textfiles/computers/CYBERSPACE/jacobson

91-07/Bob.global.initiative
From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson)
Subject: TOWARD A GLOBAL INITIATIVE:  Presentation at Nikkei Symposium. (LONG)
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1991 18:02:37 GMT
Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle


) Human Interface Technology Laboratory 1991


BRINGING VIRTUAL WORLDS TO THE REAL WORLD:
TOWARD A GLOBAL INITIATIVE

Dr. Robert Jacobson

Human Interface Technology Laboratory
Washington Technology Center, FJ-15
c/o University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195 USA
(206) 543-5075
(206) 543-5380 fax
cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu

Introduction and Overview

	Virtual worlds technology promises to greatly expand both the 
numbers of persons who use computers and the ways in which they 
use them.  Already, the demand for applications of this technology 
far exceeds the capability of the technology to satisfy these needs.  
Independent development of virtual worlds technology has been the 
norm for at least three decades, with researchers and developers 
working privately to build unique virtual-worlds systems.  The 
result has been redundancy and a slow pace of improvement in the 
basic technology and its applications.  This paper proposes a "global 
initiative" to coordinate and to some extent unify R&D activities 
around the world, the quicker to satisfy an eager market (that may 
not, however, stay eager for long) and meet genuine human needs.

About Virtual Worlds

	The virtuality paradigm

	The virtuality paradigm redefines the human-computer inter-
face.  In brief, it states that what we perceive, for us, _is_ the 
world; and how we act upon it _is_ how we live.  There can be a 
closer relationship between the images of the world we build in our 
minds and bodies QJthe subjective models we build to represent an 
"objective" world outside -- and the worlds we create within the 
computer.  Enhancing a person's perceptions, understandings, and 
actions should be the reason for which all computer systems are 
built.

	Putting the person at the center of the computer system is not 
as easy a task as it may sound.  People are difficult to "design with," 
so it is much more appealing to engineers to design for them.  What 
we get is systems that are the engineers' interpretation of what is 
correct for people.  Particularly in the fields of machine interfaces 
and software applications, the engineers need to be joined by people 
with other orientations, like quality industrial designers, environ-
mental psychologists and planners, and even artists.  If one accepts 
the virtuality paradigm, then this collaboration is essential.

	In a virtual worlds system, the participants interact in a 
natural way with digital objects within the computer-generated 
environment.

	Currently, to generate such an environment, or virtual world, a 
model is created.  Objects and their relationships are incorporated 
in this model, which runs on a single powerful computer or on a 
group of networked computers, with each contributing its slice of 
the virtual pie.  Rendering engines display the models as visual and 
aural information that mimics physical objects or designed abstrac-
tions, in three dimensions.  These objects and/or abstractions are 
presented to the participant via an LED- or LCD-based headset 
mounted stereoscopic visual device and headphones.  A position-
sensing device on the headset instructs the computer where the 
participant is and where he or she is looking.  The participant also 
wears a special glove glove or uses a Spaceball or similar tool to 
maneuver through the world and manipulate objects within it.  The 
computer or computers maintaining the world respond to the signals 
from the sensors and tools and adjust the world accordingly.  The 
net effect is a circumambience of information that is readily 
accessible and susceptible to modification.

	The virtual world can assume the appearance of the physical 
world, just as the objects within it can take on the characteristics 
of objects in the physical world  The virtual world can be as simple 
as the line imagery pioneered by Warren Robinett at the NASA Ames 
Research Center in the 1980s or as complex as the molecular-
modeling space now being refined at the University of North 
Carolina.  A property common to all virtual worlds, however, is their 
_spatiality._  Information within these worlds is presented in three 
(or more) dimensions.  The participant, able to work in three or more 
dimensions, experiences a wondrous synergy among mind and senses.

