and empower our day-to-day lives.

Every computer game you have played is also a digital reality. The characters of these games do not exist within the computer, but they do exist within the digital reality created by the program’s code. These are great examples of purely fictional realities which we can create with computers. The rules of these realities are then things we can create to entertain people.

Hopefully you can see how powerful this makes computing, and how valuable it can be to understand how digital realities can be created. This understanding underpins any study you do in computing, and computing underpins many things within our lives. Understanding how programs work within the computer, and the things they are constructed from, will help you see how to make the most of these tools in any field.