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

Science News, Jan 4, 1992 by Ivars Peterson

"We wanted to find out how kids respond to this technology," says Meredith Bricken, director of the education program at the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In that brief period, each group of eight to 10 children learned enough about the technology and the computer software underlying virtual reality to create their own interactive worlds. After agreeing on a scenario, they used special graphics software to create three-dimensional images of the objects they wanted in their creations. They decided where to put things, which objects were mobile and which ones could be picked up or manipulated in some way. Bricken herself programmed the movements.

"Each group built remarkably interesting, very imaginative and complex worlds," Bricken says. "We had everything from a mountain scene with wonderful trees, farm objects and dirty laundry . . . to a space colony with a monorail . . . in a crater-strewn landscape."

Interestingly, none of these virtual worlds involved conflict; there were no war games. Instead, the youngsters were very protective of their worlds and created interactions with such objects as ghosts, monorails, bears and boats.

Bricken found the results stunning. "They went so far beyond what any of us thought they could do that . . . it was exhilarating," she says.

Despite the hard work and concentrated effort required to complete their projects, the students loved the experience. They also proved perceptive critics, quickly pinpointing many of the inadequacies of present-day practice in building virtual worlds.

"This is an infant technology," Bricken notes. "Yet, "even given the state of the art, the fact that 13-year-olds can in a week build their own worlds is indicative taht it's not all that hard."

In trying to design systems for human use, virtual-reality researchers face many relatively unexplored issues concerning the way people respond physiologically and cognitively to such novel forms of computer-mediated interaction. Investigators need to know much more about how people develop their mental models of the external world and what role human imagination plays in creating illusions compelling enough to fool the mind and eye into accepting the reality of a virtual world.

The construction of virtual environments also raises safety issues, especially when these worlds incorporate force feedback. Right now, a "cybernaut" can step through walls and wander at will through a computer-generated building without fearing the consequences, and a player batting a rubber rock doesn't feel the impact. But that may change with the development of sensors and devices that exert actual forces on a participant. Because virtual environments can allow physically improbable situations -- in some cases, perhaps inadvertently because of a program bug -- the risk of injury or disorientation is very real.

"What we're discovering is that . . . we do not have any tools -- perceptual or design -- for actually building virtual worlds to do things," says Robert Jacobson, associate director of the University of Washington's HIT laboratory. "Eventually we want to get a scientific, more systematic understanding of how these worlds work."