Set The Style! Set The Trend! Vision! Imagine! Create!

Awe Video Tokens - Introduction to Video Virtual Internet

Global Theater of Awakening

Includes Holographic Imaginery and the concept that the whole network of knowledge and connections is everywhere distributed for instant and deep access. This will allow the instant re-creation of extended reality everywhere linked with any other place anywhere. This will allow for the fusion of the local vernacular and new spontaneous vernacular processes into new self-educating global form.

Ta panta rei --- all is flux

Heraclitus of Ephesus, sixth century B.C.

...to (in)form buildings with thematic meaning, they must convey a gestalt, the whole must be more than the sum of the parts, and there must also be an ambiguity and paradox immanent within that gestalt, as a tension.

(Quoting Heckscher on composition...)

It is the taut composition which contains contrapuntal relationships, equal combinations, inflected fragments, and acknowledged dualities. It is the unity which maintains, but only just maintains, a control over the clashing elements which compose it.

Chaos is very near, its nearness, but its avoidance, gives ...force.

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1977

Awe ViDeo NetsWorth is explicitly mission-driven, a shared commitment to Awe Creation Through the lens of creative comprehension. We unify the complex solution the range of human existence with the means to transit from the dream that has become the nightmare of contraction and failed impulse. We bring to the cultural a new life, a new life-impulse, and a new life consciousness. We empower the specific to impress the Mother of All Potential through the acknowledged, the empowering All Awe.

Here is not an appeal for the imitation of strict vernacular but rather recognition that just as in the past, differing climates and cultures should deterministically produce different design solutions, and produce discrete conventions of symbol and signal appropriate to their climatic and cultural environment. This does produce a distinct, profound regional identity and variety for architheater forms throughout the world.

The Modern Movement's main failure was that it became a metaphor for the hubris of the Newtonian mechanistic paradigm while embracing a relativistic nilism. It imposes an anonymous, excessively top-down homogeneity worldwide. It ignores global vernacular diversity of cultural response; to a plethora of conceptual constraints ---so identity is forbidden in the Machine Age. How then do we transcend this failure --- and restore Identification, our empathic self-similarity

The Future is Dynamic Adaptive Intelligent Architheater!

Imagine stepping through a looking glass in constant surprising, entertaining change. Wherever you move the Space adapts and changes. You become completely immersed in an Extended Reality Universe. Extended Reality becomes the entire ambient Form of Experience. You Are The Space! The Space is Creative.

The idea is not to simulate Science fiction, Fantasy and Futuristic Adventure but to be Science fiction, Fantasy and Futuristic Adventure Itself.

Many recent discussions of virtual reality have revolved around the technology used. I have chosen in this section to include investigations into the philosophical implications of virtual reality thereby expanding the definition to include more than data glove and headset experiences. Cross-fertilization of ideas is an important component in the evolution of any technology or art form.

The fusion of disciplines is the basis for collaborative authorship of virtual Video. In the context of this section I shall use ViDeo to represent the virtuality of video, in the Character sense and in the suddenness. The construction of the ViDeo Spaces involves the collaberation of visual artists, architects, computer-aided design teams, computer programmers, musicians and various recording specialists as well as other disciplines.

As far as architectural application is concerned, we must look at the temporal as well as the spatial, at how quite literally, the dynamics (of systems applications) can inform the statics (forms) of building. The aesthetics of the banal imitation of some motif of some fabricated Hip Scene is simply not the picture!

The Whole Architectural Structure Functions as a Single Form and Sign of Connectivity.

Aristotle implied over two millennia ago that the proper investigation required for Truth was one of Telos, form being the result of the processes that engendered it. Now we can Say in This Time, Process, Form and Relationship are unified in the realization of truth.

Here are some brief indications of how the assimilation of new dynamical systems knowledge, married with new environmental and structural engineering, plus materials and information technologies, might Emerge Architheater. All are systems (or functions) leading a potential emergent form.

The first emergent feedback-led application is in the design process itself; the form(al cause) of human environment being the result of the consultative process that informed it. If this process fully involves the users and all other concerned parties, and takes full note of all the site and brief constraints and histories; a democracy of rich mutual feedback will result.

The System Designers can then act as mediators, coordinators and catalyst for emergent, complex spontaneous and entertaining forms that arises, which appropriately should epitomize the "final cause" of least action in being the optimum artifact for its role.

The Whole Experience will expand to an Extended Real-time Community.

Members will be able to tune-in at anytime through real-time Internet video and community links.

Experiential control will increasingly become a hybrid of feedbacks between active elements, such as movement, and the passive, such as walls and tables. Low-tech, vernacular strategies for environmental control, fused with the higher technology of computerized control will fuse into the total experiential domain.

A facade incorporating electrochromic glass that is linked into a central processing unit with a parallel-processing neural network can instantaneously regulate solar gain by adjusting facade opaqueness or well as a myriad of Image Forms, depending on the facade's orientation. Such systems may display a form of metabolic homeostasis known in artificial intelligence circles as emergence; allowing for simple system-memory and learning capacities. This has everything to do with recursive feedback loops being employed in environmental services design. Dynamics can synthesize clearly, with statics. The question is one of the appropriate levels of automation. The same is true for Architheater.

For example, the people using the building form their own interface, their own dynamical sub-system. They should be included as an integral part of the feedback processes involved in the building's climatic and environmental performance.

By virtue of its emergent homeostatic qualities, the environment will be able to adapt readily to these perturbations, and the people will feel more in touch with, and in control of, and interactive with their environments.

Polyvalent facades will, using liquid crystal technologies (glass is made from silica --- as is the LCD and the silicon chip) convey graphic information on the skins of buildings for the external world to observe. Chameleon buildings will for example, be able to react to passing clouds, altering facade U-values and values for solar gain, to compensate for those clouds, or the tracking shadows cast by neighboring buildings. The pixel-like elements of a facade might communicate ambiently in the manner of some cellular automata, feeding back continually with environmental stimuli. A similar ambient music real-time soundscape might therefore truly `melt' the `Frozen Music' of architecture: defining it as a musical instrument itself, as played by its environment.

A major design constraint (and therefore, opportunity) for environment control is that strategies and final design solutions must adapt to the local moment (and therefore inevitably, the cultural readings) of sites: hence the use of the term `Vernacular', as a methodology, not an aesthetic, of Complexity, as applied to architecture. Vernacular buildings transform information. They are appropriate, creating a symbolic rubric of materials and forms connoting a cultural response to a particular environment. The vernacular is emergent, bottom-up, distributed and parallel, hence its veracity. It conveys an irreducible order: making the whole greater than the sum of the parts, a gestalt in effect. Any architecture that minimizes local (and therefore global) entropy-production (information and energy waste), by fusing passive/active strategies to optimize energy load; in exchange for optimized emergent complexity (or contradiction!), be it fractal detail for the eye at different scales, or minimum structure for maximum strength - or opposing tensile with compressive elements, the dynamic against the static; will be more likely to succeed in its purpose. It will form a better cultural response, a better metaphor for our understanding of reality; the ultimate goal of all art and science - (both of) which architecture ideally, should epitomize.

This is a recognition that just as in the past, differing climates and cultures should deterministically produce different design solutions, and produce discrete architecture appropriate to their climatic and cultural environment. This does produce a distinct, profound regional identity and variety for architectural form throughout the world, as we are already seeing.

The Modern Movement's main failure was that it became a metaphor for the hubris of the Newtonian mechanistic paradigm. It imposed an anonymous, excessively top-down homogeneity worldwide (the International Style is also the most internationally loathed). It ignored global vernacular architectural diversity of cultural response; to a plethora of environmental constraints --- so identity was forbidden for the Machine Age. How then do we transcend this failure --- and restore Identification (which is a form of empathic self-similarity)? Rather than merely imitating the statics of past and nostalgia (Planet Hollywood), we are now also liberated to epitomize the elegance of structure thematic/contextual resonance, and the economies of vernacular-informed architecture. This is the methodological Genius Loci of Complexity; celebrating diversity and contextual veracity over homogenized anomie, and applying engineering elegance and efficiency as the proper syntheses of the dynamics of function with the statics of form.

