textfiles/computers/CYBERSPACE/lanier.txt

Virtual  Reality  (VR)  has moved from the California labs to find itself in the
public eye. Various exhibits and  'Cyberthons',  numerous  articles,  television
spots, (WGBH's NOVA and National Geographic) have brought this infant technology
to the mainstream .

VR  proves  to  be  a  powerful  medium of the future.  Unlike present media, VR
relies and functions best as a creative tool, not passive mind control.


                                                  -ESLF


  The Eastern Seaboard Liberation Front (ESLF)    presents...
  --------------------------------------------

          "In the future I see virtual reality as a medium where people
           improvise worlds instead of words, making up dreams to share
           an objective form of the Jungian dream. You might even call
           it the collective conscious"

Interview with JARON LANIER
from Omni, January 1991

           \--------------------------+-------------------------/

On the living room wall of Jaron Lanier's  disheveled  bungalow  in  Palo  Alto,
California,  hangs a poster of the four-armed Hindu goddess Kali. Her 16 fingers
and 4 thumbs dexterously play a sitar. Most Westerners would find the  image  an
exotic  one,  but in the context of virtual reality, the emerging field of which
Lanier is the unquestioned guru, Kali looks as normal as Betty Crocker.  Virtual
(artificial)  reality  is  the  hot new computer technology that lets you do the
impossible - from swimming through the heart's  aorta  to  walking  the  dog  on
Saturn's  rings.  Technically  virtual  reality is a full-color, full-motion 3-D
environment manu factured by computer and displayed inside  a  pair  of  goggles
worn  by  the  virtual  traveler.  Psychologically  it's  poised  to  become  an
open-ended, no-holds-barred experience that enables people to create  their  own
dreams in Technicolor and then let their frie nds jump in.

VPL  Research,  Inc., of which Lanier is the founder, CEO, and spiritual leader,
is the first company to bring virtual reality technology to  the  market.  VPL's
customers  include  NASA,  Apple  Computer,  Pacific  Bell, and an assortment of
universities and rese arch labs. On a visit to VPL's offices  overlooking  swank
Redwood  City  sailboat marina, interviewer Doug Stewart explored a sample world
that Lanier had spent  barely  an  hour  mousing  together  on  a  Macintosh  II
computer. To enter this world, Stewart pulled a pair of VPL's cumbersome, opaque
EyePhones  and  a  wired-up Data-Glove made of black Lycra. Sensors on the glove
and goggles steadily sent a silent  flood  of  signals  to  a  powerful  Silicon
Graphics  computer  sitting  on the floor. Stewart instantly found himse lf in a
room filled with semifamiliar objects: a red  apple  on  a  table,  a  bunch  of
purple  grapes, a banana spinning lazily end over end in midair, a yellow rubber
duck bobbing in a rippling water of a hot tub. Periodically a small  pterodactyl
swooped down a spiraling chimney and out of the room.

"Reach  for the grapes," Lanier suggested to Stewart, who groped with his gloved
hand and watched as a virtual representation of his bending  fingers  closed  on
the  bunch.  He  moved his fist, and then the grapes moved with it. Leaning back
in  satisfaction,  Stewart  saw  the  room  abruptly  enveloped  in  red.   He's
accidentally  backed  his  head  into the apple. In minutes Stewart had mastered
the "fly!" gesture  (pointing  a  gloved  forefinger  while  curling  the  thumb
under),  rocketed  up  the chimney, and was soaring thr ough the gray billows of
distant computer-generated cloud.

A self-taught thirty-year-old with neither a college  nor  high-school  diploma,
Lanier  is,  not  surprisingly,  a  onetime video game designer. Virtual reality
(VR), however, promises to be much more than the ultimate  wraparound  adventure
game.   VR   systems   wou   ld   be   the  perfect  command  post  for  sending
remote-controlled robots where humans prefer not to go  (a  melted-down  nuclear
reactor,  the asteroid belt). Medical students could practice surgery on virtual
cadavers that spurt virtual blood after a misplaced in  cision.  Such  uses  are
speculative so far, but few people doubt the technology's potential.

No  one  offers more enthusiastic speculation than Lanier. A champion of virtual
reality as a key to unlocking humankind's imagination, Lanier  is  probably  the
first  man  with  full-length  dreadlocks to be profiled on page one of The Wall
Street Journal. Bea rlike, with heavy-lidded blue eyes  and  a  soft,  sometimes
dreamy  voice, Lanier dominates a room. Stewart interviewed him over five hectic
days and nights punctuated by midnight drives, unexpected visits by  delegations
of Japanese industrialists, sudden aft ernoon naps, dinners with computer moguls
eager to pick Lanier's brain, and the occasional 5:OO A.M. staff meeting.

