January 29, 1989

BEING THERE: Someone once told me that in the ultimate computer game the player would become part of the game and interact with it from inside a computerized fantasy world. So I had a feeling of deja vu when a hacker-type told me to check out the “virtual space” project at Autodesk, a Sausalito software house.

There I found Autodesk engineers working with designers from NASA’s Ames Research facility at Moffett Field to perfect a “helmet” that lets its wearer virtually climb into a three-dimensional design and interact with it.

Instead of looking at a flat screen that projects one viewpoint of a model, a stereoptic viewer projects two discrete images into each eye, filling the field of view. The result is a radical change in perspective ˆ from looking at a model to being inside it.

The idea isn’t new. Ivan Sutherland, a legendary engineer, got sidetracked from his graphics research at MIT in the early ’60s because he wanted to build a cyberspace helmet to ease the constraints of two-dimensional design. He did it, “but it required more computer horsepower than was on the planet in 1960,” said Eric Lyons, director of technology for Autodesk.

But horsepower has come a long way, and about five years ago researchers at Ames started to create the ’80s version of Sutherland’s helmet. With a team of talented engineers, they got one running for less than $3,000.

“The people at Wright Patterson (Air Force Base) were doing one that cost a million and a half dollars, and (NASA’s) worked almost as well,” Lyon says. He says that a group of military personnel and technologists recently saw the working model and were amazed.

“There’s an overwhelming response that this technology is a compelling thing ˆ not just the next video game,” says Lyons.

Key to the device is a position sensor mounted on a helmet or goggles, that tracks position, yaw, pitch and roll. Move your head and look down, you see the floor of your design. Look up, and you see the ceiling. But to make anything move inside the design, you have to don a piece of computerized clothing.

“The data glove is the one that we and NASA worked with,” says Lyons. “Now you can give it gestures. One gesture is for moving. You can walk some distance, but you’re connected by wires to the floor. So instead, you point at something and you move there.

The helmet is hooked up to a Silicon Graphics workstation, but Autodesk plans “to make something built around (IBM PC) AT class machines and (circuit) boards you can go down the street and buy,” says Lyons.

WHEN TREES FALL: Is it a contradiction to be devoted to the environment and still be an avid user of high technology?
Audio engineer and environmentalist Bernie Krause thinks not. He uses the most expensive recording equipment, a Macintosh and high-end sampling software to digitize the sounds of wild animals. And though he’s known for his Environmental Sound Series (sold at the Nature Company), he’s recently released an amazing piece of music.

On a tiny Rykodisc CD are the highly danceable “Jungle Shoes” and “Fish Wrap,” and every sound in each song is either the voice of an animal or of the environment. We’re talking tree frogs, crocodiles, gorillas, snapping shrimp, drum fish, African tortoises and the grunts of the striped sea robin, to name a very few. Peter Michael Escovedo (yes, of THOSE Escovedos) collaborated with Krause as co-composer. Krause himself was a member of the Weavers back in the ’60s, the band credited for introducing the synthesizer into rock.

Why animal voices?

“Somehow the sounds should be preserved, and technology is the only way,” says Krause. “I use these songs when I talk to kids in the schools, to bring them sounds they’d never ordinarily hear in a way they’d not ordinarily hear them. I tell them to go out in their backyards and try to record a bird, with jets flying by and people screaming at each other, to try to record an animal quietly.

“Ten years ago, it took me 22 hours of recording in the field to come up with 15 minutes of usable material. In Rwanda, when I was working at Dian Fossey’s camp recording mountain gorillas, I worked 500 hours for 15 minutes of material.” Krause said.
“Ten thousand acres a week, we’re losing rain forest. It’s hard to record (in the Amazon) anymore. It’s just lumber to these guys, so they can raise cattle. What happens is that all the animals part of that habitat ˆ amphibians, mammals, birds, lose a home. Then the earth loses a voice. And it’s a very important voice.”

Write to Denise Caruso, Business Desk, San Francisco Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120. Or contact her by computer using MCI Mail (Denise Caruso), CompuServe (73037,52) or MacNET (Caruso).