Architecture, as a cultural artifact that inevitably will be imbued with the current zeitgeist, should assimilate as much of the implications of Harmonic Chaos Dynamical Symmetry. We have the opportunity to (re)present architecture in entirely novel ways, beyond statics and state, but rather via dynamics and process: as tension, as paradox, as a dynamical unity of opposites, linking the finite with its reciprocal, the infinite, fusing the linear with the non-linear, the ordered with the random - and causality with chance. This is the logos of Heraclitus of Ephesus, or the Tao of Lao Tsu. It is a universal archetype, in the Jungian sense.

Immersive Pods can be of all sorts and alternatively private and communal with different levels of technology with not 3 or 4 programs but 100s continually being updated and perhaps created real-time. We will invite VR artists to contribute unique VR experiences for public experience and over time to be licensed.

Architecture is both an existential and ideological enclosure. In the latter half of the 20th Century we have witnessed the progressive dematerialization of architecture - a search for singular lightness and mutability.

A curriculum of these transformations could be:

Responsive soft architecture in the 60's

Kinetic luminous sculpture in the 70's

Virtual architecture in the 80's

Televirtual architecture in the 90's

Holo Extended architecture of the 21st century

Firstly - examples of responsive soft architecture in the late 60's, early 70's. These are inflatable structures - built up from air - thin skinned - transparent - lightweight - compact yet large scale - responsive - mobile - personal and sensuous.

A second stage of development of these inflatable structure was the incorporation of other media - light, slide projection, film sound. Architecture becomes event structure - the projection surface becomes expanded cinema - the public jumps into the screen and into the image - here is a literal immersion in the pictorial/cinematic space - we can see that expanded cinema was clearly the precursor of the Immersive VR strategies today.

In the 70's a kinetic luminous architecture - abandoning even the skin - just the apparatus that are the carriers of light. Then the discovery of laser technology - side by side with holography the ostensible avatar of a total architecture of light.

In the early 80's, the discovery of virtual architecture.

The Narrative Landscape, then the Legible City, builds whole cities out of virtual matter. Solid architecture is replaced by an immaterial structure of letters and words and sentences. The city then as density of visualized information - and the cyclist as a reader of this city. The Legible City mirrors the objective world into a virtual imaginative space - it deconstructs the literal and evokes a fluid poetics of place, person and intimate apprehension.

Similarly the Virtual Museum deconstructs the literal museum, and in its last room proclaims the total evanescence of form and the supremacy of those digital techniques that now can illuminate the A to Z of virtual formations.

The step from virtual to televirtual architecture by showing you TELEVIRTUAL CHIT CHAT which was an interactive televirtual installation in 1993 between two sites - the IMAGINA in Monte Carlo and the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe.

Two players who were geographically distant from each other shared a virtual image space. Letters could be chosen from a simulated computer keyboard. The position, size and shape of these letters could then be interactively manipulated over a three-dimensional game board whose surface was divided into the familiar grid of 64 squares. A map on the surface of the game board showed Europe between Monte Carlo and Karlsruhe - representing the geography that separated the two players.

In TELEVIRTUAL CHIT CHAT the two players face each other in a televirtual space of alphabetic forms, so that their formal interaction became at the same time a tentative exchange of letters, syllables, and words. Here text has detached itself from the surface of the page and assumes an autonomous existence, taking on the status of a fictitious language which at the same time constitutes the shared virtual environment where this communication takes place - a telematic graffiti which becomes itself the architecture of an interactive and evanescent televirtual city.

Like Italo Calvino's literary multiformities of Venice, a superfluity of new cities can now by constructed in Cyberspace, boundaried only by the limits of what we can propose. But even at that boundary, we can then create algorithmic architectures that will autonomously extend those cities beyond our imagination.

Critical to the project is the development and implementation of networking approaches, including modem-to-modem, server, and high bandwidth connectivity. Telecommunications specialists collaborate with the design team to resolve problems of connectivity in immersion environments.

The application of artificial intelligence, in the form of agents (or guides) and smart objects, is an essential area of development. The inclusion of investigators in the areas of interface design, smart objects, and artificial intelligence is a major component.

Multi-user interaction and groupware performance, establishes protocols within networked immersion environments, and suggests standards. The contribution of communication specialists addresses aspects of documentation and standardization.

The Fun House Metaphor

Fun house: a building in an amusement park that contains various devices designed to startle or amuse. Webster's Dictionary, 1992 While making metaphorical reference to the 'fun house' found throughout traditional amusement parks, the application is an investigation of interaction and perception employing networked, immersion based Awe ViDeo.

The fun house metaphor is particularly applicable as a container for virtual experience. Upon entering a fun house, one is acutely aware of being cast into a different world. And one's senses are amused and assaulted by a number of devices - trick mirrors, fantasy characters, manipulation of gravity, spatial disorientation, mazes and sound, for example. In the virtual Fun House, various traditional devices are adapted and some new ones are offered.

Key attributes to be found in the Fun House include:

Objectification of 'self' within an immersion environment.Users can select their image from a library including Frankenstein, Dracula, and a doctor, among others. When entering the Fun House, users can see their image reflected in real time in a mirror. They can also see the images of other users. Users can extend their hands and wave at each other - a basic and highly communicative form of human expression.

Interaction with a client (or agent) that has an 'artificial intelligence.' When entering the Fun House a client greets you and speaks. It has a polite behavior and is programmed to face you, follow at a certain distance, and to stay out of your way. After a while, it stops following and says goodbye. Smart objects are also incorporated; touching them calls events within the program.

Interaction with multiple users in real time.Networked telecommunications allow for the simultaneous support of multiple users within the Fun House. Each user can see the other, have an independent point of view, and move objects.

Links to moving objects.The Fun House features a Merry-go-round; users can grab hold and catch a ride while music plays.

Objects attach themselves to users. The Fun House features a Flying Saucer ride, where users are transported up into the spacecraft, and they can pilot its flight. The event calls the 'beaming up' of the user and a whirring sound associated with flying saucers.

Attributes of physical laws.The Fun House features a Ball Game, where users pick up a ball and throw it at targets. The ball falls, bounces, and loses velocity. Thus gravity, velocity, and friction are articulated. The motion of the ball is sound intensive.

New directions

The Music Room, Construction Room, and Painting Room. These are friendly and intuitive environments that require little learning curve to utilize. Instructions are multilingual, and the environment is co-habited by small agents or 'beasons' that are programmed with a low level artificial intelligence. There are guides to the various interactive objects, and they demonstrate how the environment functions by literal illustration. In the Music Room they run around and make contact with the instruments, and thus play music. Users can see which instruments produce what sounds and how to perform them. Intuitive controls are available for navigating around in the room.

The Music Room contains basic instruments. The largest is a large six-note keyboard attached to a wall. This instrument plays a pentatonic scale in three voices - orchestra, choir, and percussion. It is performed by touching the keys, or by simply waving ones hand within close proximity. The other instruments are a drum and shakers.

The Construction Room is designed for young children. It contains building blocks which can be assembled to construct objects, sort of a virtual Lego set. In this case, there is a nearly infinite supply of blocks, and one can enter into some of the objects created, such as a house. The 'beasons' co-inhabit this site as well, bounce merrily on the blocks, and illustrate how to stack them.

The Painting Studio is quite literal - a site for making paintings or graffiti. The user can select from a number of 'brush' effects, and choose colors.

The Virtual City

Another application currently under design is a virtual city. Inspired in part by the Music Room type applications, the city is an actual city, inhabited by a multitude of participants, and each with their own purposes. Imagine a virtual city complete with private spaces or domiciles, parks, stores, entertainment centers. As much as a grand social experiment, it also is a far-reaching graphical user interface (GUI) for electronic home shopping and entertainment.

The salient points of the virtual city include:

A distributed, three dimensional inhabitable environment

Investigation of tele-existence in a distributed virtual construct

Capability of supporting potentially unlimited participants

Private spaces, property and moral code

Exploration of tools to alter the environment, while inhabiting it

Interface (GUI) for home shopping and entertainment.

