cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (11/07/90)
Blake Sobiloff (Chrome C'Boy) (sobiloff@thor.acc.stolaf.edu) has asked me
to pose this question to the participants here:
WHAT ARE THE 10 JUICIEST (I.E., MOST SALIENT) CITATIONS
REGARDING VIRTUAL WORLDS, VIRTUAL INTERFACE TECHNOLOGY,
VIRTUAL REALITY, ETC.?
This is sort of your Citation of the Month Club special introductory
offer, for those who need a quick take on the virtual paradigm. Anyone
have any suggestions? (Like throwing meat to the alligators.)
Bob Jacobson
Moderatorgood@baviki.enet.dec.com (11/13/90)
Here are the 10 citations I probably use most heavily that are
directly related to research work in presence, or virtual
reality technology. There's much good material out there that's
not on the list. I'll group these 10 according to topic area and
describe each entry a little.
First, here are a couple of overviews of virtual reality systems.
Ditlea's is one of the best writeups I've seen in the popular
trade press. Fisher's article gives a good overview of the NASA
Ames work, and is part of a fantastic book on interface design
with many more articles that should delight people interested in
virtual reality.
Ditlea, S. Another world: Inside artificial reality.
PC/Computing, 2, 11 (November 1989), 90-102.
Fisher, S. S. Virtual interface environments. In B. Laurel,
Ed., The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design,
Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990, 423-438.
Much of the focus on virtual reality has been on vision and
head-mounted display systems. James Gibson's book outlines a
theory of ecological optics which provides a theoretical
grounding for much virtual reality work. Jacob's paper
describes his recent research in making eye tracking useful in
real-time systems:
Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986. Originally
published in 1979.
Jacob, R. J. K. What you look at is what you get: Eye
movement-based interaction techniques. In Proc. CHI '90
Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seattle, WA, April 1-5,
1990), ACM, New York, 11-18.
Sound and hearing is starting to get more attention in the VR
community. Gaver and Smith outline two different approaches to
using sounds: Gaver's is an "everyday listening" approach while
Smith et al.'s is a "musical" approach. Wenzel et al. give the
basics in how to make 3-D sound work in headphone-based systems.
Gaver, W. W. The SonicFinder: An interface that uses
auditory icons. Human-Computer Interaction, 4, 1 (1989),
67-94.
Smith, S., Bergeron, R. D. and Grinstein, G. G. Stereophonic
and surface sound generation for exploratory data analysis.
In Proc. CHI '90 Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seattle,
WA, April 1-5, 1990), ACM, New York, 125-132.
Wenzel, E. M., Wightman, F. L. and Foster, S. H. A virtual
display system for conveying three-dimensional acoustic
information. In Proc. Human Factors Society 32nd Annual
Meeting (Anaheim, CA, October 24-28, 1988), Human Factors
Society, Santa Monica, CA, Vol. 1, 86-90.
Fred Brooks and members of his lab have done a lot of work on
supporting the sense of touch in computers via force-feedback
devices. Brooks et al's paper concentrate on studies with the
6-D robotic arm at UNC; Minsky et al.'s concentrates on the use
of a 2-D force-feedback joystick.
Brooks, F. P., Jr., Ouh-Young, M., Batter, J. J. and
Kilpatrick, P. J. Project GROPE -- Haptic displays for
scientific visualization. Computer Graphics, 24, 4 (August
1990), 177-185. Proc. SIGGRAPH '90 (Dallas, TX, August 6-10,
1990).
Minsky, M., Ouh-Young, M., Steele, O., Brooks, F. P., Jr. and
Behensky, M. Feeling and seeing: Issues in force display.
Computer Graphics, 24, 2 (March 1990), 235-243. Proc. 1990
Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics (Snowbird, UT, March
25-28, 1990).
>From my perspective, too much work in virtual reality is
dominated by technology-oriented design concerns, instead of
work-oriented design concerns. There are many books and articles
in this area - I could probably make another list of 10 just from
this topic - but Ehn's is the most profound and complete analysis
and description of work-oriented design that I've seen so far.
The philosophical background also serves well for virtual reality
research, even though VR is never mentioned in the book itself.
Ehn, P. Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts.
Arbetlivscentrum, Stockholm, 1988. Available from Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.
Reading the 8 papers will give you an overview of most of the
leading aspects of presence or virtual reality technology. (I
don't have a good reference for camera-based systems, though;
maybe the reprinting of Myron Krueger's Artificial Reality book
will help fill that gap.) The 2 books by James Gibson and Pelle
Ehn add important psychological and philosophical foundations.
--
Michael Good
Good@Baviki.Enet.Dec.Com