rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (06/01/91)
Is there anyone who could give a synopsis of the Bay area SIGGRAPH meeting last Tuesday (which was announced in sci.virtual-worlds)? I'm just curious whether there was anything of note. --
GENOL%UCCMVSA.BITNET@uccvma.ucop.edu (Genevieve Engel) (06/03/91)
I took pretty sketchy notes at the Bay Area SIGGRAPH meeting so a lot of this is from memory. But since someone asked... Jaron Lanier was first up (after a lot of really bad banjo player jokes had warmed up the audience) and he had a tape of some sample VR sequences. An interesting thing he noted was that the image of the pointing hand representing the position of the user's glove suffered by not having an elbow attached. Apparently it is better for the user if the image includes an elbow. Lanier noted that he was getting a little bored with his social-implications-of-VR rap and wouldn't mind talking more about the software architecture. A thought for any of you who would like to organize an architecture discussion. Nevertheless, he spoke for a few minutes in a pretty upbeat way about his view of VR's place in the world. One of the things he likes about VR is that it's a different medium from television; television contains too many implicit messages that you don't even notice since you forget what you've watched as soon as you've seen it; your body remains immobile while your nervous system is invaded (in this and all future statements I may make about what people said, bear in mind these are not exact quotes, and if they sound loony it's probably due more to my sketchy notes than to any inherent looniness on the part of the speakers). VR, in contrast, is intrinsically interactive and is a much better medium for making the most of the creativity of anyone using it. He stressed several times that all people are creative, and said that in his experience this really comes out when they get involved in VR. He had an example of some kids who were working on a virtual world building project and who came up with some really fantastic stuff. Lanier said he views VR as less corruptible than other media such as TV because the producer of the medium cannot impose a view upon the user. In other words, if you force someone to see something they weren't pointing their head at in the virtual world, you make them nauseous and it just doesn't work when you make your media consumers throw up. Basically, he said interactivity was the important thing about VR, ideally in the form of networked VR that allows people to communicate with each other without the restrictions of other communications media (e.g., if you wish to present yourself to others as a lobster, you may do so, thus avoiding the problems of people only being able to see the most obvious side of you when you are in your "normal" human form and attire). He saw great potential for creativity, imagination, and communication as hardware prices come down and true home VR comes on the scene. Asked how long he thought it would take for VR to get out into the world, he speculated that public VR installations would be prevalent in the next 5 years, home VR would come into being in about 10 years, and a real VR "culture" would take 30 to 50 years. He views industrial or commercial VR as being primarily simulation (this was the emphasis of a couple of scenes on his tape, which were from projects done for an office designer and a subway designer), whereas nonindustrial VR would emphasize shared communication and be more about imagination -- precisely NOT just simulation. Lanier seemed to have a little bit of fatalism about the future of VR -- it was going to become a big thing in the culture, whether or not it was good in itself. On the other hand he thought it would certainly be better for the culture than TV. He thought it would enable a kind of communication that doesn't rely on generic symbolism but instead brings out individual expression. Brenda Laurel then spoke. First she hyped her book, whose title I didn't catch but which I later found out was "Computers as Theatre," finding out at the same time that she was the editor of Apple's excellent guide to user interface design (The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design -- if you're more of a SIGCHI type, like I am, than a SIGGRAPH type, you will find this indispensable -- pardon the blatant plug, but I must say Laurel rose in my esteem when I realized she was the editor of that bible). Laurel was less optimistic about VR as an incorruptible enabler of human creativity. She was pretty chilled with the way video games quickly became geared toward 14-year-old white boys to the extent that fifteen years later, it is still a rarity to find anyone willing to publish a SimCity. She warned that if artists and other people interested in bringing creativity to VR don't immediately stake a claim on the field, it has every potential for going the way of video games, citing Battletech and W Industries' video. She went into some of Marshall McLuhan's observations about "cool" and "hot" media -- hot media being things like TV which so envelop the user in experiences and detail that the user is left "cool" or uninvolved, and cool media being things with lesser resolution that leave more to the user's imagination and thus more involve the user. In other words, a lot of the same themes as Lanier was