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- 91-07/Bob.global.initiative
- From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson)
- Subject: TOWARD A GLOBAL INITIATIVE: Presentation at Nikkei Symposium. (LONG)
- Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1991 18:02:37 GMT
- Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle
-
-
- ) Human Interface Technology Laboratory 1991
-
-
- BRINGING VIRTUAL WORLDS TO THE REAL WORLD:
- TOWARD A GLOBAL INITIATIVE
-
- Dr. Robert Jacobson
-
- Human Interface Technology Laboratory
- Washington Technology Center, FJ-15
- c/o University of Washington
- Seattle, WA 98195 USA
- (206) 543-5075
- (206) 543-5380 fax
- cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu
-
- Introduction and Overview
-
- Virtual worlds technology promises to greatly expand both the
- numbers of persons who use computers and the ways in which they
- use them. Already, the demand for applications of this technology
- far exceeds the capability of the technology to satisfy these needs.
- Independent development of virtual worlds technology has been the
- norm for at least three decades, with researchers and developers
- working privately to build unique virtual-worlds systems. The
- result has been redundancy and a slow pace of improvement in the
- basic technology and its applications. This paper proposes a "global
- initiative" to coordinate and to some extent unify R&D activities
- around the world, the quicker to satisfy an eager market (that may
- not, however, stay eager for long) and meet genuine human needs.
-
- About Virtual Worlds
-
- The virtuality paradigm
-
- The virtuality paradigm redefines the human-computer inter-
- face. In brief, it states that what we perceive, for us, _is_ the
- world; and how we act upon it _is_ how we live. There can be a
- closer relationship between the images of the world we build in our
- minds and bodies QJthe subjective models we build to represent an
- "objective" world outside -- and the worlds we create within the
- computer. Enhancing a person's perceptions, understandings, and
- actions should be the reason for which all computer systems are
- built.
-
- Putting the person at the center of the computer system is not
- as easy a task as it may sound. People are difficult to "design with,"
- so it is much more appealing to engineers to design for them. What
- we get is systems that are the engineers' interpretation of what is
- correct for people. Particularly in the fields of machine interfaces
- and software applications, the engineers need to be joined by people
- with other orientations, like quality industrial designers, environ-
- mental psychologists and planners, and even artists. If one accepts
- the virtuality paradigm, then this collaboration is essential.
-
- In a virtual worlds system, the participants interact in a
- natural way with digital objects within the computer-generated
- environment.
-
- Currently, to generate such an environment, or virtual world, a
- model is created. Objects and their relationships are incorporated
- in this model, which runs on a single powerful computer or on a
- group of networked computers, with each contributing its slice of
- the virtual pie. Rendering engines display the models as visual and
- aural information that mimics physical objects or designed abstrac-
- tions, in three dimensions. These objects and/or abstractions are
- presented to the participant via an LED- or LCD-based headset
- mounted stereoscopic visual device and headphones. A position-
- sensing device on the headset instructs the computer where the
- participant is and where he or she is looking. The participant also
- wears a special glove glove or uses a Spaceball or similar tool to
- maneuver through the world and manipulate objects within it. The
- computer or computers maintaining the world respond to the signals
- from the sensors and tools and adjust the world accordingly. The
- net effect is a circumambience of information that is readily
- accessible and susceptible to modification.
-
- The virtual world can assume the appearance of the physical
- world, just as the objects within it can take on the characteristics
- of objects in the physical world The virtual world can be as simple
- as the line imagery pioneered by Warren Robinett at the NASA Ames
- Research Center in the 1980s or as complex as the molecular-
- modeling space now being refined at the University of North
- Carolina. A property common to all virtual worlds, however, is their
- _spatiality._ Information within these worlds is presented in three
- (or more) dimensions. The participant, able to work in three or more
- dimensions, experiences a wondrous synergy among mind and senses.
