Highlights of the First Annual Virtual Reality Conference
by Ben Delaney
This article originally appeared in CyberEdge Journal #1, January/February © 1991
The first annual Virtual Reality Conference was held in San Francisco on the 10th and 11th of December. An all-star line up of speakers discussed the theory, practice and promise of Virtual Reality. Sponsored by Meckler Conference Management, the show was well attended, with 320 paid attendees and more than 30 press representatives.
Adjacent to the auditorium a small exhibit hall housed nine exhibitors, notably Sense8, showing their new WorldToolKit interface to Intel's DVI, Virtual Technologies, demonstrating a new, high-precision glove, and Bio-Control Systems, who showed their Eye Controller system which allows hands-free interfacing by detecting eye movement.
The conference lasted two-days, and featured many of the best-known luminaries in VR, including Myron Krueger, the keynote speaker, Conference Chairperson Sandra Kay Helsel, Randal Walser of Autodesk, Eric Gullichsen from Sense8, and Michael Benedikt from the University of Texas.
Day One - Theory
Krueger set the tone
Day one of the conference was devoted to theory. Keynote speaker Krueger recounted some of his early work and emphasized the importance of the human/computer interface. He pointed out the plasticity of our perception of reality as he explained the work he did with his famous Videoplace. Krueger is optimistic about the promise of the new technology. Emphasizing what he believes will be the ubiquity of VR applications he said, "The challenge is to come up with something for which it will not be [used]. People will want to take their dogs with them into artificial reality."
Kreuger's talk was interesting and set the tone of muted enthusiasm that pervaded the entire conference. For those who have heard him before, there were few surprises, but he is an engrossing, articulate speaker.
Interactive training, today's VR
Following Krueger to the podium was Joseph Henderson, MD, from Dartmouth Medical School. Dr. Henderson showed an interactive, multimedia training program developed for the US Navy.
Very involving and dramatic, it uses live-action video and computer graphics to simulate a battlefield hospital situation. The user/student is a new medical officer. The student is evaluated on the speed and correctness of response in a very stressful situation. With location shots and dozens of actors, this is a very convincing application of multimedia with hyper links.
A soufflé before lunch
Nicole/Natalie Stenger, who works at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, concluded the morning session. Stenger's entertaining talk encompassed the lighter, sensual side of cyberspace; its potential as human potentiator and plaything. She titled her talk "Cyberspace: a soufflé called home". The point of the title, she explained, is that cyberspace is a lot like a soufflé, since a soufflé is so fragile that it is more like an illusion than a reality, and like many contemporary artificial realities, a soufflé is liable to collapse at any moment.
Defining VR, knowing what's real
After lunch, Michael Spring, from the University of Pittsburgh, discussed "Being there, models for virtual reality." His highly academic presentation stressed the importance of definitions and standards for these emerging technologies.
Spring offered a number of preliminary definitions, including, Cyberspace: "a place where the human nervous system and mechanical-electronic communication and computation systems are linked." He went on to assert that future definitions will be based on three dimensions:
Spring's thoughtful discussion concluded with an overview of the many models of virtual/artificial reality, and suggestions for new models.
The next speaker brought a different point of view to the colloquium. Michael Heim, from California State University at Long Beach is the VR's resident philosopher.
Heim emphasized that reality is relative, context-dependent and ephemeral. He offered what he called existential attributes of human existence, which gauge if a world is "real". They are:
The theatrical model
Brenda Laurel, a partner in Telepresence Research of Los Gatos, California discussed the theatrical and dramatic components of cyberspace. She stressed that like movies, artificial realities will likely not flourish until artists take over production.
She compared VR to a multi-sensory version of photorealism, and urged the audience to use the arts and particularly movies to understand what VR participants will demand. Pointing out that it "is not enough to imitate life", Laurel explained the parallels between performance art, theater, film, dance, and the fine arts, and the activities of VR producers.
Hard questions about access
Sandy Stone concluded the day one's formal presentations with the most provocative presentation of the day, entitled "She was asking for it: Sex and death in the virtual jungle". Stone works at the University of California at San Diego. She discussed the importance of culture and gender in our vision of virtual reality.
