Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Jacobson-VR History

Text File | 1994-11-11 | 34KB | 502 lines

EPUB: Through the Looking Glass... [e-mail]  -
sci.virtual-worlds - Dec  7, 1993 For Virtual Reality Vienna '93

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: THE VIRTUAL WORLDS INDUSTRY IN 2010, A PROSPECTIVE
RETROSPECTIVE by Avi Bar-Zeev and Robert Jacobson, Ph.D. Worldesign Inc., Seattle*

One decade into the new millennium -- in the year 2010, in New Vienna -- it is hard
to remember when the virtual worlds industry was not a leading force in the global
economy and the source of creativity and pleasure in much that we do. Today, we
can join our friends in virtual space to work and play, visit strange lands and
times, even sit back and enjoy a reflective personal encounter with our favorite
synthetic personalities.

In 2010, the words "virtual reality" are as seldom spoken as was the term
"horseless carriage" in the 1990's. People were right when they said that "VR"
would suffer the same fate as "AI" -- both took time to develop, and both
suffered during those early, halting years. By 2010, however, virtual worlds have
become the dominant media, as ingrained in our lives as are the AI-inspired expert
systems, neural nets, and inference engines that quietly run our cars, homes, and
washing machines. The virtual world has so much become the paradigm of
communication that today we simply call it: Communication.

But it wasn't always so. We must remember the early, difficult days, if only to
appreciate how far we have come (and perhaps to avoid affording the next
important invention a similar tough going- over). After the first tentative,
experimental, and highly publicized demonstrations of virtual worlds in the late
1980s and early 1990s ("hype" was the contemporary term for this overblowing of
expectations), the virtual worlds industry, tiny as it was, suffered even more from
attrition as large firms and governments shunned investments in these pioneers.
More than a few good people left the field, never to return, setting back the
evolution of virtual worlds as we know them by at least a half-decade. Grasping at
straws to keep their infant enterprises alive, managers of the nascent industry
seized on any opportunity to do business -- so detouring virtual worlds into the
volatile, faddish, and often fatal field of cheap entertainments. And yet still,
something was learned by this experience, as practitioners of world-building
became more familiar with their art and could better specify the tools they needed
to do their jobs. By 1996, the virtual worlds industry was just beginning to
diversify as new possibilities of work, in more substantial domains, began to
present themselves. At the same time, the academics and critical reviewers, who
for a decade had hovered around the fringes of the virtual worlds industry, soaking
up some of the popular acclaim engendered by the field's early toy like but
spectacular inventions, now started to make serious contributions to the industry.
They offered not only intellectual speculation but also concrete ideas about how
to make virtual worlds more useful, from the point of view of actual current and
potential users.

It was not easy at the time to explain virtual worlds. The press liked to use the
misleading phrase, "virtual reality," to describe a particular type of technology --
the by now-extinct gloves and goggles -- despite the fact that serious virtual
worlds developers were working at a much deeper level of human experience.
Today we know that the methods of physically displaying virtual worlds, while not
unimportant, are only a part of the puzzle; and that crafting virtual worlds has
much more to do with understanding how it is that human beings accumulate,
process, and distribute information. Nevertheless, it was a struggle to get this
known beyond the relatively small circle of actual virtual world practitioners.
Confusion on this point plagued the industry until the turn of the century, when it
became so obvious that even the laziest journalist could no longer avoid the fact.
It made it hard to raise capital for the really important developments in virtual
worlds, those that would take the concept and its technology out of the circus
tent into the lives of everyday people.

Another type of confusion was produced by the loose terms thrown about by the
normally hyper-energetic computer industry marketers and those others sought to
benefit by the awakening awareness regarding the power of the Virtual Worlds
Paradigm. The Paradigm, to put it simply, declared that the most useful way to
convey information is to have it conform to the way human beings deal with
information. This means that the data incorporated in a virtual world -- whether it
be a book, a theatrical drama, a musical composition, a motion picture, or a
computer-generated synthetic environment -- should be constructed and
presented in a way that complements rather than defies the human sensory and
cognitive systems. Of course, we accept today that a computer-generated virtual
world is the best medium for doing this, since it incorporates all of the other media
types and additionally offers a high degree of personal and group interactivity,
bonding, and resonance. This powerful theoretical base enabled its proponents
eventually to differentiate virtual worlds from other, more haphazard
conglomerations of computer virtuosity like multimedia. But this too took time,
and for several years, until 1998 or 1999, virtual worlds were tarred with the same
brush of failure that completely diminished enthusiasm for multimedia. Frictions
between the virtual worlds and multimedia developers took their psychological
and financial toll, permitting large buyers to play off the one against the other.
Only when multimedia -- or rather, the collection of devices for which
"multimedia" stood -- were subsumed within virtual worlds (where they proved
more effective) was this confusion finally eliminated. So much for our early
struggles!  Now let's talk about our successes, how we came to be the leading
information industry of our time. Naturally, we must start with entertainment....

