My first novel is coming out next month. Entitled Soulworm, it’s a young adult fantasy set mostly in Weyburn–sort of. For plot purposes, I moved the hospital of my fictional Weyburn up onto South Hill. With just a few words, I created an artificial reality, distinguishable from the real thing only by those who have actually been to Weyburn.
Storytellers have been creating artificial realities for as long as humans have had speech. In this century, movie makers have taken those artificial realities and made them visible. And now, there’s a new device for creating artificial realities: the computer. We call this computer-generated artificial reality “virtual reality” (VR).
What distinguishes virtual reality from the artificial realities of books and movies is that we can completely immerse ourselves in it and interact with it, moving around the computer-generated world at will and manipulating objects. Right now, virtual reality is a fairly crude representation of actual reality, but eventually, it may be indistinguishable from the real thing–a la Star Trek‘s “holodeck.”
Already, through VR technology, architects can don goggles and walk through a three-dimensional computer representation of the building they’re planning before a single shovelful of dirt has been turned over. Airlines and the military have been using flight simulators for years to train pilots, and Sandia National Laboratories has just created a training device for police in which two-person law enforcement teams grip guns, don virtual reality glasses, and burst into a computer-generated room containing hostage-takers and victims.
Virtual reality was born in the mid-1960s at the University of Utah, where Ivan Sutherland and associates created “an interactive computer graphics system utilizing a head-mounted display and wand” which “gives an illusion to the observer that he is surrounded by three-dimensional, computer-generated objects.” Sutherland’s work brought together the three basic components of any virtual reality system: a display, a transducer and an image generator.
The display is a device that presents information. For presenting visual information, most VR systems use a head-mounted display that completely fills the users field of vision with the computer-generated images. Headphones take care of the display of sound. Displaying information to the other senses is much harder, and although a few efforts have been made to provide tactile information (inflatable bladders to press against the fingertips, for example) none have been very successful. Nor have the few efforts made to integrate taste and smell. For now, virtual worlds are primarily worlds of sight and sound alone.
The second basic element of a VR system is a “transducer,” which translates the user’s action into a form the computer can understand. Creating a magnetic field that varies as the user moves is one method. Finger movements are often measured with a data glove, which contains optical fibers that transmit varying amounts of light as the fingers bend. Measuring movement of the entire body is trickier. A full-body data glove works, but it’s awkward.
Eventually, you might not have to move at all: some research has been conducted on the using brain activity alone to manipulate objects in virtual reality!
The third and final element of VR is “image generation.” This is what the computer does. It has to be programmed to create believable illusions of a real environment, and alter the appearance, sound, and (if full-fledged VR ever comes about) eventually the feel, smell and taste of that environment as necessary to maintain the illusion, in response to the actions of the user. This naturally takes enormous computing power, but computers are getting more powerful all the time..
What does VR mean for the future? Some people believe everyone will withdraw into a cocoon and social life will die out. Others believe that, on the contrary, most people will spend so much of their working time immersed in computer-generated environments, they’ll seek out real life during their free time.
Some statements are downright apocalyptic, as befits the turn of the millennium. J. G. Ballard says, “This will represent the greatest event in human evolution. For the first time, mankind will be able to deny reality and substitute its own preferred version.”
As for me, I figure VR will just be another tool and toy we’ll soon take for granted, like so many other technological advances of the past few years. And as one who has already spent a fair number of leisure hours playing computer games, my final word on the subject is, “Cool!”
