The Truth About Virtual Reality
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The truth about Virtual Reality Sex Drugs and Tesselation I Dedicated to Dave Blackburn, Mark Delaura, Eric Howlett, Randy Pausch and the other VR pioneers who gave so much. Sex, Drugs and Tessellation The Truth About Virtual Reality, as Revealed in the Pages of CyberEdge Journal © 2014 CyberEdge Information Services, Ben Delaney All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1500893293 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-63443-194-1 (Kindle version) Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918681 The publisher encourages and grants permission for the distribution and reproduction of copies of excerpts of this work, up to 200 words, for non-commercial purposes. Such copies, in whatever form, must be unmodified, in their entirety, including copyright notice and full attribution. Any adap- tation, derivative work, or any other modification requires prior written approval by the publisher. To order additional copies of this book, please visit Amazon.com, or contact the publisher. Bulk discounts are available. CyberEdge Information Services 510 419-0800 www.CyberEdge.com, [email protected] Cover design: Ck Kuebel Design, www.kuebel.com Interior design consultation: Ck Kuebel Design Acknowledgements Acknowledgements CyberEdge Journal was my baby, but many people helped to make it happen. Over the six years it was in publication, dozens of authors contributed or collaborated on articles. People working in industry, universities, government, and the military opened their doors and showed me and our many corespondents their labs. We saw projects we weren’t allowed to write about for months. We saw many good ideas and frankly, a few pretty wacky ones. But there was never a lack of imagination, vision and excitement surrounding VR in the 1990’s. Much of the excitement was generated by the great people at the Human Interface Tech- nology Lab (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am honored and thrilled that the Founding Director, Thomas A. Furness, provided an insightful introduction to this book. Several people deserve special thanks for the extraordinary assistance they provided. They include CK Kuebel, who designed this book, as well as my previous one, and all of my websites for the past decade. Her great design sense and her ability to work with my some- times cryptic instructions, has made everything she touched better than I would have hoped. During the years that CEJ was being published, Sherry Epley provided financial and operational support. Without her behind me, CEJ would never have reached as far as it did. Likewise, Robin Doody, our more-than-able Operations Manager kept the office running for several key years and enabled me to seem as if I knew what was happening. Special thanks also to Francis Hamit, Jeffrey Aboauf, Kenny Meyer, and Doug Faxon, Team CyberEdge, who worked with me to cover conferences, build websites, and write and vet articles. I’ll never forget the SIGGRAPH in New Orleans that we covered together. Finally, I want to thank and acknowledge the many contributors to CyberEdge Journal. These are the people who were my eyes and ears around the globe, and whose reporting enabled CEJ to be the most read and most trusted publication on VR for the six years it was in existence. Their names are on the next page. V Acknowledgements Introduction Thanks for the important contributions made to the virtual reality industry and CyberEdge Journal by these generous contributors. • Jeffrey Abouaf • Sean Dunn • Ralph Lamson • Toni Schneider • Joanna Alexander • Sherry Epley • Roy Latham • Mischa Schwartz- • Chris Allis • Dog Faxon • Brenda Laurel mann • Hugh Applewhite • Thomas Furness • Bowen Loftin • Gilles Scotto de • Ronald Azuma • Eben Gay • Mark Long Carlo • Christian Bauer • Robert Gelman • William Martens • Jack Scully • Sunil Bhoyrul • Patty Glovsky • Tom Mastaglio • Ralph Shapiro • Louis M. Brill • Nicola Green • Shoshana McVey • Tom Sperlich • Grigore Burdea • Walter Greenleaf • Michael Macedonia • Scot Steele • Ian Capon • Bill Griffith • Kenny Meyer • Nicole Stenger • Patrice Caire • Francis Hamit • Ken Milburn • John Stokdyk • William Chapin • Sandra Kay Helsel • Diego Montefusco • Robert Stone • Bill Chernoff • Kari Hintikka • Kenneth Nemire • James J. Thomas • Garth Chouteau • John Hough • Max M. North • Barbara Thomason • Aaron Cieslicki • Jerry Isdale • Paul Paray • Linda Trefz • Rosy Clarke-Leong • Linda Jacobson • Jon Peddie • Christine Treguier • Amanda Cowell • James P. Jenkins • Marc Pesce • Jon Waldern • Bob Cramblitt • Barbara Joans • Tom Piantanida • John Wann • Paul S. Cutt • Rob Johnston • Howard Rheingold • Penny Weiss • Mark Deloura • David Kahaner • Guiseppe Riva • Misty West • Jeffrey Donovan • Ian Kallen • Shelli Roberts- • Robin Doody • James Kramer Jurado • Kevin Williams • Daniel Duncan • Myron Kreuger • Bernie Roehl • Michael Zyda VI Introduction By Thomas A. Furness In the 60’s I became one of the original inventors of Virtual Reality, although we