BRINGING VIRTUAL WORLDS TO THE REAL WORLD: TOWARD A GLOBAL INITIATIVE

 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.

--