Adventures in Cyberspace

I'd heard that virtual reality was a seductive world in which one's fondest desires and deepest imaginings---even sexual ones---could be realized with a wave of the hand, that it was an electronic, technicolor, three-dimensional wonderland of sight, sound and even touch. It was called cyberspace and I wanted to go there.

I am standing in a conference room in New York's Marriott Marquis hotel, site of the third annual Conference on Interactive Entertainment. At my right is Chris Gentile, one of the creators of the Mattel Power Glove for the Nintendo entertainment system. "Slip this on," says Gentile, sliding a thick glove made of gray plastic over my hand and up my forearm. Immediately, a cartoon-colored rendering of a handball court appears on the monitor. There, above a light-brown floor, floats a dark-blue ball waiting to be whacked. To the left and below, a sky-blue hand gently rises and falls in time with my breathing.

"The glove on the screen will move the same way you move your hand," Gentile says. "Swing as though you were hitting the ball." I bring back my arm and whip my hand through an imaginary ball floating in front of me. The glove on the screen suddenly looms larger, as if it were approaching me, and then shrinks as if receding. It hits the ball on the screen, sending it caroming off the walls.

As the rebounding ball approaches me from the left side of the screen, I move back a few steps, line up the next shot and swing again. On screen, the disembodied glove merely freezes as the ball bounces over it, then rebounds back under it.

"Take a couple steps toward the screen," says Gentile, pulling my elbow. "You're too far away." These first few seconds contained my preschool lessons in the workings of virtual reality.

Meeting Gentile wasn't why I came to the conference. I came because I expected to interview Jaron Lanier, the man who coined the term virtual reality and whose VPL Research, Inc., in Redwood City, California, is the mecca of virtual reality. To tell the truth, the idea of being in a computer-made world gave me the hives. If you had asked me why, I probably would have said that if God had wanted us to walk through walls, fly by pointing our fingers, change our form at will or have X-ray vision, He would have put us in comic books.

•

It's predicted that virtual reality will have a great impact in medicine and architecture. For example, at the University of North Carolina, computer-science researchers have developed a virtual reality system that allows biochemists to test the pharmaceutical properties of specific molecules by grabbing a virtual molecule in a virtual fist and merging it with other molecules. Another model enables architects to "stroll" through blueprints by walking on a treadmill with (continued on page 124)Cyberspace(continued from page 105) handlebars, steering their way through the virtual corridors and rooms seen in their head-mounted 3-D display.

But the equipment at North Carolina is expensive. And while VPL Research recently announced its introduction of the first integrated VR desktop system, the $50,000 price is too costly for all but the most well-heeled consumers. That's where 31-year-old Eric Gullichsen has a better idea. He and his partner, 33-year-old Patrice Gelband, have formed their own company, Sense8, Incorporated, on the outskirts of Sausalito. Their goal is expressed in Sense8's vision of making virtual reality affordable. Gullichsen acquaints me with the tools I'll be using. The first is the same sort of power glove that I used to play the game above, Nintendo Super Handball. "Hold out your right hand," he says after I've put on the glove, "and open it. Now make a fist. Good. You're about to go into an office cubicle with a chair, some books, a painting and papers. Some of those things can be picked up and moved around with the glove."

Next, he introduces me to a large, rectangularly shaped cone that he fits on a color monitor. "This," he says, "is the Flogiston Cyberhood." I look into the narrow end and realize that it's basically a larger variation of the children's Viewmasters sold in toy stores. The only difference is that instead of looking at miniature slides, I'm looking at a television screen. Gullichsen then places my left hand over a palm-sized plastic track ball embedded in a plastic platform and explains that by pushing, pulling, lifting and twisting the ball, I'll have the same six degrees of freedom---up or down, left or right, forward or backward, roll, pitch and yaw---that I would have if I were actually standing in this office. To look around, all I have to do is move the ball as if I were turning my head one way or another. If I can't get the hang of holding my head in my left hand, Gullichsen can easily change the function of the ball to rotate the room, as if I were holding it in my hand.

Imagine for a moment that you have two heads and two right hands, and you can project one of each through the wall into the next room. That's what it's like as, staring into the Cyberhood, I push the ball forward. My vision brings me into the office Gullichsen has put on the screen. I turn the ball left and my vision rotates left to a painting on the wall. I turn the ball right and my vision rotates to a stack of papers on a wooden counter. I reach forward with my right hand and the outlined hand floating in the room moves toward the papers. I close my fist and the computer beeps.