Lanier,  the  hacker-turned-capitalist,  struck  Stewart  as  more  hacker  than
capitalist.  With  breathtaking  nonchalance,   Lanier   disregarded   scheduled
appointments  and  housekeeping  details  (he  even  had his unlisted home phone
inexplicably disconnected midweek ) or changing clothes over the course of  five
days.  Most  of  the  interviews  took  place  in  the living room of his rented
bungalow. Lanier is an accomplished improvisational musician, and the  room  was
crowded  with  more  than  1OO  instruments,  from  bagpipes  to  xylophones  to
unidentified horns and gourds. During breaks Lanier repaired to his grand  piano
and sent fluent, atonal chords crashing through the room.

The  Pied  Piper  of  a  growing  technological  cult,  Lanier  has  many of the
trappings of a young rock star: the nocturnal activity, attention-getting  hair,
incessant  demands  on  his time. He is casual, giggly, his heedlessness verging
at times on arrogance. Y et during the interviews he seemed oddly unspontaneous.
When he found something amusing, which  was  often,  he  paused  a  beat  before
issuing  a  staccato  burst  of  giggles.  Hearing  good  news  on the phone, he
screamed in delight but hesitated before whipping an object across the  room  in
celebration.  (Hmmm. Should I throw this pen or shouldn't I?) Lanier behaved, in
fact, as if he were observing himself from a distance.


Omni: What is virtual reality?

Lanier: It's an alternate reality filling the same  niche  otherwise  filled  by
physical  reality. It's created when people wear a kind of computerized clothing
over the sense organs. If  you  generate  enough  stimuli  outside  one's  sense
organs  to  indicate  the  e xistence of a particular alternate world, then that
person's nervous system will kick into gear and treat that stimulated  world  as
real.  You might be in a Moorish temple, or a heart that's pumping. You might be
watching a representation of hydrogen bonds forming. In each case the  world  is
entirely  computer generated. Now, imagine that you had the power to change that
would quickly - without limitations. If you suddenly wanted to make  the  planet
three  times larger, put a crystal cave in the middle with a g iant goat bladder
pulsing inside of that and tiny cities populating the  goat  bladder's  surface,
and  running  between  each of the cities were solid gold railways carrying tiny
gerbils playing accordions - you could build that world instead of talking about
it!

Omni: Okay.... How does the computerized clothing work?

Lanier: The goggles put a small TV in front  of  each  eye  so  you  see  moving
images  in  three  dimensions. That's only the beginning. There is one key trick
that makes VR work: The goggles have a sensor allowing a computer to tell  where
your  head is facing. Wh at you see is created completely by the computer, which
generates a new image every twentieth of a second. When you  move  you  head  to
the  left, the computer uses that information to shift the scene that you see to
the right to compensate. This creates the illusion  that  your  head  is  moving
freely  in a stationary external space. If you put on a glove and hold your hand
in front of your face, you see a computer-generated hand in the  virtual  world.
If you wiggle your fingers, you see its fingers wiggle. The gl ove allows you to
reach  out and pick up an artificial object, say a ball, and throw it. Your ears
are covered with earphones. The computer can process sounds, either  synthesized
or  natural, so that they seem to come from a particular direction. If you see a
virtual fly buzzing around, that fly will actually sound as though  it's  coming
from  the  right  direction.  We also make a full body suit, a DataSuit, but you
can just have a flying head, which isn't really so bad. The hands and  head  are
the  business  ends  of the body - they interact most with the outside world. If
you wear just goggles and gloves, you can do most of the stuff you want  in  the
virtual world.

Omni: What about touch?

Lanier:  VPL is working on developing touch sensors. We've done experiments with
tactile feedback by putting vibration simulators  inside  the  fingertips.  When
you  fingertips  feel vibrations that match what you see in virtual reality, you
associate them with the surface of the virtual object. It's surprising how  many
sensations  you  can create with vibrations alone. Another way to simulate touch
would be with a grid of tiny elements that  move  back  and  forth  like  little
pistons  so  that  the  overall  grid can tak e on shapes. That's tough to build
because it would have to be very thin to fit onto the surface of a glove.  Touch
is  a  very complex activity. Tac-tile sensation is an action; it's not passive.
You're constantly nudging things with your fingers, rubbing,  squeezing  things,
feeling  their  weight  and  textures,  judging  the  position  of  your arm and
fingers, performing hundreds of subtle little  tests.  To  synthesize  the  full
sensation  of  picking  up an object in VR, you'd have to do a number of things,
all difficu lt, some perhaps impossible.

