Title: Virtually Real
Author: Nancy Roberts
Date: 1/16/07
This is a story I have told many times: several years ago, I got a computer-based adventure game. It was a sort of mystery story in which you acted as the main character. You picked up items, clues, chatted with people, decided where to go and what to do. You solved puzzles, eventually working your way toward the solution to the “main mystery” of the game.
I started playing at about 2 or 3 in the afternoon. 10 hours or so later, I wondered if my kids were hungry for dinner. I’m dead serious. Fortunately, they were amused, but I was not only shocked, I realized that the whole concept of “being” someone, somewhere, somewhen else was amazingly seductive and potentially powerful.
Virtual Reality (VR) – of which a graphic adventure game is but a poor cousin – has been defined as “a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, real or imagined.”
The concept has been around since at least the 1970s, and has been variously attributed to Dan Brodes (The Judas Mandala, 1982 novel); VR Developer Jaron Lanier; Myron Krueger (who coined the term “artificial reality”) and William Gibson (Cyberspace). But just who first used the term “virtual reality” (and was actually heard by someone else) is uncertain.
A virtual reality can be something as simple and entertaining as an immersive game, like my adventure games, or something as complex and scientifically demanding as medical simulations, which help professionals develop skills without endangering real patients.
What they have in common is that there is no "there" there. The world you inhabit, the things you see, feel, taste and smell - and interact with - are not real, though as the VRs become more sophisticated, your brain might be hard pressed to know the difference. (It has actually been noted in research that certain forms of VR "rehearsal" are as effective at training people for such things as shooting baskets as are real practice sessions.)
There are several "methods" of delivering VR:
Simulation-based VR
Simulation-based virtual reality provides visual, motion, audio and proprioceptive cues to the user. The user interacts with the system by responding to the cues, leading to a system response and further cues based on those responses. Think of a flight simulator: you use a joystick and other controls to actually "fly" an airplane. In fact, some simulators count as actual training hours for student pilots.
Avatar-based VR
Your avatar is the you you want to be in a particular virtual world. Virtual worlds are built on real video, or in graphical realities. Users in a "distributed reality" can interact with one another via chat-type interchanges, or voice-simulations. These types of realities are often set in mythical or fanciful environments, often providing people an opportunity to do and be things not possible in day to day life (think Dungeons and Dragons).
Projector-based VR
This type of VR is often used for robot navigation, construction modeling an airplane simulation.
Desktop-based VRSimulation-based VR
This includes things like video games and other 3D-graphic virtual worlds.
True Immersive VR
Not yet ready for prime time, and some experts believe it will only happen with direct computer-brain interface.
Aside from your computer, there are some tools of the VR trade that can enhance the VR experience:
HMDs: Head Mounted Devices were already a reality as early as 1965, but these devices weren't ready for commercial use until nearly 1990. As we are told, "A typical HMD houses two miniature display screens and an optical system that channels the images from the screens to the eyes. A motion tracker continuously mesures teh position and orientation of the users head and allows the image-generating computer to adjust the scene representation to the current vieew. As a result, the viewer can look around and walk through the surrounding virtual environment."
BOOM: Binocular Omni-Orientation Monitors (from Fakespace) is essentially a box you look into through two holes, in which screens and an optical system provide a "world experience." Head movements are tracked and the box is manipulated to suit via sensors in the links of a supporting arm.
CAVE: Cave Automatic Virtual Evironment is another box, this time quite large, in which the user stands, and through projected stereo images on the walls and floors, gets the illusion of standing in another "world."
While there are few commercial examples of such VR devices, there are a number of readily available tools you can add to your computer system to enhance gaming experiences, such as force-feedback joysticks (with which you can "feel" the shock of a gun's kickback, for example) and chairs which actually rock and move with the action of the game. You can also get devices like "the perfect iPod accessory," aka "i-Theater, a completely new concept in head-worn personal displays. Featuring 230,000 pixel resolution in a truly lightweight design, this personal video display offers big pictures on-the-go in a compact AV unit.
