Inside Virtual Reality (The Myth of Transparency and the Myth of Reflection)

Subject: Inside Virtual Reality by Jeremy Wolff
Summary: The Myth of Transparency and the Myth of Relection
Reposted from ECHO's Conference on Virtual Reality:
Jeremy Wolff                         24-UN-90  19:18

     Inside Virtual Reality
     (The Myth of Transparency and the Myth of Reflection)

      A couple of weeks ago I spent two minutes inside a virtual
 reality.  I put my hand into thedataglove, the heavy, hardwired
 goggles were lowered over my head--and suddenly I was through the
 creen and into a computer-generated environment.  A checkerboard
 plain surrounded by a green field tretched to a blue horizon.  When I
 turned my head, I could see the rest of my computer-animated wold:
 red pyramids and yellow columns, a floating grey box, a toy car and
 airplane, a balloon overhed.  Responding to the movements of my hand
 inside the dataglove, my virtual hand, yellow, disembodid, floated in
 front of me.  Pointing with my index finger made me to fly to an
 object.  I could grb the car or the plane and move it to a new
 position.  Or look up at the balloon overhead, point toit, and fly
 upt, the checkerboard plain receding below me.  I flew through the
 balloon into an unsen cityscape.   Out of the balloon, arcing over
 the more familiar plain and back down to the solid urface of my
 virtual world.

      I took this trip at a press conference before a lecture and
 demnstration advertised as "FROM PSYCHEDELICS TO CYBERSPACE."  The
 show, April 30 at NYU's Loeb Studen Center, featured Sixties LSD guru
 Dr. Timothy Leary, author and conspiracy-theorist Robert Anton Wlson,
 and the first public demonstration of Virtual Reality (VR) technology
 on the East Coast.  I ad been fascinated with the concept for months,
 and when I heard this road-show was coming with thereal equipment, I
 made sure I got to try it.

      Virtual Reality (sometimes called artificial relity or
 Cyberspace) is hardware and software that puts you inside a
 computer-generated graphic word.  The goggles (or "eyephones")
 position two TV monitors before your eyes, aligned to create a 3-D stereoscopic image.  When you turn your head to "look around," your
 head movements are tracked eletronically and the computer alters the
 image before your eyes accordingly.  The illusion--the experence--is
 of a complete, 360-degree environment you can look around at and move
 through.

      Aftr two minutes of tooling around in VR I was pretty spaced
 out.  (That is the correct term.)  But I elt proud and ripe for the
 future when Eric Gullichsen, President of the SENSE8 Corporation of
 Saualito, CA, whose equipment this was, told me I was a good pilot.
 Gullichsen is a demure and clear-seaking 30- something young man with
 a scraggly beard and a very long blonde ponytail.

      RecentVR systems required half-million-dollar computers to drive
 their software; Eric's "Desktop Virtual eality" prototype is run by a
 Sun Sparkstation, a $12,000 dollar computer now selling as fast as th
 top-end Macintosh, and which Eric predicts will be down to $5000 by
 the end of the year.  [5/13:  woman at SENSE8 says Sun announced last
 week it was dropping the price of the Sparkstation by $5-600.]  The
 dataglove he uses gives an even better idea of how fast this stuff is
 moving out of the ab and into our lives.  A year ago, Eric's demos
 used a prototype that cost $8000.  Now he works wih a
 "Powerglove"--made by Mattel for Nintendo.  It sells for $79.

      Even with a lot of power bhind it, SENSE8's VR is about as slow
 and low-resolution as it can be to work at all.  But you stil get a
 sense of the possibilities.  It's not so much that the experience
 doesn't live up to the hye:  more that the experience is hard to
 connect with the amount and variety of hype.

      Doing I was brief, unique, somewhat ineffable.  The hope,
 hysteria and hypotheses that have arisen out of he concept of VR is
 what the rest of the event at NYU was all about: several hours of
 dreams and vsions, tech-talk and peptalk on what this stuff is for
 and what it will do.  My two-minutes' experince aside, you can't help
 but feel Something's Up, just from the assortment of strange
 characters nd corporations clammoring to jump, or at least keep an
 eye, on the VR bandwagon.

