Looking-glass world: learning to assemble the machinery of illusion - virtual reality

Science News, Jan 4, 1992 by Ivars Peterson

The glare of a projection video screen spills into a darkened room, catching two strangely accoutered figures in its harsh light. Wearing wired baseball caps, tethered, skintight gloves and stereo glasses, the figures bob and weave in front of the screen. Their actions and gestures seem disconnected from the world. Their encumbered heads trace out cryptic patterns; their gloved hands grasp at nothing but air.

The focus of this bizarre pas de deux, however, is not the empty space in front of the screen but the brightly colored, miniature world displayed on the screen. Images of disembodied hands swat tumbling, flexible geometric shapes -- "rubber rocks" -- that deform and sometimes shatter and shriek as they collide with each other and with the tiled walls and floor of a graphically rendered room.

Each change in head position registers on the screen as a change in viewpoint. Each movement of a gloved hand produces a corresponding shift in that hand's screen image, and the rubber rocks respond appropriately.

This simple, interactive video game, set up in a modest suite of rooms at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., serves as a crowd-pleasing, though rudimentary, demonstration of a technology aimed at providing more natural means of working with information than the keypads, conventional displays and other paraphernalia presently associated with the computer age. It represents one facet of a broad range of research activities that fall under the rubric of an ill-defined, nascent field of study commonly called virtual reality -- though some researchers prefer to use such terms as immersive simulation, artificial reality, telepresence, virtual world or virtual environment to convey the particular flavor of their work.

The IBM project, along with pioneering research at a number of academic and industrial laboratories, demonstrates both the tremendous promise of virtual reality and the great effort required to make it work. Looking to the future, researchers readily envision creating computer-based environments that would allow surgeons to practice new techniques on simulated patients, business analysts to wander through, manipulate and search for patterns in financial data, and armchair tourists to explore and experience exotic locales without leaving home.

At the same time, these pioneer creators of computer-mediated virtual worlds face a host of obstacles, ranging from the primitive state of the technology needed for generating stereoscopic images in head-mounted displays to the serious gaps in knowledge about human perception. The IBM setup alone, for example, requires at least half a dozen high-powered computers and associated equipment -- connected by a maze of cables and controlled by sophisticated, complex software -- to keep its rubber rocks in action.

Nonetheless, virtual-reality technology holds such strong appeal that researchers in a number of laboratories worldwide have mounted serious efforts to overcome these obstacles and bring virtual reality into the real world. In the last two years, these efforts have made virtual reality the subject of extended exchanges via electronic mail among researchers and enthusiasts. It has also served as the focus of a number of conferences and even a congressional hearing.

Despite this attention, however, virtual reality remains an infant technology caught perhaps prematurely in the limelight. "We're at the dawn of virtual-reality technology. It's a technology that has not yet found its focus," says Michael Heim, a philosophy lecturer at California State University, Long Beach, and a computer-industry consultant. He made his remarks in October at a virtual-reality conference in Alexandria, Va., sponsored by the Education Foundation of the Data Processing Management Association.

In one sense, virtual reality is already familiar to readers of skillfully written novels. Successful authors use words to depict such vivid, compelling characters and settings that it's easy to lose oneself in these purely imagined worlds. Hit video games play on the same mind-teasing elements through the creation of interactive environments that plunge players into the middle of the action.

Much of the technology available to virtual-reality pioneers originated in efforts to use computers to create realistic simulations. For instance, advanced computer-based flight simulators now play key roles in the training of both civilian and military pilots. Tank simulators are realistic enough to cause severe motion sickness in novice drivers who push their ersatz vehicles into gravity-defying, stomach-churning maneuvers.

This technology stands at the center of SIMNET, the world's largest immersive simulation. Personnel at military bases scattered throughout the United States and Europe jointly participate in maneuvers on the same simulated battlefield and wage war games on a massive scale entirely within computer-controlled and networked tank, helicopter and fighter-bomber simulators.