The Early Years (1990-1994): Turning Entertainment on Its Head

In the early days of the virtual worlds industry, in the early 1990s, entertainment
was king. It was a strange time. As with every new medium, the people who best
understood the nature of the beast were least in control. Said the Game Giants,
"We know 'VR':  VR is computer graphics -- only, now it surrounds you."  Their
simulation gurus, who had not a clue, agreed. For years, they had built their profits
on more speed and better graphics, often for the limited purposes of the military.
Now they put graphics everywhere!  What about content?  "We already 'do'
content," they chortled. "We'll just make it appear all around you!"  It was funny:
although the mostly pre-adolescent boys who played these simple and often
frightening violent games could shoot down things all around them, the only real
action -- just like with simulators -- was almost always dead ahead. Quite a few
over-built and over-expensive "VR" games were sold to older children, and paid for
by parents, in the process.

Then the Theme Park Giants got hold of the technology. They understood the kind
of raw "in-your-face," "speed-of-light" sensory- overload rides that appealed to
the roller-coaster crowd. "VR is more bandwidth, more experience," they said, and
what an experience it was:  virtual submarines, roller coasters, rockets, and
monsters blasted sound and images at helpless audiences screaming  for more.
Virtual rides were cheaper, safer, and more easily recyclable; that made the theme
parks lots of money. The audiences, however, were starting to want greater
interactivity, like that they available to them on their office and home
information systems and this the theme parks did not supply. "High throughput
means low interaction," they replied, "and we want the highest, so sit back and
enjoy it."   For awhile, the public did. Then it started to drift away and in 1998, for
the first time in decades, theme parks started losing money.

The Movie Giants were smarter. For them, VR was "interactive storytelling."  For
years they pumped billions of dollars into multimedia and "multiple-choice"
stories. Many people enjoyed these entertainments but their producers could not
afford the massive development costs of creating ever more complicated and
involving plots and scheme. CD-ROM was a great storage technology, but who had
the time or money to generate 600 megabytes of information and make it
accessible?  Some thinking minds in that industry realized that the secret was not
in creating n-squared story fragments ahead of time and  forcing the viewer to
make explicit choices, but rather in making the stories tap into the imagination of
the individuals implicitly, evolving at runtime, as the program ran on the
computer. That was when they turned to virtual worlds.

The first hurdle was the "Virtual Shakespeare" problem. To make an interactive
movie as good as Macbeth would require a computer with Shakespeare's skill and
knowledge. What was missing from the equation was runtime human creativity.
Putting a live person behind the story wasn't as easy as it sounded, however. No
mere glove or wand would allow the human "Directors," as  they came to be known,
to direct the action of live participants and virtual actors in real time. The second
hurdle was the "What happens next?" problem. Virtual worlds developers then
produced the necessary tools to facilitate rapid and intuitive communication
between the Directors and the computer-mediated story so the story could
progress naturally.

That's when everything took off. Interactive TV, which was supposed to be the
Medium of the Decade, flopped when it became clear that people, rather than
hibernating at home, wanted to get out and have collective experiences. As
problems of public safety and transportation were sorted out, having fun in public
became a major part of people's lives -- and in a virtual worlds presentation,
whole audiences could watch the more energetic individuals among them play out
their fantasies. So the "Virtual Theater" was born, and a new entertainment
industry along with it. Professional film and theatre directors who were Dungeon
Masters as kids loved creating these humanly-guided stories. Virtual Theaters
quickly became the most popular entertainment venue as the owners of
conventional theaters retrofitted them to support virtual environments. By 2000,
the Virtual Theater was becoming a commonplace affair, often with theaters
linked to other theaters around the world for even more variety and fun.

