From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) Subject: Howard Rheingold's VIRTUAL REALITY: A Review by Charles Tart. Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1991 01:39:07 GMT Organization: HIT Lab, Seattle Some of you may remember Howard Rheingold as the first moderator of this newsgroup. At the time, Howard, who is now editor of THE WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, in Sausalito, California, was finalizing the manuscript for his opus, VIRTUAL REALITY, two years in the making. The book has now hit the bookstores and is on its way to becoming a relative best-seller. I thought that, in honor of Howard's accomplishment, I would share this clever review of VIRTUAL REALITY by the noted psychologist and ethnologist, Charles Tart. Tart, a professor at UC Davis, is best known for his 1972 classic, ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, which became a required text for most psychology students in the 1970s. (Tart can how be reached on The WELL at cstart@well.sf.ca.us) Here's Charlie's com- mentary, in his own words, reposted from The WELL: Submitted to "Institute of Noetic Sciences Review" Review of Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality Charles T. Tart University of California Davis, California 95616 and Institute of Noetic Sciences Sausalito, California 94965 VIRTUAL REALITY. Howard Rheingold. New York: Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. July 1991. If you care about the evolution of the human mind in our technological civilization, this book is must reading. Even if you don't care that much, it's fascinating reading! Virtual reality (VR) or cyberspace, as some prefer to call it, is one of the hottest new technologies of our times, still largely in the laboratory, but probably on the street before the end of the century. I agree with Rheingold when he comments: "Virtual reality brings with it a set of questions about the industries and scientific capabilities it makes possible. It also brings with it a set of questions about human uses of tech nology, particularly the technologies that don't yet exist but are visible on the horizon. VR vividly demonstrates that our social contract with our own tools has brought us to a point where we have to decide fairly soon what it is we as humans ought to become, because we are on the brink of having the power of creating any experience we desire. The first cybernauts realized very early that the power to create experience is also the power to redefine such basic concepts as identity, community, and reality. VR represents a kind of new contract between humans and computers, an arrangement that could grant us great power, and perhaps change us irrevocably in the process." What is VR? We have had tiny tastes of technologically generated VR when we get absorbed in a TV show or an eyes-closed phone conversa tion, for we tend to think of ourselves as being in the location shown in the video or where our telephone partner is. Yet it is easy for this feeling to fade into nothingness. When you look at an ordinary TV screen, for example, the screen occupies about 6 degrees of our visual field. Our vision ordinarily takes in 150 degrees or so horizontally, so you are immersed in the real environment surrounding the TV, even if the screen is more in focus than the rest of your visual field. Psychologically and physiologically, modern research shows that our brain automatically produces a sense of embodied self, and that embodied self is experienced as being at the location where our sensory input converges. Untold millions of years of evolution must have gone into hardwiring that into the brain, for it is very adaptive. If someone throws a rock in your direction, it is vital that your brain automatically calculates the trajec tory of that rock, decide that it passes through the point where you are embodied, and get you to duck, fast! Creatures that don't have an accurate sense of bodily self when the rock is thrown or the predator charges don't reproduce. Suppose you are wearing a helmet or goggles that project a binocular TV image to each eye, filling your visual field? Here is Rheingold's experience in something closely related to VR, telepresence: "The robot itself looked like the bottom half of a large electric light pole or a fire hydrant: its body is a red metal cylinder about 9 inches in diameter. The upper torso began to get anthropomorphic, with one arm, a two finger gripper where the hand ought to be, a neck that is cantilevered the proper dis tance behind and below the visual sensors and which turns the same directions a human neck turns, and twin video cameras mount ed where eyes ought to be. It looks like a machine. The huma noid resemblance doesn't come from the hardware, but in the way the thing moves when a human is operating it. It was a strange sensation for me, because I was very aware that I was observing a piece of hardware. The weird thing about the lubricated stain less steel joints, hydraulic tubes, wire bundles was how it moved in a way that I am accustomed to seeing humans move and I am not accustomed to seeing machines move. The human operator sits in a control station that is a little scary to observe and a little scarier to operate. I sat in something that looked uncomfortably close to a no-frills dentist's chair. The display is head-mounted, but it is a "sword of Damocles" display that uses a mechanical device - a goniometer - to track head movements, rather than a magnetic sensor like the Polhemus. Along with the mechanical linkages, there is a long arm with a counterweight attached to the head-mounted display (HMD). The HMD is clunky and clamped onto my head fairly tight ly; the eyepiece was secured with a chinstrap. When I was seated and helmeted, I stuck out my right hand and the arm-hand control was locked around my limbs in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of