Lots of real stuff happening at the conference

Meckler’s information-packed three-day 4th Annual Virtual Reality Conference held in San Jose last month brought leading entrepreneurs in this fast-growing field together with 52 exhibitors showing the latest virtual reality (VR) hardware and software products. Reflecting the growing interest in VR, attendance almost doubled this year to about 4,000 attenders. Thirteen of the 16 Californian exhibitors were from the San Francisco Bay area, showing that entrepreneurial hearts still beat strongly in Silicon Valley.

SRI International of Menlo Park, CA, was one of four organizations that received a Meckler award at this conference; Tom Piantanida of SRI’s Sensory Science and Technology Center developed a VR system for NASA-Ames Research Center to train “marshallers” — the folks with batons who tell the pilot where to taxi the plane — in how to guide a simulated four-engine jet aircraft.

Other award recipients were Sense8 for its widely used WorldToolKit “world building” software, Polhemus for its Fastrak sensors that almost every VR installation uses to track objects in three dimensions, and Robert Jacobson, Ph.D. of Worldesign for developing a unified theoretical foundation for virtual reality systems.

CLIP ART, CLIP VIDEO — NOW CLIP 3D MODELS

Clip-models were the most prominent kind of digital media products on display in the exhibit hall. Viewpoint Animation Engineering, Inc., of Orem, UT, wants to be the company you call when it’s time to fill out your virtual world with realistic-looking, highly detailed animals and manufactured objects. It has been busy with its 3D digitizers scanning hundreds of different things such as a 35mm camera, a football helmet, an eagle, a Volkswagen bug, a skull, a globe, and so on.

Viewpoint cleans up the scans, segments them into parts so that a rendering program can apply different colors and textures to them, and puts them into formats that about 30 of the most common graphics programs can read. Prices range from $100 to $500 per object, depending on its complexity. Viewpoint can also do custom scanning, and will first model objects in clay if they are too big to scan or impossible to bring to the studio.

That’s Mr. Jack to you. If you want the most realistic human models you can get, the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) is making available Jack, a multimillion-dollar anthropomorphic data set that it developed over many years for NASA and U.S. Army human factors studies. Its default human figure has 71 segments, 70 joints, 136 degrees of freedom and a realistic, 17-vertebra spine.

To simplify control and positioning of such a complexly jointed object, Penn also offers special software that makes it easy to put your virtual “dummies” into vehicles, place them in workstations, make them move naturally, and so on. You can even tell them to obey a variety of postural constraints such as “keep your torso vertical.”

The Jack software, which includes a full set of advanced graphic rendering packages including radiosity, runs on Silicon Graphics Workstations. Contact the university’s Center for Technology Transfer at (215) 898-9585.

AND, OF COURSE, SOME VIRTUAL SEX

No high-technology conference is complete these days without a crowded booth selling pornographic materials. Psychoacoustic entrepreneur Ron Gompertz of San Francisco is now selling 3D binaural recordings of erotic sounds, via his Heydey Records. Gompertz recorded performers through stereo mikes in a KIMAR dummy head equipped with modular ear pinnae — the same model used by leading acoustical research scientists. He then processed the resulting audio data through a Crystal River Convolvotron. As a result, this reporter was able to clearly hear the performers pass from side to side in front of, as well as behind, him.

Normally, such a three-dimensional effect would have required a quad stereo recording and four speakers in fixed locations. But because of improved understanding of psychoacoustics obtained by decades of government-sponsored research on cognitive psychology, the effect can be experienced through ordinary earphones. The same general audio synthesis techniques were being used by exhibitors in other booths to position and move sound sources around in their three-dimensional worlds in real time.

VACTORS ARE BIG AND GETTING BIGGER

VActors (Virtual Actors) are big news these days in TV and Hollywood, thanks to Pasadena, CA-based SimGraphics’ “facial teleoperator master control” (see Vol. 2, No. 9, p. 9). This is an insectoid-looking helmet with a number of thin wire probes that come down from the top and around from the sides to rest their tips against various parts of your face. As you talk, smile, frown, wink and raise your eyebrows, the probes sense the motion of the skin on your face and tell a computer-generated face to move the same way instantly.