"You've got the papers. Pick them up," Gullichsen says.

I raise my closed hand and the disembodied glove lifts the papers.

"They'll stay there unless you put them down," he says. "Gravity hasn't been programmed into this world."

When Gullichsen sees that I have learned to use these extensions of my senses, he introduces me to a different environment---a two-story town house. I drift toward it from the outside, floating across the yard. I pass through the walls and am inside a living room with a fireplace and a sofa. And, at the end of a hallway to the right, I see a doorless washroom. "I have to go to the John," I say.

"Go ahead, by all means," he says.

I float into the bathroom and try to lift the toilet seat.

"The toilet seat isn't programmed to lift," he says.

Several hours later, when I leave the Sense8 office on my way to the Autodesk Company, I've learned three things:

First, for less than $10,000, you can purchase enough virtual reality equipment to enable you to explore the inside of a building that hasn't been built.

Second, the operative laws in a computer-generated world are precisely what one programs them to be. If you want gravity, things fall. If you don't want a toilet seat to lift, it doesn't lift.

Third, the projecting of sensual perceptions into a disembodied hand and a headless point of view, while eerie at first, becomes quite comfortable. It feels normal to be in two places at the same time.

•

Less than half a mile down the road from the Sense8 building sprawls the multibuilding complex of Autodesk, the world's largest designer of computer-aided design software. Here I'm about to experience total immersion, and the man who's going to baptize me is Chris Allis, Autodesk's applications and marketing liaison. Thanks to Gentile and Gullichsen, I feel prepared, like a pilot who has trained on single-engine craft before finally moving up to a Learjet.

I go through the standard procedure with the glove, opening and closing my fist. Then Allis puts VPL eye-phones (or cyberspace goggles, as I like to think of them) over my eyes. Immediately, I notice little things. The resolution is better than Sense8's, the colors more vivid. The glove is made of flexible Lycra and covers my hand like a second layer of skin. But then, I shouldn't be surprised, since this is the VPL Data Glove, originally designed for use by astronauts.

"Ok," says Allis, "you're in."

Yes, but I don't know what I'm in. It seems to be a huge, gaudy structure composed of Grecian columns surrounding a modern chair placed in the center of a marble-tiled floor.

By pointing my forefinger up, I will fly skyward, and by pointing my finger down, I will descend. By holding my hand open, I will stop. By making a fist on any object, I can pick it up---even throw it.

I lift the chair with the virtual hand and swing my arm across my body. After I release the chair, it becomes embedded in the opposite wall, with only the top half visible inside the room. I pass through the wall of the building, where my eyes encounter an azure sky.

"What are you trying to do?" Allis asks me.

"I'm looking for the other half of the chair," I say.

"Well, just turn around and you'll see it."

Half an hour later, I've played virtual racquetball using a real racquet wired with magnetic sensors. I've inhabited a posh mansion with a swimming pool in the backyard, flown above my estate and landed on the roof without a helicopter and generally lived the life of a man who has a lot of discretionary income. Were it not for the fact that the water in the pool didn't ripple, that after diving into it I came out dry, and that I wasn't smoking a cigar, I might have thought I was Bill Cosby.

When I remove the glove and headgear, I realize that the experience has left me with a feeling of déjà vu.

The first association that comes to mind is Patrick Swayze's character in the film Ghost. I could now identify with the disembodied spirit that can penetrate walls at will. Virtual reality also reminds me of my own dreams. In the dream state, we often are merely a "point of view." Our phantasmal bodies enter into play only as needed and more often simply as impressions. When I dream I'm running, I don't actually see my legs; I simply assume that I'm using them to move toward or (continued on page 163)Cyberspace(continued from page 124) away from something.

As I was leaving Autodesk, still not fully recovered from the lingering memory of total immersion, I asked Allis if he has had any aftereffects from being in VR.

"Negative side effects? Not really," he answers. "If people attend to the other dimensions of their lives, virtual experiences aren't in any way deleterious. But now and then I feel that I ought to be able to float up over a building and look down on the roof. I think I've gained a gut feeling of what it's like to fly."

My flights thus far have been over rooms and roofs; useful capabilities from an architectural viewpoint, but not particularly astounding. The thrill of flying perhaps lies in having someplace unusual or special to fly to. And that's one of the many experiences that awaited me in the domain of Jaron Lanier at VPL.

