August 18, 1989

VIRTUAL GETS REAL: The concept of “virtual reality,” a buzz term for futuristic computer-generated simulations that allow you to interact with a manufactured world, just took a great leap closer to your living rooms and schools.

Tom Furness, father of the super cockpit — the high-tech flight helmet that allows fighter pilots to aim weapons using eye, head and hand motions — has left the military for the greener pastures of the University of Washington. For the past 23 years, Furness was founder, director and chief of visual display systems at Armstrong Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
When he moves to Washington next month, he’ll be founding director of the Center for Human Interface Technology, part of the university’s Washington Technology Center.

Though the center does some aerospace work, it does not engage in proprietary or classified research, says WTC Executive Director Edwin Stear. So Furness will first work toward decidedly unmilitaristic goals.

He says he intends to build “the world’s most advanced facility for coupling humans to machines,” and his highest priority is developing prostheses for dyslexics and other learning-disabled folks. “Dyslexics mainly have a wiring problem in the way the sensory end organs (i.e. the eyes) work,” says Furness. “We will use virtual space as a better means of communicating.”

Ideally, Furness says, he wants to build a virtual interface system that costs no more than $100 and which everyone can plug into their TVs and computers. Another of his many great ideas is to apply virtual reality to the learning process.

“We want to build a whole-brain learning capability,” says Furness. “Right now, we only train the left brain. What we want to do is develop an interactive way of also teaching the right brain, using spatial relations to teach math and engineering and physics. Humans have such remarkable ability to learn when we can touch things and see things. The human intellect is just getting ready to blossom again in these areas.”

Stear says he is delighted that Furness decided to head west, since he had other, equally juicy offers: “It doesn’t happen every day that you get a world-class person like him.”

OFF THE DESKTOP: Most people think of RISC as the latest technology for workstations in the engineering and scientific world. RISC, for reduced instruction set computing, is popular because it is much faster than traditional microprocessors, and relatively cheap. In other words, it’s more bang for the buck.
But workstation maker Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View has made a deal with Philips which may mean that the Dutch giant will build Sun’s SPARC chip into consumer products. A source close to MIPS Computer Systems in Sunnyvale says the company, considered to be the heaviest contender in the RISC market, is even closer to announcing big design wins in the commercial marketplace.

MIPS, says my source, will soon sell its R3000 chip set to a major telecommunications company which will use it to control its digital PBX systems. The Japanese and European auto industries are preparing to use the MIPS chip as well, for command control and diagnostics.

The upcoming announcement likely signals a trend. “Engineering workstation people are gunslingers, they’ll shoot at anything,” says my source, noting that workstation companies often bet new computer designs on unproven cutting-edge technologies. “But commercial markets are different. They’re much more cautious, and have a longer design time (for their products).”

SYMPOSIUM FEVER: Armchair generals always know just what to do about the serious trade issues that confront the U.S. and Japan, but an upcoming symposium has lined up some of the world’s real authorities on the subject.

Clearpoint Research Foundation of Hopkinton, Mass., is sponsoring a U.S.-Japan trade policy symposium at the World Trade Center in Boston from Oct. 12 to 14. The foundation is a nonprofit arm of Clearpoint Research Corp. which makes memory and storage devices, two areas hit hard by Japan.

Sessions will be led by such notables as Clyde Prestowitz, former Counsellor for Japan Affairs to the Secretary of Commerce; James Fallows, Washington editor of Atlantic Monthly, who lives in Tokyo and reports regularly on Japan; former U.S. Congressman Ed Zschau, who served both on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as chair of the House Republican Task Force on High Technology Initiatives; Hideo Yoshizaki, chairman of the board of Texas Instruments Japan; John Stern, executive director of the U.S. Electronics Industry Association, Tokyo; and Yoichi Funabachi, senior editor and columnist for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Key aspects of the trade policy issue will be discussed, says Greely Summers of Clearpoint. They include a case study on the semiconductor industry, Japan’s direct investments in U.S. firms, and options for both the U.S. and Japan.