"Weighing just 3.5 ounces, the i-Theater features a sleek, ergonomically comfortable and lightweight design. But don't let the small package fool you. All the necessary electronics and optics have been integrated into this compact, stylish, video-eyewear product. The i-Theater is a completely mobile video system that delivers a crisp, vivid-color, QVGA resolution (320 x 240) video image which is equivalent to a 50 inch video screen viewed from a distance of 8.5 feet. The full-screen image is compressed into two of the industry's smallest light-transmitting LCDs (liquid crystal displays), by means of award-winning technology, protected by more than 200 global patents." $319
Or if you want to spend a little more, try: "i-glasses Video 3D Pro. The i-glasses Video 3D Pro - Head Mounted Display (HMD) is a portable, high resolution video monitor for video professionals. Weighing in at only seven ounces, they're lightweight, comfortable, fully adjustable and can be used in conjunction with ordinary prescription eyeglasses. And now, due to recent advancements in technology, the VIDEO 3D Pro offers the capability to view interlaced 3D Video in True Stereoscopic 3D." $999
One of the more entertaining uses of VR is in the building of Virtual Worlds. As one purveyor, ActiveWorlds (www.activeworlds.com) tells us: "Active Worlds, the web's most powerful Virtual Reality experience, lets you visit and chat in incredible 3D worlds that are built by other users. Think you have what it takes to build your own world or Virtual Reality game? Active Worlds is the place for you, where in minutes you can create fascinating 3D worlds that others can visit and chat in. The Active Worlds Universe is a community of hundreds of thousands of users that chat and build 3D virtual reality environments in millions of square kilometers of virtual territory. Take a quick look at some of our satellite maps and see how our community has grown over the years. Launch the free software and come check us out for yourself. You'll be amazed at how vast our Virtual Reality universe is.
What can you do there:
• Build your own 3D virtual reality home on the Internet
• Shop online in our own 3D virtual reality mall and chat with store clerks (this is obviously the key!)
• Explore over 1000 unique virtual worlds
• Make new friends and chat with people from all over the globe
• Play interactive 2D and 3D games
• Choose from a vast range of avatar identities and chat with other avatars.
I tried out one of these virtual reality worlds, and while I didn't get hooked on it - it's a lot of work - it was quite an experience to "walk" around and chat with people, visiting the houses, nay, estates they had developed with imagination and care.
And of course there are the ever-popular MUDs (multi-user dungeons/domains) and MMO (massively multiplayer online) "games." I use the term "game" only to give you a notion of the kind of interaction you'll find in these worlds. You do create an avatar (or avatars), and you do advance through specific ranks depending on what you accomplish (through skill, talent, or chicanery), but otherwise, these worlds are as random, competitive, and ruthless as the real one. I have talked to gamers who will tell you quite honestly that for them, the game world is more real to them than the "real" world.
Gamers have found ways to cheat their way to higher ranks (creating bots that do all the tedious work of building up experience points necessary for advancement), or buying their way to fame and fortune (check out sites like http://www.mysupersales.com/ where you can buy items for some of the more popular multi-user games).
But beyond the gaming world, the concept of VR has some real promise for advancing science, training, even marketing and sales. For example, VR can be used for:
- Education
- Simulations: (the Clinical Simulation Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis is one of several trant recipients involved in a federal initiative that hopes to improve patient safety by using simulators as research tools, rathan than only as teaching aids. (Science Daily)
- Therapies: Exposure therapy, ranging from the treament of phobias to new approaches to treating PTSD.
- Sales/Marketing: (treating customers to VR tours of buildings, large installations and products, distant or complex products, or products that are made to order)
- Experimentation: Science Daily, Dec. 25, 2006: "By repeating the Stanley Milgram's classic experiment from the 1960s on obedience to authority -- that found people would administer apparently lethal electrical shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure -- in a virtual environment, the UCL (University College London) led study demonstrated for the first time that participants reacted as though the situation was real. Professor Mel Slater, of the UCL Dept. of Computer Science, says: “It has been argued before that immersive virtual environment can provide a useful tool for social psychological studies in general and our results show that this applies even in the extreme social situation investigated by Stanley Milgram."
