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Subject: Inside Virtual Reality by Jeremy Wolff
Message-ID: <1990Jul12.105135.21310@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
From: patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (Patt Haring)
Date: 12 Jul 90 10:51:35 GMT
Reply-To: patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (Patt Haring)
Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: City College of New York - Science Computing Facility
Summary: The Myth of Transparency and the Myth of Reflection
Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu
Lines: 509
Reposted from ECHO's Conference on Virtual Reality:
13:1) Jeremy Wolff 24-JUN-90 19:18
Inside Virtual Reality
(The Myth of Transparency and the Myth of Reflection)
A couple of weeks ago I spent two minutes inside a virtual
reality. I put my hand into the dataglove, the heavy, hardwired
goggles were lowered over my head--and suddenly I was through the
screen and into a computer-generated environment. A checkerboard
plain surrounded by a green field stretched to a blue horizon. When I
turned my head, I could see the rest of my computer-animated world:
red pyramids and yellow columns, a floating grey box, a toy car and
airplane, a balloon overhead. Responding to the movements of my hand
inside the dataglove, my virtual hand, yellow, disembodied, floated in
front of me. Pointing with my index finger made me to fly to an
object. I could grab the car or the plane and move it to a new
position. Or look up at the balloon overhead, point to it, and fly
upt, the checkerboard plain receding below me. I flew through the
balloon into an unseen cityscape. Out of the balloon, arcing over
the more familiar plain and back down to the solid surface of my
virtual world.
I took this trip at a press conference before a lecture and
demonstration advertised as "FROM PSYCHEDELICS TO CYBERSPACE." The
show, April 30 at NYU's Loeb Student Center, featured Sixties LSD guru
Dr. Timothy Leary, author and conspiracy-theorist Robert Anton Wilson,
and the first public demonstration of Virtual Reality (VR) technology
on the East Coast. I had been fascinated with the concept for months,
and when I heard this road-show was coming with the real equipment, I
made sure I got to try it.
Virtual Reality (sometimes called artificial reality or
Cyberspace) is hardware and software that puts you inside a
computer-generated graphic world. The goggles (or "eyephones")
position two TV monitors before your eyes, aligned to create a 3-D
stereoscopic image. When you turn your head to "look around," your
head movements are tracked electronically and the computer alters the
image before your eyes accordingly. The illusion--the experience--is
of a complete, 360-degree environment you can look around at and move
through.
After two minutes of tooling around in VR I was pretty spaced
out. (That is the correct term.) But I felt proud and ripe for the
future when Eric Gullichsen, President of the SENSE8 Corporation of
Sausalito, CA, whose equipment this was, told me I was a good pilot.
Gullichsen is a demure and clear-speaking 30- something young man with
a scraggly beard and a very long blonde ponytail.
Recent VR systems required half-million-dollar computers to drive
their software; Eric's "Desktop Virtual Reality" prototype is run by a
Sun Sparkstation, a $12,000 dollar computer now selling as fast as the
top-end Macintosh, and which Eric predicts will be down to $5000 by
the end of the year. [5/13: A woman at SENSE8 says Sun announced last
week it was dropping the price of the Sparkstation by $5-6000.] The
dataglove he uses gives an even better idea of how fast this stuff is
moving out of the lab and into our lives. A year ago, Eric's demos
used a prototype that cost $8000. Now he works with a
"Powerglove"--made by Mattel for Nintendo. It sells for $79.
Even with a lot of power behind it, SENSE8's VR is about as slow
and low-resolution as it can be to work at all. But you still get a
sense of the possibilities. It's not so much that the experience
doesn't live up to the hype: more that the experience is hard to
connect with the amount and variety of hype.
Doing It was brief, unique, somewhat ineffable. The hope,
hysteria and hypotheses that have arisen out of the concept of VR is
what the rest of the event at NYU was all about: several hours of
dreams and visions, tech-talk and peptalk on what this stuff is for
and what it will do. My two-minutes' experience aside, you can't help
but feel Something's Up, just from the assortment of strange
characters and corporations clammoring to jump, or at least keep an
eye, on the VR bandwagon.