The idea of a distributed application based on the notion of an inhabited city, is fascinating. Traversing the city and encountering other inhabitants from all over the world will be a startling experience.

Telentainment and design

The last area of investigation includes distributed virtual reality as an interface for telentertainment and design. The range of possible applications is broad.

(Education can benefit with regard to long distance learning, and the industry can gain from a higher level of video teleconferencing. This raises the question, what is the advantage of distributed virtual reality over video teleconferencing. And the answer is, the relationship to the subject.)

In a telentainment session employing distributed virtual reality, multiple participants can share a dynamic relationship with their subject. For an example, imagine a team of automobile designers discussing options via video teleconferencing. To look at the subject, they might program a pre-recorded videotape, highlighting the desired aspects.

The following are salient aspects of a design studio which would employ distributed virtual reality:

The virtual environment supports interaction among networked remote players, for the purpose of telentainment.

The application establishes a relationship between an actual workstation, and a virtual workstation, operators have the capability of switching back and forth, employing a windowing method.

Tele-existence is made evident thru synchronous voice communication, and the capability of each member to 'see' the other members in the virtual environment.

Stations consist of display, stylus, keyboard and mouse; additional input devices include head mounted displays, data gloves, and machine vision for voice and gesture recognition.

Design teams utilize freely available software.

Peer-to-peer networking

The advantages of, distributed design stations are numerous, but an essential point is economy. The other key point is human experience. Teams located in remote sites and benefit from a collective design experience.

Connectivity

The basis for distributed virtual reality is a function of telecommunications. Two or more sites are joined by an operating system, which can employ a number of telecommunication delivery services

Direct dial up lines

Internet computer network

High band networks

Cable television

Wireless

Pre-programmed Templates

Select functions for point to point include:

Providing all functions of the virtual world creation software in a distributed manner; the world and its attributes are distributed to each node, and one node is specified to be the controller

Providing constant views and updates of each users object manipulations; users can move objects, including themselves, and updates to position and change occur with imperceptible update cycles

Writing and saving files to record the manipulations to objects; users can change worlds and carry an object with them into another world.

The formation of a client-server model, where multiple users can simultaneously share immersion environments

The servers or nodes are to be located across the world and can be updated automatically via the Internet

The nodes will offer sites for access and distribution of virtual reality software

The nodes will support multiple platforms.

Distributed virtual reality has a history and has been given many different forms, shaped by varied intentions. It also has the promise of a future, marking the advancing edge of a new industry.

Further Introduction to Holo'Extended Reality (HER)

Includes Holographic Imaginery and the concept that the whole network of knowledge and connections is everywhere distributed for instant and deep access. This will allow the instant re-creation of extended reality everywhere linked with any other place anywhere. This will allow for the fusion of the local vernacular into new spontaneous vernacular processes.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information... A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky... Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding... And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner Eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

-William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

These lines are culled from a science fiction masterpiece in which human existence is intertwined with virtual worlds and existence, computer images generating a secondary but no less real plane of reality. However, the roots of human virtual experience go much farther back, and are not solely the domain of silicon systems. The founding and exploration of virtual worlds is something people have been fascinated by since the dawn of language and storytelling, and the vibrant VR systems which are showcased today, held up as the best and brightest of human technology, actually have much in common with older, universally experienced and much more down to earth forms of education and entertainment.

Virtual reality does not only mean headsets, data gloves and intricate computer programs to fool the human senses. Virtual reality and virtual experience are anything that presents a realm different from the everyday world that the viewer, for a time and in a certain scope, can accept as real. These realities can be grouped along lines such as textual vs. visual, passive vs. (inter)active, and many other less obvious divisions.

Historically, theatrical drama and the novel is the first popular, portable form of virtual reality experience designed for entertainment and education and made widely available. Such extended literary works provide a reality distanced from what the reader can physically experience by history, geography, or imagination. Decorated with visual imagery, populated with characters, and given narrative dynamic by plot and conflict, literary worlds can be the most realistic virtual experience--the world can become personal because the reader must create the mental images themselves.

Novels are a textual, passive VR experience; the world is conveyed through written language, and the reader passively "experiences" the events. Nonetheless, they have historical pull on all types of virtual experience--the basis for most types of immersionary experience is storytelling.

Movies are arguably the best-developed and best-known form of virtual experience. A fantasy world and an act of escapism, cinematic narrative uses complex system of continuity and analytical editing to provide complete immersion in the VR world; the viewer is presented with plot, mis-en-scene, and stars as denizens of this virtual world. Cinema can even seem more realistic than the everyday world--manipulating time and space to provide a seamless and perpetually active panorama for the viewer.

Movies are a visual, passive VR experience. They are VR because they provide immersion in a powerful virtual world, in a way which is common to nearly everyone in a technological culture--nearly everyone has gasped and felt their their throat go dry at a slasher or horror film, or cried while watching a romance or war film...

Interestingly, cinema has also demonstrated that the immersionary quality of virtual experience is subjective and dependent upon the viewer's culture and prior experience with the media. The disorientation a US movie viewer often experiences while watching a foreign film (even if the movie is made in English) results mainly from something as simple editing conventions--shots not framed by Hollywood standards, dialogue cuts not standardized shot/reverse shot, continuity and eyeline matches not present. Similarly, a viewer who spends their entire cinematic life watching Young German Cinema of the 1960's would feel a similar sense of disorientation watching contemporary Hollywood fare, all because of minute and often imperceptible production decisions.

MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs are all online, interactive virtual forums where users communicate in real time through typed and attributed text, speaking through virtual characters of their own creation and description and living in complex virtual worlds limited only by physical disk space on an intangible server and the imagination of the citizens. They are used for entertainment and games, social interaction, and even professional conferencing. Traditional senses of persona & ego do not apply here--a person's concept of themselves or your perception of them (their "description") can change at a character's whim. In a very real sense, subjects create and define their own existence. In a world this personal and interactive, true feeling and emotion become a part of the experience--a user can laugh or cry at the keyboard, be excited or bored, feel loved, sympathetic or spurned. It is an experience that cannot really be described or understood until you've thrown yourself into it.

Home video games on personal computers and dedicated game systems represent a turning point in the development of virtual reality--they are the first experience that many consumers and families unfamiliar with computer technology have with computer VR in any sense. These types of systems, while they may not seem like virtual worlds, actually can provide a very intense (while self-conscious) immersion--man a letter to parenting magazines deplores the addictive qualities of video games and possible psychological ramifications on the young. Sega, Nintendo, Atari and the like are actually paving the way for VR systems to be accepted into our culture, familiarizing consumers with technology and firmly establishing computer generated virtual experience as a form of entertainment. Whether or not this unquestioning assimilation of VR experience into contemporary culture is warranted, however, is a question worthy of debate.

The height of VR computer gaming technology at this time is the First-Person Perspective game, a format that presents the screen image as the protagonist's line of vision, and the player in a sense is the involved character. The viewer controls movement and action, which usually consists of a variation on the "run through a maze and find bigger guns while shooting anything that moves" theme. These games are a richly visual and auditory, interactive form of virtual reality, although the plot is almost always linear--the viewer is simply finding a way through a predetermined path, not actually controlling the outcome of the scenario in any way.

The immersionary aspect of these games is among the most intense available in any form of virtual reality. A well-written and crafted game playing experience can result in psychologically and physiologically real experiences of panic, anxiety, accomplishment and relief, and if the authors bother to construct an equally textured plot to accompany the action, real character empathy and interaction take place as well.

VR Virtues and Vices

She drifts into the gray room. As she waves her hands over the walls, they change to a bright yellow. Sticking her hand through the wall, she pulls open a large picture window and the afternoon sun now streams into the rapidly changing room. A few more gestures of her hand and a door appears across from the window, a couch and chairs fall into place in a neat semi circle, and a hanging light sprouts from the ceiling.

