yamauchi@aic.hrl.hac.com (07/16/90)
In article <1990Jun18.160252.10718@watmath.waterloo.edu> watmath.waterloo.edu!mwtilden@ria.ccs.uwo.ca (M.W.Tilden, Hardware) writes: > >In article <Jun90.110146.20473@x.co.uk> mike@ixi-limited.co.uk, "try mike"@ixi.co.uk writes: >>For the virtual concept to propagate throughout the working/leisure >>population, we will need to not only give them dreams to work with (which >>is often what that 'first-sale' is based on - e.g. the home computer) but >>IMHO, concrete reasons as to what it will do for them in the long term... ^^^^^^^^^ >Well, personally I think it's just too irrisistible a toy to pass >up, but that's not really a valid reason. Not one you could make >obsene amounts of money from anyway. Well, that depends, would Steven Spielberg's proceeds from ET, Jaws, Close Encounters, and the Raiders trilogy be obscene enough for you? :-) I think many people are underestimating the huge entertainment industry that is likely to sprout up as soon as reasonably convincing simulations of reality can be acheived at consumer prices. Arguing about the business applications of VR strikes me as similar to arguing that the primary impact of TV is teleconferencing. Certainly, business applications will exist, but the largest impact on most people's lives will be entertainment. Interactive entertainment (video games) is currently at the stage of the penny arcade "movie" viewers of long ago. I wonder whether Edison could have imagined Hollywood movies with $60,000,000 budgets (i.e. Die Hard 2) and THX sound systems. Personally, I believe that in 20-30 years the VR entertainment industry is going to make both the movie and TV industries look like small potatoes -- if they're still around at all. ______________________________________________________________________________ Brian Yamauchi Hughes Research Laboratories yamauchi@aic.hrl.hac.com Artificial Intelligence Center ______________________________________________________________________________
mbutts@mentor.com (Mike Butts) (07/18/90)
>From article <9007160320.AA21126@aic.hrl.hac.com>, by yamauchi@aic.hrl.hac.com: >>Well, personally I think it's just too irrisistible a toy to pass >>up, but that's not really a valid reason. Not one you could make >>obsene amounts of money from anyway. ...> > Personally, I believe that in 20-30 years the VR entertainment > industry is going to make both the movie and TV industries look like > small potatoes -- if they're still around at all. > I recently spent a week at Disney World in Florida, and came away with the impression that it is mostly a *very* elaborate mechanically-induced artificial experience. In other words, it does brute-force through rides, audio- animatronics, etc., what will eventually be done in the arcade and the home through virtual reality. Star Tours is the latest hot ride, and it's distinctive because it provides a more intense experience for fewer people (a few dozen) at a time. Indicative of a trend. How soon will we see such rides spin outside of the parks? Also look at the convergence of theme parks with the movie business. I imagine that once virtual reality systems are really perfected and widespread, that the 20th century theme park will seem as quaint and clumsy as a 19th century circus side show seems to us today. Wonder how many people Disney has working on VR??? -- Michael Butts, Research Engineer KC7IT 503-626-1302(fax:1282) Mentor Graphics Corporation, 8500 SW Creekside Place, Beaverton, Oregon 97005 !{ogicse,sequent,tessi,apollo}!mntgfx!mbutts mbutts@pdx.MENTOR.COM Any opinions are my own, and aren't necessarily shared by Mentor Graphics Corp.
oster@uunet.UU.NET (David Phillip Oster) (07/18/90)
The VR Entertainment Industry will get its start from the trivial
application of VR: with a good pair of eyephones, everybody can have a
virtual OMNIMAX or Cinerama movie theatre that they can hold in their hand.
There is an immense amount of this programming already in the can, and
the market is so huge that the cost to develop the technology can be amortized
over the huge sales, so we can expect Casio $20.00 Cinerama eyephones in
the near future. Wouldn't you like a Cinerama virtual CRT for your window
system? Once that hardware is in place, then we'll begin to see real VR
applications, but the Cinerama video and true-stereo audio are the markets
that are going to make this thing a reality.
--
-- David Phillip Oster - Note new address. Old one has gone Bye Bye.