      Representig psychedelics at the "From Psychedelics to
 Cyberspace" show was Dr. Timothy Leary, the former Harvrd Prof.  and
 Acid-activist, now willing to commit his career-long utopian dreams to
 this straight labcoat technology.  (The work of nerds!) Age 70, he
 comes bounding on stage, energetic and radian, in brand-new white
 Adidas and a sharp suit sporting a "Just Say Know" button (for sale,
 $2).  Hi ramblings have slowed, but you still have to pay attention
 to follow the playful and curious threas of his thinking.  Among many
 other things, he's here to contend that 90-percent of the engineers
and programmers creating the current personal-computer revolution are,
 like Steve Wozniak and SteveJobs (the founders of Apple Computers),
 veterans of psychedelics.  That Silicon Valley is a stone'sthrow from
 Berkeley and the Haight, he says, is no coincidence.

      Technology (of all things) i allowing Leary to speak in a new
 and more accessible way about the benefits of altered consciousnes.
 He thinks the experience of these computer- generated realities breaks
 down the "straight" ideaof a Real World or an Absolute Reality as
 much as the LSD experience did--but without the stigma of"Drugs,"
 which has always prevented Leary's theories from being taken
 seriously.  Instead of soundng like a chemical prophet, he's talking
 about technology and innovation and competition, almost lie some Lee
 Iacocca-type on TV, "Working to make America great again."

      During the show, Learywas the first to demonstrate the goggles
 and glove.  He was strapped in by Gullichsen, then took of, twisting
 his wired head around, giggling, and squirming in his chair as he
 glanced, pointed and lew through his imaginary world.  "Whoa-ho,"
 came his self-mocking laugh, "I've been here before!"
      "PSYCHEDELICS TO CYBERSPACE" pulls virtual reality into the realm
 of drugs, and also into theworld of Science Fiction:  "Cyberspace" is
 sci-fi writer William Gibson's word for his conception o VR.  Gibson
 posits the ultimate interface--what he calls being "jacked in": a
 direct link from mahine wires to human nerves and brain.  In the
 world revealed in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, Gibson' characters can
 jack into cyberspace--a computer-generated visually abstracted matrix
 of informatin--or into the live or recorded senses (the "sensorium")
 of another person.

      Gibson's vision,and his role in the development of the concept
 and consequences of VR, is taken very seriously; hisname comes up in
 every VR speech, and the scientists talk like he's one of the boys.
 Gibson's ideaof a direct interface is beginning to happen (in work
 with damaged hearing, experimenters are conneting microphones
 directly to auditory nerves); current VR technology is not direct, but
 tries to mke the human-computer interface transparent (that is,
 perceived as direct).  The effect is to put "ou" (some part of you,
 some ratio of your senses) into an artificial world that you can
 actually mve through and operate within.

      "Artificial Reality"--the first term used to describe computer and video environments--was coined by author-inventor-engineer Myron
 Krueger in the early Seventie, and is the title of his seminal book
 on the subject.   Written in 1972 but not published until a ecade
 later, Krueger's Artificial Reality presented all the major concepts
 guiding today's VR invetigations, including the idea of a dataglove.

      Krueger, hailed by all present as the "Father o Artificial
 Reality," was the first speaker.  "I feel a little like Rip Van
 Winkle," he said, "excpt that it's the rest of the world that's been
 asleep for 20 years."  A good-looking, square-jawed,clear- eyed
 American, he could be your milkman or your mayor, or your math
 teacher.  He has the don-to-earth practicality of someone who, in his
 words, "knits computers," but he too talks about scince fiction's
 role in real-world breakthroughs:  "I don't read as much now, but when
 I was youngerI read everything.  I used to believe it when someone in
 this field said they hadn't read science fction; I used to believe
 it, but I don't anymore.  I don't think it's possible."

      Conspicuousy absent was the best known and most publicized of
 the VR pioneers:  Jaron Lanier, a 29-year old whte rasta and high-
 school drop-out distinguished by his long dreadlocks and his NASA
 contracts.  H makes the most mystical claims for VR, which might not
 be taken seriously were he not ahead of eveyone in VR software and
 hardware and working for the government.  Jaron (everyone here invokes
 thedemi-diety on a first-name basis) sees VR having therapeutic,
 ritual uses--in the way of psychotropc drugs in shamantic tribes.  A
 recent Wall Street Journal article on Lanier offered these brave bu
 tentative subheads: "COMPUTER SIMULATIONS MAY ONE DAY PROVIDE SURREAL
 EXPERIENCES," and, "A KIND F ELECTRONIC LSD?".