handcuffs. At that moment, I was blind to the world and free to move my neck and arm but nothing else. When I moved my hand, arm, or fingers, the movements were reproduced almost simultane ously by the robot across the room. I wasn't able to transmit motion in every dimension I am accustomed to use: the arm has three degrees of freedom, the neck has seven degrees of freedom. But the constraints didn't carry as much weight with my awareness as the possibilities. Just being able to pick up a wand with my robot body and thread it through a hoop 12 feet away and feel as if I did it myself, was far more impressive than the fact that I couldn't dropkick the wand through the hoop. When the apparatus was switched on, I began to look through the eyes of the robot. The world looked like the world would look if I was located twelve feet to the left of my body, where the robot was located. I reached out my arm, craned my neck, opened my gripper, and picked up a small rod. It took me about five seconds to figure out how to poke the rod through 2-inch diameter hoops that were set around me at various intervals. It took about 10 seconds to be completely comfortable with my con trol of the robot......"How easy it is for a well-tuned human to adapt to a machine," I wrote in my notebook as soon as they unstrapped me. The strangest moment was when Dr. Tachi told me to look to my right. There was a guy in a dark blue suit and light blue painted shoes reclining in a dentist's chair. He was looking to his right, so I could see the bald spot on the back of his head. He looked like me, and abstractly I understood that he was me, but I know who me is, and me is here. He, on the other hand, was there. It doesn't take a high degree of sensory verisimilitude to create a sense of remote presence......It was an out of the body experience, no doubt about it." What you see on the TV screens dominating your field of view tends to become not pictures on screens but visual reality. The arm you see in front of you may, at some intellectual level, be the robot's arm, but it quickly becomes your arm. After all, it moves as you will it, you feel it move, you see it move. Consider now the images dominating your visual field. There is no reason that they have to come from cameras at some other real-world location: a fast, powerful computer can generate realistic, three-dimensional images too. Suppose you find your self moving around in a room in your robot body (but remember, it quickly becomes your body). If the images are detailed and realistic enough, does it matter whether a real set of cameras is focused on a real room in which a real robot moves a real arm to grasp real objects? The room, your hand, your body, the objects in the room may just as well be virtual objects, that is, they exist only as electronic patterns in a computer and as neurologi cal patterns in your mind. Technically, the VR images I and most others have experi enced to date are just plain stylized and grainy, yet experien tially, they are already fairly real, even at this crude state of the art. Yet they are good enough to trigger the feeling of being there: our natural brain functioning helps out the comput er. By the turn of the century the image quality, in more senses than just visual, will be very real indeed. "Cognitive simulation - mental model-making - is one of the things humans do best. We do it so well that we tend to become locked into our own models of the world by a seamless web of unconscious beliefs and subtly-molded perceptions. And computers are model-making tools par excellence, although they are only beginning to approach the point where people might confuse simu lations with reality. Computation and display technology are converging on hyper-real simulation capability. That point of convergence is important enough to contemplate in advance of its arrival. The day computer simulations become so realistic that people cannot distinguish them from non-simulated reality, we are in for major changes." To create VR or cyberspace, then, you visually surround your cybernaut with a coherent visual space that is interactive. This interaction is vital to give the feeling of presence. You don't just see a canned image of some object in VR, you can move around it and inspect it, stereoscopically, from all sides. If you have lots of money you can build a special room whose walls are all rear projection screens. Or, much more cheaply, your cybernaut wears special goggles (Eyephones [TM], as VPL, one of the pio neering companies calls them). The goggles contain a position sensor (such as the Polhemus sensor mentioned above) which con stantly tell the computer what direction you are looking in. The computer then gives you the appropriate view whenever and wherev er you turn your head. How do you move around? In your virtual body, of course. In the simplest form, as in the description of Rheingold's expe rience teleoperating the robot given above, all the virtual body you have is an arm and hand. The most widely used device today is the Dataglove [TM], also made by VPL. In addition to a Polhe mus sensor which tells the computer where your hand is in three dimensional space and how it is oriented, sensors in the glove indicate how much each finger and the thumb is bent. Thus at any moment the computer knows where your hand is and whether it is pointing, making a fist, releasing, etc. This translates into a hand you see in VR, and hand that psychologically becomes your hand because it does what you want and matches your sensations. Make a fist: you not only feel your hand making a fist, the hand you see in VR makes a fist. Open your hand and turn it palm up: the VR hand opens and turns palm up. It is yours. Full body sensing suits are under development, though not yet commercially available, so the computer will know the posi tion of all your arms and legs, and