From: bross@nas.nasa.gov (Bill Ross) Subject: VR '91/SF: Tuesday: Lanier Date: Mon, 7 Oct 91 01:28:10 GMT Organization: NASA Ames Research Center Keynote address: Jaron Lanier 1st signs of maturation in industry: real applications are in the field. Trend in applications: e.g. where data exists and too much time is spent managing it. AI = Assistive Intelligence; software making choices in ways of displaying data & user accepting/rejecting. For the next 10 years, software will be the rate-limiting step. Don't expect VR to explode like PCs did: PCs had a ready-made, efficiently manipulable world of symbols to operate on. It takes a year per virtual world model. Level of hype is counterproductive - shares blame - too much time spent educating users on the limits vs. what their expectations are. E.g. sex w/ VR: so far from what VR can do & what sex is. Project w/ MCA: VR theater w/ standup MC who changes into lots of creatures along the way - an opportunity to embed VR in culture & create a market for it. That & surgical & endoscopic stuff is hugely software intensive. But clients want their applications done rather than tools for building applications faster. Q: What to tell people back at med school in Arkansas? A: Fields are: endoscopy, physiotherapy, diagnosis, handicapped. 6 months per model of a procedure, hope to eventually auto-import imaging data. Phys therapy: learning how things work, slowing down gravity to learn juggling. Sign language -> synthesized speech. Maybe phobic desensitization. Q: Tools for VR object creation? A: sometime next year Q: Programming language for VR generation? A: expect in 5 years a mixture of manual & automatic; key is how combined. Q: Standards? A: infuriating necessity: more inadequate => more easily adopted. Expect to learn a lot in next few years. 3D & texture is easy, dynamics is hard. Why we aren't exhibiting here: can only do so many conferences a year; business decision. Q: will you publish your in-house standard? A: no one has burningly asked; don't know. Q: ..Swivel 3D? A: porting to other machines than Mac, working on "Swivelocity" Q: # of VPL VR systems sold? A: 550-570. expect high end market is ~10,000; low end could sell millions & then they'd be gone Q: real time radiosity, improvements in visuals? A: will charge extra .. what you need depends on the application. Q: breakdown of 6 months spent on surgical case A: multiple iteration & adjudication individual users' ideas. Turnarond time for small changes is the critical factor. Q: who does the development on your systems in the field A: us (contract), customer (in-house) or 3rd party Q: your dreams A: shared VR: replace phone; shared dreams: starting ~50 years from now. Hope it kills tv. Hope it suggests a paradigm for people/technology relation; nowadays technology improvements tend to be cultural rather than survival oriented. [[local TV cameraman blocks my view at this point, filming into another audience member's face ~5' from lens, then points it at person sitting behind me]] ... Q: glove? A: not the universal interface; maybe as tactile feedback improves - now selling low-tac pneumatic system from England: you can tell what object you picked up behind you. Q: can you identify any basic perceptual research that would help A: used to try to keep track of this. In part it's been isolated, specific studies, but not how it all integrates. HITL, NASA Ames should advance field a bit. Q: sound A: more advanced than visual, not included as a standard. Audiosphere cased on Convolvotron w/ reflections & material types coming up this year.