Mark and I were discussing his ubicomp work 32 years ago, a few years before his SciAm article, and I asked him about the term "real virtuality", and he explained:
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 89 21:43:27 -0800
From: Mark Weiser <mark@arisia.Xerox.COM>
To: don@mimsy.umd.edu
Subject: real virtuality
Actually, my term was "embodied virtuality".
-mark
>Scientific American: The Computer for the 21st Century, September 1991
>By pushing computers into the background, embodied virtuality will make individuals more aware of the people on the other ends of their computer links.
>[...] Neither an explication of the principles of ubiquitous computing nor a list of the technologies involved really gives a sense of what it would be like to live in a world full of invisible widgets. Extrapolating from today’s rudimentary fragments of embodied virtuality is like trying to predict the publication of Finnegans Wake shortly after having inscribed the first clay tablets. Nevertheless, the effort is probably worthwhile: [...]
>[...] Indeed, the opposition between the notion of virtual reality and ubiquitous, invisible computing is so strong that some of us use the term “embodied virtuality” to refer to the process of drawing computers out of their electronic shells. The “virtuality” of computer-readable data—all the different ways in which they can be altered, processed and analyzed—is brought into the physical world.
>[...] Most computers that participate in embodied virtuality will be invisible in fact as well as in metaphor. Already computers in light switches, thermostats, stereos and ovens help to activate the world. These machines and more will be interconnected in a ubiquitous network. As computer scientists, however, my colleagues and I have focused on devices that transmit and display information more directly. We have found two issues of crucial importance: location and scale. Little is more basic to human perception than physical juxtaposition, and so ubiquitous computers must know where they are. (Today’s computers, in contrast, have no idea of their location and surroundings.) If a computer knows merely what room it is in, it can adapt its behavior in significant ways without requiring even a hint of artificial intelligence.
>[...] How many tabs, pads and board-size writing and display surfaces are there in a typical room? Look around you: at the inch scale, include wall notes, titles on book spines, labels on controls, thermostats and clocks, as well as small pieces of paper. Depending on the room, you may see more than 100 tabs, 10 or 20 pads and one or two boards. This leads to our goal for initially deploying the hardware of embodied virtuality: hundreds of computers per room.