your virtual body will mimic all your major body actions. Rheingold spent two years traveling around the world to find the various strands of research and development that are converg ing to make VR such a powerful technology, as well as tracing its history. In a fascinating vignette, we see how Hollywood could have pioneered VR twenty years ago, but it didn't have the vi sion. Now we have major research projects in Japan, England and France, to name just a few, as well as in the United States and in the place we would most expect to find it, California. In Japan we see VR technology being linked to telecommunications to open the way to seeing each other on the phone as well as hearing each other. In Franc ewe metaphorically listen to a virtual violin played, movements in the air that will lead to the devel opment of new virtual musical instruments beyond what any physi cal instrument could ever do. I shall mention just two practical applications of VR to date: I have proposed new psychological ones elsewhere. In North Carolina Rheingold tells us about a practical applications of VR to research in developing new medicines through molecular synthesis. The molecules you would like to join literally seem to float in three dimensional space in front of you as you push and pull on them from various angles, feeling when they resist union and where you can join them. Chemists who have worked with the system find they can work about twice as fast as they could before. The first medical drug designed this way is now undergo ing clinical trials. Also in North Carolina Rheingold tells us about the new Computer Sciences Building which was designed with the assistance of VR. Consider an architect's job: she has to have excellent visualization abilities to internally simulate what a building will look like after it is done. Are these abilities good enough. Perhaps the architect is a good visualizer, but what about the client? Do they share the same vision? The Computer Sciences Building was constructed in VR before it was built. The people who were going to use it then donned goggles and walked on a treadmill that told the computer how far they had walked, which directions they had turned in. They virtually entered the building, walked along its corridors, peered out its windows, entered its rooms. A question like "Will this room have too much glare when the winter sun is low in the sky?" could be immediately answered by shifting the sun in the virtual world containing the virtual building so you experienced what the light in that room would be like then. A building feature was found to obstruct pedestrian traffic flow, and so altered before the actual building was constructed. It would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make that altera tion after the building was literally set in concrete. It is well to remind ourselves too that it is not all work and no play, but both: "As Brenda Laurel put it: "Reality has always been too small for human imagination. The impulse to create an 'interac tive fantasy machine' is only the most recent manifestation of the age-old desire to make our fantasies palpable - our insatia ble need to exercise our imagination, judgment, and spirit in worlds, situations, and personae that are different from those of our everyday lives. Perhaps the most important feature of human intelligence is the ability to internalize the process of trial and error. When a man considers how to climb a tree, imagination serves as a laboratory for 'virtual' experiments in physics, biomechanics, and physiology. In matters of justice, art, or philosophy, imagination is the laboratory of the spirit."" I am particularly excited by the development of VR because of my long standing interest in altered states of consciousness. In the early 1970s I developed a systems approach to understand ing states of consciousness like hypnosis, dreaming, meditation and drug-induced states, but I lacked a good technological model to make it easier for people to understand. VR is it, for what I proposed was that we live in an internally produced VR, a World Simulation, produced by our physiology and our particular psy chology. Change some of the fundamentals of the World Simulation process and you have an altered state of consciousness. I shall be writing about this extensively in the future, as VR opens up many possibilities for exploring and inducing altered states, as well as understanding them better. I could go on at great length about Rheingold's book, but I think I said enough to communicate the excitement. Like techno logical developments before it - the automobile, the telephone, television, as just three examples - VR is going to change our world in both good and bad ways. "The advent of technology-generated hyper-reality could be the nightmarish "consensual hallucination" described by William Gibson in the novel Neuromancer, where the word cyberspace origi nated. Or the result might be an increase in human freedom and power, akin to the aftereffects of printing and communication technologies. Which way it will go -dystopia or empowerment - depends in part upon how people react to the unmasking of reality as a cognitive-perceptual construct. People tend to react in different ways to the news that reality might be an illusion, depending on their personal emotional attachment to their brand of reality. Denial, cognitive dissonance, resistance, and satori are all possible psychological reactions to the truth we are forced to face in the illusory realm of cyberspace, in roughly descending order of popularity." References: (1)Tart, C. T., Multiple personality, altered states and virtual reality: The world simulation process approach. Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders, in press. (2)Tart, C. T., States of Consciousness. El Cerrito, Califor nia, 1983. Originally published by Dutton, New York, 1975.