From: Robert Jacobson Subject: EPUB: Through the Looking Glass... [LONG] Organization: WORLDESIGN, Seattle For Virtual Reality Vienna '93 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: THE VIRTUAL WORLDS INDUSTRY IN 2010, A PROSPECTIVE RETROSPECTIVE Avi Bar-Zeev and Robert Jacobson, Ph.D. Worldesign Inc., Seattle* One decade into the new millennium -- in the year 2010, in New Vienna -- it is hard to remember when the virtual worlds industry was not a leading force in the global economy and the source of creativity and pleasure in much that we do. Today, we can join our friends in virtual space to work and play, visit strange lands and times, even sit back and enjoy a reflective personal encounter with our favorite synthetic personalities. In 2010, the words "virtual reality" are as seldom spoken as was the term "horseless carriage" in the 1990's. People were right when they said that "VR" would suffer the same fate as "AI" -- both took time to develop, and both suffered during those early, halting years. By 2010, however, virtual worlds have become the dominant media, as ingrained in our lives as are the AI-inspired expert systems, neural nets, and inference engines that quietly run our cars, homes, and washing machines. The virtual world has so much become the paradigm of communication that today we simply call it: Communication. But it wasn't always so. We must remember the early, difficult days, if only to appreciate how far we have come (and perhaps to avoid affording the next important invention a similar tough going- over). After the first tentative, experimental, and highly publicized demonstrations of virtual worlds in the late 1980s and early 1990s ("hype" was the contemporary term for this overblowing of expectations), the virtual worlds industry, tiny as it was, suffered even more from attrition as large firms and governments shunned investments in these pioneers. More than a few good people left the field, never to return, setting back the evolution of virtual worlds as we know them by at least a half-decade. Grasping at straws to keep their infant enterprises alive, managers of the nascent industry seized on any opportunity to do business -- so detouring virtual worlds into the volatile, faddish, and often fatal field of cheap entertainments. And yet still, something was learned by this experience, as practitioners of world-building became more familiar with their art and could better specify the tools they needed to do their jobs. By 1996, the virtual worlds industry was just beginning to diversify as new possibilities of work, in more substantial domains, began to present themselves. At the same time, the academics and critical reviewers, who for a decade had hovered around the fringes of the virtual worlds industry, soaking up some of the popular acclaim engendered by the field's early toy like but spectacular inventions, now started to make serious contributions to the industry. They offered not only intellectual speculation but also concrete ideas about how to make virtual worlds more useful, from the point of view of actual current and potential users. It was not easy at the time to explain virtual worlds. The press liked to use the misleading phrase, "virtual reality," to describe a particular type of technology -- the by now-extinct gloves and goggles -- despite the fact that serious virtual worlds developers were working at a much deeper level of human experience. Today we know that the methods of physically displaying virtual worlds, while not unimportant, are only a part of the puzzle; and that crafting virtual worlds has much more to do with understanding how it is that human beings accumulate, process, and distribute information. Nevertheless, it was a struggle to get this known beyond the relatively small circle of actual virtual world practitioners. Confusion on this point plagued the industry until the turn of the century, when it became so obvious that even the laziest journalist could no longer avoid the fact. It made it hard to raise capital for the really important developments in virtual worlds, those that would take the concept and its technology out of the circus tent and into the lives of everyday people. Another type of confusion was produced by the loose terms thrown about by the normally hyper-energetic computer industry marketers and those others sought to benefit by the awakening awareness regarding the power of the Virtual Worlds Paradigm. The Paradigm, to put it simply, declared that the most useful way to convey information is to have it conform to the way human beings deal with information. This means that the data incorporated in a virtual world -- whether it be a book, a theatrical drama, a musical composition, a motion picture, or a computer-generated synthetic environment -- should be constructed and presented in a way that complements rather than defies the human sensory and cognitive systems. Of course, we accept today that a computer-generated virtual world is the best medium for doing this, since it incorporates all of the other media types and additionally offers a high degree of personal and group interactivity, bonding, and resonance. This powerful theoretical base enabled its proponents eventually to differentiate virtual worlds from other, more haphazard conglomerations of computer virtuosity like multimedia. But this too took time, and for several years, until 1998 or 1999, virtual worlds were tarred with the same brush of failure that completely diminished enthusiasm for multimedia. Frictions between the virtual worlds and multimedia developers took their psychological and financial toll, permitting large buyers to play off the one against the other. Only when multimedia -- or rather, the collection of devices for which "multimedia" stood -- were subsumed within virtual worlds (where they proved more effective) was this confusion finally eliminated. So much for our early struggles! Now let's talk about our successes, how we came to be the leading information industry of our time. Naturally, we must start with entertainment.... The Early Years (1990-1994): Turning Entertainment on Its Head In the early days of the virtual worlds industry, in the early 1990s, entertainment was king. It was a strange