Stone observed that there are already many high-tech artificial realities available, like phone sex, other 900 services, and computer bulletin board systems where one may adopt any desired persona. Most of these, she asserted, were male designed and oriented.
Stone challenged the audience to arrive at VR for everyone - nondiscriminatory, color blind, gender aware but not gender biased, available to rich and poor. .
Issues of concern
The closing discussion was a panel of all the day's speakers accepting questions from the audience. The speakers agreed that VR will first be used for entertainment, but struggled with the questions of who makes the rules, who writes the scripts and who gets to play. Nicole Stenger suggested that VR will constitute a "new space where the rules are not written at all, and perhaps will never be written". Michael Spring advocated an "information act" similar to the law which guarantees access to telecommunications, assuring that everyone can have access to information.
Sandy Stone expressed her concern that since most of the research and development in these technologies is being done by men, women may be implicitly or explicitly excluded from full participation. Her comments fomented a spirited discussion. Joe Henderson felt that telepresence could eliminate gender, and associated prejudice as an item, since the participants would be free to define their preferences. Many others agreed, but Stone demurred, stating her belief that without gender, there is no identity.
These questions were not resolved. But it was important that they be asked. These issues are at the core of what will be an ongoing controversy concerning the philosophy and mores of life in virtual worlds.
Day Two - Practice and Promise
The second day of the conference addressed the practice of VR in the morning, bringing everyone up to date on the current state of the art. The afternoon session suggested where the future would lead us, through real and other spaces.
New TRIX from Autodesk
The day opened with Randal Walser's visually stimulating presentation. Representing Autodesk, he explained that they are in the tool business, supplying the cyberspace "industry" with ways and means to build worlds. For that, Autodesk has developed TRIX, a software tool for building cyberspaces.
TRIX is a cyberspace development environment which, according to Walser, is interactive, fast, compact and extensible. It has the look of C++ and the feel of LISP, is object-oriented, modular and usable for low or high level programming.
Autodesk, one of the few companies with virtual world production tools, tests them by developing simulations. Walser presented a thorough, though brief, view of how they do it, from the conceptual design of a cyberdeck, through the actual process of using TRIX to create a cyberspace.
Virtual anatomy
Following Walser's talk Suzanne Weghorst spoke about her work at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Labs. They are experimenting with computerized medical models, using 3D modeling techniques and a simple VR front end.
This is an interesting application, though hardly state of the art. But the UW HIT Lab is only a little over a year old and is just getting up to speed, so expect to hear more from them.
The first cyberdeck?
The last speaker before lunch was Eric Gullichsen of Sense8 in Sausalito, California. He discussed what he thinks VR is (3D multimedia) and isn't (goggles, gloves and other trappings) and spoke of Sense8's direction and projects. He explained that they see software as the difficult part of VR and intend to concentrate in that area. Stressing the need for device independence and versatility, he pointed out that Sense8's WorldToolKit software can accept interact with many platforms and programs
Gullichsen then demonstrated Sense8's newest project; linking their WorldToolKit with Intel DVI boards to bring real-time texture mapping to PCs. (See related story, page #) He said he sees a market for about 100 such systems in 1991. Luckily Sense8 was also showing their new system in the exhibit hall, because problems with the video projector made it difficult for those in the auditorium to see the effect.
The token Fortune 500 representative
After lunch, Tom Barret of Electronic Data Systems spoke about using VR in the workplace. Though characterizing himself as a "token representative of a Fortune 500 business", Barret had no problem connecting with the audience. Embodying a manager with bottom-line responsibility, he presented a fanciful but plausible vision of the Personal Virtual Workspace (PVW).
The PVW isn't a particularly novel concept; going to meetings in virtual space, presenting concepts with virtual white-boards and hyper/multimedia. But one idea we found amusing is the "concept cannon", a virtual device that fires ideas into virtual space before the eyes of your preoccupied colleagues.