For more information on this topic, visit:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base-onthenet.html
Author: Nancy Roberts
Date: 1/16/07
This is a story I have told many times: several years ago, I got a computer-based adventure game. It was a sort of mystery story in which you acted as the main character. You picked up items, clues, chatted with people, decided where to go and what to do. You solved puzzles, eventually working your way toward the solution to the “main mystery” of the game.
I started playing at about 2 or 3 in the afternoon. 10 hours or so later, I wondered if my kids were hungry for dinner. I’m dead serious. Fortunately, they were amused, but I was not only shocked, I realized that the whole concept of “being” someone, somewhere, somewhen else was amazingly seductive and potentially powerful.
Virtual Reality (VR) – of which a graphic adventure game is but a poor cousin – has been defined as “a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, real or imagined.”
The concept has been around since at least the 1970s, and has been variously attributed to Dan Brodes (The Judas Mandala, 1982 novel); VR Developer Jaron Lanier; Myron Krueger (who coined the term “artificial reality”) and William Gibson (Cyberspace). But just who first used the term “virtual reality” (and was actually heard by someone else) is uncertain.
A virtual reality can be something as simple and entertaining as an immersive game, like my adventure games, or something as complex and scientifically demanding as medical simulations, which help professionals develop skills without endangering real patients.
What they have in common is that there is no "there" there. The world you inhabit, the things you see, feel, taste and smell - and interact with - are not real, though as the VRs become more sophisticated, your brain might be hard pressed to know the difference. (It has actually been noted in research that certain forms of VR "rehearsal" are as effective at training people for such things as shooting baskets as are real practice sessions.)
There are several "methods" of delivering VR:
Simulation-based VR
Simulation-based virtual reality provides visual, motion, audio and proprioceptive cues to the user. The user interacts with the system by responding to the cues, leading to a system response and further cues based on those responses. Think of a flight simulator: you use a joystick and other controls to actually "fly" an airplane. In fact, some simulators count as actual training hours for student pilots.
Avatar-based VR
Your avatar is the you you want to be in a particular virtual world. Virtual worlds are built on real video, or in graphical realities. Users in a "distributed reality" can interact with one another via chat-type interchanges, or voice-simulations. These types of realities are often set in mythical or fanciful environments, often providing people an opportunity to do and be things not possible in day to day life (think Dungeons and Dragons).
Projector-based VR
This type of VR is often used for robot navigation, construction modeling an airplane simulation.
Desktop-based VRSimulation-based VR
This includes things like video games and other 3D-graphic virtual worlds.
True Immersive VR
Not yet ready for prime time, and some experts believe it will only happen with direct computer-brain interface.
Aside from your computer, there are some tools of the VR trade that can enhance the VR experience:
HMDs: Head Mounted Devices were already a reality as early as 1965, but these devices weren't ready for commercial use until nearly 1990. As we are told, "A typical HMD houses two miniature display screens and an optical system that channels the images from the screens to the eyes. A motion tracker continuously mesures teh position and orientation of the users head and allows the image-generating computer to adjust the scene representation to the current vieew. As a result, the viewer can look around and walk through the surrounding virtual environment."
BOOM: Binocular Omni-Orientation Monitors (from Fakespace) is essentially a box you look into through two holes, in which screens and an optical system provide a "world experience." Head movements are tracked and the box is manipulated to suit via sensors in the links of a supporting arm.
CAVE: Cave Automatic Virtual Evironment is another box, this time quite large, in which the user stands, and through projected stereo images on the walls and floors, gets the illusion of standing in another "world."
While there are few commercial examples of such VR devices, there are a number of readily available tools you can add to your computer system to enhance gaming experiences, such as force-feedback joysticks (with which you can "feel" the shock of a gun's kickback, for example) and chairs which actually rock and move with the action of the game. You can also get devices like "the perfect iPod accessory," aka "i-Theater, a completely new concept in head-worn personal displays. Featuring 230,000 pixel resolution in a truly lightweight design, this personal video display offers big pictures on-the-go in a compact AV unit.