-
- Nearly everyone who enters a virtual world, while lamenting
- the low resolution of today's visual presentations, experiences an
- "Ah-hah!" when his or her spatial sense cuts in. When three-dimen-
- sional sound (already well-developed) is added, the virtual world
- attains a verisimilitude that, if not equal to the physical world, is
- much more familiar than the usual computer interface. We can see
- and hear things In the future, when the tactile interface is com-
- plete, we may touch them, too. In only a few years (so we like to
- think) the componentry of virtual interfaces will present credible
- images that are of high resolution for all the senses.
-
- A critical history of virtual worlds invention
-
- The job of recounting the specific histories of various virtual
- worlds developments has already been done, in Japan by Katsura
- Hattori's _What's Virtual Reality?_ and in the U.S. by Howard
- Rheingold's _Virtual Reality,_ Myron Krueger's _Artificial Reality
- II,_ and other books to be published this year. I want to emphasize
- the individualistic character of the invention that has taken place so
- far, which may explain why our technology is less than we would
- have it be.
-
- Clearly, many inventors were inspired by science fiction
- stories, in which people traveled through space and time, either
- physically "teleporting" their bodies or sending their thoughts
- around via telepathy. Vannevar Bush was perhaps the first modern
- computer scientist to conceive of knowledge as a medium through
- which one might travel by machine. His "Memex" was a fantasy
- computer that would put all knowledge at the disposal of its user in
- multimedia form, Now Vannevar Bush's dream of universal access
- to knowledge has become international.
-
- In the U.S., in the 1960s, Ivan Sutherland started experiment-
- ing with stereoscopic images created by a computer, to build a "data
- field." Around the same time, Myron Krueger, another American, was
- using video cameras and other techniques to reverse the flow, put-
- ting the user "into" the computer terminal and merging him or her
- with the images on the screen. And, in the next decade, Thomas
- Furness began directing the "Super Cockpit" project for the U.S. Air
- Force, a completely pilot-attuned ensemble (complete with virtual
- world projectors) that the pilot would wear. While these eminences
- knew of each other, their work did not coalesce but continued in dis-
- tinctly different directions: Sutherland, toward flat-screen simula-
- tors; Krueger, deeper into art and media environments; and Furness,
- toward continuing to refine data-presentation and manipulation.
-
- The popularization of virtual worlds occurred with the simpli-
- fication of a stereoscopic, head-mounted data display with position-
- sensors by NASA; and the subsequent commercialization of a similar
- display complete with world-design software, the "Eyephones" and
- "Body Electric/Swivel 3D" by VPL Research, in Redwood City, Cali-
- fornia. With the appearance of these systems, and later the 3D
- sound unit, the Convolvatron, marketed by Crystal River Engineering,
- virtual worlds took off in the press and popular imagination. Auto-
- desk, of Sausalito, California, announced its work on Cyberspace, a
- 3D CAD program. Cyberspace begat Sense8, also of Sausalito, a
- small firm working on a Sun workstation platform rather than the
- traditional, more powerful Silicon Graphics computers that had been
- the tradition until then. For awhile it looked as if the Mattel Power-
- glove, a derivative of VPL's Dataglove developed by A.G.E., in New
- York, might take virtual worlds into the exploding Nintendo game
- market, but this did not occur.
-
- However, although work in virtual worlds was going on in many
- places by the 1990s, almost all of this activity was completely
- independent and uncoordinated. Developments and inventions would
- usually become known within the virtual worlds community only
- after their introduction at one of the computer professional conven-
- tions or trade shows, and even so inventors liked to hold onto secret
- code or hardware tricks to keep their pint-sized corporate empires
- intact. This tradition of individuality and secrecy is only slowly
- being eroded by professional and social communications. Unfortu-
- nately, it is no longer the legacy of small firms; today, many larger
- firms practice the same self-serving tactics, to the disadvantage of
- our field.
-
- The emerging virtual worlds industry
-
- Today, virtual worlds research is taking place around the
- world. Here, in Japan, research is taking place in many university
- and MITI laboratories, as well as in private firms. Fujitsu, Matsu-
- shita Electronics, and ATR are have interesting projects underway,
- though none is yet what we might call commercial. I am less an
- expert in Japanese science than you are, but I understand that the
- University of Tokyo, the Technical University of Tokyo, and Tsukuba
- University are main centers of academic research in the field.