-- oster@well.sf.ca.us = {backbone}!well!osterrkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (Robert Kelly) (07/27/90)
Yes, the entertainment application opf VR is incredible, but I think the most valuable is going to in the stages of "User Friendly" computers. Look at MacIntoshes and their appeal to persons who "dont understand" computers, or those who think they are "computer illiterate." If you give them a headset (goggles) where the icons of a word processor and a music program is done, they will be equivalently "PHYSICALLY" enhanced to the point where they can play a keyboard like Mozart or type faster than the best secretary. Speakerphones that will allow a person to talk and type (dictaphones, we have them now, but technology will be enhanced). Of course - in comparison to MacIntoshes - what is the reason for MacIntoshes? A product that will sell. If we are basing the reason why they sell is easiness, then VR will be infinitely easier. If we base it on appearance and output, then VR will have to develop a form of output that rivals MacIntoshes. However, I do not think that this is the case. "User Friendly" has a connotation that computers are not "friendly." There is a large fear of the machine that exists in our society. Now, if a user is afraid of typing on a keyboard - a rather easy fear to overcome - then he/she will be a LOT more afraid of "Here, put on these goggles and this dataglove and sit in this chair... Yep, you look like Darth Vader." Will a user friendly VR comp sell? I don't think so. Not until mankind learns to overcome fears easier. But as entertainment? Quite possibly. Recently, a trend at this school is to get an account so you can play games. Of course, the system then responded by restricting access to these games. But they did not restrict access to Forum, ReadNews and IRC. These are User Talk channels that allow people to communicate from all across the world. This can also include tinyTalk, MUD, and similar sites. If you haven't seen a trend to "fantasy" environments over Virtual Reality, try out any one of these sites, like Islandia or MongoMud, where users _create_ where they want to be. In Virtual Reality, Users could create their own Environament without having to read it. Literally Cyberspace. Telnet in, walk to an unused portion of diskspace and create. And if you don't like where you are, uncreate. Three dimensions would be easy to simulate in VR goggles and it doesn't have to be blue corridors with shimmering neon signs. Digitize your favorite picture and POOF it is there. Throw it through a 3-d emulator and POOF your 2-d picture is brought into a near-life quality. Run the preprogrammed tape sounds and you have got anything from birds to trucks to funky electronic music. The hallucinatory experience capable here is incredible... what happens when we could make what we want, when we want it. It wouldn't be exactly REAL, but neither is TV and in TV, all you do is SIT there. Here you can interact without moving a muscle. And we sit in front of a TV on the average of eight to twelve hours a day... for the Average American, of course. But we are having more "user interface" (heh - i love that word) via computers. It is easier... You dont have to worry about what you look like, you don't have to dress up. Even if you 300 lbs, you don't need to worry about your SELF. VR can take this one further. Instead of programming what you really look like in a VR "digitizer" you can create one. You can literally design what you look like on a VR screen. And the limits of looking like anyone thing can also change. One day you could be the Duke, with a gun and hat, the next, a dog, the next a large 2-dimensional pyramid with an eye in the center. Now, _THAT_ is entertainment. :-) Brian Yamauchi writes: >Interactive entertainment (video games) is currently at the stage of >the penny arcade "movie" viewers of long ago. I wonder whether Edison >could have imagined Hollywood movies with $60,000,000 budgets (i.e. >Die Hard 2) and THX sound systems. This is speculative, but I think he would be quite pleased with what we have been creating in the last decade of technology. But that is neither here nor there... But he did have foresite that his invention would be used around the world (ref. Memoirs, dont remember the specific quote.) and knew that many people would want his invention. Here, on the edge of Virtual Reality, the information we are sharing - along with the ideas that were are sharing (user interface) are the most important. One of the big drives behind VR is the "CyberPunk" Literary movement. And though there is a lot of schlock being published about this, there is even more people who are becoming used to the idea that Cybernetics is going to be possible. If we say that CyberPunk is the "imaginative" side to VR, and VR is is - excuse the pun - the reality, then we are joining two sides of human stylistic thinking to create a product -whether it be called "Virtual Reality" or Cyberspace. William Gibson - author of Neuromancer and Count Zero - is ALREADY making millions on the VR as an entertainment media. And since his is just the written concept of it, there is more money to be had by entreprenuring minds. >Personally, I believe that in 20-30 years the VR entertainment >industry is going to make both the movie and TV industries look like >small potatoes -- if they're still around at all. We have yet - in the length of