Representing psychedelics at the "From Psychedelics to
Cyberspace" show was Dr. Timothy Leary, the former Harvard Prof. and
Acid-activist, now willing to commit his career-long utopian dreams to
this straight, labcoat technology. (The work of nerds!) Age 70, he
comes bounding on stage, energetic and radiant, in brand-new white
Adidas and a sharp suit sporting a "Just Say Know" button (for sale,
$2). His ramblings have slowed, but you still have to pay attention
to follow the playful and curious threads of his thinking. Among many
other things, he's here to contend that 90-percent of the engineers
and programmers creating the current personal-computer revolution are,
like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (the founders of Apple Computers),
veterans of psychedelics. That Silicon Valley is a stone's throw from
Berkeley and the Haight, he says, is no coincidence.
Technology (of all things) is allowing Leary to speak in a new
and more accessible way about the benefits of altered consciousness.
He thinks the experience of these computer- generated realities breaks
down the "straight" idea of a Real World or an Absolute Reality as
much as the LSD experience did--but without the stigma of "Drugs,"
which has always prevented Leary's theories from being taken
seriously. Instead of sounding like a chemical prophet, he's talking
about technology and innovation and competition, almost like some Lee
Iacocca-type on TV, "Working to make America great again."
During the show, Leary was the first to demonstrate the goggles
and glove. He was strapped in by Gullichsen, then took off, twisting
his wired head around, giggling, and squirming in his chair as he
glanced, pointed and flew through his imaginary world. "Whoa-ho,"
came his self-mocking laugh, "I've been here before!"
"PSYCHEDELICS TO CYBERSPACE" pulls virtual reality into the realm
of drugs, and also into the world of Science Fiction: "Cyberspace" is
sci-fi writer William Gibson's word for his conception of VR. Gibson
posits the ultimate interface--what he calls being "jacked in": a
direct link from machine wires to human nerves and brain. In the
world revealed in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, Gibson's characters can
jack into cyberspace--a computer-generated visually abstracted matrix
of information--or into the live or recorded senses (the "sensorium")
of another person.
Gibson's vision, and his role in the development of the concept
and consequences of VR, is taken very seriously; his name comes up in
every VR speech, and the scientists talk like he's one of the boys.
Gibson's idea of a direct interface is beginning to happen (in work
with damaged hearing, experimenters are connecting microphones
directly to auditory nerves); current VR technology is not direct, but
tries to make the human-computer interface transparent (that is,
perceived as direct). The effect is to put "you" (some part of you,
some ratio of your senses) into an artificial world that you can
actually move through and operate within.
"Artificial Reality"--the first term used to describe computer
and video environments--was coined by author-inventor-engineer Myron
Krueger in the early Seventies, and is the title of his seminal book
on the subject. Written in 1972 but not published until a decade
later, Krueger's Artificial Reality presented all the major concepts
guiding today's VR investigations, including the idea of a dataglove.
Krueger, hailed by all present as the "Father of Artificial
Reality," was the first speaker. "I feel a little like Rip Van
Winkle," he said, "except that it's the rest of the world that's been
asleep for 20 years." A good-looking, square-jawed, clear- eyed
American, he could be your milkman or your mayor, or your math
teacher. He has the down-to-earth practicality of someone who, in his
words, "knits computers," but he too talks about science fiction's
role in real-world breakthroughs: "I don't read as much now, but when
I was younger I read everything. I used to believe it when someone in
this field said they hadn't read science fiction; I used to believe
it, but I don't anymore. I don't think it's possible."
