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Pure Bollocks Issue 21_009
Cyberspace - The final frontier
Imagine seeing the full interior of a house before it is
built. Or flying an inter-continental reconnaissance mission in
a fighter plane without leaving your home.
Such applications in 'cyberspace' technology - considered
potentially the most lucrative frontier in computing - are years
away. But researchers insist they can eventually be a reality -
or, more accurately, a 'virtual reality'.
Cyberspace is the 'space' that exists only as data inside a
computer. By getting 'inside' computers with all that data,
house hunters, fighter pilots or anybody else can touch it and
control it directly, in the same way people use their senses in
the real world.
"You do that by having the computer create a world which the
human experiences as if it were a three dimensional place," said
Tom Furness, engineering professor at the University of
Washington (UW) and director of the school's newly established
Human Interface Technology Laboratory.
Thanks to a $1.4m grant from Digital Equipment, the fledgeling
computer lab is setting out to create virtual worlds using
special devices such as stereoscopic goggles, 3D sound headphones
and motion sensing gloves. Such equipment creates the illusion
of moving through a 3D space, or virtual reality, by generating
an image of the wearer moving inside the computer.
In virtual reality, the computer images are as real as you
are. Or as unreal. The experience of cyberspace, Furness says,
is a powerful, even emotional one.
"Something magical happens when we create a wide field of view
display," said Furness about the stereo goggles. "When you wear
those monitors, they fill your field of vision. It is like you
really are in a new place."
If you touch a virtual switch in cyberspace, a virtual light
might be turned on. Or if that switch is hooked by a computer to
a real light, then the real light will go on. Turning complex
data into 3D visual and audio forms also makes it easier to
understand.
For example, a stock or bond trader who has to watch half a
dozen financial indicators before making an instant decision
whether to buy or sell, might more easily watch a virtual image
of a stock or bond controlled by a virtual reality computer
program.
The computer does the complex work, considering all possible
financial factors. When those factors indicate it is time to
sell a bond, the virtual bond might turn yellow and swell. When
it is time to buy, it might turn green and shrink.
As far out as it sounds, Cyberspace is drawing serious
attention not only from the military and Nasa, but also from a
wide range of corporations nationwide, from DEC to Boeing.
The UW lab will use the DEC grant - and other corporate
financing it is seeking through the creation of a Virtual Worlds
Consortium - explore radically new methods of human interaction
with computers and the massive amounts of data stored in them.
That focus prompted DEC, which has its own virtual reality
research under way, to give the lab $1.4m in computer equipment.
"We are trying to find that next big breakthrough in what will
make a work station more useful," said Michael Good, principal
software engineer for DEC's software usability engineering group.
Separately, Boeing will collaborate with the lab on an
evaluation of practical applications for virtual space technology
during the next three to five years.
Boeing is not alone in its interest. The first national
conference on cyberspace, held in the spring at the University of
Texas, Austin, attracted researchers from diverse businesses such
as AT&T, American Express and Autodesk, a leading cad company.
Cyberspace is currently explored in labs nationwide chiefly by
using products from VPL Research in Redwoord City. It has a
$225,000 system composed of a bulky stereoscopic PyePhones
headset and a motion detecting glove, called DataGlove. Video
game manufacturer, Nintendo, based its PowerGlove on the VPL
design.
Furness is known as the father of the air force's 'super
cockpit', an advanced virtual reality flight simulation system
being used for air force training. One of his projects at the UW
lab will be to develop a 'laser microscanner' which would use
tiny solid state lasers to scan colour images directly on to the
retina.
But as exiting as the research projects and the notions of
virtual worlds are, it is tough to sort the science from the
fiction. The term cyberspace was first coined by William Gibson,
a science fiction author, in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. In
Gibson's futuristic cyberspace world, computers are connected
through one global network. Humans access corporate, military or
entertainment data by entering the 3D virtual world of the data.
The competition in Gibson's world is fierce, and the boundary
between reality and virtual reality is often blurred. The
competition is only now heating in the real world, where
commercial cyberspace remains a virtual reality.
