Giga Games 1/Giga Games.iso/net/vir_real/faq/conf/sri_91.rv1

Text File | 1991-12-30 | 7.4 KB | 141 lines

91-06/SRI.report
From: [e-mail] (Human Int. Technology Lab)
Subject: SRI Conference on Virtual Reality, June 1991: Report.
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1991 22:15:43 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle



Reposted from The WELL (415-332-6106)    vr   conference, by permission
of Johannes Nicholas Johannsen:


Topic  75:  Virtual Worlds Conference at SRI
By: Johannes Nicholas Johannsen (jojo) on Wed, Jun 19, '91


 Anyone go to the SRI conference?  (Virtual Worlds: Real Challenges)

 I went, and thought it was great.  Nearly every presentation was by
 someone doing real work in the field (i.e. VR itself or technologies
 that help create a feeling of presence in a virtual world).  There
 was so much covered, and alot I missed because of the parallel sessions.

 Anyway, here's a random sampling of a few things I remember:

 Mark Bolas sold me on his boom system for entering a visual world, mainly
 because its so easy to enter and leave the world (he compared it to
 using a telephone handset).  The software application developement
 toolkits was interesting, there were only three companies represented,
 Sense8 - complete VR system for $20,000, VPL - complete VR system for
 $250,000, and Autodesk - complete VR system, price unknown, release
 date unknown.  VPL's was the best, which you might have guessed by the
 price.  Sense8 is pretty good if you are a programmer, or think $20k
 isn't all that much (as opposed to $250k).

 The presentation I found most interested was a surgeon who is planning
 on doing telepresence (stereo vision) surgery probably fairly soon.  He
 said surgeons have already made the required leap of faith when they
 started doing surgery with a mono-view camera inside the body with
 their mini-surgery tools not directly controlled by their hands.
 Besides being an interesting way to operate, its pretty good for the
 patients -- his example of a gall bladder operation had patients spending
 a week in the hospital with a 6 week recovery with traditional cut-em-open
 surgery, as opposed to a one-day in the hospital and 1 week recovery with
 this mini-video-through-the-hole surgery (he called it laporoscopic surgery).
 Anyway, he seemed to be convinced that stereo view would make these
 operations go alot smoother, since they spend alot of time poking around
 to get a feeling of depth because of the mono view used currently.
 And in case you might be wondering what this has to do with VR (as I was)
 the explanation is that as soon as you have the surgeon viewing screens
 operating tools as seen on the screen, the surgery is already virtual,
 the patient doesn't necessarily have to really exist if the video feedback
 is appropriate.

Topic  75:  Virtual Worlds Conference at SRI
#  2: Johannes Nicholas Johannsen (jojo)      Thu, Jun 20, '91  (16:31)      81
lines

 Here's some of the other stuff I saw:

  - an input device for computers which senses muscle tension, it was
    able to sense eye movement with a small band placed on the forehead,
    and muscle tension anywhere they could strap something which I never
    did see.  Their device also senses brain waves, but they said this
    was only accurate enough to act as a switch rather than being used
    for more sophisticated control.

  - TiNi Alloy's tactile output device, which can get small enough to
    put about 40 touch-pixels on the end of your finger.  They had a mouse
    with about 5 of these pixels on the button, so you can feel when you
    move it over certain spots on the screen, and a glove with touch
    pixels on the finger tips which I didn't try.

  - the Convolvotron, which uses 300 Mips just to place a sound "out there"
    at a specific place real time.  VPL systems use this.

  - lots of stuff related to VR for people with physical disabilities.
    This is fairly relevant since, as in VR, often direct interaction
    with the world is impossible, and technology must be used to bridge
    the gap.

  - another surgery presentation, heavy into the aspects of VR simulation
    for training and for future robot controlled surgery.  There's lots of
    advantages of giving up direct control in situations like this, since
    the surgeons aren't limited by their physical size (lots can work together)
    or location (only digital communication required to control robots), and
    altering scale of movement on the robots can simplify tricky situations.

  - a robot arm VR for doing something underwater, in which the arm kind of
    pokes around an object until it gets enough data points for a 3-d picture,
    then using the resulting picture and changing the point of view to be
    able to deal with the object, pick it up I guess.  This wasn't stereo,
    but like the surgery, could benefit from depth perception.

 The sense8 software keeps looking better, so I placed an order.  Its frame
 rate is decent 7-8 frames for fairly simple worlds on a 25 mhz 486 with
 soon to be obsolete DVI boards (supposedly a faster next generation is out
 soon).  It is entirely possible that the frame rate more than doubles
 within a year.

 There were a few interesting things that I learned, such as how the
 our vision gives a seemingly uniform high resolution even though the
 number of photoreceptors in the eye decreases as you move from the
 focal point.  Similarly our sense of touch is processed into a somewhat
 consistent feel from several types of sensors with different distributions
 in the skin.  Another interesting thing was that telepresent people work
 better when software simulations eliminate time delays in their
 teleoperations, even though the software model may not be entirely
 accurate.  It probably works because the simulation is accurate most of
 the time.

 The areas I missed were system architecture, data visualizeaion, virtual
 worlds and learning, arts and design.  It was nice to be at a conference
 where I wanted to be two places at once, though unfortunately being a
 somewhat lazy person, often I wasn't even one place at once.  Also, I left
 before the "group-designed world" where the conference participants
 directed the construction of a virtual world.  I left during the future
 issues when the conversation turned to race and gender in VR, bizarre
 agendas strike again.

 One thing that almost struck me as strange was the lack of imagination
 in the applications discussed.  For some reason most applications consist
 of physical objects such as boxes, walls, rooms, which represent (surprise)
 boxes, walls, rooms (though the VPL demo did have a magic hat that turned
 into a rose when grabbed).  Visual properties only, and no symbols or data.
 If you drop away the mapping from physical-visible to virtual-visible,
 there is nothing left to see.  There is rarely a physical-invisible to
 virtual-visible mapping, even though the invisible properties may be
 relevant to many applications.

 Similarly, visualizing the invisible (as in the "data plane" topic) is
 rarely heard when potential applications are enumerated.  In some ways
 this makes sense given the additional complexity of having an
 information-analysis phase.  On the other hand, there are cases where
 by its nature the information must be structured (as in compiled
 program text) or where the information analysis is not all that
 complicated.  In these cases immersion allows physical location to
 convey information, and specific groupings of information can be shown
 symbolically.  It might sound weird, but no weirder than thinking.