Conspicuously absent was the best known and most publicized of
the VR pioneers: Jaron Lanier, a 29-year old white rasta and high-
school drop-out distinguished by his long dreadlocks and his NASA
contracts. He makes the most mystical claims for VR, which might not
be taken seriously were he not ahead of everyone in VR software and
hardware and working for the government. Jaron (everyone here invokes
the demi-diety on a first-name basis) sees VR having therapeutic,
ritual uses--in the way of psychotropic drugs in shamantic tribes. A
recent Wall Street Journal article on Lanier offered these brave but
tentative subheads: "COMPUTER SIMULATIONS MAY ONE DAY PROVIDE SURREAL
EXPERIENCES," and, "A KIND OF ELECTRONIC LSD?".
You get a sense that Leary and Wilson are hitching their old
messages to The Next Big Thing. But, in fact, the connections they're
making hold remarkably well. One message is that VR does what
psychedelic drugs do. Another message is political: how electric
communication will break down the fascist control of centrist
governments. "It was electrons," Leary says, "that brought down the
Berlin Wall".
Politics, drugs, science fiction, philosophy, and mysticism are
just a few of the fields and factions inspiring and being inspired by
the cutting-edge technology and scientist-inventors of Virtual
Reality. The range of these factions parallels the range of
implications of the concept: When consciousness is extended by
electronics, science and philosophy are in the same room, and there
are ramifications everywhere in between.
Leary, Wilson and Gullichsen each referred to VR as part of an
electronics revolution that will change television from a passive to
an active medium--the Viewer will no longer be in the thrall of the
broadcast monopolies, whose centralized control stems from the current
state of TV technology (i.e., TV is cheap to receive, but only a
government or big corporation can afford to produce and broadcast).
That's changing, with cheap VCRs and portable cameras; with cable, and
especially fiber-optic cable, which will increase television's
interfaces with computers. All of these new forms (including, soon,
VR) give the individual more control and choice as to how to use the
medium. Strictly speaking, "Television" as a medium is visual
electronic information; your Mac is as much a TV as your Sony.
Television will no longer be just a receiver for a centralized
broadcast medium, but one component of an interactive, computer-based
communications network.
"VR is a network like the telephone, where there is no central
point of origin of information," Jaron stated in a recent interview in
the Whole Earth Review. "Its purpose will be general communication
between people, not so much getting sorts of work done." He's already
created a "Reality Built for Two" (RB2), a virtual space in which two
people interact.
Virtual reality is like the telephone medium, which opens a new
realm for human interaction but doesn't affect the content, i.e., what
you talk about. The technology of VR per se has nothing to do with
what you create or do within it. But whenever I explain the concept
of VR to people, they have strong reactions to it. Fear is common, a
kind of Brave New World/1984 paranoia. A professor I described this
stuff to waxed rhapsodic about how it signals the end of the
mind-brain duality, creating a sort of spiritual or mystical
materialism. (John Barlow has published an article on VR called Being
in Nothingness.) Leary and Wilson look into VR and see a
technological utopia. Others dream of its pornographic
possibilities--virtual sex-partners. A visionary- rebel like Lanier
is drawn to mystical ends; as the Wall Street Journal observed, "[His]
obsession with Artificial Reality seems to reflect his dissatisfaction
with conventional reality."
These are all understandable human reactions. Every new medium
works like a mirror, reflecting back some part of ourselves. (The
telephone, in this sense, "reflects" our speech and hearing.) VR is a
mirror that reflects our entire consciousness--which might explain
some of the extreme reactions it's eliciting. These reactions reveal
something of the general resonance of the new medium, but more than
anything specific about what VR does, these reactions reveal us.
Marshall McLuhan addressed this phenomenon in Understanding Media
(1964), labelling it "Narcissus as Narcosis." In the myth, Narcissus
falls in love with his own image, unaware that it is his reflection.
He is numb or blind to an extension of himself, and remains unaware of
the medium operating on him, in this case, a reflecting pool. With
any new medium, we are entranced by its content--which is an extension
or reflection of some part of ourselves--but remain numb or blind to
the operation of the medium itself. We are able to look through or
conceive into a mirror because it extends our sense of sight--but it
is impossible for us to focus on or perceive the surface of a mirror
(the place where its technology is operating) as a two-dimensional
plain.