"Now the finishing touches," she says to herself. "Some plants over by the window, a fish lamp in the corner, and some paintings on the wall." With her words, the objects appear. She brings her client into the newly created room and as the client walks around the room, picking up the objects, sitting in the chairs, and looking out the window, his smile signals his approval. Finished with the showing, they both remove their head-mounted-displays and sensor gloves and they are back in the architect's office, having left it only in their perceptions.

This image of the future is the newest hype of the present: virtual reality. The technology to implement this type of mental space travel exists now or will in the next few years. Its uses include architectural design, product design, entertainment, surgical simulation, flight simulation, education, and cyber sex. And some people predict that virtual reality may completely change the world as much as the first telegraphs or even the first languages, by allowing people to be mentally in any reality, actual or completely imaginary, without having to move one inch physically. They argue that by allowing you to be anyone (or anything) with anyone, anywhere, new undreamed of forms of communication and understanding will be opened up. Virtual reality can be considered socially acceptable electronic LSD.

Basic ideas and equipment

Since virtual reality is such a big fad in the world of technology of course every one wants to use to describe everything from a Viewmaster 3D viewer to simple video games just so that they can get on the latest bandwagon. The true definition of virtual reality is still under a lot of debate, but the simplest explanation is that it is any media where you are completely immersed in the data, where you feel that you have actually been transported to another world, not just looking at one on a screen.

To achieve this most systems involve a helmet that contains two little television screens or liquid crystal displays as in protable TV's. A computer controls that image that is produced on these screens, and since the image presented to each eye is slightly different, the image appears three dimensional as with 3D movies. The computer tracks where in the room your head is and which way it's pointing, so that as you move your head around, the computer recalculates the image canceling any movement you've made. This makes the virtual world appear stationary as you walk through, just as the real world does. In other words, if you swing your head to the left, the entire computer image is rotated to the right to give you the feeling of looking around a virtual room.

Usually the view of the external world is blocked off, so the reality you enter is completely composed of the computer generated images, but some people are trying to create helmets that mix a view of the external world in with the computer images, allowing virtual objects to be interspersed with real objects. These are called see-thru or half-silvered displays.

Some people like to make a distinction between immersive and non-immersive virtual reality. Immersive virtual reality would be where the user feels totally enclosed in the environment as with the head mounted display described above. Non_immersive virtual reality would be where you are still looking at an image on a television screen in front of you of a model of a building or some other object. The display may still be three dimensional, but it does not surround the user by 360 degrees. This distinction was made so that companies that made normal non-immersive three dimensional modeling programs on a flat computer screen could call their programs "virtual reality" since it is such a hyped technology. It is easier to just consider virtual reality as the immersive version. Otherwise it is too general a term, applying to computer aided modeling programs among other myriad programs.

To make interaction with the virtual objects around the user as intuitive as possible a glove is usually used as input. The glove has sensors on it that allows the computer to tell the position of the entire hand and each of its joints. With this data, the computer can create a virtual copy of the user's hand floating in front of them in the displays. Sometimes full body suits lined with sensors can be worn, so that the entire body can be used for interactions, but these are prohibitively expensive right now and very bulky, making entry and exit painful.

Once the hand is part of the virtual image, the user can then just play with objects as they do in the real world, picking them up, turning them around, throwing them etc. This is supposedly easier than using a keyboard or joystick for input as with conventional computers, but the vast differences in people's hand sizes and motions make it difficult for the computer to always interpret correctly what the user is attempting to do.

Some of the more advanced systems include 3D or binaural sound which make the user feel immersed in a three dimensional sound environment just as the computer images make the visual environment immersive. With stereo sound, there are just two signals, one for each ear, and certain sounds are louder in different ears, making those sounds seem to come more from one side. Stereo sounds still seem to come from inside the head, just closer to one ear or the other. The sounds are not externalized. With binaural sound on the other hand, the sound is externalized.

To do this, a computer is given the position of the two ears and the position of certain sound sources. It then computes the different sounds that would arrive at the two ears given their direction, intensity, etc. A large part of our ability to discern the direction of sounds has to do with the pinnae, the external parts of our ears that we can see. The pinnae change the quality of the sound depending on its direction relative to the ear, and the computer simulations add this factor into the equations when determining the sound arriving at the ears. The final calculated sound is then played into the ears through normal headphones, but the sounds seem to exist in the outside world, adding another element of realism to the outside world.

Some very expensive systems incorporate force feedback so that when the user grabs a virtual object, their hand is stopped and they can feel the texture of the object. This is often done with bulky motors that are slow to respond. This is one of the big problems with current virtual reality systems: you hand just seems to go right through everything you touch, so to accomplish anything with your hand, you have to be looking at it at the same time, since you can't just feel your way.

Other senses have been largely ignored. There are only one or two devices that can produce tactile senses such as heat and cold. There are no odor simulators or gustatory output devices currently in existence, probably because most virtual reality investigators feel that taste and smell are primitive senses and they aren't really necessary to accomplish most tasks. But since these senses are so primitive, there are often most effective at bringing a flood of emotions with a single scent or flavor. Taste and smell seem most directly linked to memory of all the senses. A single whiff of a flower can bring back an entire scene of a childhood house or a certain food can make us remember every detail of a great restaurant, so perhaps these senses should be looked into more to add a more emotional side to virtual reality. But what scientists want their million-dollar piece of high-tech gadgetry compared to a scratch and sniff?

What is most important with all of these various pieces of hardware to read from and send signals to the body is to produce a sense of reality. As long as the user is convinced that they have actually been transported to another place, the concept of virtual reality is successful. Often the study of perception is brought in to measure this. If we can measure how accurate a certain sound or image has to be so that the user can't tell the difference between the simulated stimulus and a real stimulus we have succeeded in fooling that sense. Once a certain amount of accuracy has been achieved in a stimulus, we know we can stop working on that and apply our time to a different sense that has been ignored.

But none of the stimuli are good enough yet to be considered a solved problem. Most common virtual reality displays have so a low image quality that the user is effectively legally blind in the virtual world. Sound is often ignored and force feedback is only taking its first steps. It will be a long time before we could wake up inside a virtual reality and not be able to tell that it wasn't reality. That doesn't mean that virtual reality isn't useful right now. Television is not convincing enough to fool us into thinking it is real, but it still can convey a lot of ideas that a drawing cannot. Analogously, virtual reality is one more step convincing than television or movies or records or any conventional technology.

As virtual reality becomes a more mature technology, we will have more and more sensors and output devices strapped on to our body: gloves, helmets, headphones, force feedback suits, etc. Soon, the user will be so covered in apparatus the will look like some suffocating robot. They will be so encumbered by the equipment that they wont be able to move to accomplish anything. To alleviate this problem, eventually the computer will plug right into the user's sensory system; there will be a direct neural connection. Instead of produce images for the eyes to see, the computer will produce the same nerve signals on the optic nerve that those images would have elicited. There needn't be any mechanical sounds produced. The aural nerve will be sent electrical signals instead.

Entering a virtual reality will involve sticking a big plug into the back of your head. This is a scary image to many people, but then again, so is a ten-year old transfixed in front of a television for five hours at a time. At least virtual reality involves interaction, thought, movement, and action. It is an active media rather than a passive media.

Just as the military experiences hypothetical battles with virtual reality, architects and their clients can use it to take tours of unbuilt buildings. Instead of designing a building on a flat blueprint, and architect can take a more direct approach and design a building from inside a virtual reality. As described in the opening paragraph,

The architect can construct a building as a sculptor, manually creating the different rooms and placing them where they please. They could even scale themselves up to the size of a giant to design the large-scale features of a skyscraper, shrink themselves down to two feet tall to get a baby's-eye-view of a house, or fly thousands of feet up in the air to get a feeling for a building's place in its environments. And this can all be done with the flick of the wrist.

Once the architect is happy with a design, the client can experience the house just as they would the finished product, walking down the hallways, opening cabinets, moving furniture around. Even better than looking at a real house, they can change the time of day or even the season in a few seconds to get a year round feel for the house. The client could also rearrange the order of the rooms if they weren't happy with them.

