When VR Really Hits the Street Panel Transcript Final
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When VR Really Hits the Street Panel presented at the 2014 SPIE “Engineering of Virtual Reality” Session. Session Chairs Ian MCDowell and Margaret Dolinsky February 3, 2014 Panel Moderator JaCki Morie, All These Worlds, LLC (JFM) Panelists, VR Pioneers Brenda Laurel (BL) and Margaret Dolinsky (MD) AudienCe member partiCipants (AM) JFM: Welcome everybody. I am really excited to be doing this panel. My name is Jacki Morie and I have some illustrious VR people here with me today. Here’s our schedule on the slide, which we’ll try to keep to so we can get a lot of information covered. This is not only about us up here as panelists; it is also about you. We have an extra seat up here and there will times during the presentation that ask YOU to come up and be part of the panel. This panel was actually inspired by recent events – that Silvia (Ruzanka) mentioned in her talk earlier – the new devices coming out, how inexpensive they are, and how much better they are than what we had 20-25 years ago. So many of us who have worked in VR are looking at this and wondering: What is this? Is this the Second Coming, or is this the Second Coming of more hype? We have to figure this out. So my idea was to bring some experts in and have this conversation. Do we really have what we dreamed of 25 years ago or is there still a big gap between what we need and what’s still coming in today? So that’s what we are going to be talking about today. Now let me introduce my esteemed guests. Brenda Laurel has been called a techno diva (audience laughs), which is one of the milder descriptions, but one that fits her very well. And among her published books, Computers as Theater stands as a really foundational work that radically redirected our thinking about computers and our relationships to them. There is a new version out now – 22 years later. Her tenure at the Banff Centre in Canada during their Art and Virtual Environment Project in the early 1990s resulted in a groundbreaking VR that pioneered a number of great techniques. That included networked participation and virtual objects where you could actually leave a voice message for somebody – which I thought was amazing and which haven’t seen much of since. More than anything over the years, from creating a company to actually commercialize the technology – a company called Telepresence Research – to doing the artwork, in all the work she has done in VR and other disciplines she has always presaged the future of what our technologies can do. Our second illustrious panelist is Margaret Dolinsky, whom I am sure all of you know due to your association with this venue. Margaret is an Associate Professor and a Research scientist at Indiana University Bloomington. She is both a pioneer and one of the most prolific artists doing immersive VR art with a career that spans almost two decades now. Her work and her research has not only help push the practical technologies of VR like the CAVE but it has also, more importantly, pushed the aesthetic possibilities, and the way we think about what content we think could be in these immersive media. For me I started in VR in 1989 when I wiggled my way into a research lab in Orlando that was doing some work for the military because I thought VR was just the coolest thing around and I had to get my hands on it. We were working on really basic stuff for the Army, like what kind of visual acuity do you actually have in the VR helmet and can we actually use VR to train people to become familiar with their surroundings. I thought that was boring. So with another colleague, after hours, we created VR environments that evoked emotional responses from participants. He was a psychology major turned computer scientist and I was an artist turned computer scientist, and together we made a number of these environments that evoked emotional responses. So there you have 3 of us here. We all have some sort of Art connection as well as a connection to pushing technology in ways it wasn’t expected to go. Now I want to take a couple of minutes to have our panelists make a couple of personal statements, answering the questions: What was your first VR experience? What HMD did you use? What was your first time? and: What were your thoughts about it? Did it change the way you thought about Life living and the nature of the universe or was it just another “oh this is cool.” Let’s start with you Brenda. BL: The first time I had my head in it, I believe was 1986 at NASA Ames Research in Scott Fisher’s lab and it was a Leap HMD with your basic data glove, which everyone invented. Eventually I got some funding, pulled Scott out of NASA and we started Telepresence Research. We did some great work, but realized about 6 months in that we didn’t have a business plan. It was too early to monetize the technology in any reasonable way. So, I parted company with Scott and went on to university work. I should say Telepresence was a dream team: Mark Bolas, Scott Foster (who made the Convolvotron), Scott Fisher, Michael Naimark, Rachel Strickland and Steve Saunders. These people keep showing up on my life in various disguises. I think my biggest contribution to the field obviously was the Placeholder project at Banff. We had extra money from Interval Research. We had a million dollars from them to play with, more than Banff could provide. Our team included Rob Tow, John Harrison, Michael Naimark, Scott Foster, Steve Saunders, a lot of the Telepresence Research gang. I think the reason we did Placeholder was as a design statement. It was to say that beyond these training simulations with drop down menus – which I never understood – why would you go to the trouble to produce a three-dimensional virtual environment with a pull down menu? We wanted to demonstrate that this could really be Through the Looking Glass, that we could explore environments of the imagination in an active way. And that there could be spiritual psychological and emotional value to that and it was a possibility of the medium. That thread was certainly picked up by certainly picked up by Char Davies with Osmose. And Margaret, the queen of VR has given us another view of the kind of visceral emotional connections we can have. For me it was “dream soup” – JFM: and you were swimming in it. OK Margaret. Was your first time with an HMD or was the CAVE your first? MD: The CAVE was definitely my first and something I really, really love. I was actually interested in going to grad school for painting and I found out about the EVL at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I went over for a visit and they were doing demonstrations, and the first thing I experienced was a roller coaster in the CAVE. There were a lot of people in the CAVE and someone yelled “Throw your hands up in the air.” And we all threw our hands up in the air, and we flew down this roller coaster and I was “Wow this is amazing!” It was this group experience in this 3D stereo space and it was very visceral And I thought: This is a good place for my paintings I could finally be in a place where the characters from my paintings could be as well and I could actually walk through their world and get them to respond to me. So I was hooked. I have been doing VR ever since. I still teach VR and my student s have VR exhibitions at the end of every semester, and people come from all over campus come to see them. I have been doing this for about 15 years. JFM: It’s interesting that you had a very social experience for your first one, where you, Brenda probably had a much more insular experience. And the early days you pretty much by yourself in VR. BL: Until Scott and I working together, and Michael Naimark who was doing other things with projection and presence and then we met Mark and the Fake Space Lab guys and saw all the commonalities we had. JFM: My first time was using a Leap HMD with the breastplate counter weight you needed to wear to counterbalance the weight of the device on your head. I have no recollection of what environment I went into. I just knew I was there and that I would be working in this area. MD: We should mention that Mark Bolas started this conference. BL: Really? So where the hell is he? JFM: And Ian is still carrying the torch here. MD: The first fantastic HMD experience I had was when Ian brought me over to Fake Space Labs and put one of his new devices on my head and that was a very memorable moment. Fakespace was awesome. IS – There is still Fakespace! JFM: I do want to ask the audience a few questions Because we talking about this new dawn, where there are now affordable devices out there, and we are in the age of the crowd sourced this and the crowd funded that, I want to ask how many people out in the audience have supported one of these new technology campaigns on something like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo within the past year.