      You get a sense that Leary and Wilson are hitching their old
 messages toThe Next Big Thing.  But, in fact, the connections they're
 making hold remarkably well.  One messag is that VR does what
 psychedelic drugs do.  Another message is political:  how electric
 communicaion will break down the fascist control of centrist
 governments.  "It was electrons," Leary says, "hat brought down the
 Berlin Wall".

      Politics, drugs, science fiction, philosophy, and mysticim are
 just a few of the fields and factions inspiring and being inspired by
 the cutting-edge technlogy and scientist-inventors of Virtual
 Reality.  The range of these factions parallels the range o
 implications of the concept:  When consciousness is extended by
 electronics, science and philosopy are in the same room, and there
 are ramifications everywhere in between.

      Leary, Wilson andGullichsen each referred to VR as part of an
 electronics revolution that will change television fro a passive to
 an active medium--the Viewer will no longer be in the thrall of the
 broadcast monopoies, whose centralized control stems from the current
 state of TV technology (i.e., TV is cheap to eceive, but only a
 government or big corporation can afford to produce and broadcast).
 That's chaning, with cheap VCRs and portable cameras; with cable, and
 especially fiber-optic cable, which willincrease television's
 interfaces with computers.  All of these new forms (including, soon,
 VR) giv the individual more control and choice as to how to use the
 medium.  Strictly speaking, "Televisio" as a medium is visual
 electronic information; your Mac is as much a TV as your Sony.
 Television ill no longer be just a receiver for a centralized
 broadcast medium, but one component of an interative, computer-based
 communications network.

      "VR is a network like the telephone, where ther is no central
 point of origin of information," Jaron stated in a recent interview in
 the Whole Eath Review.  "Its purpose will be general communication
 between people, not so much getting sorts ofwork done."  He's already
 created a "Reality Built for Two" (RB2), a virtual space in which two
 peple interact.

      Virtual reality is like the telephone medium, which opens a new
 realm for huma interaction but doesn't affect the content, i.e., what
 you talk about.  The technology of VR per s has nothing to do with
 what you create or do within it.  But whenever I explain the concept
 of VRto people, they have strong reactions to it.  Fear is common, a
 kind of Brave New World/1984 paranoa.  A professor I described this
 stuff to waxed rhapsodic about how it signals the end of the
 mindbrain duality, creating a sort of spiritual or mystical
 materialism.  (John Barlow has published anarticle on VR called Being
 in Nothingness.)  Leary and Wilson look into VR and see a
 technologicalutopia.  Others dream of its pornographic
 possibilities--virtual sex-partners.  A visionary- rebel ike Lanier
 is drawn to mystical ends; as the Wall Street Journal observed, "[His]
 obsession with Atificial Reality seems to reflect his dissatisfaction
 with conventional reality."

      These are ll understandable human reactions.  Every new medium
 works like a mirror, reflecting back some partof ourselves.  (The
 telephone, in this sense, "reflects" our speech and hearing.) VR is a
 mirror tat reflects our entire consciousness--which might explain
 some of the extreme reactions it's elicitng.  These reactions reveal
 something of the general resonance of the new medium, but more than
 anthing specific about what VR does, these reactions reveal us.

      Marshall McLuhan addressed thisphenomenon in Understanding Media
 (1964), labelling it "Narcissus as Narcosis."  In the myth, Narcisus
 falls in love with his own image, unaware that it is his reflection.
 He is numb or blind to anextension of himself, and remains unaware of
 the medium operating on him, in this case, a reflectin pool.  With
 any new medium, we are entranced by its content--which is an extension
 or reflection f some part of ourselves--but remain numb or blind to
 the operation of the medium itself.  We are ale to look through or
 conceive into a mirror because it extends our sense of sight--but it
 is imposible for us to focus on or perceive the surface of a mirror
 (the place where its technology is opeating) as a two-dimensional
 plain.