In large-scale consumer product design, immersive virtual reality is already being used. Several car companies have systems where a car can be completely designed and prototyped on computer. Then prospective customers can take the car for a test drive even if the car doesn't physically exist. They can then give feedback to the designers about the feel of the dashboard and the responsiveness of the car. Car manufacturers could save millions on car redesigns this way. Many companies, such as Mercedes-Benz, already use simulators that bounce the car around just as if it were on the road. These simulations will improve until you'll be able to get your driver's license without ever having driven a real car.

Virtual reality may also help surgeons get their licenses. How can a doctor learn to do open heart surgery when the first couple of attempts may be fatal to the patient? One way is to operate on cadavers, but they lack a lot of the real qualities of a living human, like blood flow or respiration. Therefore many doctors are excited about surgical simulation where student surgeons could learn how to perform new procedures on an electronic model of the human body. The computer running the simulation would contain a detailed model of workings of the human body: how skin reacts when it's cut, how blood flows and clots, how drugs spread throughout the body. The body model that the student surgeon operates using a head mounted display and gloves would react almost exactly like a living human would. If they slip and cut the wrong way, they can backtrack and try again without having to waste a cadaver, or a living person. Just as flight simulators thrown in exploding engines and other such emergencies, the surgery trainer could also add problems that might crop up during certain surgeries, such as blood clots and allergy to anesthetics. This would prepare the future surgeon much better than working on predictable cadavers.

But experienced doctors as well as students to design and try out new surgical procedures could use the surgical simulators. A doctor may ask what might happen if a certain ligament is cut and moved, or how blood pressure may change if an artery is bypassed. If a specific patient's body could be scanned-in in enough detail, the surgeon could try out an operation on that patient's model before the actual operation is done. Problems might show up that could then be planned for.

It will be a while before we understand the workings of the human body well enough to make detail models of how it will respond to every possible surgical procedure, but already certain areas of the body are being modeled with good results. There are models of the leg and arm muscles that can predict changes in strength and in a person's walk if certain muscles are cut and moved. There is also a skin model that shows how sutured incisions will heal after reconstructive or plastic surgery. These more mechanical systems are easier to understand right now than the more chemical systems of the blood and hormones. Those models may take decades to be accurate.

If virtual reality becomes cheap enough, it may be used to teach high school students as well as surgeons. But this is a big if. One of the big blocks to use this high technology for education is the price. However a bigger problem seems to be training teachers how to use it. Right now, although many schools could afford video and computer equipment, they do not use it because teachers are not properly trained in how to incorporate these technologies into their curriculum. Many teachers seem most comfortable sticking to using a chalkboard and books to do their job. So the price of virtual reality will eventually come down to the level that small schools can afford. That is inevitable, but the bigger question is whether or not there will be a bigger emphasis made on using high technology in high school.

If the jump to high technology were made, there would be many uses and benefits to education. For one, virtual reality would be able to hold the supposedly waning attention of todays students. We all remember how in high school we were all ecstatic when the teacher told us we would be watching a movie or a video that day instead of having a lecture. Virtual reality would have this draw and it would also be more beneficial than just watching a video because virtual reality is not passive. It involves being active and interacting with the surroundings, just as you walk around and pick up objects in your real surroundings.

What traditional museums cannot do and what interactive computers can, is restore the cultural context to a work of art--refer to literature, music, historical events, even politics. In its simplest form, interactive audio/visual tapes provide fingertip access to megabytes of contextual information as visitors physically tour the galleries. More sophisticated interactive computers, CD-ROMs, the Web offer everything from straightforward encyclopedic systems to detailed multiple pathways exploring hundreds of specific topics in depth. The future, however, is young and experimentation is very much a part of today's interactive digitized art scene. Some works are scholarly--the Whitney's CD-ROM on Edward Hopper for one; some virtual--The Guggenheim Museum Soho's installation of five separate virtual reality "worlds," including artist Jenny HOLZER's first virtual artwork, featuring" a cavernous world in which souls alternately flee from and engage the viewer." Some works are engagingly informative--The Minneapolis Institute of Art's gallery-based interactive multimedia programs, for example. "We try to contextualized objects for people," says SAYRE. CD-ROM and Virtual Reality experiences lend themselves nicely to the task. The collective goal, then, is to seamlessly integrate these micro-chipped inter-activities with more traditional museum experiences. One of the most sophisticated interactive museum experiences can be had in the recently opened Micro Gallery at National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Modeled after a system installed at National Gallery, London in 1991, the American version exploits a four-year technological growth spurt. The short story is: visitors who opt to interact with any one of 13 computers in the Micro Gallery can navigate a labyrinth of electronic pathways to access detailed information about a sweep of subjects. A touch-screen accessing system, innovative animation and graphics, high resolution images, 24-bit digitized color and elaborate zoom capabilities combine to educate users in vastly entertaining ways "My big emphasis is on content," says Micro Gallery Curator Vickie POTER. "Trying to use the technology as a tool. That's what this is to me, a teaching tool." Chris RIDING, artist and theorist, is not so sure. Writing of his Micro Gallery experience in London in his critical essay "Drowning by Micro Gallery," Riding worries that "the key to the seduction of the Micro Gallery lies in navigating the information and not in the information itself."

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then the old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

Shoshana Zuboff

The design of such intimate technology is an aesthetic issue as much as an engineering one. We must recognize this if we are to understand and choose what we become as a result of what we have made.

---Myron Krueger

The potential of virtual reality technology to free us from the constraints of time and space appeals to a human longing for transcendence. We want to experience other circumstances without any real threat of danger. We want to be gods, to be able to change shape and form at will. Virtual reality assures us that we can---that we can reach the sun without melting our wings.

One of the oldest forms of virtual reality---a rhetorical device originating in Greece of the fourth century called the "Art of Memory" enriches our understanding of "the relationship between artificial reality, history and fiction."

Immersion in narrative space from another perspective... Her "theater without actors" engages the audience in environments that are based on flow rather than on cinematic cuts. Dove discusses her extensive work in this arena, concluding with a description of her collaborative virtual reality installation, The Archeology of a Mother Tongue, created at the Banff Center for the Arts with Canadian playwright Michael Mackenzie. "As artists working in the theater . . . we do not believe in goggles." Nai Wai Hsu and his theater group, Wan Shi, based in Taiwan, have exemplified this stance in their recent theater pieces incorporating virtual reality. In these plays, based on ancient Chinese myths about the universal themes of love, betrayal, death and rebirth, "the performers and audience can 'interact' with the setting or can even change the entire environment."

Marianne Petit describes her multisensory piece, The Mutant Gene and Tainted Kool Aid Sideshow, and her role as the audience's shamanic guide through altered realities where "boundaries between environmental and psychological states are disrupted" and "issues of normality" are explored in a Janus-faced, hallucinatory experience of revelry and dirges.

Dan O'Sullivan with his depiction of his interactive piece, Mirror Play, produced for Apple Computer, as well as three interactive works seen on cable television in New York City: Dan's Apartment, Being There with the Melons, and The Electronic Neighborhood. His description of "facilitating the imagination to create virtual worlds from very sparse sensory props (rather) than fooling it by blanketing the nervous system" is the back-to-the-future approach that all of us interested in the transcendent possibilities of virtual reality should keep in mind.

A VR Artists are engaged in making previously solid boundaries permeable. They are interested in creating spaces and spectacles in which the participant is transported, in the sublime sense of the word. The "consensual hallucination" involved evokes the "exuberant portals" and "glittering palaces" of the fantastical worlds of another turn-of-the-century phenomenon, the "Age of Fairs" in Europe and the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s

The quests of the artists parallel the aesthetic and metaphysical journeys of many before them. In expanding multimedia's accepted definitions of choice, response, interaction, navigation and immersion, these modern alchemists continue to herald the power of the imagination to construct experience.