didn’t call it that at the time. I was joined by Ivan Sutherland, then a professor at the University of Utah. Ivan’s motivation was to build an ‘ultimate interface’ that would allow people to interface with computers by being inside 3D computer graphics and to use direct interaction with those graphics through hand- held devices. My motivation was different. I was trying to solve several problems in fighter cockpits for the United States Air Force. These problems centered on cockpit complexity, night vision and weapon-aiming issues in military aircraft. In our separate ways both of us pioneered what we know today as Virtual Reality….or the idea that people can experience as real an alternative reality of a computer-generated world that only appears to exist. Unbeknownst to us at the time was an earlier pioneer: Mort Heilig. Mort was a cinematographer and filmmaker. He felt that traditional films and theaters did not involve the ‘whole person’ from a sen- sory standpoint. Driven by his desire to create experiences that involved the whole body, Mort built the Sensorama, an arcade ‘ride’ that would propel the customer through an immersive three-dimen- sional world that included wide field-of-view visual effects, sound, smell and vibration that together made the user’s experience more realistic, engaging and enjoyable. He was way ahead of his time. We were joined later in the 70’s and 80’s by such legends as Jaron Lanier, Fred Brooks, Henry Fuchs, Myron Kreuger, Michael McGreevy, Scott Fisher, Jonathan Waldern and others who, like us, became infected with VR fever. Sadly, I can attest that such an addiction never subsides and makes one wish and hope for better and better quality virtual worlds to inhabit. For two decades after those beginnings, I orchestrated for the Air Force and other military services the development of many configurations of helmet tracking and display systems while also venturing into 3D binaural sound, speech and gesture input. My work in the Air Force culminated in the development of the super cockpit concept…”a cockpit that the pilot wears.” It essentially was a control/display medium that organized and fused information from aircraft subsystems and por- VII IntroductionIntroduction trayed that information in the form of a virtual visual, auditory and tactile circumambience for rapid assimilation by the pilot. The simulators we built in support of the super cockpit project (such at the ‘Darth Vader’ hel- met) represented the first viable multisensory interactive Virtual Reality. But others were also doing amazing things. Jaron Lanier was working on a way to program computers with a visual program- ming language that used ‘eyephones’ and ‘data gloves’ to manipulate objects. In fact, it was Jaron that gave us our name: Virtual Reality. This at least is the name that stuck. About the same time Jonathan Waldern was making arcade games through his company, W Industries. Bob Stone was working on virtual interfaces for robots. Those early days were heady times. When we began to realize the implications of what we were doing we became even more intoxicated by this VR thing. In 1989 I left the Air Force to become a professor at the University of Washington and start the Human Interface Technology Laboratory. I wanted my education, which had cost the taxpayers millions of dollars, to teach the next generation of students about Virtual Reality and its power. About this time Howard Rheingold authored his book: Virtual Reality and many of us were ushered into the public spotlight. We speculated about futures where Virtual Reality could be used for everything — medicine, training, education, design and not Ivan Sutherland’s mechanically-tracked, head-coupled display. VIII Introduction the least —entertainment. We were on fire. Amongst this excitement Fred Brooks, Jaron Lanier and I were asked to testify before the Senate regarding the future of VR within the context of the Informa- tion Highway that was being promoted by Senator Al Gore. During the early 90’s Ben Delaney emerged as a bellwether for our art. Ben took the satellite view across the sandboxes of our collective Virtual Reality community. Through the pages of the CyberEdge Journal we began to network and feel a part of a larger community of not only believers, but doers. This became a boon for us, especially as a forum for those involved in the business side of this fledging revolution. In 1991 Tom Sheridan (MIT) and I started the journal Presence: Teleop- erators and Virtual Environments, which was the first academic journal for serious investigators of virtual environments. In parallel, I worked with colleagues David Mizell and Tom Caudell in 1993 to start the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS) that morphed into the IEEE Virtual Reality conference that still exists today. At the turn of the millennium things began to cool down… we entered into ‘VR winter’. Unfor- tunately, in our enthusiasm of the 80’s and 90’s, we had set high expectations for VR and its appli- cations. The reality was that we were a long way from anything practical.