Introduction


'...Virtual reality has captured the public's imagination. It is also in the unique position of being commercially available before being academically understood.'
- Dr. William Bricken (1)


'Virtual Reality' first came to my attention through a collection of press cuttings I began compiling early 1991 without really knowing why. In May came Horizon's 'Colonizing Cyberspace', and abruptly, it seemed, the common buzzword was... 'Virtual Reality'. As my interest increased, so it became the initial choice of dissertation subject.

As Virtual Reality has begun to capture the West's collective imagination, there will be many dissertations/theses emerging on the subject from now onward. Contemporary becomes cliche, and I was not surprised to find, in the wake of the current hype, that many working in this still-esoteric field have been swamped by the demands of information-hungry media and academia. By itself, as a raw topic, it is a subject all too easy to choke on....initially motivated out of nothing more than a desire to self-educate on a highly contemporary topic, one quickly finds each of its angles by itself readily fascinating to the limits of available space.

Probably the worst way of explaining VR is on the printed page! Many definitions and suggestions exist; but in general terms VR is the tricking of the human brain, through the senses, into believing it is somewhere else. The classic way of achieving this is to place small LCD screens in front of each eye, giving a stereo view, with depth, of an alternative environment. If this 3D model is continuously recalculated and redrawn at high speed by a sufficiently powerful computer, it can be updated to give the illusion that it exists in real time. If a participant is equipped with sensors, they can then be persuaded to believe they are interacting with the model; if they move, for example, the system detects this movement and shows them an accordingly different perspective of the virtual environment, which has accordingly been dubbed 'Cyberspace'; from the term 'Cybernetics'; coined by robotics pioneer Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) to define "the modern science that studies the control and communication mechanisms in artificial and acknowledged biological systems".(2) In the States, the VR concept and process originated out of aeronautics and space research; over 20 years ago, the development of flight simulators for military training purposes revealed the phenomena. Today, it is being researched all over the world for many diverse applications.

'The primary defining characteristic of VR is inclusion, being surrounded by an environment. VR places the participant inside information....When we extend our field of view onto a computational environment beyond about 60 degrees, a remarkable phenomenon occurs. We shift from a feeling of viewing a picture to a feeling of being in a place.....we shift from external users (excercising rights) to internal participants ( exercising responsibilities ), from being observers to having experiences, from interfacing with a display to inhabiting an environment.'(3)

As I hope to demonstrate, there are enormous potential implications. In the years since Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871) designed then struggled to build the first 'Difference Engine" (Fig.1) information technology has dragged itself up out of its own primordial soup of mechanicals, through the thermionic valve, then the solid state transistor, into the esoterica of silicon chips by the 1980s, and now gallium arsenide microprocessors, at each stage achieving further miniaturisation, complexity, and power. And this is still only the 1990s.

'It is no exaggeration to say that modern human society in the developed countries is largely shaped by what technology can deliver in practical and cost-effective terms'(4)

Information Technology's impact is irretrievably woven into the fabric of much of Western life. Things are achieved faster, better; less error, more versatility. Even those who treat the subject with indifference, disdain or active dislike cannot fail to be moved by the implications of the disappearance of the computers overnight, once percieving that effect on an individual, subjective basis. Willingness to accept becomes irrelevant; as the computer penetrates every field, our culture adapts accordingly, and reliance is absolute. Up to now, we as the majority have experienced computer applications from an external basis. Increasingly, everyday machines are blessed with digital faculties. A camera no longer exposes a strip of chemical emulsion to light, a tape recorder no longer encodes the electrical analogue of a sound, a telephone line no longer transmits the direct pulse of a human voice. In each case, these machines, in different ways, now deal with numbers.

We touch and manipulate numbers using keyboards, joysticks, buttons, levers; we read information off VDU screens, credit card magnetic strips and, using lasers, bar-codes. In supermarket and stock-exchange, school and strip-joint alike, silicon has assiduously gained reliance whilst remaining, up to now, a machine inside a case.
 VR is attracting attention precisely because it promises to revolutionise the way in which we interact with information and its technology.....users have, to date, been interfacing with the imagined realities inside their computers for a long time with a myriad of games and interactive fantasies, but always through their keyboard, joystick, monitor.

"As a computer interface, virtual reality could take some beating " - Paul Marks(5)

Numbers offer power. Now that the power to really crunch them is readily available, and, once a sensation, or an object, or an environment, has been digitised - that is, numerically encoded through an interface, this model; analogue, can be twisted, mutilated, enhanced, modified in any way, for once information is translated into the digital, it can then be processed more quickly, efficiently, with a far greater range of options; in so many more unconcievable ways than the human machine is possibly capable of.....before being fed back into a suitable transducer which will either reproduce the original or its updated version, as a reality. Besides programming, mathematics themselves can be used to generate landscapes, structures; alternate realities, in the sense that one can touch them, feel them, see them, interact with them.....people are able to enter a space that does not, strictly speaking, exist, move around in it, and actually physically interact with it. For the first time, we are able to experience the machine world from the inside, and use it to design our own realities, albeit primitively at present.

According to researcher and VR protagonist Howard Rheingold, the VR paradigm in itself is not as novel as it may sound:

'Trillions of human-hours have been logged so far in the virtual worlds of I Love Lucy, Dallas, fax, computer networks and mobile telephones. The transformation in our psyches triggered by the electronic media thus far may have been mere preparation for bigger things to come....' (6)



References

(1) Bricken, William, 'Virtual Reality: Directions of Growth', Meckler Ltd, 1991, p.1
(2) Simons, G, 'Are Computers Alive?', Harvester Press, Brighton, 1983, p.30
(3) Bricken, William, 'Virtual Reality: Directions of Growth', Meckler Ltd, 1991, p.1
(4) Simons, G, "Are Computers Alive?", Harvester Press, Brighton, 1991, p2
(5) Marks, Paul, 'A Goggle at Reality', in 'New Scientist', 23/3/1991, p.55
(6) Rheingold, Howard, 'Reaching Out to Touch Our Fantasies', Guardian, 26/8/1991, p.26