Cyberspace is a globally networked, computer sustained, computer generated, multi-dimensional, artificial, or virtual reality. In this world, onto which every computer screen is a window, actual, geographical distance is irrelevant. Objects seen or heard are neither physical, nor, necessarily, representations of physical objects, but are rather - in form, character, and action - made up of data, of pure information. This information is derived in part from the operations of the natural, physical world, but is derived primarily from the immense traffic of symbolic information, images, sounds, and people, that constitute human enterprise in science, art, business, and culture.

Michael Benedikt, Collected Cyberspace Abstracts, 1990

We foresee that computing environments in the next decade will be very widely distributed, ubiquitous, open-ended, and ever changing. All the computers in the world will be mutually connected. New services will be added from time to time, while old services will be replaced. New computers will be connected, and the network topology and capacity will be changing almost continually. Users will demand the same interface to the environment regardless of login sites. Users will move with computers and will move even while using them. Users will also demand much better user interfaces, so that they will be able to communicate with computers as if they are communicating with humans.

Mario Tokoro, Toward Computing Systems for the 2000's, 1991

Welding together these various tacks contributes significantly toward the framing of a 'matrix,' a 'computer-sustained, computer-generated, multi-dimensional, artificial, or virtual reality,' that is 'widely distributed, ubiquitous, open-ended, and ever changing.' They also suggest three essential areas of recent cultural and technical development:

1. The formation of a cyber culture, which includes individuals who prefer to inhabit the domain of distributed digital media - electronic bulletin boards, databases, and multi-user simulation environments, including virtual reality. These inhabitants more or less live in such domains; the majority of their time is occupied within them. There they can alter their identities, their manner of social interaction, and their relationship with society. They become virtual beings in a virtual place. By living in such domains, a society becomes established, and a morality may emerge. What kind of morality will this be? Will it be governed? By whom and for what? This line of questioning becomes even more involving when one considers distributed virtual reality as a three dimensional environment, that may contain private spaces or residences, which contain personal objects and possessions.

2. The emulation of the physical world, and private spaces may have doors, closets, and windows that look out onto multi-dimensional vistas. Toolkits allow for the transformation of the world, and extensions of it are comprised of a never-ending field of pure data. The field of data can include all walks of commerce and produce worlds that do not fit our present descriptors. Some experiences will be familiar, like going shopping, or going to a concert. Other things will be unusual, like going to an ancient place or another planet.

3. The pervasiveness of the data field is everywhere, and people move about with computer devices. Interfaces become intuitive. Guides or agents co-inhabit the domains. Agents acquire knowledge, become familiar, and grow old with us.

While this could read as science fiction, extensive research is already being conducted in networked or distributed virtual reality. It currently constitutes a very small industry, but one with great potential for growth.

Contrary to the imputations of technophilic rhetorics, it is clear that the real time interactive digital image processing known as Virtual Reality represents a realization of an aspiration deeply embedded in western culture. Jaron Lanier once remarked that Virtual Reality was the 'culmination of culture'. This is true, not in the sense that it is perfect, or that it is the digital gesamptkunstwerk, but that it can be seen as the product of a succession of western philosophical and cultural enterprises. This essay asks: how is VR continuous with historical aspects of western culture? I intend to sketch some of the significant landmarks along two related historical trajectories, of pictorial representation and the perspective illusion; and of theatrical spectacles and immersive simulations. These trajectories are themselves underpinned by a consistent train of philosophical ideas, which include Christian religious thought, renaissance humanism, Enlightenment rationalism and the condition of consumer culture. A central motivation for this essay is to emphasize that technologies do not simply happen, they are products of specific social and cultural histories. Technologies embody philosophical ideas. Here I have attempted to assemble some critical approaches to reveal the ideas reified in the technology we call VR.

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

The developers of VR have, perhaps unwittingly, inherited a humanistic worldview (an attitude to life and a way of making pictures) that places the eye of the viewer in a position of command, a privileged viewpoint on the world. As such it is integrally connected with the rise of the notion of the individual. Asian imagery offers us alternative ways of looking or of picture construction, medieval European imagery offers another. Television offers third, with its multiple viewpoints and rapid cuts that dissolve the body. What if VR had developed along principles other than renaissance humanism? Could we feel we could inhabit it at all? How much is any so called VR dependant upon culturally acquired knowledge in order to be decipherable? Western perspective, or any system of pictorial representation, is in no sense innate, but a learned (often arduously) convention. But this is much more than a drawing technique. Inscribed into the conventions of renaissance perspective is a system of values that place the viewer at the single authoritative location. The power of the gaze. Virtual Reality has taken the limited technology of renaissance perspective (limited because it only works for a 10-15 degree angle of view) and has wrapped it right around the (powerful) viewer. A recent article on Indian dance relates: "The sense of space was wholly different...no long runs or soaring leaps or efforts to transform the stage into a boundless arena, a kind of metaphysical everywhere, but content within the realm of the body, comfortable with dimension and gravity, all ease, all centered." The author described the attitude of the dance teacher to the body "...no sense of elevation or extension... body self contained ...inwardness, inwardness ...In Hinduism" said the teacher "there is no beyond." This is an understanding of the relationship between the body and space antithetical to that inherent in VR. The corporeal sense of touch requires immediate physical contact with its object, not so the eye. VR arms the eye, it allows the eye a hand of its own, propelled (appears to be propelled) by the gaze itself. The primacy of the visual: action at a distance, the authoritative viewpoint of renaissance pictorial space. The entire body is propelled by scopic desire. VR, as currently formulated, is a direct continuation of the tradition of illusionistic pictorial representation that was already in evidence in Pompeii. It was rediscovered in the renaissance along with classical optics. These two became integral ideas in the formulation of the renaissance humanistic worldview, a view upon which our contemporary culture still depends. In the following centuries this illusionism became technologized, first through the use of optical drafting devices and through the development of photography, both mono- and stereoscopic. This drive toward 'complete' or 'immersive' illusionism gained a time dimension with the development of cinema. Parallel with this technologising of illlusionism is the long tradition of grand theatrical spectacles and of world's fairs, amusement piers and theme parks: these present another continuity of increasingly sophisticated simulation. This desire for the spectacular, the simulated, runs deep in western culture, and has always been carried as far as the available technology would allow. The following loose string of historical examples will serve as viewpoints from which VR may be considered. Grand theatrical spectacles were regular occurrences through the renaissance and the baroque. In 1548 the Queen of Hungary welcomed Phillip II of Spain with a grand two-day event spectacle that began as a dance tournament. During the dance, 'savages' attacked and carried off a number of the women when repelled. The next day 'knights' attacked the castle in which the 'savages' had barricaded themselves. During the battle that ensued, Phillip was served a banquet by nymphs and naiads, in the middle of the raging battle. The king sat safely at the center of the immersive spectacle. Baroque ceiling painting must properly be included in this history of technologies of simulation. The vertigo inducing draftsmanship constructs for the viewer the sense of 'peering up into heaven; the pictorial illusion dissolving the physical architecture. This historical utilization of advanced simulation technologies by the church to present a persuasive representation of realities other than those we experience day to day is a clear example of the long interest of the church in Virtual Reality. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary explosion is invention in technologies we might call proto-cinematic. It was not until 1838 that the British scientist Wheatstone built the first stereographic image projection system. The first multiple user stereographic projection system was exhibited in Lyons on 1890. Along with the well-known time-lapse photography of Marey and Muybridge, Edisons' kinetoscope and the cinematograph of the Lumiere brothers; numerous more or less bizarre optical/mechanical theatres were constructed. Daguerre's Diorama was one such mechanized theatre, in which the audience was propelled on a revolving viewing platform, past enormous scene paintings which were painstakingly painted with differing degrees of transparency, such that by controlling lighting from the front and the back, the illusion of the transition from daylight to dusk to night, could be effected. After a faltering career as a hack realist and theatrical scene painter, Daguerre found great success in this invention, the revenue from which funded his photographic experiments, for which he is better known today. The World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 sported several of these optical mechanical theatres. The Mareorama simulated a sea voyage from Nice to Constantinople via Venice. During the simulation, two screens, 40ft high and 2500 ft long were to be unrolled while the viewers stood on a pitching ships deck. The inventor of this system was yet another minor realist painter, Hugo d'Alesi, who spent a year on board ship painting the sections of the screens. A contemporary newspaper report trumpets: "Few visitors to the Exhibition will be able to resist the temptation ... to make an inexpensive voyage which involves no hazards whatsoever, yet is so natural.... even on the high seas, amid raging elements, one can get out and tread on terra firma at any moment."