Barret presented the knowledge worker's dilemma:
Discussing ways to deal with this dilemma, he described an experiment
in 3D data representation conducted at Xerox PARC. Finally, he stressed the
need for intelligent agents as part of the PVW, virtual workers who will know
what we need and when.
Education applications
David Traub of Center Point Communications, San Jose, California, made an intense, rapid-fire dissertation on the educational implications of VR.
One of Traub's main premises is that education and entertainment are not different. He pointed out that emotion and cognition seem to be linked; we remember not just experience and information, but also how we felt when we learned something. This suggests that VR, with its high entertainment quotient, has significant educational potential.
Traub pointed out several challenges to VR use in education:
Traub is optimistic that VR will meet these challenges and take its place as a significant educational tool in the not too distant future.
Computers the size of index cards
The penultimate speaker of the conference was John Thomas, director of NYNEX's Artificial Intelligence Lab in White Plains, NY. Thomas' speech was one of the most entertaining and among the simplest, as he eschewed the slides, overhead cells and video projections that most of the other speakers employed. He shared his expectations of computers and computing in the future.
Thomas' humor surfaced when he spoke about the problems of using computers. He pointed out that maximizing the "gulf of execution" (how do I operate this device), and the "gulf of evaluation" (how do I know what the device did), seems to be an important criteria among today's designers. The result of this design strategy is that it could take about 52,000 lifetimes to learn to operate the hypothetical 2000 device interfaces available in 2020. He suggested that we may want to avoid this problem by standardizing operational metaphors.
Thomas described the new technologies which he expects to emerge. They include broadband phone networks, more application-specific computer architectures, and communication and cyberspace specific systems. He also anticipates universal, wireless connectivity, based on "spread spectrum" networks, encoding data not only temporally, but also across a broad band of frequencies. This enables the network to overcome noise problems and recover data lost at one frequency by extrapolating from intact data in another frequency.
He went on to describe the computer of 2020 as being about the size of an index card, solar powered, with both handwriting and voice interfaces. It would include a camera and sound recorder, audio and eyeglass-based display output, and a full-surface display on the unit itself. (This vision is quite similar to Ted Nelson's Walky-Thingy, see sidebar.)
Seven Principles of Cyberspace
The final speaker was Michael Benedikt of the University of Texas at Austin. In his presentation, titled Cyberspace, VR, and the Principle of Commonality, he presented a scholarly and concrete vision of how VR will really work, and of real-world problems to be solved.
Benedikt provided his definition of cyberspace as a public, consensual space, including many different virtual worlds. In this he differed little from earlier speakers. But he raised the interest and eyebrows of many when he elucidated his "Seven Principles of Cyberspace Design".
These are a set of rules, a virtual constitution, for the design of cyberspaces. Though adamantly debated by many in the audience, in our opinion these or similar rules will be essential to any consensual VR experiences.
Benedikt's Seven Principles of Cyberspace Design:
A spirited discussion
Day two concluded with Q&A for the final speakers. The emotional backlash surrounding Benedikt's Seven Principles was impressive. Many of the questioners felt that there should be no rules, that as one speaker pointed out, "what we need here is a well-organized anarchy". Others joined Benedikt in defending his principles, agreeing that rules were inevitable and ultimately beneficial. Benedikt pointed out that the principles were not simply his invention, but are drawn from observation and analysis of interaction in the real world.
This discussion was a high point of the conference. Much of what had been said during the two days was interesting, but not particularly novel, having been presented before, both in print and at other conferences. But the debate fostered by Benedikt's remarks, and to a lesser extent, Stone's comments on gender bias, will help us to create the consensus that will make our dreams real. That was the greatest value in the Virtual Reality Conference.
The next conference
There will be another Virtual Reality Conference in San Francisco next fall. The dates are September 30 and October 1, 1991 at the Le Meridien Hotel. Contact Meckler Conference Management at 800 635-5537, FAX 203 454-5840, for information about attending or exhibiting.
Home | Speaker | Writer | Advisor | Bio | CyberEdge | Contact | SiteMap | Privacy