"Weighing just 3.5 ounces, the i-Theater features a sleek, ergonomically comfortable and lightweight design. But don't let the small package fool you. All the necessary electronics and optics have been integrated into this compact, stylish, video-eyewear product. The i-Theater is a completely mobile video system that delivers a crisp, vivid-color, QVGA resolution (320 x 240) video image which is equivalent to a 50 inch video screen viewed from a distance of 8.5 feet. The full-screen image is compressed into two of the industry's smallest light-transmitting LCDs (liquid crystal displays), by means of award-winning technology, protected by more than 200 global patents." $319One of the more entertaining uses of VR is in the building of Virtual Worlds. As one purveyor, ActiveWorlds (www.activeworlds.com) tells us: "Active Worlds, the web's most powerful Virtual Reality experience, lets you visit and chat in incredible 3D worlds that are built by other users. Think you have what it takes to build your own world or Virtual Reality game? Active Worlds is the place for you, where in minutes you can create fascinating 3D worlds that others can visit and chat in. The Active Worlds Universe is a community of hundreds of thousands of users that chat and build 3D virtual reality environments in millions of square kilometers of virtual territory. Take a quick look at some of our satellite maps and see how our community has grown over the years. Launch the free software and come check us out for yourself. You'll be amazed at how vast our Virtual Reality universe is.
What can you do there:
• Build your own 3D virtual reality home on the Internet
• Shop online in our own 3D virtual reality mall and chat with store clerks (this is obviously the key!)
• Explore over 1000 unique virtual worlds
• Make new friends and chat with people from all over the globe
• Play interactive 2D and 3D games
• Choose from a vast range of avatar identities and chat with other avatars.
I tried out one of these virtual reality worlds, and while I didn't get hooked on it - it's a lot of work - it was quite an experience to "walk" around and chat with people, visiting the houses, nay, estates they had developed with imagination and care.
And of course there are the ever-popular MUDs (multi-user dungeons/domains) and MMO (massively multiplayer online) "games." I use the term "game" only to give you a notion of the kind of interaction you'll find in these worlds. You do create an avatar (or avatars), and you do advance through specific ranks depending on what you accomplish (through skill, talent, or chicanery), but otherwise, these worlds are as random, competitive, and ruthless as the real one. I have talked to gamers who will tell you quite honestly that for them, the game world is more real to them than the "real" world.
Gamers have found ways to cheat their way to higher ranks (creating bots that do all the tedious work of building up experience points necessary for advancement), or buying their way to fame and fortune (check out sites like http://www.mysupersales.com/ where you can buy items for some of the more popular multi-user games).
But beyond the gaming world, the concept of VR has some real promise for advancing science, training, even marketing and sales. For example, VR can be used for:
- Education
- Simulations: (the Clinical Simulation Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis is one of several trant recipients involved in a federal initiative that hopes to improve patient safety by using simulators as research tools, rathan than only as teaching aids. (Science Daily)
- Therapies: Exposure therapy, ranging from the treament of phobias to new approaches to treating PTSD.
- Sales/Marketing: (treating customers to VR tours of buildings, large installations and products, distant or complex products, or products that are made to order)
- Experimentation: Science Daily, Dec. 25, 2006: "By repeating the Stanley Milgram's classic experiment from the 1960s on obedience to authority -- that found people would administer apparently lethal electrical shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure -- in a virtual environment, the UCL (University College London) led study demonstrated for the first time that participants reacted as though the situation was real. Professor Mel Slater, of the UCL Dept. of Computer Science, says: “It has been argued before that immersive virtual environment can provide a useful tool for social psychological studies in general and our results show that this applies even in the extreme social situation investigated by Stanley Milgram."
For more information on this topic, visit:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base-onthenet.html
Comments