The thinking of McLuhan (who was dubbed "the Media Guru" around
the same time in the Sixties when Leary was being accorded guru-status
for his work with psychedelics) lurks at the edges of a lot of the
ideas VR is inspiring. Like Gibson's, his name came up several times;
Gullichsen quoted McLuhan--"In the future we will wear our nervous
systems outside our bodies"--as a preface to demonstrating his
data-goggles and glove. And Leary later mentioned and gave a good
illustration of McLuhan's best-known maxim, The Medium Is the
Message: "When Moses came down from the mountain with the Word of God
carved into those marble tablets, let me tell you, boys and girls,
those were not suggestions...."
McLuhan prefigured the electronic extension of consciousness more
than 25 years ago: "Having extended or translated our central nervous
system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage
to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at
least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it
cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the
entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself
extended in his own gimmickry."
All the reactions to VR (the "Narcissus illusions") say nothing
about how this particular mirror works or why our brains are able to
conceive into and make from this mass of electronic information a
space that is perceived as real.
VR technology does not create "reality" in any sophisicated way;
in fact, it works in the most unsophisticated way, revealing to us our
simplest perceptual illusions. The "space" one enters during the VR
experience is not visually sophisticated; rather it takes advantage of
our inclination to conceive three-dimensional space out of two
dimensions. In the West, we have been trained to see depth in the
simplest two-dimensional drawings if the lines of perspective are
right. We perceive depth in a line-drawing of a cube (the classic
"optical illusion"), but this is a relatively recent technical
development (perspective drawing is a Renaissance invention). The
effect will not work in a tribal society whose visual perceptions have
not been trained in this way.
Myron Krueger: "What VR does is highlight the status of
artificial experience which we already have lots of." Jaron Lanier:
"The reason the whole thing works is that your brain spends a great
deal of its efforts on making you believe that you're in a consistent
reality in the first place. What you are able to perceive of the
physical world is actually very fragmentary. A lot of what your
nervous system accomplishes is covering up gaps in your perception.
In VR this natural tendency of the brain works in our favor. All
variety of perceptual illusions come into play to cover up the flaws
in the technology."
Entering SENSE8's "flawed" virtual reality on April 30, 1990, was
the culmination of an exactly nine-month gestation period whose
conception was my first encounter with the idea of electronically
extended consciousness in the real world. From then on it was as
though I was being bombarded by the concept, and from so many diverse
angles that it was impossible to ignore. It started on August 1,
1989, when I read an article in the "Science" TIMES about a device
called a teleoperated robot. The operator of the robot moves two
mechanical arms that move, remotely, a robot's arms. A helmet covers
the operator's head, with speakers by his ears and two small video
monitors before his eyes--with which he "sees" and "hears" via the
video-camera eyes and microphone ears on the robot's head. The
technology allows delicate and dangerous work (like disarming a bomb)
to be done from a safe distance. The term "telepresense" has been
coined for the perceptual illusion: "The closer you come to
duplicating the human experience, the more easily your mind transposes
into the zone as though you were there," operators say. "You forget
where you are."
"Telepresence" got me, and the idea that "your mind transposes
into the zone as though you were there." This was the first real
example I'd come upon of what McLuhan had predicted more than 25 years
ago, the electronic extension of consciousness or electronic direct
experience. (Like VR, telerobotics puts your consciousness
elsewhere.)
Shortly after, a Seattle computer-jock friend of mine asked if
I'd heard about Virtual Environments, and it was from him that I first
learned of the goggles and glove and suit you could wear to see in and
move around a computer-generated space.
The next time I encountered the idea was in the unexpected
context of an interview with Jerry Garcia in ROLLING STONE (Nov. 30,
1989). "Have you heard about this stuff called virtual reality?" the
lead-guitarist for the Grateful Dead asked his interviewer. He went
on to describe the idea quite cogently, and also to connect it with
psychedelics: "You can see where this is heading: You're going to be
able to put on this thing and be in a completely interactive
environment...And it's going to take you places as convincingly as any
other sensory input. These are the remnants of the Sixties. Nobody
stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've
been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get myself back
there again but make it a little easier on myself?'"