The Mid-1990s:  Technology Advances

Despite the growth of the Virtual Theater industry, at the turn of the century
virtual worlds designers still were up against the established "if it ain't broke,
don't fix it" mentality of the CAD, simulation, and film-ware manufacturers who
dominated the early days of virtual worlds. Even when CASE methods were
introduced for faster world-building, most virtual worlds were still being built by
programmers, computer scientists, and engineers. World- wrights, producers, and
directors simply worked differently and could not use the software that nominally
was intended for their use. Of necessity a new type of modeling and world-building
software amenable to the "creatives'" needs and based on intelligent objects and
object-relationships was born. Appearing in 1995, this unique software relieved
programmers of the responsibility for building virtual worlds by making everyone a
"world-builder."  By now, all of us have seen many films built within and around
these virtual worlds. In fact, this software proved equally useful for creating
worlds in immersive 3D environments and even 2D environments, such as those still
being run by television. Unfortunately, television's declining audience shrunk this
market and made it less profitable than it might have been, but the burgeoning
demand for Virtual Theaters and other 3D applications for business and personal
use more than made up for TV's disappearance.

The changes were no less profound on the hardware side of the industry.
Throughout the early 1990s, head-mounted display-makers had promised
high-quality, inexpensive devices that would appeal beyond the small population
of videogame-playing 10-to-18-year- old males; but these HMDs were slow in
coming. It wasn't the manufacturers' fault:  they were caught on "the bleeding
edge" of technology development. When Version 2.0 of these devices was promised
to be twice as good and half the price of Version 1.0, what incentive was left for
customers to buy Version 1.0?  And, if enough customers didn't buy Version 1.0, the
manufacturers had insufficient revenues to advance the state-of-the-art. Yet,
the manufacturers had to promise higher resolution, lighter, and cheaper HMDs lest
they lose the public's interest.

Real advances came in the mid-1990s with the general acceptance of non-intrusive
technologies. Beginning with the University of Illinois's CAVE and the Worldesign's
WorldSpace <TM>, users began to discover that the feeling of presence, of being in
a well-crafted immersive environment employing projected images was as good or
better than it was with the various existing HMDs. Moreover, projection-based
virtual worlds could be shared with others in real- time, thus heightening the
enjoyment of being in a virtual world. Expensive and movement-limiting
head-tracking and stereoscopic images also were used less frequently as their
necessity became less clear. Projection systems manufactured in quantity for
Virtual Theaters ultimately became price competitive with HMDs. Enhanced by
spatialized 3D sound systems already well-developed in the 1990s, Virtual
Theaters became all-inclusive venues for presenting both entertainment and
educational experiences. Over time, the two types of experiences became nearly
indistinguishable.

Finally, in the late 2000s, the Virtual Theater in its ultimate form also used
kinesthetic devices enabling their patrons to haptically experience

Entertainment drove the early development of virtual worlds technology in a
technically favorable direction. It required applications in the business sector,
however, to reveal just how powerful the Virtual World Paradigm could be.

Virtual Worlds and the Reengineering of Business

The changes that occurred in entertainment business were paralleled in other
industries. These changes have been just as dramatic, too. In design and
manufacturing, for example, our problem was not overcoming facile, overly
simplistic conceptions of our technology. Instead, we had to make another
beginning, building the case from the ground up for the application of virtual
worlds to the needs of industrial and commercial firms. Early on the more
innovative companies saw the benefits of virtual worlds for improving their
business processes. The first Virtual Retail Store was constructed in a market
where inventories were too great in number and variety to physically display.
Using a Virtual Catalog and Virtual Showroom, customers -- who clearly preferred
public markets to staying home and ordering from TV -- now could see their
choices and visions assembled before items were delivered. Sales soared.

With the success of the Virtual Theater and the technology ensemble that it called
forth from hardware and software manufacturers, design applications that had
previously daunted architects and designers because of their high cost now
became practical. Sometime toward the end of the 1990s it became common
practice for architects, engineers, and builders to pass "virtual blueprints"
(dynamic volumetric renderings, complete with internal structures and external
landscapes) among them, speeding the process of translating ideas into structures.
Just as importantly, clients and regulators could join the professionals in the
Virtual Design Environment to evaluate designs and constructions prior to the
actual laying of foundations and erection of walls. These systems incorporated GIS
and GPS technology. This integrative package of technologies, melded into virtual
worlds systems, extended augmented design techniques to larger public projects
like freeways and ports. By 2000, similar systems were regularly employed to
virtually prototype automobiles and aircraft, replacing less flexible and more
difficult to use conventional CAD technology. These systems seamlessly unify
design, production, distribution, and sales, so that many products designed in a VDE
are immediately delivered to or even built at customers' businesses and homes.