One lucrative application for VActors is advertising at trade shows and sports events. SimGraphics also expects VActors to be widely used to reduce costs and speed up production of animated cartoons, commercials and feature films. Less lucrative but certainly more heartwarming, seriously ill children at Loma Linda Hospital responded better to encouragement and instructions from VActors on televisions in their hospital rooms than to parents and hospital staff, improving the outcome of their treatment.

BIG BUCKS FOR NON-MILITARY VR RESEARCH

An estimated $50 million has been spent so far on research and development of nonmilitary VR. Even so, the Investment Perspectives panel held at the conference made it clear that virtual reality is to a large extent barely out of the “garage” phase of the startup process. The first pure VR company to go public, and so far the only, is Division Group in the United Kingdom. Division sells an integrated VR development environment including software, VR devices and Silicon Graphics computers.

Many venture capitalists (VC) are now convinced that potential returns from investments in VR startups may be able to meet their demanding requirements for 25-to-1 or better returns in three to five years. But they are still holding back from a 1980s-style funding/feeding frenzy because they are not sure yet precisely which applications of VR will pay off first.

They are pretty sure that entertainment applications are the lead horse and that the others (science, finance, education, manufacturing, medicine, military) are barely out of the gate. But they are not yet convinced that the lead horse can finish the race. VCs are waiting to see a “killer application” of entertainment VR before they commit.

One notable exception is Shamrock, the Disney family’s VC fund, which recently decided to buy into Virtual World Entertainment (VWE). VWE, founded by Gordon Weissman and Bruce Babcock, runs the highly successful Battletech centers in Chicago and, recently, New Jersey.

Battletech is an example of a “sit-down” location-based entertainment (LBE). In plain words, it’s a game. You get into a pod that looks like a spaceship cockpit, then it closes around you and you are off shooting down bad guys in another 3D world for about twelve minutes. It’s also tied in with 20 Penguin science-fiction novels on the Battletech theme. VWE sold 300,000 $7 Battletech tickets in two years and revenues were climbing when Shamrock came in to add value based on the extensive Disney experience with LBEs in its theme parks around the world.

Andrew Messing, the ex-Shamrock executive who now runs VWE as part of the deal, said Shamrock picked VWE because it met its three main investment criteria: vertical integration from manufacturing to operation of the LBE facilities, in-house software creativity, and ownership of the intellectual property.

Messing emphasized that without creative software developers who can keep the games continually interesting, it could not count on repeat business, which it considers all-important. For example, the 5 percent of Battletech players who are “regulars” (either loners or organized teams) accounted for 60 percent of revenues.

He also noted that writing LBE software required different skills from writing ordinary arcade game software. A new Battletech installation will open this summer in Walnut Creek, CA. Messing has decided to redesign this one like a miniature Disneyland, with four “lands,” each offering a different game scenario. It will also have a central lounge area for socializing after the game, and where the nonplaying spouses and significant others and the kids can wait and talk until the battle is over, enjoying California cuisine and nonalcoholic drinks.

CROSSING SHEEP WITH LEMMINGS

The old Silicon Valley joke is “Cross a sheep with a lemming and you get a venture capitalist.” So, if this Walnut Creek experiment turns out to be the long-awaited killer application of VR, you can bet that other VC firms will fall in rapidly behind Shamrock and do deals as fast as they can write checks with any VR company whose product even remotely resembles Battletech.

Two LBEs — Battletech and Dactyl Nightmare from Dr. Jonathan Waldren’s W Industries (UK) — seem to be tapping into a powerful social phenomenon. This phenomenon is also showing up increasingly on “cyberspace” of the global Internet and on commercial networked multiplayer games on home computers such as the Sierra On-Line System.

Briefly put, people enjoy cooperating with complete strangers in group activities. Competing with them is not as acceptable. (In California, we’ve seen this abandonment of class/race/status distinctions happen spontaneously in more serious, real, common-threat situations whenever we have a big earthquake.)