- Japanese researchers are making deliberate gains, especially in the
- fields of telerobotics and tactile worlds. Nevertheless, while the
- level of local activity is broad, it is not always as well funded as it
- might be. More than anywhere else, too, institutional boundaries
- perhaps serve to isolate researchers from each other. This sympo-
- sium may signal a welcome end to these boundaries. The Japanese
- potential for cooperative, creative work has been demonstrated in
- other fields and may be here, too.
-
- In North America, larger firms are joining in the research
- effort. Twelve companies, including Digital Equipment, Boeing, Sun,
- Microsoft, Alias Research (the leading Canadian firm), and U S West
- (a local telephone company) have joined in the Virtual Worlds
- Consortium, which supports the virtual-worlds industrial R&D
- conducted by Seattle's HIT Lab (the Human Interface Technology
- Laboratory), where I work. Also, firms are creating their own
- research laboratories: Boeing, Digital Equipment, Sun, Alias
- Research, and Cray are among them. Also, many more universities,
- including the University of Central Florida, the University of
- Alberta, Syracuse University, the University of Virginia, and MIT
- have joined the University of North Carolina and the HIT Lab, at the
- University of Washington, as North American centers of research
- activity. The tiny firms of TiNi Alloy, in Oakland, California, and
- EXOS, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have even begun to explore the
- tactile environment -- how things "feel" in a virtual world. The
- pattern of individual, private enterprise holds, however, for large
- firms and small. With the possible exception of the Virtual Worlds
- Consortium, one might justifiably say that the North American
- industry is highly fragmented.
-
- Europe expresses an interesting paradox. On the one hand,
- nowhere is press attention to virtual worlds more extreme. Artists
- gather to ponder the value of this technology to their work, and
- intellectuals pontificate on the philosophical meaning of cyberspace.
- This in itself is not unusual; it occurs in Japan and North America,
- too. What is surprising is that, where this popular attention is
- greatest, the work on virtual worlds is least advanced. It is in the
- European "hinterlands" where the exciting work is being done. In
- Britain, certainly off the Continental intellectual circuit, W Indus-
- tries is successfully pioneering virtual-worlds entertainment. And
- the Advanced Robotics Laboratory is building unusual tactile devices
- for future worlds. In Sweden, likewise off the beaten path, SICS,
- the Swedish Institute for Computer Science; the Royal Institute of
- Technology, in Stockholm; and Linkping University are collaborating
- in the MultiG, or "Multi-Gigabit" project, to make televirtuality a
- reality. Perhaps the only really substantial Continental research is
- taking place in three slightly peripheral sites: 3D acoustics at the
- Ruhr University, in Bochum, Germany; general experimentation at the
- CyberLab, at the University of Milan, Italy; and the excellent percep-
- tual research taking place at the Technical Universities of Delft,
- Eindhoven, and Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Once again, as in Japan
- and North America, the European work is scattered and not well-
- related.
-
- Toward A "Global Initiative"
-
- The problem: ad hoc, uncoordinated development.
-
- Lack of coordination and communication in our field results in
- several deleterious effects. Among these are:
-
- % Duplicative projects make unnecessary demands
- on scarce labor and produce few advances (or, as we say
- in English, there is too much "reinventing of the wheel").
-
- % An overemphasis on highly visible research prob-
- lems (like a better visual display) leads to the neglect of
- less popular problems (like producing usable earprints for
- 3D sound).
-
- % Interdisciplinary isolation (between fields, even
- within the same organizations) denies the best-informed
- solutions.
-
- % Rumors, suspicion, and premature competition sap
- the emotional energy of inventors and developers and hinder
- the development of the field.
-
- % Commercial users' needs and general human needs
- go unmet, and potentially rich markets lie fallow.
-
- When we have time, we can talk about these observations at
- greater length. Although some of my colleagues may disagree about
- the degree to which these conditions prevail, no one will deny that,
- for now, they characterize many aspects of our infant virtual worlds
- industry.
