Giga Games 1/Giga Games.iso/net/vir_real/faq/rsrch/ibm

Text File | 1991-12-30 | 7.0 KB | 146 lines

91-05/IBM.VR
From: [e-mail] (Robert Jacobson)
Subject: IBM Veridical Interface:  Report from CHI
Date: Fri, 31 May 1991 16:28:03 GMT
Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle




|IBM: ADVANCE/IBM researchers are using "virtual reality" to explore ways to
|    make computers friendlier
|
|April 30, 1991
|
|    (ADVANCE) NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--IBM researchers are giving
|a subtly spectacular demonstration in New Orleans which suggests how
|computer users may one day virtually "enter the realm" of their work,
|whether it be a molecule -- to explore its strucuture -- or a financial
|record, to study a corporate or national economy.
|
|    The IBM demonstration is a kind of "deep metaphor" of a world
|beyond the looking glass.  In the demonstration, people in the real
|world can interact with each other through three-dimentional, moving
|objects in an artificial world depicted on their computer screens.
|
|    A team of scientists led by Daniel T. Ling of IBM's Thomas J.
|Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., is using the
|demonstration to explore ways in which computer-generated virtual
|worlds may extend human cognitive and perceptual faculties into the
|computer and eventually erase the boundary between person and machine.
|
|    Far more than fun-and-games that so-called "virtual reality" -
|simulations of the real world - often seems to be to the general
|public, a primary objective of the IBM research effort is to make
|computers easier to use by enabling them to interact more fluidly and
|naturally with their users.
|
|    On the surface, it is all just a game played in a wire cage shown
|on each player's screen.  The human opponents - designated "alpha"
|and "beta" - stand and view the playing area from opposite ends of
|the cage that tilts differently for each according to the player's
|perspective, or head position.
|
|    Brightly colored, flexible geometric objects - "rubber rocks" of
|different shapes - appear spontaneously and bounce around the cage,
|changing hue as they go, from blue to green to red; shortly after they
|turn red, they "explode."
|
|    The object of the game is to bat, squirt (with a jet from pointed
|forefinger) or grab an object and move it near the opponent before it
|explodes and subtracts a point from that player's score.
|
|    No sci-fi headgear with goggles and earphones are involved.
|Three-dimensionality is created by perspective and movements of the
|players' heads and of the objects on their computer screens.
|
|    A sensor on the cap each player wears registers head position as
|"motion parallax", making the cage move.
|
|    Each player wears a glove that signals hand movements and gestures
|(pointing and grabbing).  The "game", itself, can follow verbal
|commands, and it announces the score in a synthetic voice ("got alpha;
|alpha four, beta five"), as well as producing sounds of rocks bouncing
|and breaking in the cage.
|
|    Everything in between is done by seven IBM RS/6000 Power
|Workstations connected in a way both to amass computing power and to
|distribute it so that the two players could as well be five or six
|(with additional RS/6000s) and located not in the same room but in
|different places across the country or around the world.
|
|    While the game is fun to play and to watch, it achieves its subtle
|spectacularity by what it represents beneath its flashy exterior; a
|way, eventually, both of making computers more widely and easily accessible
|to people everywhere and of enabling groups of scientists, engineers,
|economists or other specialists virtually to "get into their data"
|and collaborate on a problem from several different remote locations
|simultaneously.
|
|    Dr. Ling and his colleagues are presenting their work at a meeting
|of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in
|Computers and Human Interaction (SIGCHI) at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.
|
|    The chief novel feature of the IBM simulation is the "dialogue
|manager".  This system coordinates each player's movements and his or
|her interactions with the objects, keeping separate what appears on the
|screen from the mechanisms that produce it, thus separating cause and
|effect in the simulation of interactions between players and the
|virtual world.  The movement of the objects is handled by the
|simulator.
|
|    The cause-effect separation is demonstrated in the creation of a
|rubber rock.  Rocks can be created in three ways: automatically during
|the game, by voice command, or manually by selection from a menu with an
|input device called a mouse.
|
|    The dialogue manager "reads" all three mechanisms of ordering an
|object but tells the simulator simply to make one without having to
|specify how the order had been given.
|
|    "This makes it possible to have multiple persons in the same
|virtual world cause things to happen which are different from what one
|person could do," said Dr. Ling
|
|    For example, two players can pick up the same rock and break it
|apart, thereby interacting with each other through a simulated object.
|
|      Such feats are produced by a collaboration of IBM RS/6000 Power
|Workstations.  One produces the graphic representation of the playing
|area for each player; that's two.  Another simulates the "rubber
|rocks" and the way they wobble and bounce and respond to actions of
|the players in a physically realistic situation in real time.
|
|    Two more manage the dialogue for the players, translating their
|gestures and hand movements and also producing the game's "own"
|speech (comments, score-keeping).  A sixth RS/6000 handles input from
|the glove and head-tracker and recognizes gestures.  The seventh
|recognizes spoken commands for creating objects and coloring them.
|
|    Dr. Ling explained that this demonstration is the third in a
|logical progression of improvements in artificial worlds at IBM.  The
|first project was a simulated handball game involving a glove with
|which the player could bat a ball around a simulated room: a very
|simple simulation, he said.
|
|    The second project was more complex.  In it, a fluid vortex tube
|was created mathematically; the simulation involved grasping the tube
|(data), turning it and even moving through it.  This project brought in
|spoken commands and more complex gestures.
|
|    The new "rubber-rock game" capitalizes on experience with the
|previous models, enabling multiple users to interact with each other
|and with a complex simulation produced with multiple channels of data
|(graphics, sound, motion) simultaneously from multiple locations.  The
|scientists say they will eventually incorporate touch, and, perhaps,
|even smell.
|
|    Associated with Dr. Ling in this work at IBM were: Christopher F.
|Codella, Ronald I. Frank, Reza Jalili, Lawrence Koved, Bryan Lewis,
|Alan Norton, David Rabenhorst, Paula K. Sweeny, G. Turk Turk (now at
|the University of North Carolina) and C.P. Wang.


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