Omni: Who are your customers?

Lanier: Most are companies and institutions with their own  technical  know-how.
Some  use VR to test designs before building them. Some are trying to understand
scientific or engineering data better. Some are people who want to have fun.

Omni: Millionaires who want to play three-D games?

Lanier: There's only been one example of that so far, which I  don't  encourage.
But  there's  nothing  wrong  with  a  technology  that unites work and play. VR
allows you to do work that you couldn't  do  otherwise  by  making  it  playful.
People in the business worl d are sick of being told that things that aren't fun
are  fun,  like  using a spreadsheet. Virtual reality actually is fun. You might
think of it as a general-purpose simulator, or as a fantasy  machine.  But  what
makes  it so special is that you and others wearing VR clothing can be networked
together to  share  the  same  alternate  reality.  The  content  is  completely
variable  -  you could be on top of Mount Everest or the bottom of the sea - but
the environme nt is the same for everyone in it. You and your  VR  partners  can
shake  hands,  dance  together, play ball. You can construct buildings together.
Virtual reality is an epistemological milestone, a new reality that's shared  as
the physical world is. Yet it is open and unhindered like dreams.

Omni: What are some applications?

Lanier:  Each  application  by  itself  is  a  whole-amazing world, so in a way,
anytime you talk about a particular application you're somehow losing  sight  of
the overall picture.

Omni: Still, don't your customers view it as an efficient  tool  rather  than  a
mindboggling experience?

Lanier:  Absolutely.  It's extremely efficient. An architect can make a building
real before it exists and bring people through it. In a demo with  Pacific  Bell
recently,  two  architects  got  together over the phone and explored a proposed
day-care center in V R. One showed proposed features to the  other,  they  could
see  each  other  moving  around  in  the room and could make design changes. By
holding the glove a certain way, they could  change  their  bodies  to  take  on
characteristics  of children's bodies. So they we re able to run around and test
features like a water fountain from a child's perspective.  Another  example  is
city  planning.  Tom  Furness  is  heading a lab at the University of Washington
that's studying VR. We're helping them put a version of Seattle in to a VR  that
you  can walk around in. You can add skyscrapers to the skyline to see what they
feel like aesthetically, whose views are blocked, and so on.

Omni: How can virtual reality advance medical technology?

Lanier:  We  take  information  about  the human body from scanning machines and
turn it into objects in virtual  reality.  This  means  doctors  can  put  their
patients  through  a  scanner,  then  walk in to virtual reality and pick up the
patient's bones and internal organs. Suppose the patient has a serious deformity
or injury. A surgeon could get a feeling  for  the  three-D  structure  of  that
person's  body  to  help  plan  surgery.  This  is still in the earliest testing
phases, but we've done one project with the San Diego Supercomputer Center where
we had people crawling around inside patients and looking at  the  structure  of
their  brains.  You  can  have two physicians inside the brain at the same time,
and they can talk about what they see. One can point to the structure  and  say,
"There's an abscess here.

Omni: What's the smallest world anyone's made a virtual visit to?

Lanier:  Fred  Brook  and  Henry  Fuchs at the University of North Carolina have
done some marvelous work letting chemists pick  up  molecules  whose  atoms  are
about  first  size.  You  can  figure  out  certain chemical problems quicker by
holding on to a sort of robot arm that comes out of the ceiling and pushes  back
at  you  to  simulate  a  molecule's  forces.  So  you  can literally feel where
chemical bonds could occur. A complicated organic molecule is something  like  a
handful  of  little  magnets  in  a  cluster.  Their  forces  combine  to form a
complicated, irregular field. As you move a new magnet  over  the  big  cluster,
sometimes  it's attracted, sometimes repelled. In a sim ilar way, a molecule has
a landscape of atomic forces around it. There might be  little  patches  exactly
complementary,  so  that  two  molecules  will bond at one point. That's easy to
study in simple molecules, but it's much harder  with  large  organic  molecules
like  an  enzyme.  The  systems  that  the  North  Carolina  lab  and others are
developing are tremendous new tools for seeing and feeling how  these  molecules
behave.  Some  mathematicians  and  physicists  are  using it to make intangible
worlds real. We're doing  some  work  with  actuaries.  They  can  fly  over  an
abstract  forest  that  represents  various  insurance statistics. It helps them
notice patters in the data more easily than they could  on  even  a  very  large
computer  screen.  Computer programmers could look at a whole program at once. A
large program might look like a  giant  Christmas  tree,  and  you  could  be  a
hummingbird flying around it. Landing on any one branch, you coul d see in great
detail  the  structure  of  that part of the program. From a distance, you could
learn to plan a very large program spatially.