-
- The solution: a global initiative.
-
- Perhaps the crisis is not yet felt acutely by all researchers
- and developers, but at some point it will become clear to most that
- premature competition and lack of cooperation is severely damaging
- to our future interests. In the few short years since 1989's first
- Virtual Reality Day, it is not uncommon these days to come across
- people who are despondent about virtual worlds technology. They
- relegate it to the same status as AI, or artificial intelligence, the
- favorite scapegoat of the short-sighted. These individuals have had
- their expectations raised by sales pitches and the press -- and very
- often, by their own imaginations -- only to discover that the
- technology cannot do what they hoped it would.
-
- If this is not going to become a universal experience, we need
- to take steps to bring our technology up to snuff. We have perhaps
- three to five years of public and, more importantly, commercial
- tolerance of our need to experiment with trial and error. After that,
- if we have not produced virtual-worlds systems with applications
- for the real world, our credibility will be seriously impaired.
-
- We must come to a common understanding on this point: we
- need to intensify and accelerate our research efforts. We can build
- upon this understanding to create an international, interdisciplinary
- effort -- what I call the "Global Initiative." The Global Initiative's
- primary goal would be to hasten technological development in our
- field by (1) opening better channels of communication; (2) ensuring
- that rewards are equitably disbursed to researchers and developers
- who have earned them; and (3) developing to the fullest the many
- markets for virtual worlds technology, thus ensuring more than
- enough work for everyone in the industry. By the estimate of one
- telecommunications company's analyst, the annual market for
- virtual worlds-based technology and services, in the U.S. alone, is
- over $1 trillion. It doesn't matter if this figure is off by a factor of
- one hundred or one thousand, it is still enormous; and the same is
- true of every other advanced industrial market.
-
- We must recognize that there are more applications for this
- technology than there are products to satisfy these demands. And
- we must meet them or watch our potential customers go elsewhere,
- to other technologies like HDTV or computer-automated operation
- that seem to offer an alterative to virtual worlds. We know that
- these other technologies cannot do the things our systems can do,
- but others may not, and it is their confidence we must get and keep.
-
- I propose the following steps to produce cross-disciplinary,
- interlaboratory, and international communications and cooperation,
- which will lead us to our ultimate and common goal:
-
- 1. Establish for ourselves an identity as a distinct community
- of researchers whose work is uniquely our own yet of benefit to
- many communities outside our own.
-
- The publication of the new journal, _Presence,_ by the MIT
- Press sometime this year will herald our academic credentials; but
- we still need a way of unifying the work of the academy and the
- commercial laboratories.
-
- 2. Initiate conferences bearing on our field.
-
- These days we are the honored guests of the giant internation-
- al computer conferences, SIGCHI (human-computer interaction) and
- SIGGRAPH (computer graphics), and their national equivalents.
- Tomorrow we may be out on the street. In any case, participation in
- these conferences ends up diluting our attention and energy. We do
- not have enough time to talk among ourselves about what is impor-
- tant, and we do not hear from others outside the computer field. At
- our own conferences, we could share vital information efficiently
- and also hear from others, outside the computer industry, whose
- work is important to our own: psychologists, architects, linguists,
- designers, artists, and various end users. It is time, I believe, to
- seriously consider consolidating conferences like this week's,
- sponsored by Nikkei; the HIT Lab's Industry Symposium on Virtual
- Worlds Technology; the recent meeting at SRI International; and
- others into one common annual meeting or a regular series of
- moderately sized get-togethers. We need to stop being exotic guests
- and become homeowners and hosts.
-
- 3. Expand the reach of the USENET and other forums for
- electronic information sharing.