Messing told of eight wildly mismatched people enjoying each other’s company who would normally have ignored one another if they hadn’t just fought on the same side in a Battletech game — businessman with punker, female grad student with high school nerd, etc. The social excuse provided by the game allowed them to meet afterwards and discuss the battle. The grad student later married the nerd, but VWE doesn’t guarantee that everyone will get the same results.

Available VR hardware and software has so far been inconvenient to use and hasn’t been able to produce a very realistic simulation of reality. The original face-suckers — strap-on goggles with Walkman TV screens inside — distributed primarily by Jaron Lanier’s VPL, Inc. (now in Chapter 11, with French arms manufacturer CSF-Thomson picking up the pieces) are heavy, the pictures they show you aren’t very clear, and what you see looks jerky and doesn’t keep up with your head motions.

At this year’s conference we began to see some improved products that begin to correct these deficiencies. More powerful computers were being shown, such as Silicon Graphics’ Onyx parallel-processing supercomputer that can generate up to nine different images in nine stereo displays simultaneously for $200,000 to $600,000. Images this year were smoother-moving than ever, thanks to new techniques such as predictive tracking of head motion and multiple-resolution object models.

They still ruin your hair. The newer, helmet-style, head-mounted displays (HMDs) from companies such as Tier 1, N-Vision, and Liquid Image were being used in most of the booths in the exhibit hall. They take the weight off the bridge of your nose, but they still ruin your hair and steam up your glasses. In an arcade setting, attendants will have to clean them between customers (sweat, Brylcreme, perfume, cooties). Virtual Images Inc. (Columbus, OH) plans to hand out three-cent disposable plastic sanitary helmet liners to players of their Reality+ games.

A good head-mounted display can cost $10,000, so there was much curiosity about the capabilities of the astoundingly low-cost, $200 3D color helmet display that Sega announced for later this year that will hook up to its Genesis video games (see p. 24).

The lightest, simplest 3D viewing system consisted of an ordinary pair of Polaroid clip-on sunglasses with a simple adhesive retroreflective dot stuck on the bridge. A little box called a DynaSight Sensor (Origin Instruments, Grand Prairie, TX) sitting on top of a display screen equipped with a PLZT polarizer window tracked your head motion and continuously adjusted the image on the screen to show you a 3D color image. Stereographics’ Crystal Eyes eyeglasses and 3DTV’s low-cost version of the same thing were the next heaviest, both containing electronics for viewing 3D images on display screens.

A few nights before the conference, Oliver Stone’s Wild Palms TV miniseries had featured fictional VR eyeglasses that lit up the wearer’s face. Conference attenders saw life imitate art when Anthony Ryder, CEO of RPI, Inc. (San Francisco), took his company’s $9,000, 3D color, eyeglass-sized, head-mounted display out of his suit jacket’s inside pocket and asked for the house lights to be turned down. When he put them on, an eerie blue glow outlined the glasses on his face just as in the TV show.

The RPI display makes use of custom, high-resolution LCD displays less than an inch across, electroluminescent backlights, and optics. RPI hopes to increase today’s barely useful, 200×400-pixel LCD s directly to 1,000×2,000 or better, skipping VGA resolution entirely.

A couple of hours later, David J. Ferichs, founder of Future Vision Technologies, demonstrated an early version of his company’s 3D eyeglass-sized display based on two Private Eye monochromatic displays, hooked up to a proprietary, wearable RISC-based graphics engine. He claimed to have worked closely with RPI on a full-color model of the eyeglasses, but would not say whether that one will use the same display technology as RPI’s device.

Conference attenders were also happy about Xerox PARC’s May 20 announcement of its new active-matrix, liquid-crystal display technology with twice the resolution achieved previously (6 million monochromatic pixels or 2 million color pixels in a 13-inch screen) and 20 times the contrast, thanks to a new 500-volt pixel-driver transistor. That will mean even smaller, lighter, eyeglass-sized, head-mounted displays that show even more realistic-looking images, maybe by next year’s conference.

William T. Park