Omni: Do people send you suggestions about uses you never dreamed of?

Lanier: Tons. Some of them are truly crazy. We've had  inquiries  about  putting
animals  in  virtual  reality  from people who design animal clothing. Ministers
call up to ask if we could use VR as a kind of methadone treatment. And  virtual
sex  -  you  should  see  how  stupid  my  mail is on this subject! A lot of the
inquiries don't make any sense, but it's important to be open-minded.

Omni: The National Enquirer reported that VPL was working on a spy glove.

Lanier: Yes! [Laughter] They said we were working with the CIA to make  a  robot
resembling  a  severed  hand  that could be remote-controlled by a DataGlove. It
would crawl into enemy territory, climb over fences,  steal  enemy  papers,  and
crawl back. It was sil ly.

Omni: Could virtual squash someday replace the real thing?

Lanier:  Absolutely.  Visually  a  simple squash game in low resolution might be
doable right now on an inexpensive system. As  for  force  feedback,  you  could
design  a  robot  that  pushes  back  at  your feet in a particular way. Perhaps
there'd be a robot arm with a racket handle that comes out of  the  wall.  You'd
grab  the  handle, it would jerk back when the ball was hit. When the simulation
is specific like this, you can go all-out and make it good.

What's hard is to build a general force-feedback machine.  Here  are  some  Rube
Goldberg  examples:  Imagine  having  tiny  rockets  over  your body with little
thrusters that are pushing back and forth at you so that any possible force  can
be applied to any part of you. Or imagine that there are all these little robots
all  around  you,  and like tiny bustlers, whenever you slam your hand down on a
virtual table, they run up to receive your  blow  just  before  your  hand  gets
there.  You  can  take  any  form  you want. You might pull your nose to make it
longer or choose from a drawer of extra snouts or  horns.  You  might  point  to
another  person or animal wandering around in the environment and turn up a knob
that says BLEND and gradually turn into them or something halfway b etween.

At VPL  we've  often  played  with  becoming  different  creatures  -  lobsters,
gazelles,  winged  angels. Taking on a different body in virtual reality is more
profound than merely putting on a  costume,  because  you're  actually  changing
your body's dynamics.

What  surprised  us  is  that  people  adapt  almost  instantly  to manipulating
radically different body images. They pick up virtual  objects  just  as  easily
with  a  human  one.  You'd  think your brain is hardwired to know your arm, and
that if suddenly it grew thr ee feet, your brain wouldn't be able to control it,
but that doesn't appear to be true.

I become curious about how far I could push this, and added fingers to  my  hand
and  limbs to my body. But how do you control this extra limb? Wiggle your nose?
Let's say you want a third, virtual arm in the middle of your  chest.  The  most
obvious  way  to  c  ontrol  it  is  to make its position an average of your two
physical arms, so its thumb is always halfway between your physical  thumbs  and
so  forth. Now, that's moderately interesting, but basically the new arm is just
something that gets in your way. Imagin e a more complicated way of  controlling
it:  a  bodysuit  that's  constantly  making dozens of measurements of different
parts of your body - a little bit of ankle, writs, neck - all convoluted by  the
computer  in a funny algorythm to control how far the elbow in a new virtual arm
is bent at any moment. You've essentially snuck in control of a new  limb  while
letting  each  individual  part  of  your physical body move freely. It's like a
hidden resource.

Omni: You'd consciously learn to control the new limb?

Lanier:  It's  too  complex  to  do  consciously.  You'd  learn  to  control  it
intuitively,  by  getting feedback. This suggests that you might help people who
are paralyzed have the experience of walking in virtual reality. Sensors  placed
on  uninjured  parts  of thei r bodies could let them control a complete body in
virtual reality, allowing paralyzed kids to play sports with other  kids.  Would
this  activity  keep  parts  of  the  brain  awake  that might otherwise atrophy
through lack of use? This is completely unknown righ t now. I haven't studied it
as a scientist; I've only hacked it as a technologist. The field is  crying  out
for more study of phenomena like this, which VPL is not set up to do.