Almost everything constructed in the last decade contains many components that
were designed using VDEs. Many products are actually built in factories where
continuous processes are monitored and controlled using virtual worlds
technology, for greater efficiency and higher quality. Fortunately, public demand
in the industrial world for cleaner, ecologically respectful products has helped to
reduce the waste occasioned by still too frequent overproduction, a human
condition that virtual worlds have yet to eliminate. But there is hope that we may
yet see virtual worlds systems employed to better manage our finite resource,
through situation realization.







The first "Realizers" were created for the world's largest and most complex
companies. Trillions of dollars had been lost because executives couldn't see the
bottlenecks in their operations, employees were ignorant regarding their role in
meeting corporate goals -- and neither group could effectively share with the
other their respective visions and goals. Now, using immersive Realizers,
executives and employees can visualize, understand, and participate in corporate
management. They can avoid to some extent through virtual scenario building the
usual series of trials-and-errors that have characterized industrial practices since
the earliest days. In the last decade a new group of professionals, the facilitators
able to compare and synthesize points of view revealed in Realizers, has emerged.
Many of us believe that their skills may be applied in the not too distant future to
better-informed stewardship of the earth's natural treasures and its ecosystem.

For the moment, virtual worlds ideas have achieved their highest form as
televirtuality -- the sharing of distributed virtual worlds via global and local
telecommunications networks. The first true televirtual conferencing systems --
fairly expensive technology requiring broadband communications networks -- were
installed in the mid-1990s to serve situations where considerable human or
economic costs were at stake:  for example, to enable transcontinental
telesurgery and closer management of the global financial system.

In the late 1990s, islands of applications were everywhere, as they were in the
early days of the computer industry, back in the 1960s and 1970s. From the very
first days of the virtual worlds industry, however, it was apparent that networked
virtual worlds drawing on the power of network technology would eventually make
possible both the standardization of virtual worlds technology -- a dynamic
standardization, of course, subject to change -- and the sharing of virtual worlds
and their object components. In turn, the applications of virtual worlds would
become much more useful.

Unfortunately, despite the promising experiments organized by the early
proponents of this televirtuality, in Europe, Japan, Singapore, and the United
States, the essential infrastructure to support virtual worlds transmissions
(several gigabits per second and higher speeds were required for quality shared
worlds) was not yet in place. Only in the mid-1990s did providers of
telecommunications begin seriously to install broadband fiber and data-capable
radio links.

So, by the late 1990s, while televirtuality was gaining ground, it was not as
widespread as the telephone or television and it certainly hadn't replaced either,
despite the slogan of the Virtualists to "Kill TV."  Virtual worlds technology was
still too exotic. High quality virtual worlds were too expensive for most businesses
and homes, although some larger firms had installed dedicated systems for very
specific purposes. The industry was suffering from a failure to break down the
acceptance barrier, a barrier that personal computers had blasted through two
decades before. There were virtual rides, virtual stores,  virtual exploration, and
the Virtual Theater. But despite these and a host of hyped nonsensical
applications, televirtuality had not yet occurred on a universal basis.

The communications companies, who had put money on every option from home
shopping to interactive games held all the cards. They had helped to bring
information transceivers into every home in the form of computers or game
machines. They finally paid for the "last mile" of the global information
infrastructure, mainly with the revenues from well anticipated successes like
video-on-demand. They also had a few major successes investing in content
producers who met an ever-increasing demand.

The difference now was that all of the pieces were in place. The technology and
content that the Movie Giants developed could fill the information highways
instead of only being localized in Virtual Theaters. Ever more powerful and cheaper
processors, and the long- awaited appearance of large, reasonably-priced
flat-panel displays meant that customers finally had the computing and display
power to maintain virtual environments in the workplace and at home. The success
of non-intrusive  technologies based on projection screens paved the way. Instead
 of narrowcasting a single channel of high- definition video and audio,  two
channels could give 180 degrees of surround. Three channels  could provide a fully
immersive virtual environment anywhere. People could buy whatever level of
immersion they wished. Even HMDs based on the legendary "virtual retinal scanner"
had by now developed to a point where the single- or double-participant
experience made sense.