•

Standing in the VPL demonstration room, I have a rush similar to the one I felt more than 20 years ago when I went to my first Jimi Hendrix concert. I had been to dozens of blues and rock concerts, but never before had I seen such an intimidating array of amplification hardware. Although I'm going into VR alone, the room is equipped for a two-person VR experience, which David Levitt, who has a Sc.D. in computer science from MIT, calls RB2-Pro: reality built for two. There are two Silicon Graphics Skywriter computers, which are as big as refrigerators. One will create the images I see according to my head movements. The other will do the same for the other participant. It has one display adapter; two Data Glove systems with control units; and two eyephone head-display systems with units for tracking and control. The hardware is coordinated by Body Electric software, which defines the behavior of the objects or "creatures" in VR worlds. Total cost: $400,000.

If you don't understand the system, don't feel bad. I don't understand it either. The point is that the equipment gets me into Duck World, where I'm about to do some meaningful flying using a quacking duck as my aeronautical point of reference.

Imagine that you're the male half of a duo of ducks that have built a nest on the topmast of a ship afloat on a vast, featureless sea. You have been abruptly thrown aloft by the ship's captain. Your goal is to return home quickly to be reunited with your mate, who flies in a great parabola above the ship searching for you and quacking piteously.

This, in any case, is my fantasy as I descend out of a great cloud toward the sound of a crazed mallard. As I approach the ship, I notice something strange. Towering above the deck is a giant tube that looks like an oversized smokestack for a steamboat. But there's no steam coming from it, and a flapping duck periodically darts out of and back into it.

I descend through the mouth of the smokestack and see my feathered friend flying up and down in endless spirals. As she flies away from me, the sound of her quacking recedes, and as she dives closer, it becomes louder.

When I exit through the bottom of the great tube, I'm on the ship's deck. I find a strange cargo of objects there, all of which I can pick up and handle. There's a black top hat, a bright green lime and the most luminous red apple I've seen since the one the witch gave Snow White.

"Pick up the hat," says Levitt. I grasp it in my virtual hand and it instantly transforms into a beautiful red rose.

I'm a stranger in three more strange lands. In Munchkin World, a spidery little creature begs me to pick him up and throw him down, thanks me profusely each time I do so and immediately begs to be picked up again. Sadomasochism aside, it's sort of an electronic version of a three-year-old who wants you to play horsey until you drop.

There's an ominously desolate kitchen with a whirling ceiling fan and a clock ticking on the wall. I can turn off the fan by flicking a wall switch; the clock always shows the correct time.

And there's a towering island from which comes the sound of pounding African drums. The drums get louder as I fly toward the island, until I feel as if I'm standing in the middle of them. Yet I don't see any drummers.

I'm told to pick up what looks like a shining white stalagmite, and find it's the source of the drumming. I wave it around my head, and the sound whirls around with it. I instantly feel free, powerful and exhilarated.

I realize that someone watching me wave my empty hand around my cranium might think I'm nuts. Embarrassed, I remove the eyephone and smile sheepishly at Levitt, who smiles knowingly. Behind him, chuckling, is Jaron Lanier.

Lanier has promised that he can teach anyone to create a virtual reality world in a few hours. He, Levitt and I gather around while he explains what goes into making characters.

"You work with sculpture, behavior and sound. It's not hard at all. I created Duck World in an hour and a half."

Levitt guides me as I attempt to create a building and a little square-faced character. The results are primitive. After watching me fumble with the mouse, Lanier takes it from me. He uses the mouse to summon colors, shapes and shading, creating a character named Esky, who was once the symbol of Esquire magazine. Very cute, this ironic jibe.

"We believe in speed around here," Lanier says. "We have hundreds of worlds. Right now we're making a virtual planet that can satisfy Western mankind's urge to conquer a frontier, without trashing the environment."

Of all the VR masters I've visited, Lanier is the only one who doesn't ask me what I thought of the experience---his experience, really.

Part of Lanier's reluctance to extol the virtues of his system is that like most brilliant inventors he tends to see his latest product as merely one step toward a new and improved version. For Lanier that means "improving the quality of the product and making it less expensive."

This past January, he and the VPL Research team made a major step in that direction by introducing MicroCosm, the first desktop VR system. Available for between a mere $51,000 (if you already own a top-of-the-line Quadra Mac II) and $58,000 (if you don't), MicroCosm includes an eyephone, built-in magnetic head-tracking device and Data Glove. It's also equipped with true 3-D audio.