citing earlier. Both of these people seem to have gotten into VR partly as a reaction to TV! Laurel questioned the push to develop highly realistic VR, in light of the hot/cool question. She wondered whether a photorealistic VR would really be of any use in letting its users be creative and direct their own experiences. She saw a drive towards photorealism also occurring in standard video games but said that in VR this would be even more pernicious since it would be multisensory. My notes then say that Laurel envisioned the future of VR as not just liberating the individual imagination, but liberating social interaction in networked VR. See lobster paragraph above. Laurel made what I thought was a rather oddly interesting point quoting Timothy Leary saying that VR had to get the cognitive psychologists out and the transpersonal psychologists in. For one thing, I am totally unaware of cognitive psychologists being substantially involved in VR at all, but then I don't know what cog psy is doing. For another, even if any of these people are involved this can be taken only as a metaphor for a need to reduce the involvement of analytical design and increase the involvement of communicative design in VR (by which I mean, create virtual worlds that are more open to interpretation and less circumscribed by other people's ideas of what is going on in the user's head). If anyone else has another idea of what exactly the Leary quote was about, let me know -- my notes, as ever, are sketchy on this point. The most interesting part of the session was the question-and- answer afterwards. One especially interesting comment came from someone who had been at the VR lab at UNC who said everyone preferred the tank simulation to the desert island there -- didn't that prove people wanted conflict and structure, not open-ended "nice" VRs? [It seemed to me to prove that most people wanted anything but a desert island -- is that too simplistic a view or what?] Lanier responded that the fluidity or nonlinearity of VR allows conflict without getting stuck in specific structures as in TV or video games. The examples he gave included putting your hand through someone's head without actually injuring them. [Seemed kind of violent to me but it does open up a whole new interpretation of violence.] Laurel said constraints would be necessary but that top-down control by the VR designer would be impossible and undesirable. In the discussion of constraints Lanier preferred to speak of standards, in which for example two people would not be able to do two contradictory things to an object because there would be conventions about what one person could do with an object already being used by someone else. Lanier and Laurel seemed to agree that there was a need for some kind of standard to avoid disorienting people completely, yet when Laurel said some kind of constraints would be needed, an audience member said "Yes, Mommy." [Shall we take this as an agreement with the preference for the word "standards" rather than as the stupid remark of someone who didn't understand what was going on? Well, no, it was really the stupidest remark of the whole show. In fact it made me ponder the whole concept of women in VR. Having in a previous job been something of a hardware person myself, it still throws me off when people continue to view women as non-hardware and therefore mommy ... or something ... I still can't figure it out. It still isn't anywhere near as bad as in the auto parts business but obviously it p***es me off!] Someone asked what is it that makes VR VR ... something of the same thread that was on sci.v-w a while ago. Lanier basically said it was a cultural thing [implying the communication aspect I guess] and kind of dismissed the question as "if you have to ask..." Laurel viewed it as more of a threshold: if you use an optical and a kinesthetic interface together, the impression of an alternate reality is then formed. Laurel mentioned that it would be a good idea to incorporate AI to react interestingly to the VR user's actions. Lanier responded to a question about the use of tactile feedback mentioning that currently both audio and shadow are used together to simulate boundaries in the absence of a tactile boundary. Laurel said, on the topic of media involving or discounting your body, VR was "a heinous medium" for those who didn't like their bodies because it involves your body so much. I would have thought the opposite -- that VR is most notable for allowing you to forget about the real state of your body. The prospects of VR as an aid to disabled people was brought up pretty late in the question-answer period and was thought by Lanier and Laurel to be a pretty obvious application; any other ramifications for the disabled weren't really discussed. All in all, both Lanier and Laurel seemed to be pretty mellow yet very enthusiastic. As for what their companies are doing VPL is getting involved with establishing entertainment VR centers (along with their usual simulation work) and Telepresence Research is getting artists involved with building virtual world environments. The upshot being, send your resume to VPL but don't hold your breath, or if you have an art/theater background, send your resume to Telepresence and you may get a part time job. Genny Engel GENOL@UCCMVSA.BITNET <-preferred gen@magnum.ucop.edu <-slower response - last resort