humankind - had a media of idea exchange totally disappear. Pictures, Speech, Written Text, and Radio have been going strong since their beginnings. Yes, in America, we are going to be facing a problem of illiteracy in the near future - supposedly one third of our nation will be illiterate by the year 2000. Even worse, we are going to provide people with a medium that doesn't require them to read - Virtual Reality, taken to the logical extreme, allows people to send mail VERBALLY like a telephone - and if we can get our legal acts together - documentated just like any other written/published media. Our very ideas will become published as soon as we type them into our computers and hit the save button. TV, I feel wont disappear - a VR setup will be bigger than the normal entertainment area of a house for quite some time. TV's will probably decrease in use - like books - and importance but not removed altogether. The will probably become LED readouts a la 2001: A Space Oddessy. Handy, portable, like a Walkman radio already has. As for twenty or thirty years to make VR an Entertainment Industry, I feel that is an underestimate of the human race, technology is growing exponentially. At the beginning of this century, communication was impossible to span the globe. Now we circumnavigate it in mere minutes. A television in the late fifties is nothing compared to the fact that we can take a photograph and reproduce it onto a screen in about eight seconds. An announcement on the radio is expected to be able to reach 50,000 to 100,000 people simultaneously in a large city on any one station. How many people are going reading this article alone? VR is yet another frontier that we are going to walk. And for a while, the rich will have it. Then many will have it. Then all will have access to it. Bob's Trickle Down Theory of Technology.... Hey Diddle, Diddle, The Cat and the Fiddle, And the cow blew up on the launch pad... From the Complete Guide to Cows ______________________________________________________________________ rkelly@carina.unm.edu
jellinghaus-robert@CS.YALE.EDU (Rob Jellinghaus) (07/29/90)
In article <9007172028.AA03530@case.MENTOR.COM> mbutts@mentor.com (Mike Butts) writes: >Star Tours is the latest hot ride, and it's distinctive because it provides a >more intense experience for fewer people (a few dozen) at a time. Indicative >of a trend. How soon will we see such rides spin outside of the parks? Also >look at the convergence of theme parks with the movie business. > >I imagine that once virtual reality systems are really perfected and >widespread, that the 20th century theme park will seem as quaint and clumsy as >a 19th century circus side show seems to us today. Probably true to some extent. But one thing that occurred to me when I was riding my last amusement park ride: most such rides are big mechanical contrivances designed to give your inner ear a thrill. The sensations of going upside down, being at an angle to the ground, feeling yourself be shoved this way and that in your seat, are all so unusual and outside everyday experience that people are willing to pay for them. I haven't been to many big theme parks, so I don't know about the convergence of the movie and amusement industries of which you speak. But if VR is going to try to simulate (for example) fighter airplanes, in which you travel upside down, do outside loops, and experience large accelerations, some way to fool the inner ear (just as the eyes, ears, and hands are fooled) will have to be found. For cheap. >Michael Butts, Research Engineer KC7IT 503-626-1302(fax:1282) >Mentor Graphics Corporation, 8500 SW Creekside Place, Beaverton, Oregon 97005 >!{ogicse,sequent,tessi,apollo}!mntgfx!mbutts mbutts@pdx.MENTOR.COM >Any opinions are my own, and aren't necessarily shared by Mentor Graphics Co. -- Rob Jellinghaus | "Next time you see a lie being spread or a jellinghaus-robert@CS.Yale.EDU | bad decision being made out of sheer ignor- ROBERTJ@{yalecs,yalevm}.BITNET | ance, pause, and think of hypertext." {everyone}!decvax!yale!robertj | -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_
schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) (07/31/90)
rkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (Robert Kelly) writes: [lots of good stuff deleted] >In Virtual Reality, Users could create their own Environament without >having to read it. Literally Cyberspace. Telnet in, walk to an unused >portion of diskspace and create. And if you don't like where you are, >uncreate. Three dimensions would be easy to simulate in VR goggles and >it doesn't have to be blue corridors with shimmering neon signs. >Digitize your favorite picture and POOF it is there. Throw it through >a 3-d emulator and POOF your 2-d picture is brought into a near-life >quality. Run the preprogrammed tape sounds and you have got anything >from birds to trucks to funky electronic music. The hallucinatory >experience capable here is incredible... what happens when we could >make what we want, when we want it. It wouldn't be exactly REAL, >but neither is TV and in TV, all you do is SIT there. Here you can >interact without moving a muscle. [...] >VR can take this one further. Instead of programming what you really >look like in a VR "digitizer" you can create one. You can literally >design what you look like on a VR screen. And the limits of looking >like anyone thing can also change. One day you could be the