-
- I mentioned earlier the emergence of _Presence,_ the MIT
- Journal. Even before the first issue of _Presence_ hits the stands,
- however, there will have been over a year of professional dialogue
- about our field, all conducted online, by computer network. This is
- the _sci.virtual-worlds_ newsgroup on the USENET, the global
- public-service computer conferencing system. Nearly every
- university and many companies in North America, Western Europe,
- Australia, and parts of Asia (mostly Japan and Tokyo) are tied to the
- USENET. Consequently, when the HIT Lab began hosting _sci.virtual-
- worlds_ in early 1990, even with our peers being so few and
- scattered, we immediately signed up 500 users. Now, with the
- addition of Japan and Eastern Europe to the USENET, our numbers
- have tripled and quadrupled. The 1,500-2,000 people now using
- _sci.virtual-worlds_ have generated over three megabytes of stored
- text, which we archive on the University of Washington computer.
- The quality of this newsgroup and the exchanges of information it
- promotes suggests that we can make greater use of electronic
- networks to our common benefit.
-
- 4. Start collaborative projects bilaterally and under the aegis
- of national and international organizations.
-
- I do not know how this can be done, only that it should be done.
- There exist mechanisms that provide favorable conditions for colla-
- borative research, both nationally and internationally, and they are
- well used in other fields. Why not our own? At this early stage in
- our science and industry, we stand to gain the most from building
- good relationships and sharing knowledge.
-
- 5. Announce applications/products with common standards and
- production characteristics.
-
- I saved this for last because it is the most controversial of my
- proposals. Standards are commonly taken to mean an end to com-
- petition, as it is often the case that established industries use
- standards as an obstacle to new competitors with better ideas. This
- may well be the case in some fields, but in ours, it is the _lack_ of
- standards is what is proving a hindrance. It is the _lack_ of consis-
- tency, even down to the way componentry is wired or written about
- in manuals, that is proving to be our constant nemesis. Perhaps in
- our field we can do things differently and begin to talk about pre-
- liminary standards now, before any one entity has a vested interest
- in them. When, over the next few years, as the systems we are
- toying with become sufficiently stable, we should consider agreeing
- on certain standards or specifications to carry us into the stage of
- commercialization. Then, when the technology is more advanced and
- its applications more certain, we can revisit the issue of standards
- and decide to keep what we have or go off in new directions.
-
- I will not get deeply into the organizational means for accom-
- plishing these ends; they are easily enough thought of. Perhaps the
- most important thing is to agree to start working on setting up the
- channels of communication necessary to building our common future.
-
- Conclusion
-
- I am optimistic about the future of our field. I believe that we
- will make both technological and organizational progress in the next
- five years that will astonish our critics and please our advocates.
- Clearly, the move toward an international community, which I advo-
- cate in this paper, is already underway (although not yet firmly
- established).
-
- Let me make a final plea, however, and that is to our intellec-
- tual patrons and financial supporters: _The common aspirations
- among the researchers and developers in our field, which can lead to
- much good for humanity, must be protected from those without
- vision._ The temptation to use virtual worlds technology for pur-
- poses that are trivial, base, or dangerous may prove overwhelming
- for those who seek only material gain. We who labor in the field are
- generally without great resources, either within our organizations
- or without, and we are susceptible to the influence money wields.
- For too many in our field, daily life is simply a matter of trying to
- survive. That is not a healthy environment for a progressive indus-
- try. If you want us to deliver on the promises we have made -- to
- enhance education, improve health care, make design and manufac-
- turing more successful, and convert deadening entertainment into an
- edifying experience -- then provide us with the support we need to
- stay focused on what is important rather than what is expedient. As
- we say in America, help us to "do well by doing good."
-
- It is a positive irony that the virtual worlds we create may
- become a medium for greater international understanding and pro-
- gress in the real world. That has been my experience so far. I am
- proud to be a member of our community.
-
- Please permit me to close with a _koan_ for our times:
-
- A Master and student were walking down a dusty,
- virtual road, in search of Enlightenment.
-
- Eventually they came to a fork in the road, for
- which there were no signposts.
-
- The student turned to the teacher and asked,
- "Master, which way shall we proceed, to find
- Enlightenment?"
-
- To which the Master, in reply, merely smiled,
- reached down, and pulled the plug.
- --
-
-