	Nearly everyone who enters a virtual world, while lamenting 
the low resolution of today's visual presentations, experiences an 
"Ah-hah!" when his or her spatial sense cuts in.  When three-dimen-
sional sound (already well-developed) is added, the virtual world 
attains a verisimilitude that, if not equal to the physical world, is 
much more familiar than the usual computer interface.  We can see 
and hear things  In the future, when the tactile interface is com-
plete, we may touch them, too.  In only a few years (so we like to 
think) the componentry of virtual interfaces will present credible 
images that are of high resolution for all the senses.

	A critical history of virtual worlds invention

	The job of recounting the specific histories of various virtual 
worlds developments has already been done, in Japan by Katsura 
Hattori's _What's Virtual Reality?_ and in the U.S. by Howard 
Rheingold's _Virtual Reality,_ Myron Krueger's _Artificial Reality 
II,_ and other books to be published this year.  I want to emphasize 
the individualistic character of the invention that has taken place so 
far, which may explain why our technology is less than we would 
have it be.

	Clearly, many inventors were inspired by science fiction 
stories, in which people traveled through space and time, either 
physically "teleporting" their bodies or sending their thoughts 
around via telepathy.  Vannevar Bush was perhaps the first modern 
computer scientist to conceive of knowledge as a medium through 
which one might travel by machine.  His "Memex" was a fantasy 
computer that would put all knowledge at the disposal of its user in 
multimedia form,   Now Vannevar Bush's dream of universal access 
to knowledge has become international.

	In the U.S., in the 1960s, Ivan Sutherland started experiment-
ing with stereoscopic images created by a computer, to build a "data 
field."  Around the same time, Myron Krueger, another American, was 
using video cameras and other techniques to reverse the flow, put-
ting the user "into" the computer terminal and merging him or her 
with the images on the screen.  And, in the next decade, Thomas 
Furness began directing the "Super Cockpit" project for the U.S. Air 
Force, a completely pilot-attuned ensemble (complete with virtual 
world projectors) that the pilot would wear.  While these eminences 
knew of each other, their work did not coalesce but continued in dis-
tinctly different directions:  Sutherland, toward flat-screen simula-
tors; Krueger, deeper into art and media environments; and Furness, 
toward continuing to refine data-presentation and manipulation.
	
	The popularization of virtual worlds occurred with the simpli-
fication of a stereoscopic, head-mounted data display with position-
sensors by NASA; and the subsequent commercialization of a similar 
display complete with world-design software, the "Eyephones" and 
"Body Electric/Swivel 3D" by VPL Research, in Redwood City, Cali-
fornia.  With the appearance of these systems, and later the 3D 
sound unit, the Convolvatron, marketed by Crystal River Engineering, 
virtual worlds took off in the press and popular imagination.  Auto-
desk, of Sausalito, California, announced its work on Cyberspace, a 
3D CAD program.  Cyberspace begat Sense8, also of Sausalito, a 
small firm working on a Sun workstation platform rather than the 
traditional, more powerful Silicon Graphics computers that had been 
the tradition until then.  For awhile it looked as if the Mattel Power-
glove, a derivative of VPL's Dataglove developed by A.G.E., in New 
York, might take virtual worlds into the exploding Nintendo game 
market, but this did not occur.

	However, although work in virtual worlds was going on in many 
places by the 1990s, almost all of this activity was completely 
independent and uncoordinated.  Developments and inventions would 
usually become known within the virtual worlds community only 
after their introduction at one of the computer professional conven-
tions or trade shows, and even so inventors liked to hold onto secret 
code or hardware tricks to keep their pint-sized corporate empires 
intact.  This tradition of individuality and secrecy is only slowly 
being eroded by professional and social communications.  Unfortu-
nately, it is no longer the legacy of small firms; today, many larger 
firms practice the same self-serving tactics, to the disadvantage of 
our field.

