cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (05/17/91)
My Cyberspace Trip Report, Part One:
Philips and the European Commission
Philips
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On 7 April 1991, after a pleasant 9-1/2 hour flight on SAS
via Copenhagen, I touched down in Schipol Airport, Amsterdam. A
short train ride later -- well, actually two train rides, as I took
the wrong one the first time -- I was disembarking in Eindhoven,
the mythical homeland of Philips B.V., the world's largest
electronics consumer manufacturer. Philips, currently going
through tough economic times (with losses of almost a billion
dollars a year), is taking a hard look at its current and future
operations.
Waiting to meet me at the utilitarian but tulip-planted
train station was Jack Gerrissen, a friend and researcher at the
Institute for Perception Research (IPO), Technical University at
Eindhoven. Jack's work centers on human-computer interaction
and groupwork, including the sharing of common video images on
remote computer terminals, to enhance design work. Jack
enlisted at IPO, an organi-zation jointly funded by the TU and
Philips, three years ago. Since that time he has been an advocate
of change within Philips, bringing in guest researchers and
speakers with odd new ideas. My own assignment was to speak to
the assembled research managers from the Philips company and
their colleagues at IPO.
After a pleasant night at a local hotel situated in a park
bordered by blooming tulips, I rose to take a nice walk across
town. Passing under the railroad station, I soon found myself on
the impressive campus of the Technical University of Eindhoven.
TUE is one of three Dutch technical institutions situation on a
modern site not unlike the Philips installations nearby. As I
walked along the campus roads, admiring their cleanliness, I
came upon a trailer installation featuring Silicon Graphics
products. (I learned later that this was the larger of two such
traveling displays commissioned by SG; the other is in the U.S.)
How incongruous, I thought, to be here on a special mission for
the virtual worlds industry, and the main current platform for
our work is over there, and never the twain shall meet....
My meeting at IPO was in the afternoon following a
pleasant lunch. (Unfortunately, this lunch proved the undoing of
some of the Philips research managers, who proceeded to nap as
soon as they entered the lecture hall.) I received a good hearing
about the HIT Lab, the Virtual Worlds Consortium, and our nascent
industry generally from Mr. Waumans, one of the real shakers and
movers within the Philips R&D establishment. The questions
asked by Waumans illuminated his thinking about how Philips can
take some new directions in the use of VR technology within the
constraints imposed by its continuing dedication to the consumer
electronics market. Philips, it turns out, is also a manufacturer
of very impressive high-end technical and medical
instrumentation and devices, for which our technology might be
well-suited. Except for Waumans's and Gerrissen's interest,
there is no formal VR activity within Philips.
After the managers had come and gone, a livelier crowd of
young IPO researchers -- several of them Jack's disciples --
spent about 90 minutes grilling me. They questioned just how
real virtual reality might be, what its technical foundational
requirements are, and how VR will be tangibly applied in the next
five years. A certain skepticism among these researchers can be
attributed to the general malaise affecting the Philips
organization. But more importantly, perhaps, is the media hype
for VR that these researchers have read in the European VR,
without accessible demonstrations of the technology itself.
In fact, there is a virtual worlds installation at the
University of Delft, one of the Netherlands' superb perception-
research oriented research institutions. It's a sophisticated
variety of garage-VR being used to describe the spatial metrics
experienced by subjects in a virtual world. These subjects
parade down the hall behind a sort of walker which is used to
measure the objective distance travelled by the subjects. These
measurements are compared with the subjective distance
perceived to have been travelled by the subjects them-selves.
It's a crude but ingenious first step toward developing virtual-
spatial metrics, typical of the unique style of the Dutch
perception laboratories. (The other two major institutions in
this field are IPO and the University of Utrecht. Perception
research has a long tradition in Holland, worth looking into. I
hypothesize that this tradition has roots in the Dutch Masters art
scene, when people started noticing the world around them and
depicting it in both realistic and fantastic style, epitomized by
Rembrandt and Bosch.)
After a roisterous dinner with the Gerrissen family and
friends, I bedded down at my hotel and contemplated by trip to
Brussels and the European Community, in the morning.
[To contact Jack Gerrissen, email gerris@philipo.prl.philips.nl .]
* * *
The typical full Dutch breakfast, with lots of good dark
coffee and Gouda cheese, well-equipped me for my two hour
luxury train ride to Brussels. My arrival was easy. Another
traveler, a young American, was not so lucky: he had left his
passport on the train and had a flight back home in two hours.
Wow, I thought...was this me a couple of decades ago? Thank
goodness for experience!
A short trip on Brussel's charming trams, miniatures of the
clanging Amsterdam monster snakes, brought me to the executive
officers of the European Commission (EC), a famous tri-winged
building whose form will become more familiar to non-Europeans
as 1992 approaches. That is when the EC begins to assert its
unifying principles and brings the (currently) 12 member nations
of the EC into closer alignment. Brussels is a hive of activity as
new buildings are being erected for the coming European
Government. The blue flag of united Europe, with its circle of12
gold five-pointed stars (reminiscent of early American flags), is
flying everywhere.
Finding my way through the local maze of small shops and
government offices, I finally located the building that houses the
telecommunications directorate of the EC. There I met Ms. Geist
and Mr. Ben-Sassoon of the ESPRIT program. ESPRIT is Europe's
answer to the U.S. High Speed Computing Initiative. and Japan's
ongoing broadband fiber experiments. They discussed with me
the favorable implications of virtual worlds technology for the
applications to be carried over the ESPRIT networks, and
promised to discuss the field with their colleagues at the various
nationUs labs.
While acknowledging the personal energy of Geist and Ben-
Sassoon (who smokes the finest small cigars), I observed that
the EC establishment represents a fascinating overlay of French
diplomatic ritual on classical German bureaucracy. The arrival of
"1992" should be interesting....
I spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon walking the
bridges of the medieval town of Bruges, whose antique character
has been preserved despite the crowded congregation of visiting
tourists. Belgium does indeed have its charms. My Canaries
Islands dinner, watching the sun process toward the horizon, was
wonderful.
Leisurely training back to Brussels, I prepared for an
overnight sleeper, on my way to the Munich "Im Cyberspace"
event. As it turned out, I had the cabin to myself and bedded
down in sweet luxury....
[NEXT: "IM CYBERSPACE," IN MUNICH]
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