Then I was given Neuromancer--Gibson's sci-fi novel (and I've
never liked sci-fi) that introduces and explores "Cyberspace"--and a
copy of the interview with VR-pioneer Jaron Lanier. Reading Gibson
and Lanier at once, I was startled by how close sci-fi and fact had
become.
Appropriately, it was via ECHO, a new computer bulletin-board,
that I found out about "From Psychedelics to Cyberspace." I'd joined
ECHO a couple of weeks before; getting a modem and entering the world
of telecommunication transformed my computer from a typewriter to a
tool for putting ideas online in real-time, a new medium for
conversing with a group of unseen others, like me, typing down the
telephone lines.
VR is the beginning of another new medium for human
communication--huge amounts of processed digital information used to
create the bare-bones of what our brains perceive as "reality." What's
new is that this realm of information is encountered as experience.
The content of the telephone medium is speech; the content of the
television medium is movies and drama and talking- heads: with the
telephone or TV, you are aware of the inside and the outside--of the
medium and its limits, and of the real world that surrounds it. The
TV or telephone experience does not exist separate from its entrancing
content (which is itself a different medium, what McLuhan calls "the
juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of
the mind"). In VR, there is no such duality. You know it's not
"real," and when the perceptual illusion works, you are just Being
There. The content of virtual reality is not speech or action or any
other visual or auditory medium. The content of VR is consciousness.
This sets up a basic question about the difference between
information and experience. Information--the kind that comes from
other people or books or movies or TV--is mediated experience. It is
not like the Real World--the real, direct experience of things that
surround us. VR is also information, but it is perceived as
immediate; that is, it is not mediated or digested or translated-- it
is just "lived." If "experience is the only teacher," it was the
experience of psychedelics that taught many people, in a profound and
direct way, the limits of "reality." The experience of VR can teach
that too, and many other things.
Playing a video-game or reading a book or watching TV or a movie,
there are times when you are unconscious of the medium, when you are
immersed in its content (when "the watchdog of the mind" is chewing
that meat). At other times you are aware of the television or the
book's boundaries. Within a virtual reality, there is no such losing
and regaining awareness of your state. You are aware of its unreality
and perceive its reality at the same time and all the time. In fact,
in VR you have a heightened awareness of perceiving reality in an
unreal system. Your consciousness it at once the perceiver of VR, and
its content.
All of which is thrilling to ponder. But if this stuff is going
to develop on a mass scale, it has to get there via some marketable,
real-world applications. Many people think VR will be carried through
this intermediate phase by applications in pornography, as was the
case with the VCR less than ten years ago. (Add some sort of
force-feedback or tactile response system, and every sort of inter-,
trans- and multi-sexual interaction could be programmable: safe sex,
indeed.)
Krueger and Gullichsen, guys on the practical, hands-on, I-
need-funding side, are working to come up with simple, high-concept
applications that even America's short-sighted venture capitalists can
understand. This sets up some strange situations (since they are
courting business partners but depend on frontmen like Leary to bring
in the crowds and press), like when these older corporate guys in
suits arrive en masse to check-out Gullichsen's gear.
They look like money; like their good graces could shower SENSE8
with contracts and options. They struggle with the eyephones and the
glove. They did not grow up with TV--they are not good pilots. Eric
is deferential and cogent and clear, trying to dispel with his manner
any doubts his long blonde ponytail and rough beard might cast. And
then the suits have to sit through the lecture, surrounded by
college-age Trekkies and every stripe of New Age huckster (a man
selling "psycho-active soda" for three dollars a cup), and listen to
Leary and Wilson make fun of Bush, Quayle and the drug-addict Drug
Czar.