A simulated Trans- Siberian Railway was another mechanical theatre that utilized a complex system of moving backdrops at the Exhibition. The railway was placed strategically nearby the Russian and Chinese pavilions and was built by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. There is recognizable here a certain historical continuity in the utilization of high tech for corporate PR. The EPCOT scheme is not significantly different. About the same time, the scholarly Marquis de Selby seems to have been engaged in experiments into a more truly 'virtual' tourism: "During his stay in England, he happened at one time to be living in Bath and found it necessary to go from there to Folkestone on pressing business. His method for doing this was far from conventional. Instead of going to the railway station and enquiring about trains, he shut himself up in a room in his lodgings with a supply of picture postcards of the areas which would be traversed on such a journey, together with an elaborate arrangement of clocks and barometric instruments and a device for regulating the gaslight in conformity with the changing light of the outside day. What happened in the room or how precisely the clocks and other machines were manipulated will never be known. It seems that he emerged after a lapse of seven hours convinced that he was in Folkestone and possibly that he had evolved a formula for travelers which would be extremely distasteful to railway and shipping companies."

TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIANISM

The technophilic rhetoric characteristic of VR, like other aspects of VR is not new. Utopian techno-hype seems to have been an aspect of technological PR since the beginning of the industrial revolution, as is evidenced by this piece of C19th doggerel:

Lay down your rails, ye nations near and far-- Yoke your full trains to Steam's triumphal car. Link town to town; unite with iron bands the long estranged and oft embattled lands. Peace, mild-eyed seraph--Knowledge, light divine, Shall send their messengers by every line... Blessings on Science, and her handmaid Steam! They make Utopia only half a dream.

The infiltration of the machine into western culture has induced the formation of an oppositional rhetoric, utopian and dystopian. The dystopian side is characterized by a panic at once psychological and pragmatic: the fear of redundancy, both as labor and as mind. On the Utopian side, Theodore Roszak notes the "salvational longings ... entwine themselves around new technology" and give rise to artistic pinnacles such as these. This verse encapsulates the Enlightenment calculus: Peace, Knowledge, Science and Technology the sum to Utopia. Thomas Edison imagined that his phonograph would find its niche as acoustic 'happy snaps', a way of preserving the voices of beloved relatives after they died. He had no conception of the uses that corporate capitalism would put his invention to: i.e. the music commodity industry. Bazin makes similar observations regarding the cinema: " Those who had the least confidence in the future of the cinema were precisely the two industrialists Edison and Lumiere. Edison was satisfied with just his kinetoscope and if Lumiere judiciously refused to sell his patent to Melies it was undoubtedly because he hoped to make a large profit for himself, but only as a plaything of which the public would soon tire. Brecht eulogized over the emancipatory potential of radio. Television, contrary to the idealistic rhetoric of the early years, evolved not into an ideal democratic information network, but into a fantastic way to sell commodities and inculcate values. VR has inherited the liberationist, democratic rhetoric that has surrounded these previous waves of new technologies. Sadly, in these cases, the rhetoric stands as a bleak counterpoint to institutionalized application of these technologies, which tend to result in a greater degree of domination, manipulation and control. We must recognize that the current condition of utopian euphoria for VR represents a stage in the familiar history of the development of technologies in a laissez faire capitalist economic context. The utopian rhetoric, no matter how heartfelt by the inventor community, is ultimately very useful PR for the corporate merchants. It is common knowledge that tobacco and junk food corporations pay substantial amounts of money to have their product appear on Hollywood movies. Back in the '70's Richard Serra noted that in order to receive the delivered television broadcasts, the consumer pays $40 for every dollar invested by the networks. In the face of this, only a fool would wallow in the illusion that Virtual Reality will be any different. One can imagine possible Disneyland-style consumeristic virtual worlds with interactive and quasi-intelligent cans of Coke and cuddly giant hot-dogs with sexy giggles. A virtual supermarket where the products lean out at you from the shelves imploring you to buy them, explaining how you will be happier, healthier, sexier, wealthier... In terms of corporate economics, VR serves the computer industry very well. It is intuitive (no learning curve, no consumer resistance) and calls for unlimited computer power. It thus fulfills the industry's need for Technological Desire: the transference of libidinal desire onto fetish objects which offer the promise of ecstasy but never finally consummate, driving the consumer to the next purchase the next purchase in a continual process of delayed gratification.

CONSUMER CULTURE

As early as 1967, Guy Debord observed that in modern societies: "... all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. He quotes Feuerbach: "But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

VR will slip frictionlessly into our culture because our culture has prepared us for it. I have suggested that every significant media technological development since the renaissance has been employed to create theatres of simulation. This idea was shared by Andre Bazin, who noted mid-century that: " The guiding myth...inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time." This readiness for VR has been produced by such phenomena as Disneyland, Hollywood, Liposuction and Nintendo. Conceptually vacuous theme parks, anesthetizing cinema, interactive games that perpetuate the myth of the individual and the cult of violence-as-liberty. And perhaps most significantly, the acceptance that the body may be customized at will like some kind of hotrod. US culture now customizes its bodies the way it used to customize its cars. The body is a representation only, an external appearance, and may be adjusted to suit the taste of the owner. The absolute malleability of the Virtual Body is different only in degree. The attitude to the surgical customizing of the flesh, "body sculpting" and the designing of the Virtual Body both assume and reinforce the Cartesian duality by restating the body as pure representation. Thus VR is an easy step because the body is already a representation. I understand that during early April 1992, daytime TV host Jeraldo Rivera had liposuction live on TV in front of a studio audience. Gobs of yellow fat were sucked from his buttocks and injected into his lips and around his eyes. How real is VR? The cultural underpinnings already in place induce a general acceptance that VR does adequately represent 'reality'. TV and cars have done it. To a culture that thinks you can "experience" the countryside from inside an air-conditioned car traveling at 60mph: very real. VR is as real as a picture of a toothache. A reality in which you can walk through walls with impunity, a reality that has no odor or temperature isn't very real. And construction of more and more complex and expensive interfaces is beside the point. There is a paradoxical aspect to increased verisimilitude of simulation: as the representation becomes increasingly complex, the gap yawns: the greater precision only more clearly defines the ways and degrees in which the representation will not stand for the reality. This is all rather reminiscent of Arthur Dent's tea dilemma: "After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found the Nutri-matic machine that had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea.

MIND/BODY SPLIT

One of the claims made of VR is that it constitutes liberation from the mind-body duality. It is argued that VR achieves this by sidestepping the process of translation into, and out of, symbolic representation. This is called post-symbolic communication by William Bricken and others. This claim is, in my view, questionable. My sense is that it reinforces the Cartesian duality, replacing the body with a body image, a creation of mind. As such it is a clear continuation of the rationalist dream of disembodied mind, part of the long western tradition of denial of the body. Lanier argues, "The way you talk to your body doesn't use symbols". Fair enough, but what is then suggested to be a logical corollary doesn't follow: "you can make a cup that someone else can pick up...without ever having to use a picture or the word 'cup'...you create the experiential object 'cup' rather than the symbolic object". But a cup in VR is a representation it is a stereographic image. You can't drink out of it. There is clearly a paradigm shift in the VR experience, but it does not replace the symbolic with the 'real' (in the sense of experiential), rather it nests one within the other, or superimposes them, so that the object is simultaneously a representation and an experiential phenomenon. VR is a communications technology that on the one hand directly interfaces with the body, the kinesthetic, bypassing 'language'. But on the other hand, any VR is itself a giant (albeit interactive) representation, and thus just as subject to critical analysis as any other representation.

