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

Science News, Jan 4, 1992 by Ivars Peterson

Driven by the visions of filmmakers and industrial designers, computer programmers have also developed increasingly sophisticated techniques for rendering realistic, three-dimensional graphic images. Though computer-intensive, these expressive graphic techniques for visualizing information capture hitherto unseen patterns, whether in masses of financial data or the topography of Mars.

Virtual reality represents the convergence of computer simulation and visualization into a single, coherent entity. It also encompasses an attempt to eliminate the traditional separation between user and machine and to provide a means of naturally and intuitively interacting with information.

"We've had to do things in ways that the machine could understand -- using punch cards, keyboards and the like. With virtual reality, you wouldn't even know you were interacting with a computer," says Thomas P. Caudell of Boeing Computer Services in Seattle.

Researchers have already used various combinations of hardware and software to create complex, interactive computer models of human systems, which represent first attempts at creating virtual reality.

At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a chemist, wearing bulky goggles to see a three-dimensional image on a computer screen and using a special joystick, can maneuver a small molecule so that it docks in the cranny of a gigantic protein -- while literally feeling the force exerted on the incoming molecule by the protein.

On the same campus, an architect, walking on a treadmill while steering a pair of bicycle handlebars, can stroll through a visualization of his or her creation -- in effect, experiencing blueprints brought to life. In Japan, a customer in an appliance showroom can design a new kitchen on the computer screen, then don goggles and glove to wander through the imaginary custom kitchen's array of gleaming gadgets.

At the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., a researcher, wearing an instrumented glove and peering through a boom-mounted display device resembling a scuba diver's mask, can explore the aerodynamic intricacies of air streaming past an airplane in a virtual wind tunnel (SN: 6/22/91, p.398). In another Ames laboratory, a pilot can skim over a Martian landscape, painstakingly reconstructed from photographs obtained in the 1970s during various missions to Mars.

Each of these well-publicized demonstrations results from a lengthy research-and-development effort. All of them suffer from glitches, and once the initial wonder that it can be done subsides, all display various shortcomings. Most require complex, costly technology that is not always as reliable as its users or creators would wish.

But they attract attention -- so much so that researchers who created these virtual worlds complain that the time they spend shepherding visitors through the displays severely cuts into their ongoing research.

IBM's modest virtual-reality effort, led by Daniel T. Ling, is an attempt to build a generic system for generating virtual worlds. The handful of researchers involved in the project have focused on designing computer programs that afford sufficient flexibility to allow users to readily change the way they interact with and build a computer-mediated virtual environment.