Gullichsen does his best to talk toward the most mundane
applications: Imagine an architect showing a client around a
"virtual" building (it's been designed but not built). The client
wants to see how it looks with bigger windows, so the architect, in
the virtual world, can reach over and enlarge the windows with his
hands. Another area he talks about is education--the Defence
Department's use of VR in fighter-pilot training is probably the most
sophisticated form now in practical use. A related application, the
first one we're likely to see, is in entertainment, VR video-arcade
games.
Krueger has one device that's so basic and useful, it seems
inevitable. Simply put, it allows you to use your unencumbered hands
to do anything a mouse does--access menus, draw pictures, move text,
etc. (Of course, this isn't VR, you don't put goggles on and put your
head inside. But it should make Krueger rich while he waits for the
technology of the goggles, and the 3-D imaging and computers that run
them, to catch up to his ideas.)
Leary, not surprisingly, flies off into the future, imagining VR
as some kind of holographic telephone. "You'll call up your friend Joe
in Tokyo and say, Where do you want to meet today? and press some
buttons and the two of your are strolling in Hawaii, or meeting in a
cafe in Paris or on top of Everest, or joining Aunt Ethel for tea in
Idaho."
Jaron Lanier seems to have the most developed ideas about how VR
will function and where it will be relevant. He talks about
handicapped people experiencing full-motion interaction with other
people, and tele-operated mircorobots performing surgery from within
the human body. But he also builds on Leary's dreams of the
therapeutic uses of psychedelics as tools for exploring the
unconscious mind.
"Idealistically, I might hope that VR will provide an experience
of comfort with multiple realities for a lot of people in western
civilization, an experience which is otherwise rejected. Most
societies on earth have some method by which people experience life
through radically different realities at different times, through
ritual, through different things. Western civilizations have tended
to reject them, but because VR is a gadget, I do not think that it
will be rejected. It's the ultimate gadget.
"It will bring back a sense of the shared mystical altered sense
of reality that is so important in basically every other civilization
and culture prior to big patriarchal power. I hope that that might
lead to some sense of tolerance and understanding." Jaron envisions
the VR experience, potentially, functioning like an Amazonian
shamantic drug ritual for the electronically re- tribalized Global
Village.
When considering these predictions and dreams, it's important to
remember the stage all of this is at. People at the show were asking
how VR would help the Homeless and what good it would do for babies
dying of AIDS in Africa. This would be like asking Alexander Graham
Bell in 1870 what the telephone was going to do to stop the
Franco-Prussian War.
VR is now at the Wright Brothers stage, the thing's sputtering
and popping and just barely getting off the ground--and everyone's
trying to predict what moon-rockets will be like. Back then, instead
of William Gibson, you had Jules Verne's sci-fi model; and in sixty
years we did walk on the moon. But who could have imagined any of the
mundane and earth-changing reality in between-- 747s and People's
Express and plane-food and in-flight movies and jetlag? Who, looking
at television in the 40s, could have predicted Watchman TV or
palm-size video cameras or the worldwide resonance of seeing Tiananmen
Square on CNN? And the speed of the computer revolution is on an
altogether different scale.
If cars had progressed at the same rate, they'd cost $10 and run
for a lifetime on a tank of gas. In ten years flat we've gone from
4000 to 4 million transistors on a thumbnail chip, and the power is
quadrupling every two years. At this pace, science fiction like
Neuromancer becomes a myth of the present. The technology has
progressed faster than our ability to even imagine what do to with it;
it's almost as though it has appeared magically and full-grown in our
midst. The VR toys now being demonstrated barely scratch the surface
of the brain-extending fun and games possible when creative thinking
gets applied to this new and limitless computer power. Hold tight:
the unimaginable future of virtual reality is only a few years away.
16.5.90
Comments, criticism appreciated. This is not copyrighted. It is, in
fact, open to wholesale theft.
--
Patt Haring patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu
"The harder you fall, the higher you bounce."
-- American Proverb