For Lanier, the availability of desktop VR is the first prerequisite to the accomplishment of his ultimate dream, which is to have people worldwide plug into a communal cyberspace for a ritual gathering of the tribes. I can't decide whether Lanier's vision of a people immersed in virtual reality is ultimately healthy or dehumanizing. Either way, it's hard to state with conviction that it won't happen.

Before going to sleep, I make a note to myself: "Ask somebody who isn't an inventor about virtual reality."

•

Several days later, I put in a call to the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. The HIT Lab was founded by Dr. Thomas Furness in 1989 after he ended a 23-year stint researching for the Air Force. Furness created the flight simulator that employed a 3-D head-mounted display to train jet pilots for combat situations. And, indirectly, it was the flight simulator that inspired Furness to escape the military. What triggered his departure was the public reaction to his research: Immediately after the airing of Top Gun and Beyond, an award-winning 1987 Nova documentary, he and his associates were besieged with calls and letters from civilians who hoped that virtual reality technology might solve some human problems.

There were, predictably, inquiries from engineers and architects, but more compelling were letters from parents of disabled children, from relatives of individuals who suffered severe visual impairment and from organizations devoted to improving the quality of life for shut-ins. Schoolteachers wrote, looking forward to a day when the technology that produced the flight simulators could help them make history, literature and biology come to life for today's generation of TV-oriented students.

The man I need to interview at the HIT Lab isn't Furness---who in his way is just as much a visionary as Lanier---but the lab's associate director Robert Jacobson. Jacobson, a Fulbright research scholar in technology policy with a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA, spent eight years as an information policy analyst for the California legislature before teaming up with Furness.

I ask him what the immediate future holds for virtual reality.

"Over the next ten years," Jacobson answers, "the technology will advance in five fields. The first is industrial. Major manufacturers will use virtual reality to design everything from automobiles to household appliances. The second is biomedicine, for making devices that offer virtual mobility for people in wheel-chairs and visual enhancement for the near-blind. The third is in the arts and entertainment, with amusement-park displays and arcades being the primary source of growth. The fourth is in education. We're trying to get funding for the development of a virtual classroom in which a child can experience things that would otherwise be inaccessible or invisible---such as seeing an electron in an atom or seeing how galaxies are configured in space."

"And fifth?"

Jacobson's eyes light up. "Televirtual reality---the ability to share virtual realities across computer networks and, eventually, our telephone system. This could happen very quickly, depending on the interest and commitment of the telephone and computer industries to make it happen."

I tell Jacobson that what he's talking about sounds like Jaron Lanier's vision of a nation---a world---wired for VR.

"Jaron's projections aren't unrealistic, but they depend on some events that may be slow in coming. The telephone companies and the federal government must make a commitment to a fiber-optic telephone system. If they do, it is conceivable that by the end of the decade, everyone who has a telephone will have in their home something similar to a 3-D stereo eyephone. But this depends on public demand for universal fiber-optic wiring."

What will create the public demand in such a relatively short time? "Virtual reality entertainment centers will help," says Jacobson. "Once people have had fun with it there, they'll want it in their homes, too. But even more than that is the natural competitive nature of Americans. Japan's telephone system is in the process of being wired fiber-optically. The Japanese already have their government, academic institutions and corporations focused on creating a communications plan that they expect to be the most advanced in the world. An integral part of that plan is to have the country wired for virtual reality. And Americans invented that technology. I'm just hoping that Americans will say to our government and telephone companies, 'Hey, how come we don't have a communications system as sophisticated as the Japanese?' Because if they do, we will."

One obstacle to Americans' ready acceptance of virtual reality is the equipment, the fancy gloves with dangling wires and six-pound head-mounts.

"Right now we're developing a light-weight stereo eyephone that projects an image directly on your retina," Jacobson says. "We're working on a wand much like the one recently developed by the Swedes. It has buttons on it that enable you to do everything in VR that you can't do with the glove. You can send out a beam and attach it to things and move them. You can use it to draw paintings, position yourself in relation to other objects, make yourself larger or smaller. Amazing things.

"You remember that scene in 2001 in which the first tool the ape used was a big bone? He finally threw it up into the air and suddenly it was transformed into a space station. Well, that's an analogy that applies here, only in reverse. We're going to make virtual reality as easy to understand as possible. We're going back to the original tool, the bone."

"By pointing my forefinger up, I will fly skyward, and by pointing my finger down, I will descend."