cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (05/31/91)
|IBM: ADVANCE/IBM researchers are using "virtual reality" to explore ways to | make computers friendlier | |April 30, 1991 | | (ADVANCE) NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--IBM researchers are giving |a subtly spectacular demonstration in New Orleans which suggests how |computer users may one day virtually "enter the realm" of their work, |whether it be a molecule -- to explore its strucuture -- or a financial |record, to study a corporate or national economy. | | The IBM demonstration is a kind of "deep metaphor" of a world |beyond the looking glass. In the demonstration, people in the real |world can interact with each other through three-dimentional, moving |objects in an artificial world depicted on their computer screens. | | A team of scientists led by Daniel T. Ling of IBM's Thomas J. |Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., is using the |demonstration to explore ways in which computer-generated virtual |worlds may extend human cognitive and perceptual faculties into the |computer and eventually erase the boundary between person and machine. | | Far more than fun-and-games that so-called "virtual reality" - |simulations of the real world - often seems to be to the general |public, a primary objective of the IBM research effort is to make |computers easier to use by enabling them to interact more fluidly and |naturally with their users. | | On the surface, it is all just a game played in a wire cage shown |on each player's screen. The human opponents - designated "alpha" |and "beta" - stand and view the playing area from opposite ends of |the cage that tilts differently for each according to the player's |perspective, or head position. | | Brightly colored, flexible geometric objects - "rubber rocks" of |different shapes - appear spontaneously and bounce around the cage, |changing hue as they go, from blue to green to red; shortly after they |turn red, they "explode." | | The object of the game is to bat, squirt (with a jet from pointed |forefinger) or grab an object and move it near the opponent before it |explodes and subtracts a point from that player's score. | | No sci-fi headgear with goggles and earphones are involved. |Three-dimensionality is created by perspective and movements of the |players' heads and of the objects on their computer screens. | | A sensor on the cap each player wears registers head position as |"motion parallax", making the cage move. | | Each player wears a glove that signals hand movements and gestures |(pointing and grabbing). The "game", itself, can follow verbal |commands, and it announces the score in a synthetic voice ("got alpha; |alpha four, beta five"), as well as producing sounds of rocks bouncing |and breaking in the cage. | | Everything in between is done by seven IBM RS/6000 Power |Workstations connected in a way both to amass computing power and to |distribute it so that the two players could as well be five or six |(with additional RS/6000s) and located not in the same room but in |different places across the country or around the world. | | While the game is fun to play and to watch, it achieves its subtle |spectacularity by what it represents beneath its flashy exterior; a |way, eventually, both of making computers more widely and easily accessible |to people everywhere and of enabling groups of scientists, engineers, |economists or other specialists virtually to "get into their data" |and collaborate on a problem from several different remote locations |simultaneously. | | Dr. Ling and his colleagues are presenting their work at a meeting |of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in |Computers and Human Interaction (SIGCHI) at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. | | The chief novel feature of the IBM simulation is the "dialogue |manager". This system coordinates each player's movements and his or |her interactions with the objects, keeping separate what appears on the |screen from the mechanisms that produce it, thus separating cause and |effect in the simulation of interactions between players and the |virtual world. The movement of the objects is handled by the |simulator. | | The cause-effect separation is demonstrated in the creation of a |rubber rock. Rocks can be created in three ways: automatically during |the game, by voice command, or manually by selection from a menu with an |input device called a mouse. | | The dialogue manager "reads" all three mechanisms of ordering an |object but tells the simulator simply to make one without having to |specify how the order had been given. | | "This makes it possible to have multiple persons in the same |virtual world cause things to happen which are different from what one |person could do," said Dr. Ling | | For example, two players can pick up the same rock and break it |apart, thereby interacting with each other through a simulated object. | | Such feats are produced by a collaboration of IBM RS/6000 Power |Workstations. One produces the graphic representation of the playing |area for each player; that's two. Another simulates the "rubber |rocks" and the way they wobble and bounce and respond to actions of |the players in a physically realistic situation in real time. | | Two more manage the dialogue for the players, translating their |gestures and hand movements and also producing the game's "own" |speech (comments, score-keeping). A sixth RS/6000 handles input from |the glove and head-tracker and recognizes gestures. The seventh |recognizes spoken commands for creating objects and coloring them. | | Dr. Ling explained that this demonstration is the third in a |logical progression of improvements in artificial worlds at IBM. The |first project was a simulated handball game involving a glove with |which the player could bat a ball around a simulated room: a very |simple simulation, he said. | | The second project was more complex. In it, a fluid vortex tube |was created mathematically; the simulation involved grasping the tube |(data), turning it and even moving through it. This project brought in |spoken commands and more complex gestures. | | The new "rubber-rock game" capitalizes on experience with the |previous models, enabling multiple users to interact with each other |and with a complex simulation produced with multiple channels of data |(graphics, sound, motion) simultaneously from multiple locations. The |scientists say they will eventually incorporate touch, and, perhaps, |even smell. | | Associated with Dr. Ling in this work at IBM were: Christopher F. |Codella, Ronald I. Frank, Reza Jalili, Lawrence Koved, Bryan Lewis, |Alan Norton, David Rabenhorst, Paula K. Sweeny, G. Turk Turk (now at |the University of North Carolina) and C.P. Wang. --