      The thinking of McLuhan (who was dubbed "the Media Guru" round
 the same time in the Sixties when Leary was being accorded guru-status
 for his work with psyhedelics) lurks at the edges of a lot of the
 ideas VR is inspiring.  Like Gibson's, his name came u several times;
 Gullichsen quoted McLuhan--"In the future we will wear our nervous
 systems outsideour bodies"--as a preface to demonstrating his
 data-goggles and glove.  And Leary later mentioned ad gave a good
 illustration of McLuhan's best-known maxim, The Medium Is the
 Message:  "When Moses ame down from the mountain with the Word of God
 carved into those marble tablets, let me tell you, oys and girls,
 those were not suggestions...."

      McLuhan prefigured the electronic extension o consciousness more
 than 25 years ago:  "Having extended or translated our central nervous
 system nto the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage
 to transfer our consciousness to the omputer world as well.  Then, at
 least,  we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise tha it
 cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the
 entertainment world that best mankind when he encounters himself
 extended in his own gimmickry."

      All the reactions to VR(the "Narcissus illusions") say nothing
 about how this particular mirror works or why our brains ar able to
 conceive into and make from this mass of electronic information a
 space that is perceivedas real.

      VR technology does not create "reality" in any sophisicated way;
 in fact, it works n the most unsophisticated way, revealing to us our
 simplest perceptual illusions.  The "space" oneenters during the VR
 experience is not visually sophisticated; rather it takes advantage of
 our inlination to conceive three-dimensional space out of two
 dimensions.  In the West, we have been traied to see depth in the
 simplest two-dimensional drawings if the lines of perspective are
 right.  W perceive depth in a line-drawing of a cube (the classic
 "optical illusion"), but this is a relativly recent technical
 development (perspective drawing is a Renaissance invention).  The
 effect willnot work in a tribal society whose visual perceptions have
 not been trained in this way.

      Myrn Krueger:  "What VR does is highlight the status of
 artificial experience which we already have los of."  Jaron Lanier:
 "The reason the whole thing works is that your brain spends a great
 deal of ts efforts on making you believe that you're in a consistent
 reality in the first place.  What you re able to perceive of the
 physical world is actually very fragmentary.  A lot of what your
 nervou system accomplishes is covering up gaps in your perception.
 In VR this natural tendency of the bran works in our favor.  All
 variety of perceptual illusions come into play to cover up the flaws
 inthe technology."

      Entering SENSE8's "flawed" virtual reality on April 30, 1990, was
 the culmiation of an exactly nine-month gestation period whose
 conception was my first encounter with the ida of electronically
 extended consciousness in the real world.  From then on it was as
 though I wasbeing bombarded by the concept, and from so many diverse
 angles that it was impossible to ignore.  t started on August 1,
 1989, when I read an article in the "Science" TIMES about a device
 called ateleoperated robot.  The operator of the robot moves two
 mechanical arms that move, remotely, a robt's arms.  A helmet covers
 the operator's head, with speakers by his ears and two small video
 moniors before his eyes--with which he "sees" and "hears" via the
 video-camera eyes and microphone earson the robot's head.  The
 technology allows delicate and dangerous work (like disarming a bomb)
 tobe done from a safe distance.  The term "telepresense" has been
 coined for the perceptual illusion: "The closer you come to
 duplicating the human experience, the more easily your mind transposes
 ino the zone as though you were there," operators say.  "You forget
 where you are."

      "Telepresece" got me, and the idea that "your mind transposes
 into the zone as though you were there."  This as the first real
 example I'd come upon of what McLuhan had predicted more than 25 years
 ago, the lectronic extension of consciousness or electronic direct
 experience.  (Like VR, telerobotics puts our consciousness
 elsewhere.)

      Shortly after, a Seattle computer-jock friend of mine asked if I'd heard about Virtual Environments, and it was from him that I first
 learned of the goggles and love and suit you could wear to see in and
 move around a computer-generated space.

      The next ime I encountered the idea was in the unexpected
 context of an interview with Jerry Garcia in ROLLIG STONE (Nov.  30,
 1989).  "Have you heard about this stuff called virtual reality?" the
 lead-guitrist for the Grateful Dead asked his interviewer.  He went
 on to describe the idea quite cogently, nd also to connect it with
 psychedelics:  "You can see where this is heading:  You're going to be
 ble to put on this thing and be in a completely interactive
 environment...And it's going to take yo places as convincingly as any
 other sensory input.  These are the remnants of the Sixties.  Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences.  Once you've
 been to some of those places, yu think, 'How can I get myself back
 there again but make it a little easier on myself?'"