The Communications Giants finally began to fully realize the power of  virtual
worlds. "Virtual worlds are the essence of communication," they proclaimed. In the
late 1990s and early 2000s they converted their 2D information and communication
services into true virtual worlds-based services, replacing telephones and
computers-with-modems in the workplace and home. Not surprisingly, their
customers preferred to share information in the WorldSpace, the virtual global
village. Just as electronic mail by now had largely replaced surface mail for
correspondence, so had virtual communications replaced the telephone and
television -- not only  because of its speed but also for its naturalness. No one
called it "virtual this" or "virtual that."  Just as with TV when it was the dominant
mode of home entertainment, virtual worlds were called, simply, Communication.




Social Impacts and Transformations

Today, we work, learn, and play in virtual worlds. Our ability to do more things in
both the virtual and the material worlds surprises some critics who themselves
were so little informed about the Virtual World Paradigm. It's no surprise to those
of us who have worked to make the dream come true, however. We have learned
over the years that as human beings become more acutely knowledgeable about
the many worlds in which they live -- both the "real world" and the virtual world --
the better able they are to make decisions affecting the quality of their lives.
Virtual worlds have helped us to understand that "reality" is really the interplay
of ideas and actions in the social world, and that the social world is only one
among many in which we live. More to the point, by making obscure but important
data accessible to many billions of individuals, virtual worlds systems have
revolutionized the nature of learning and vastly increased our ability to manage
ourselves wisely.

We owe a good deal of our knowledge to a loose coalition of artists, designers, and
social scientists:  the artists because they predicted what was possible, the
designers because they gave form to these visions, and the social scientists
because of the methods they developed to measure the experience of these forms.
I still marvel at how many correct applications of virtual worlds were initiated in
the early days strictly on intuition. In this field unlike some others, intuition has
been a pretty good evaluator of the ways in which virtual worlds can be sensibly
applied, since it is the most natural path to awareness -- and awareness is what
the virtual world is all about. But without sound measurements of virtual worlds'
effectiveness, subjective as well as objective, we might build ourselves into
unsuccessful cul-de-sacs and even negative experiences, as was too often the
case in the early years.

I remember, for example, the first experiments with virtual sex, which to many
sensation-seekers seemed the complete answer to a perceived lack of personal
intimacy in society. To meet this apparent demand, some crafty entrepreneurs
devised crude systems for sharing sensory stimulation; for awhile, every shopping
mall had one. Sadly, all that came of these schemes, besides a few unfortunate
dual electrocutions, was disappointment at discovering that human intimacy could
not be produced simply by sights, sounds, and vibrations. "Cybersex," it seems,
could not match the degree of closeness produced by the sharing of  ideas and
emotions that could already be experienced in conventional virtual worlds. The
large number of partnerings that occurred among men and women who had
together explored challenging and edifying experiences of the usual virtual
variety, without the paraphernalia of the glorified sex toys, was evidence of this.
Although some individuals, particularly those whose psychology is resistant to
sharing under any circumstances, continue to dabble in cybersex, for the rest of  us
it seems a silly detour and trivial by comparison with, say, a mutual trip to the
Andromeda Galaxy or immersion in the intricate mosaics of Mozart's finest
compositions. Indeed, we have found that simpler types of virtual worlds, like
those offered in books of poetry and inspired songs, still have a power to ignite
passion on a par with the best virtual worlds. And, of course, there is no substitute
for the warmth of another human being.

Petty crime does occur in distributed virtual worlds:  the worst computer virus we
now believe to be the self-generating "Hyper Eraser," bred somewhere in the
twisted mind of an unknown cracker,. It makes its appearance unexpectedly,
cloaking exquisite virtual worlds with dross creations that, like grey curtains
before a scenic window, conceal the appearance and operations of the virtual
world. Although many remedies have been proposed to eliminate the Eraser and its
predations, it always comes back to haunt us, like the unhappy part of some human
psyches that cannot tolerate beauty. Well, one day we may have an answer. For
now, we can only recommend regular backups.