We were thinking of selling a booklet, "1OO Dissertations for 5O Cents."

Omni: What about vacations, say, in a virtual Maui?

Lanier:  The  existence  of a virtual Maui will just make the physical Maui that
much more precious and desirable. I don't think virtual reality will ever  serve
as  a  substitute for the physical world. It's not as good. A virtual Maui could
never be a full si mulation. By putting it  into  a  computer,  you  remove  its
mystery; it's blander and clunkier. You turn it into a finite model.

Omni: Still, you talk about the awesome illusions possible.

Lanier:  The emotional character of virtual reality is completely different from
that of the physical world. VR is a craft you create. People  say,  "I  want  to
try  virtual  reality because I want the thrill of having these experiences wash
over me," but in fa ct the  experience  is  the  opposite  of  that.  It's  very
intentional.  A  better name for it, actually, might be intentional reality. The
physical world is thrilling because it's infinitely subtle: There's always  more
to  perceive.  It surrounds us with a sea of mystery. Those of us in science and
technology tend to live under the delusion that we mostly understand the  world,
that  there are just little patches that are mysterious. But in fact, we've just
constructed around us  a  small  set  of  things  that  we  underst  and.  Also,
particular  environments  in  VR will never be terribly exciting because they're
so readily available. That ornate silver drum over there is an  unusual  object,
which  gives  it  a  certain preciousness. If we were in virtual reality and you
saw one of those, it wouldn't mean a damned thing,  because  you  could  make  a
hundred  of  them  as  easily as one. So particular forms become mundane. What's
exciting are the frontiers of imagination, the waves  of  creativity  as  people
make up new things.

Omni: How is it possible to build a virtual world?

Lanier:  There's no one answer; anything's possible. We're working on technology
that will grab a part of the physical world - an architect's rendering or  brain
scan  - and translated that into the virtual world. Ultimately, though, the most
efficient way w ill be to  use  virtual  tools  you  find  on  the  inside.  For
instance,  if  you saw a big block of stone in a virtual reality, you might also
see a chisel that you could pick up with your virtual  hand  and  start  carving
with.  The  difference  is  that virtual tools will have super powers. You might
make an eyedropper that could touch an object and squeeze it  in,  then  squeeze
it  out  somewhere  else  to make copies of the original. You might have another
tool that stretched anything it came across and made it long. Some  tools  could
be  very expressive. This room is filled with musical instruments because I find
them to be the most eloquent tools ever made. I want to make tools for  VR  that
are  like  musical  instruments. You could pick them up and gracefully "play" re
ality. You might "blow" a distant mountain range with  an  imaginary  saxophone.
You'd  be  using gestures instead of building something stone by stone. When you
can improvise while inside it, making it up as fast as you think and  feel,  you
can  reach  other  people.  As  a  babies,  each of us has an astonishing liquid
infinity of imagination on the inside, that butts up against the  stark  reality
of  the physi cal world, which resists us. That the baby's imagination cannot be
realized is a fundamental indignity that we only learn  to  live  with  when  we
decide  to  call  ourselves  adults.  With virtual reality you have a world with
many of the qualities of the physica l world,  but  it  doesn't  resist  us.  It
releases  us  from  the  taboo against infinite possibilities. That's the reason
virtual reality electrifies people so much. In the future I see it as  a  medium
of  communications  where  people  improvise  worlds instead of words, making up
dreams  to  share.  An  ideal  VR  conversation  would  have   the   continuity,
spontaneity, expressiveness of a jazz jam but the literal content that's missing
from  music. Things being made would be objects - houses, chemical processes, or
whatever the conversation is about. It  would  be  a  reality  conversation,  an
objective  form of the Jungian dream, the collective unconscious. You might call
it the colle ctive conscious.

Omni: What about virtual sex? Is it a possibility or not?

Lanier: Oh, God [glumly].... I suppose virtual reality can contain any  kind  of
imagery,  so  why  not  sexual?  But the whole subject of virtual sex forces the
question. What is sexy? What is intimacy? There are  some  interesting  ways  to
have  intimacy  in  virtua  l reality. Consider trading eyes. You'd hook up your
virtual eyes to look out of another's head and vice versa, so that  you  control
each  other's point of view. It's hard at first, and you really have to learn to
dance together at a very intimate level to  make  it  work.  If  ind  that  more
interesting than the idea of virtual sex, which seems a little funny to me.