      The I was given Neuromancer--Gibson's sci-fi novel (and I've
 never liked sci-fi) that introduces and eplores "Cyberspace"--and a
 copy of the interview with VR-pioneer Jaron Lanier.  Reading Gibson
 andLanier at once, I was startled by how close sci-fi and fact had
 become.

      Appropriately, it wa via ECHO, a new computer bulletin-board,
 that I found out about "From Psychedelics to Cyberspace." I'd joined
 ECHO a couple of weeks before; getting a modem and entering the world
 of telecommunicaion transformed my computer from a typewriter to a
 tool for putting ideas online in real-time, a ne medium for
 conversing with a group of unseen others, like me, typing down the
 telephone lines.

     VR is the beginning of another new medium for human
 communication--huge amounts of processed diital information used to
 create the bare-bones of what our brains perceive as "reality." What's
 ne is that this realm of information is encountered as experience.
 The content of the telephone mediu is speech; the content of the
 television medium is movies and drama and talking- heads: with the
 elephone or TV, you are aware of the inside and the outside--of the
 medium and its limits, and of te real world that surrounds it.  The
 TV or telephone experience does not exist separate from its enrancing
 content (which is itself a different medium, what McLuhan calls "the
 juicy piece of meat crried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of
 the mind").  In VR, there is no such duality.  Youknow it's not
 "real," and when the perceptual illusion works, you are just Being
 There.  The contet of virtual reality is not speech or action or any
 other visual or auditory medium.  The content o VR is consciousness.

      This sets up a basic question about the difference between
 informationand experience.  Information--the kind that comes from
 other people or books or movies or TV--is meiated experience.  It is
 not like the Real World--the real, direct experience of things that
 surrond us.  VR is also information, but it is perceived as
 immediate; that is, it is not mediated or diested or translated-- it
 is just "lived."  If "experience is the only teacher," it was the
 experiece of psychedelics that taught many people, in a profound and
 direct way, the limits of "reality." The experience of VR can teach
 that too, and many other things.

      Playing a video-game or readng a book or watching TV or a movie,
 there are times when you are unconscious of the medium, when yu are
 immersed in its content (when "the watchdog of the mind" is chewing
 that meat).  At other ties you are aware of the television or the
 book's boundaries.  Within a virtual reality, there is nosuch losing
 and regaining awareness of your state.  You are aware of its unreality
 and perceive it reality at the same time and all the time.  In fact,
 in VR you have a heightened awareness of perciving reality in an
 unreal system.  Your consciousness it at once the perceiver of VR, and
 its conent.

      All of which is thrilling to ponder.  But if this stuff is going
 to develop on a mass sale, it has to get there via some marketable,
 real-world applications.  Many people think VR will b carried through
 this intermediate phase by applications in pornography, as was the
 case with the CR less than ten years ago.  (Add some sort of
 force-feedback or tactile response system, and everysort of inter-,
 trans- and multi-sexual interaction could be programmable: safe sex,
 indeed.)

     Krueger and Gullichsen, guys on the practical, hands-on, I-
 need-funding side, are working to com up with simple, high-concept
 applications that even America's short-sighted venture capitalists ca
 understand.  This sets up some strange situations (since they are
 courting business partners but epend on frontmen like Leary to bring
 in the crowds and press), like when these older corporate guy in
 suits arrive en masse to check-out Gullichsen's gear.

      They look like money; like their god graces could shower SENSE8
 with contracts and options.  They struggle with the eyephones and the glove.  They did not grow up with TV--they are not good pilots.  Eric
 is deferential and cogent an clear, trying to dispel with his manner
 any doubts his long blonde ponytail and rough beard might ast.  And
 then the suits have to sit through the lecture, surrounded by
 college-age Trekkies and eery stripe of New Age huckster (a man
 selling "psycho-active soda" for three dollars a cup), and liten to
 Leary and Wilson make fun of Bush, Quayle and the drug-addict Drug
 Czar.