	The emerging virtual worlds industry

	Today, virtual worlds research is taking place around the 
world.  Here, in Japan, research is taking place in many university 
and MITI laboratories, as well as in private firms.  Fujitsu, Matsu-
shita Electronics, and ATR are have interesting projects underway, 
though none is yet what we might call commercial.  I am less an 
expert in Japanese science than you are, but I understand that the 
University of Tokyo, the Technical University of Tokyo, and Tsukuba 
University are main centers of academic research in the field.  
Japanese researchers are making deliberate gains, especially in the 
fields of telerobotics and tactile worlds.  Nevertheless, while the 
level of local activity is broad, it is not always as well funded as it 
might be.  More than anywhere else, too, institutional boundaries 
perhaps serve to isolate researchers from each other. This sympo-
sium may signal a welcome end to these boundaries.  The Japanese 
potential for cooperative, creative work has been demonstrated in 
other fields and may be here, too.

	In North America, larger firms are joining in the research 
effort.  Twelve companies, including Digital Equipment, Boeing, Sun, 
Microsoft, Alias Research (the leading Canadian firm), and U S West 
(a local telephone company) have joined in the Virtual Worlds 
Consortium, which supports the virtual-worlds industrial R&D 
conducted by Seattle's HIT Lab (the Human Interface Technology 
Laboratory), where I work.  Also, firms are creating their own 
research laboratories:  Boeing, Digital Equipment, Sun, Alias 
Research, and Cray are among them.  Also, many more universities, 
including the University of Central Florida, the University of 
Alberta, Syracuse University, the University of Virginia, and MIT 
have joined the University of North Carolina and the HIT Lab, at the 
University of Washington, as North American centers of research 
activity.  The tiny firms of TiNi Alloy, in Oakland, California, and 
EXOS, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have even begun to explore the 
tactile environment -- how things "feel" in a virtual world.  The 
pattern of individual, private enterprise holds, however, for large 
firms and small.  With the possible exception of the Virtual Worlds 
Consortium, one might justifiably say that the North American 
industry is highly fragmented.

	Europe expresses an interesting paradox.  On the one hand, 
nowhere is press attention to virtual worlds more extreme.  Artists 
gather to ponder the value of this technology to their work, and 
intellectuals pontificate on the philosophical meaning of cyberspace.  
This in itself is not unusual; it occurs in Japan and North America, 
too.  What is surprising is that, where this popular attention is 
greatest, the work on virtual worlds is least advanced.  It is in the 
European "hinterlands" where the exciting work is being done.  In 
Britain, certainly off the Continental intellectual circuit, W Indus-
tries is successfully pioneering virtual-worlds entertainment.  And 
the Advanced Robotics Laboratory is building unusual tactile devices 
for future worlds.  In Sweden, likewise off the beaten path, SICS, 
the Swedish Institute for Computer Science; the Royal Institute of 
Technology, in Stockholm; and Linkping University are collaborating 
in the MultiG, or "Multi-Gigabit" project, to make televirtuality a 
reality.  Perhaps the only really substantial Continental research is 
taking place in three slightly peripheral sites:  3D acoustics at the 
Ruhr University, in Bochum, Germany; general experimentation at the 
CyberLab, at the University of Milan, Italy; and the excellent percep-
tual research taking place at the Technical Universities of Delft, 
Eindhoven, and Utrecht, in the Netherlands.  Once again, as in Japan 
and North America, the European work is scattered and not well-
related.

Toward A  "Global Initiative"

	The problem:  ad hoc, uncoordinated development.

	Lack of coordination and communication in our field results in 
several deleterious effects.  Among these are:

		% Duplicative projects make unnecessary demands
	on scarce labor and produce few advances (or, as we say
	in English, there is too much "reinventing of the wheel").

		% An overemphasis on highly visible research prob-
	lems (like a better visual display) leads to the neglect of
	less popular problems (like producing usable earprints for
	3D sound).

		% Interdisciplinary isolation (between fields, even 
	within the same organizations) denies the best-informed 
	solutions.

		% Rumors, suspicion, and premature competition sap
	the emotional energy of inventors and developers and hinder 
	the development of the field.

		% Commercial users' needs and general human needs
	go unmet, and potentially rich markets lie fallow.