Omni:  When  it  reaches  the  mass  market,  might  people  settle  for touring
mass-market worlds?

Lanier: Once you get a taste for making up your own reality,  you  don't  go  in
for  passive  realities anymore. I'm not saying that everyone will make up stuff
all the time; there will be catalogs of old stuff. But I'll bet you a  pizza  in
thirty  years  that  pe ople turn out to be creative. We're living in one of the
strangest periods that has been  or  will  be.  In  the  twentieth  century  our
society  has  been  completely warped by technology, but the technology is still
astonishingly primitive. Considering that  kids  grow  up  with  TV,  a  one-way
medium,  there's  a  tendency toward noninteractivity. This is the first century
when technology has been the primary mode of people reaching each  other.  After
this, it will be interactive technology.

Omni: Who first made VR work?

Lanier:  A  lot  of  people. Ivan Sutherland [a computer graphics pioneer] built
head-mounted display with interactive graphics back in 1968. In  the  Seventies,
Tom  Furness,  who was working for the U. S. Air Force, made enormous strides in
the technology. My r ole has focused on turning this into a shared medium.  That
had  never  been  done  before.  Until  then,  there'd  be  one  person inside a
simulation just looking around in it. I also figured for  the  first  time.  Tom
Zimmerman,  who  was  VPL's first hardware engineer in the early Eighties, built
the first glove, and I integrated that  into  a  way  of  picking  up  imaginary
objects  in  space. Tom's original idea was to use the glove to play air guitar.
You could play music with a guitar  that  doesn't  exist.  I've  made  a  few  e
laborate  versions  of  this  glove  including one last year where I played Jimi
Hendrix solos.

Omni: A Wall Street Journal headline said virtual reality was "electronic LSD."

Lanier: That's stupid. The idea of spacing out in  virtual  reality  is  absurd.
It  would be like getting a model train in order to fall asleep over it. VR is a
medium; it affects the world outside your sense organs and that's  all.  It  has
nothing  to  do  with  brain  chemistry  or  your state of being. If one becomes
euphoric in virtual reality, it would  be  because  you  were  reacting  to  the
outside  world  that  way.  The  first moment of freedom is always ecstatic, but
after that you're on your own. Actually I'm  unqual  ified  to  talk  about  the
subject  because  I've  never  taken  LSD.  I don't take drugs and I don't drink
alcohol.

Omni: Why do you wear dreadlocks?

Lanier: I think of myself as a student who experiments with different things  at
different  times.  I had much more conventional hair two years ago, and I'm sure
I will again in two years. I had no intention of becoming  a  well-known  person
this  year.  One  nic e thing about my hair is that if I ever want to get out of
the hassles of being well-known, all I have to do is cut it off.  I  can  always
save it as a wig and put it back on when I give talks.

Omni: You're a high-school dropout?

Lanier:  Escapee  is  more  like it. I left it ar fifteen and then kind of snuck
into college - New Mexico State and other  places.  I  was  never  much  on  the
rituals  of By rituals I mean turning in papers and finishing degrees.  Computer
science is a splendid fi eld and most of the founders are still alive. I learned
by apprenticing myself to some of them. Marvin Minsky  was  extremely  important
to  me,  and  I used to just hang out with him. He is rethinking the whole world
from the bottom up all the time. That's an inspiring quality.

Omni: Did you invent make-believe worlds as a child?

Lanier: What I  remember  most  about  my  childhood  isn't  so  much  inventing
make-believe  worlds  as  being  overwhelmed  by  the  experience  of  different
physical places. My sensitivity to the mood of a particular room  was  sometimes
so intense I could hardly talk. I didn't know how to communicate that feeling to
others.  I  love  words  - I love to read, write, talk - but I think words leave
out almost everything. That frustration more than anything else -  feeling  that
what  we  can  share  with  other  people  is so much mor e limited than what we
actually experience - is what has driven me into this  technology.  Sometimes  I
think  we've  uncovered  a  new  planet, but one that we're inventing instead of
discovering. We're just starting to sight the shore of one  of  its  continents.
Virtual reality is an adventure worth centuries.

           \--------------------------+-------------------------/

O1/14/91  3:32 pm
WRD: 4845
CHAR: 23816

  thanks to K.I.M.
                                             -Shock LSD for the
                                              ESLF