Now it is fair to say that the possibility of handing a co-participant in a shared VR a virtual object in the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid is a more directly communicative gesture that to offer a written algebraic equation that must be decoded by the mind of the receiver. The Virtual form is doubly useful as the object is itself a visual representation of precisely that data encapsulated in the equation, and this mathematical information remains available. A plaster cast of the same form does not offer this fluid access to information. In fact William Bricken maintains that all the operations of symbolic logic can be performed in VR without recourse to symbolic languages, that logic is equivalent to inference in visual programming. Set theory, number theory, and algebra can all be represented as objects in space that is non-symbolic and totally math-rigorous! Binary logic can be represented as open and shut doors, knot theory as fish swimming upstream over dams. "All computation is algebraic pattern matching and substitution (proven)" What is required is a new critique, a way of thinking about the meeting point between the immediate physiological reality of the body as lived in, and the critique of representation.

DOUBLE BODY

Although some military and industrial simulator systems utilize force-feedback or hydraulic motion simulation, the available 'civilian' systems synthesize only the visual and auditory sense inputs. But we live in our bodies, and a large portion of our sense of 'being in the world' is derived from our internal body senses, the sense of balance and the kinesthetic or proprioceptive sense in particular; not to mention the body surface senses that relate temperature, texture etc. A fully simulated 'body' experience would need to simulate all theses senses, but this is way beyond the range of current technologies. Thus Virtual Reality technology splits the body in two. The visual and auditory simulation presents a representation of a body to the eyes and ears, while the 'meat body' remains in the chair. VR replaces the body with two partial bodies: the corporeal body and an (incomplete) electronic 'body image'. In terms of the rhetoric there is no question which is in the ascendant. This is a kind of sensory apartheid. A confirmation, rather than a liberation from, Cartesian dualism. The body representation of VR is, in this sense, a culmination of western culture. When we go into VR we enter a realm of pure mental abstraction, populated with 'ideals' Plato would recognize. Going into VR is like going to Christian heaven, we finally leave the troublesome, messy body behind. All that remains of the body is the powerful gaze, the gaze that travels and conquers without physical limitation, the authoritative viewpoint of renaissance perspective finally freed to act.

Virtual environments (VEs) are a broad multidisciplinary research area that includes all aspects of computer science, virtual reality, virtual worlds, teleoperation and telepresence. A variety of network elements are required to scale up virtual environments to arbitrarily large sizes, simultaneously connecting thousands of interacting players and all kinds of information objects. Four key communications components for virtual environments are found within the Internet Protocol (IP) suite: lightweight messages, network pointers, heavyweight objects and real-time streams. Software and hardware shortfalls and successes for internetworked virtual environments provide specific research conclusions and recommendations. Since large-scale networked are intended to include all possible types of content and interaction, they are expected to enable new classes of interdisciplinary research and sophisticated applications that are particularly suitable for implementation using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).

Overview

Virtual environments (VEs) and virtual reality applications are characterized by human operators interacting with dynamic world models of realistic sophistication and complexity. Current research in large-scale virtual environments can link hundreds of people and artificial agents with interactive three-dimensional (3D) graphics, massive terrain databases, global hypermedia and scientific datasets. Related work on teleoperation of robots and devices in remote or hazardous locations further extends the capabilities of human-machine interaction in synthetic computer-generated environments. VE construction can include concepts and components from nearly any subject area. The variety of desired connections between people, artificial entities and information can be summarized by the slogan "connecting everyone to everything." The scope of virtual environment development is so broad that it can be seen as an inclusive superset of all other global information infrastructure applications. As diversity and detail of virtual environments increase without bound, network requirements become the primary bottleneck.

The most noticeable characteristic of virtual environments is interactive 3D graphics, which are ordinarily concerned with coordinating a handful of input devices while placing realistic renderings at fast frame rates on a single screen. Networking permits connecting virtual worlds with realistic distributed models and diverse inputs/outputs on a truly global scale. Graphics and virtual world designers interested in large-scale interactions can now consider the worldwide Internet as a direct extension of their computer. A variety of networking techniques can be combined with traditional interactive 3D graphics to collectively provide almost unlimited connectivity. In particular, the following services are essential for virtual world communications: reliable point-to-point communications, interaction protocols such as the IEEE standard Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol, World-Wide Web (WWW) connectivity, and multicast communications.

Existing Infrastructure Technologies

Layered models. The integration of networks with large-scale virtual environments occurs by invoking underlying network functions from within applications shows how the seven layers of the well-known Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standard network model generally correspond to the effective layers of the Internet Protocol (IP) standard.

Process/Application Layer. Applications invoke TCP/IP services, sending and receiving messages or streams with other hosts. Delivery can be intermittent or continuous.

Transport Layer. Provides host-host packetized communication between applications, using either reliable delivery connection-oriented TCP or unreliable delivery connectionless UDP. Exchanges packets end-end with other hosts.

Internet/Network Layer. Encapsulates packets with an IP datagram that contains routing information, receives or ignores incoming datagrams as appropriate from other hosts. Checks datagram validity, handles network error and control messages.

Data Link/Physical Layer. Includes physical media signaling and lowest level hardware functions, exchanges network-specific data frames with other devices. Includes capability to screen multicast packets by port number at the hardware level.

These diagrams and definitions are merely an overview but help illustrate the logical relationship and relative expense of different network interactions. In general, network operations consume proportionately more processor cycles at the higher layers. Minimizing this computational burden is important for minimizing latency and maintaining virtual world responsiveness.

Methods chosen for transfer of information must use either reliable connection-oriented Transport Control Protocol (TCP) or nonguaranteed delivery connectionless User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Each of these complementary protocols is part of the Transport layer. One of the two protocols is used as appropriate for the criticality, timeliness and cost of imposing reliable delivery on the particular stream being distributed. Understanding the precise characteristics of TCP, UDP and other protocols helps the virtual world designer understand the strengths and weaknesses of each network tool employed. Since internetworking considerations impact all components in a large virtual environment, additional study of network protocols and applications is highly recommended for virtual world designers.

Internet Protocol (IP). Although the variety of protocols associated with internetworking are very diverse, there are some unifying concepts. Foremost is "IP on everything" or the principle that every protocol coexists compatibly within the Internet Protocol suite. The global reach and collective momentum of IP-related protocols makes their use essential and also makes incompatible exceptions relatively uninteresting. IP and IP Next Generation (IPng) protocols include a variety of electrical, radio frequency and optical physical media.

Examination of protocol layers helps clarify current network issues. The lowest layers are reasonably stable with a huge installed base of Ethernet and FDDI systems, augmented by the rapid development of wireless and broadband ISDN solutions (such as ATM). Compatibility with the Internet Protocol (IP) suite is assumed. The middle transport-related layers are a busy research and development area. Addition of real-time reliability, quality of service and other capabilities can all be made to work. Middle-layer transport considerations are being resolved by a variety of working protocols and the competition of intellectual market forces. From the perspective of the year 2000, lower and middle layer problems are essentially solved.

Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS). The DIS protocol is an IEEE standard for logical communication among entities in distributed simulations. Although initial development was driven by the needs of military users, the protocol formally specifies the communication of physical interactions by any type of physical entity and is adaptable for general use. Information is exchanged via protocol data units (PDUs) that are defined for a large number of interaction types.

The principal PDU type is the Entity State PDU. This PDU encapsulates the position and posture of a given entity at a given time, along with linear and angular velocities and accelerations. Special components of an entity (such as the orientation of moving parts) can also be included in the PDU as articulated parameters. A full set of identifying characteristics uniquely specifies the originating entity. A variety of dead reckoning algorithms permit computationally efficient projection of entity posture by listening hosts. Dozens of additional PDU types are defined for simulation management, sensor or weapon interaction, signals, radio communications, collision detection and logistics support.

Of particular interest to virtual world designers is an open format Message PDU. Message PDUs enable user-defined extensions to the DIS standard. Such flexibility coupled with the efficiency of Internet-wide multicast delivery permits extension of the object-oriented message-passing paradigm to a distributed system of essentially unlimited scale. It is reasonable to expect that free-format DIS Message PDUs might also provide rem