	When we have time, we can talk about these observations at 
greater length.  Although some of my colleagues may disagree about 
the degree to which these conditions prevail, no one will deny that, 
for now, they characterize many aspects of our infant virtual worlds 
industry.

	The solution:  a global initiative.

	Perhaps the crisis is not yet felt acutely by all researchers 
and developers, but at some point it will become clear to most that 
premature competition and lack of cooperation is severely damaging 
to our future interests.  In the few short years since 1989's first 
Virtual Reality Day, it is not uncommon these days to come across 
people who are despondent about virtual worlds technology.  They 
relegate it to the same status as AI, or artificial intelligence, the 
favorite scapegoat of the short-sighted.  These individuals have had 
their expectations raised by sales pitches and the press -- and very 
often, by their own imaginations -- only to discover that the 
technology cannot do what they hoped it would.

	If this is not going to become a universal experience, we need 
to take steps to bring our technology up to snuff.  We have perhaps 
three to five years of public and, more importantly, commercial 
tolerance of our need to experiment with trial and error.  After that, 
if we have not produced virtual-worlds systems with applications 
for the real world, our credibility will be seriously impaired.

	We must come to a common understanding on this point:  we 
need to intensify and accelerate our research efforts.  We can build 
upon this understanding to create an international, interdisciplinary 
effort -- what I call the "Global Initiative."  The Global Initiative's 
primary goal would be to hasten technological development in our 
field by (1) opening better channels of communication; (2) ensuring 
that rewards are equitably disbursed to researchers and developers 
who have earned them; and (3) developing to the fullest the many 
markets for virtual worlds technology, thus ensuring more than 
enough work for everyone in the industry.  By the estimate of one 
telecommunications company's analyst, the annual market for 
virtual worlds-based technology and services, in the U.S. alone, is 
over $1 trillion.  It doesn't matter if this figure is off by a factor of 
one hundred or one thousand, it is still enormous; and the same is 
true of every other advanced industrial market.

	We must recognize that there are more applications for this 
technology than there are products to satisfy these demands.  And 
we must meet them or watch our potential customers go elsewhere, 
to other technologies like HDTV or computer-automated operation 
that seem to offer an alterative to virtual worlds.  We know that 
these other technologies cannot do the things our systems can do, 
but others may not, and it is their confidence we must get and keep.

	I propose the following steps to produce cross-disciplinary, 
interlaboratory, and international communications and cooperation, 
which will lead us to our ultimate and common goal:

	1.  Establish for ourselves an identity as a distinct community 
of researchers whose work is uniquely our own yet of benefit to 
many communities outside our own.

	The publication of the new journal, _Presence,_ by the MIT 
Press sometime this year will herald our academic credentials; but 
we still need a way of unifying the work of the academy and the 
commercial laboratories.

	2.  Initiate conferences bearing on our field.

	These days we are the honored guests of the giant internation-
al computer conferences, SIGCHI (human-computer interaction) and 
SIGGRAPH (computer graphics), and their national equivalents.  
Tomorrow we may be out on the street.  In any case, participation in 
these conferences ends up diluting  our attention and energy.  We do 
not have enough time to talk among ourselves about what is impor-
tant, and we do not hear from others outside the computer field.  At 
our own conferences, we could share vital information efficiently 
and also hear from others, outside the computer industry, whose 
work is important to our own:  psychologists, architects, linguists, 
designers, artists, and various end users.  It is time, I believe, to 
seriously consider consolidating conferences like this week's, 
sponsored by Nikkei; the HIT Lab's Industry Symposium on Virtual 
Worlds Technology; the recent meeting at SRI International; and 
others into one common annual meeting or a regular series of 
moderately sized get-togethers.  We need to stop being exotic guests 
and become homeowners and hosts.

