Virtual Reality: Performance, Immersion, and the Thaw
Jon McKenzie · TDR/The Drama Review · 1994
Awaiting takeoff, I received instructions on having the best flight possible. Evans & Sutherland, the company offering the virtual-reality (VR) hang-glider ride, ran a short videotape featuring their new Liberty line of computers, whose animation would generate Los Angeles 2000, the virtual world I'd be soaring through momentarily. Fellow travelers and I huddled around the small monitor, straining to hear the audio track over the ambient roar of the surrounding trade show. We were all very anxious, having stood in line early that morning to receive a boarding pass with flight time. The demand was great; everyone at the annual meeting of the Association of Computing Machines' Special Interest Group on computer graphics (SIGGRAPH) was talking about the VR glider ride. SIGGRAPH '93, held in Anaheim, California the first week of August, was part academic conference, part art and design exhibition, and part trade show. I'd come to do as much VR as I could, and that took me from panels to installations to demonstrations and back again. From other cybertrips, I'd learned that good instructors, official or otherwise, were crucial to initial VR performances. Since I never managed to hear the tape's audio track, my preflight instructions came from the hearsay of on-line travelers. A guy ahead of me said, Someone told me, 'Whatever you do, don't pull back on the bar. That will make you drop like a rock. If you want to turn right, push left-left, push right.' The bar was part of a simulator apparatus; assisted by a flight attendant, I stepped into a large body suspended from a steel frame by a harness. The bag covered me from shoulders to toes. Next, I grabbed the stabilizer bar with both hands, leaned forward and felt my feet leave the floor as I became horizontal. As I hung from the harness, the attendant guided an enormous display hood toward my face. I was immersed. Before and below me stretched a three-dimensional cityscape reminis-