Duke, >with a gun and hat, the next, a dog, the next a large 2-dimensional >pyramid with an eye in the center. >Now, _THAT_ is entertainment. :-) [...] I think we have to be very careful to distinguish two aspects of VR: on one hand there's the drive to provide artificial sensory input that is as realistic as possible and covers as many modalities as possible, on the other there's the exciting aspect of interactive VR, ie. the viewer actively influencing his experience. Of course the ultimate goal of simulating Reality (TM) requires both these aspects; however, at present they are quite distinct, and they will remain so for quite a while because each presents enormous technical challenges, and a convincing synthesis outside some very narrow scope (such as fingering virtual protein molecules) is simply way beyond present technology. Now ask yourself where the entertainment giants will put their money. Look at DisneyWorld, where you pay many $$ to watch 3-D surround-sound clips that cost huge amounts of $$ to produce. The average couch potato will be per- fectly happy (and quite willing to shell out lots of money) to passively con- sume "Die Hard XIV" on a future home entertainment unit with similar powers. Where is the money in going through all the additional trouble of making entertainment interactive? If people would be willing to pay for it, we'd have somewhat interactive TV (in low-res 2-D and with poor sound quality) now. Look at TinyMUDs, the most interactive (although text-only) entertainment VR around today. Recently, the overwhelming majority of TinyMUD players expressed outrage at the thought of having to pay for their entertainment. Given that to most humans any improvement in sensory reality of passive entertainment is far more attractive (and addictive) than an equally hard improvement in the degree of interaction possible, I am afraid we will go through a long phase of "couch potatoes' paradise" before seeing widespread use of anything like the kind of VR Robert Kelly describes. -- Nici Schraudolph, C-014 nschraudolph@ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego nschraudolph@ucsd.bitnet La Jolla, CA 92093 ...!ucsd!nschraudolph
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (07/31/90)
In article <1990Jul26.171516.21252@ariel.unm.edu>
rkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (Robert Kelly) writes a great deal. Let
me first take exception to one of his major points:
"User Friendly" has a connotation that computers are not "friendly."
There is a large fear of the machine that exists in our society. Now, if
a user is afraid of typing on a keyboard - a rather easy fear to overcome
- then he/she will be a LOT more afraid of "Here, put on these goggles
and this dataglove and sit in this chair... Yep, you look like Darth
Vader."
Will a user friendly VR comp sell?
I don't think so. Not until mankind learns to overcome fears easier.
There are two errors here. One is the assumption that "a user friendly VR
comp" must equal something with computer clothing (goggles, dataglove,
etc.). This is simply not so. To take only the most prominent example:
Myron Krueger has, for decades, been building the most 'user-friendly' VR
computers around. His machines do not have any sort of computer clothing;
you simply move yourself in the area observed by the system (a room or a
desktop) and you're in. Similar things are today done by Vivid Effects and
Rokeby's Very Nervous System. All are operable with no wearing of clothing;
all are so user-friendly that they require no instruction to the user beyond
"stand there."
The second error is the assumption that computer clothing will turn people
off because of their fears. I've seen hundreds of people ranging from
computer wizards to naive news reporters to computer-illiterate artists
using today's (admittedly awkward) computer clothing. I've seen them get
simulator sick; I've seen them refuse to give up the equipment when their
turn was over. I've *never* seen anyone afraid.
Indeed, the Mattel Powerglove exhibit at CHI'89's Interactive Experience
attracted everyone from the old and grey computer types to the young
security guards we hired to supervise the room after hours.
No insult intended, Mr. Kelly, but I think you need to get some more
experience in this area before sounding off.
--
--Alan Wexelblat
Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com
phone: (508) 294-7485 (new #) Usenet: spdcc.com!slug!wex
"Zen is the essense of Christianity, of Buddhism, of culture, of all that is
good in the daily life of ordinary people. But that does not mean we are
not to smash it flat if we get the slightest opportunity."maddox@blake.acs.washington.edu (Tom Maddox) (08/03/90)
In article <1990Jul26.171516.21252@ariel.unm.edu> rkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (Robert Kelly) writes: >William Gibson - author of Neuromancer and Count Zero - is ALREADY >making millions on the VR as an entertainment media. He'd be astounded to hear it. >And since his is just the written concept of it, there is more money to be >had by entreprenuring minds. Actually, he's made about as much money writing film scripts as he has writing books. And when you factor in what he's made selling film rights to books and stories, he's almost certainly made more off films (though none of them has been made) than books. -- Tom Maddox "Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly." Orson Scott Card