	3.  Expand the reach of the USENET and other forums for 
electronic information sharing.

	I mentioned earlier the emergence of _Presence,_ the MIT 
Journal.  Even before the first issue of _Presence_ hits the stands, 
however, there will have been over a year of professional dialogue 
about our field, all conducted online, by computer network.  This is 
the _sci.virtual-worlds_ newsgroup on the USENET, the global 
public-service computer conferencing system.  Nearly every 
university and many companies in North America, Western Europe, 
Australia, and parts of Asia (mostly Japan and Tokyo) are tied to the 
USENET.  Consequently, when the HIT Lab began hosting _sci.virtual-
worlds_ in early 1990, even with our peers being so few and 
scattered, we immediately signed up 500 users.  Now, with the 
addition of Japan and Eastern Europe to the USENET, our numbers 
have tripled and quadrupled.  The 1,500-2,000 people now using 
_sci.virtual-worlds_ have generated over three megabytes of stored 
text, which we archive on the University of Washington computer.  
The quality of this newsgroup and the exchanges of information it 
promotes suggests that we can make greater use of electronic 
networks to our common benefit.

	4.  Start collaborative projects bilaterally and under the aegis 
of national and international organizations.

	I do not know how this can be done, only that it should be done.  
There exist mechanisms that provide favorable conditions for colla-
borative research, both nationally and internationally, and they are 
well used in other fields.  Why not our own?  At this early stage in 
our science and industry, we stand to gain the most from building 
good relationships and sharing knowledge.

	5.  Announce applications/products with common standards and 
production characteristics.

	I saved this for last because it is the most controversial of my 
proposals.  Standards are commonly taken to mean an end to com-
petition, as it is often the case that established industries use 
standards as an obstacle to new competitors with better ideas.  This 
may well be the case in some fields, but in ours, it is the _lack_ of 
standards is what is proving a hindrance.  It is the _lack_ of consis-
tency, even down to the way componentry is wired or written about 
in manuals, that is proving to be our constant nemesis.  Perhaps in 
our field we can do things differently and begin to talk about pre-
liminary standards now, before any one entity has a vested interest 
in them.  When, over the next few years, as the systems we are 
toying with become sufficiently stable, we should consider agreeing 
on certain standards or specifications to carry us into the stage of 
commercialization.  Then, when the technology is more advanced and 
its applications more certain, we can revisit the issue of standards 
and decide to keep what we have or go off in new directions.

	I will not get deeply into the organizational means for accom-
plishing these ends; they are easily enough thought of.  Perhaps the 
most important thing is to agree to start working on setting up the 
channels of communication necessary to building our common future.

Conclusion

	I am optimistic about the future of our field.  I believe that we 
will make both technological and organizational progress in the next 
five years that will astonish our critics and please our advocates.  
Clearly, the move toward an international community, which I advo-
cate in this paper, is already underway (although not yet firmly 
established).

	Let me make a final plea, however, and that is to our intellec-
tual patrons and financial supporters:  _The common aspirations 
among the researchers and developers in our field, which can lead to 
much good for humanity, must be protected from those without 
vision._  The temptation to use virtual worlds technology for pur-
poses that are trivial, base, or dangerous may prove overwhelming 
for those who seek only material gain.  We who labor in the field are 
generally without great resources, either within our organizations 
or without, and we are susceptible to the influence money wields.  
For too many in our field, daily life is simply a matter of trying to 
survive.  That is not a healthy environment for a progressive indus-
try.  If you want us to deliver on the promises we have made -- to 
enhance education, improve health care, make design and manufac-
turing more successful, and convert deadening entertainment into an 
edifying experience -- then provide us with the support we need to 
stay focused on what is important rather than what is expedient.  As 
we say in America, help us to "do well by doing good."

	It is a positive irony that the virtual worlds we create may 
become a medium for greater international understanding and pro-
gress in the real world.  That has been my experience so far.  I am 
proud to be a member of our community.

	Please permit me to close with a _koan_ for our times:

		A Master and student were walking down a dusty,
	virtual road, in search of Enlightenment.

		Eventually they came to a fork in the road, for 
	which there were no signposts.

		The student turned to the teacher and asked, 
	"Master, which way shall we proceed, to find 
	Enlightenment?"

		To which the Master, in reply, merely smiled, 
	reached down, and pulled the plug.
--