Note

'Investigations In Cyberspace'

An investigation of the phenomenon 'Virtual Reality':
Considerations and consequences of the ultimate man/machine interface

During the concluding year of my degree, I was obliged to submit the above-titled thesis, which ran to something in the order of 10,000 words. Researching the chosen subject matter, Virtual Reality, provided me with a welcome respite from the core elements of my actual degree. Back then, VR had rapidly become a buzz-word among the prevailing technoscenti, and more latterly, the general public during the early 1990s - conceptually dovetailing with the ideas of science fiction writers such as William Gibson, whose ground-breaking work in the late 1970s and early 1980s had helped to define a new, noirish genre - 'cyberpunk'; compellingly cross-fertilising genres such as the nihilistic pulp detective novel, with deft speculation about imminent and near-future computer technology.

The only real downside to my enterprise, aside from my realisation that whatever work I produced would be rendered obsolete in a sacreligiously short timespan, was having to prune back the completed script to an acceptable length. Nonetheless, the work won me a special commendation despite mutterings from various thesis tutors that VR had largely dominated the submissions that year across all disciplines.

In retrospect, it has been instructive to reflect what happened next. Aside from various costly and complex military or commercial simulation applications, virtual reality has now largely retreated from public interest; finding its rational niche once the hype and the bold claims quietly faded away, and the media sought other targets for its spotlight. VR's legacies live on as analogues; for instance in the immersive worlds of the post-modern computer game which, over the past 20 years, has taken the entertainment industry by storm. The same industry has experimented with various facets of VR, but has struggled in the main to bring the results of those investments to the marketplace. Riding shotgun with the democratization of the computer as a domestic device providing a fictional, interactive reality, let alone an indispensable ubiquity around which, unwittingly or not, a formidable percentage of humans now structure their lives, came user-friendly 3D-interactive programming applications, which have superseded the development and propagation of VRML, which I was not to encounter for a few years.

Originally, each page was typed into an IBM 286; 14 years on they have been retrieved from a dusty floppy disk; copied and pasted into web-pages using a commonplace dual 3D workstation which, in the hands of a skilled operator, is routinely capable of reproducing and manipulating the kind of digital graphics which would have been unthinkable at the time.

And, of course, to its credit the text was written before I had access to - or had even heard of - the rationalised implementation of 'cyberspace': the Internet.

The original text is therefore of historical interest only now, and presented here in its entirety for its curiosity value alone. At the time it was written, it helped to shape my subsequent interest in digital graphics which, since 2000, has become a keystone in my present career.