      Gullichsen oes his best to talk toward the most mundane
 applications:  Imagine an architect showing a client aound a
 "virtual" building (it's been designed but not built).  The client
 wants to see how it look with bigger windows, so the architect, in
 the virtual world, can reach over and enlarge the window with his
 hands.  Another area he talks about is education--the Defence
 Department's use of VR in ighter-pilot training is probably the most
 sophisticated form now in practical use.  A related applcation, the
 first one we're likely to see, is in entertainment, VR video-arcade
 games.

      Krueer has one device that's so basic and useful, it seems
 inevitable.  Simply put, it allows you to us your unencumbered hands
 to do anything a mouse does--access menus, draw pictures, move text,
 etc. (Of course, this isn't VR, you don't put goggles on and put your
 head inside.  But it should make rueger rich while he waits for the
 technology of the goggles, and the 3-D imaging and computers tha run
 them, to catch up to his ideas.)

      Leary, not surprisingly, flies off into the future, imgining VR
 as some kind of holographic telephone. "You'll call up your friend Joe
 in Tokyo and say,Where do you want to meet today? and press some
 buttons and the two of your are strolling in Hawaii or meeting in a
 cafe in Paris or on top of Everest, or joining Aunt Ethel for tea in
 Idaho."

     Jaron Lanier seems to have the most developed ideas about how VR
 will function and where it will e relevant.  He talks about
 handicapped people experiencing full-motion interaction with other
 peole, and tele-operated mircorobots performing surgery from within
 the human body.  But he also build on Leary's dreams of the
 therapeutic uses of psychedelics as tools for exploring the
 unconscious ind.

      "Idealistically, I might hope that VR will provide an experience
 of comfort with multipe realities for a lot of people in western
 civilization, an experience which is otherwise rejected. Most
 societies on earth have some method by which people experience life
 through radically differnt realities at different times, through
 ritual, through different things.  Western civilizations hve tended
 to reject them, but because VR is a gadget, I do not think that it
 will be rejected.  Its the ultimate gadget.

      "It will bring back a sense of the shared mystical altered sense
 of rality that is so important in basically every other civilization
 and culture prior to big patriarchl power.  I hope that that might
 lead to some sense of tolerance and understanding." Jaron envision
 the VR experience, potentially, functioning like an Amazonian
 shamantic drug ritual for the electonically re- tribalized Global
 Village.

      When considering these predictions and dreams, it's mportant to
 remember the stage all of this is at.  People at the show were asking
 how VR would hel the Homeless and what good it would do for babies
 dying of AIDS in Africa.  This would be like askng Alexander Graham
 Bell in 1870 what the telephone was going to do to stop the
 Franco-Prussian Wa.

      VR is now at the Wright Brothers stage, the thing's sputtering
 and popping and just barelygetting off the ground--and everyone's
 trying to predict what moon-rockets will be like.  Back then instead
 of William Gibson, you had Jules Verne's sci-fi model; and in sixty
 years we did walk on he moon.  But who could have imagined any of the
 mundane and earth-changing reality in between-- 74s and People's
 Express and plane-food and in-flight movies and jetlag?  Who, looking
 at televisionin the 40s, could have predicted Watchman TV or
 palm-size video cameras or the worldwide resonance f seeing Tiananmen
 Square on CNN?  And the speed of the computer revolution is on an
 altogether diferent scale.

      If cars had progressed at the same rate, they'd cost $10 and run
 for a lifetim on a tank of gas.  In ten years flat we've gone from
 4000 to 4 million transistors on a thumbnail hip, and the power is
 quadrupling every two years.  At this pace, science fiction like
 Neuromancerbecomes a myth of the present.  The technology has
 progressed faster than our ability to even imagie what do to with it;
 it's almost as though it has appeared magically and full-grown in our
 midst. The VR toys now being demonstrated barely scratch the surface
 of the brain-extending fun and gamespossible when creative thinking
 gets applied to this new and limitless computer power.  Hold tight: the unimaginable future of virtual reality is only a few years away.

 16.5.90

 Comments, criticis appreciated.  This is not copyrighted. It is, in
 fact, open to wholesale theft.



-- 
Patt Haring                      patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu  

"The harder you fall, the higher you bounce."  
                     -- American Proverb


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