VIRTUAL REALITY AS METAPHOR
Raymond D. Gozzi · ETC.: A Review of General Semantics · 1995
Virtual reality has caught people's imaginations and inspired fantasies far out of proportion to what technology can actually deliver, now (1995) or foreseeable future. Virtual reality technology promises to immerse you an exotic computer-generated world. You put on helmet-like headset, slip on data glove, perhaps get on a treadmill, and connect to a computer. (Ultimately you will wear an entire body suit.) Pick your reality-generating software -- planet Venus, perhaps, or a Wild West scenario with bad guys to shoot. As you move, environment alters to create illusion that you are moving around within it. Other people can also enter environment, you can interact. To virtual reality user, experience is one of being in new environment. To outside observer, there is only strange spectacle of a person wearing a bulky helmet waving a gloved hand around and moving weird, unpredictable ways. I have not yet tried technology myself, although I am told that graphics are rudimentary and illusion is partial. There is a slight time delay between your movement and corresponding movement of environment. The head-mounted display is bulky and heavy. And after a while, some users start to feel queasy and ill. In fact, despite glossy depictions of VR movies like Lawnmower Man and Disclosure, researchers are having difficulty reproducing realistic sights, sounds, and touches. The small TV sets eyepieces of helmets don't have same power to resolve details as human eye, so high-resolution images still look like they are composed of little dots (pixellated). Realistic sounds are also proving difficult to simulate, despite invention of a machine called Convolvotron to generate sounds that will vary with movement of subject. And it has proven surprisingly complex to simulate touch of a real object by computer. Illusion is never easy. As an article Technology Review concluded, ...it will be many years, if ever, before a computer simulation will be in-distinguishable from physical reality. (1) Still, article held out hope for useful applications training pilots (where VR has been used for many years), assisting architects and designers, training surgeons, and devising various forms of entertainment. So why has virtual reality technology become so glamorous? Why does its future seem so promising? I had occasion to think about this at a conference Miami Beach, Florida. Several panels were discussing VR technology (actually a more accurate name is VE or Virtual Environment, one panelist said). In VR there is possibility of virtual act, act without consequences. (2) We may blur boundaries between real and illusion even further, and may import acts from VR environments into real environments, posing new ethical questions. The panel presentations were interesting, but I had nagging feeling that we were all missing something. And then I had an aha experience. The technology we call virtual reality is a miniaturization, a model, of something that already exists. We have a massive virtual reality machine already place. We call it the press, radio and television, the newspaper, the news. I had a perfect example right there. I had flown into Miami Airport, which had been news lately. Some German tourists had apparently been trailed from there, robbed and by enterprising Americans. The American criminals would bump into their rental cars, and then rob them when they got out to discuss incident. In a couple of recent cases, this had led to murder of tourists. The murdered German tourist stories were spread all over world. And I was planning to fly into Miami Airport -- I wondered if I should put an American flag on my luggage. …