A more important danger we have yet to conquer is the implicit but faithless
validity of some virtual worlds whose constitution is seriously in doubt. Through
inadvertence, ignorance, or intention, these virtual worlds show us things as they
are not. We believe them anyway, because they are otherwise so well-constructed
that they seduce our sense of proportion and truth. I remember a magnificent
bridge designed in an architect's Virtual Design Environment and built on a certain
archipelago in Latin America. The model, complete with tidal surges and seagulls,
was compelling in the virtual world, for which we had received assurances that all
of the algorithms were right. Precautions were taken to ensure that the bridge
would withstand even the strongest earthquake. Only two years after the bridge
was built did we discover that a basic error had been incorporated in the
suspension cables. It was a dramatic moment when the steel fibers snapped and
the platform below tumbled into the sea. Fortunately, an inspection of the bridge
conducted with sonic sensors converted into a visual field viewed within a
CAVE-like supercomputing environment had alerted the authorities and the bridge
was unoccupied when it plummeted to destruction. The images remain one of the
most vivid reminders of the old GIGO acronym:  garbage in, garbage out. Only, in a
virtual world tuned to its audience's perceptions, sometimes even garbage can
appear to have integrity.







On the positive side, this type of cataclysmic malfeasance is balanced by a greater
awareness that virtual worlds are fallible; today, multiple tests and observations
of even the best-looking virtual worlds give us some assurance that we are
eliminating the more obvious errors. Human beings seem supremely well-equipped
to detect pattern anomalies such as those that virtual worlds show off so well:
the slightly angled building, the molecules that do not quite fit together, and the
sound-and-sight palette that looks slightly off-key are easy clues that something
is wrong. It is common practice today to subject every important question of
public policy for which data exists to virtualization and then testing by opposing
parties, who get to alter the algorithms and see what happens. In many countries,
the law requires this type of technology-assisted disputation.

The fundamental alteration of consciousness that has resulted from adoption of
the Virtual World Paradigm and its derivative applications in every area of human
life is that we no longer take things for granted. Instead, having at hand the
means for better understanding both the fundamental and more complex forces
that bear upon our existence, more of us take responsibility for achieving this
level of understanding. Oh, virtual games are still popular and parents still bemoan
the hours after dinner spent by teenagers doing what seem to their elders the
most boring thing possible in televirtual worlds:  simply talking. There is always
the temptation for people in business and politics to fudge the truth a little by
shaving off significant details in the world models they trade with their
competitors and the opposition; sometimes governments are complicit in the
deception, and then things really are in bad shape. But not for long. There are
always rebel hackers everywhere to create and distribute new imagery that paints
another picture of what is and what can be. In this way at least, virtual worlds
have a democratic dimension that so far has escaped the notice of business bullies
and tinhorn dictators who still try to impose their "truths" on the rest of us. They
learn.

These are the worst things one can say about the virtual worlds industry. The
power of the industry as the central engine of learning and, in turn, social
progress, economic development, and ecological rearrangements is the best and a
far stronger argument for the value of this now multi-billion dollar,
multi-billion-person industry and its product,  participatory experience.

All in all, I would say that virtual worlds have proven a very nice invention all
around. While they haven't created too many new jobs in their own right, they
have made work more enjoyable and made possible new approaches to doing things
that eventually show themselves as professional opportunities. For those of us
engaged in producing virtual worlds, either as infrastructure or content, a few of
us have gotten rich and the rest of us have a reasonable income; most importantly,
we have respect for the work we do, which is essential to our sense of well-being.

No, it wasn't always so. There was a time when information and knowledge were
the property of a relatively few who were educated in decoding arcane data. There
was a time when virtual worlds were scoffed at and their proponents derided for
their foolishness in the face of allegedly more pressing "real-world" problems. In
the end, it has been the Virtualists who have prevailed, who have demonstrated
that the "real world" is sometimes the most unreal world, if we can see it, and
that prior experience garnered in a synthetic environment can be just as valuable
as a laboratory test or trial-and-error in the material world.

Today we gather in New Vienna to review our accomplishments, of which we are
rightly proud. Some of us are a little more grey than we were when we met in the
Palais Ferstil nearly two decades ago, in 1993. Watching our students, children, and
grandchildren playing and learning in virtual worlds-equipped classrooms and
indulging ourselves in occasional jaunts to the far corners of the universe
(including the mind), it's hard to remember when the most popular entertainment
was a TV show or maybe a video on the weekend. Today we have our virtual worlds
to explore and enjoy...and of course, with a friend, a good cup of coffee; a walk on
the beach or a climb in the mountains; time to wrestle with an important question;
and most importantly, the look in the eye and the touch of the hand.

---------------

* Worldesign Inc., 5348-1/2 Ballard Avenue NW, Seattle, WA 98107- 4009 USA.
Telephone, [phone]; fax, [phone]. Email:  [e-mail],
[e-mail]

Worldesign's designs software products for easier world-building; and uses these
tools to create virtual environments for its primarily industrial and commercial
customers.