time. As with every new medium, the people who best understood the nature of the beast were least in control. Said the Game Giants, "We know 'VR': VR is computer graphics -- only, now it surrounds you." Their simulation gurus, who had not a clue, agreed. For years, they had built their profits on more speed and better graphics, often for the limited purposes of the military. Now they put graphics everywhere! What about content? "We already 'do' content," they chortled. "We'll just make it appear all around you!" It was funny: although the mostly pre-adolescent boys who played these simple and often frightening violent games could shoot down things all around them, the only real action -- just like with simulators -- was almost always dead ahead. Quite a few over-built and over-expensive "VR" games were sold to older children, and paid for by parents, in the process. Then the Theme Park Giants got hold of the technology. They understood the kind of raw "in-your-face," "speed-of-light" sensory- overload rides that appealed to the roller-coaster crowd. "VR is more bandwidth, more experience," they said, and what an experience it was: virtual submarines, roller coasters, rockets, and monsters blasted sound and images at helpless audiences screaming for more. Virtual rides were cheaper, safer, and more easily recyclable; that made the theme parks lots of money. The audiences, however, were starting to want greater interactivity, like that they available to them on their office and home information systems and this the theme parks did not supply. "High throughput means low interaction," they replied, "and we want the highest, so sit back and enjoy it." For awhile, the public did. Then it started to drift away and in 1998, for the first time in decades, theme parks started losing money. The Movie Giants were smarter. For them, VR was "interactive storytelling." For years they pumped billions of dollars into multimedia and "multiple-choice" stories. Many people enjoyed these entertainments but their producers could not afford the massive development costs of creating ever more complicated and involving plots and scheme. CD-ROM was a great storage technology, but who had the time or money to generate 600 megabytes of information and make it accessible? Some thinking minds in that industry realized that the secret was not in creating n-squared story fragments ahead of time and forcing the viewer to make explicit choices, but rather in making the stories tap into the imagination of the individuals implicitly, evolving at runtime, as the program ran on the computer. That was when they turned to virtual worlds. The first hurdle was the "Virtual Shakespeare" problem. To make an interactive movie as good as Macbeth would require a computer with Shakespeare's skill and knowledge. What was missing from the equation was runtime human creativity. Putting a live person behind the story wasn't as easy as it sounded, however. No mere glove or wand would allow the human "Directors," as they came to be known, to direct the action of live participants and virtual actors in real time. The second hurdle was the "What happens next?" problem. Virtual worlds developers then produced the necessary tools to facilitate rapid and intuitive communication between the Directors and the computer-mediated story so the story could progress naturally. That's when everything took off. Interactive TV, which was supposed to be the Medium of the Decade, flopped when it became clear that people, rather than hibernating at home, wanted to get out and have collective experiences. As problems of public safety and transportation were sorted out, having fun in public became a major part of people's lives -- and in a virtual worlds presentation, whole audiences could watch the more energetic individuals among them play out their fantasies. So the "Virtual Theater" was born, and a new entertainment industry along with it. Professional film and theatre directors who were Dungeon Masters as kids loved creating these humanly-guided stories. Virtual Theaters quickly became the most popular entertainment venue as the owners of conventional theaters retrofitted them to support virtual environments. By 2000, the Virtual Theater was becoming a commonplace affair, often with theaters linked to other theaters around the world for even more variety and fun. The Mid-1990s: Technology Advances Despite the growth of the Virtual Theater industry, at the turn of the century virtual worlds designers still were up against the established "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality of the CAD, simulation, and film-ware manufacturers who dominated the early days of virtual worlds. Even when CASE methods were introduced for faster world-building, most virtual worlds were still being built by programmers, computer scientists, and engineers. World- wrights, producers, and directors simply worked differently and could not use the software that nominally was intended for their use. Of necessity a new type of modeling and world-building software amenable to the "creatives'" needs and based on intelligent objects and object-relationships was born. Appearing in 1995, this unique software relieved programmers of the responsibility for building virtual worlds by making everyone a "world-builder." By now, all of us have seen many films built within and around these virtual worlds. In fact, this software proved equally useful for creating worlds in immersive 3D environments and even 2D environments, such as those still being run by television. Unfortunately, television's declining audience shrunk this market and made it less profitable than it might have been, but the burgeoning demand for Virtual Theaters and other 3D applications for business and personal use more than made up for TV's disappearance. The changes were no less profound on the hardware side of the industry. Throughout the early 1990s, head-mounted display-makers had promised high-quality, inexpensive devices that would appeal beyond the small population of videogame-playing 10-to-18-year- old males; but these HMDs were slow in coming. It wasn't the manufacturers' fault: they were caught on "the bleeding edge" of technology development. When Version 2.0 of these devices was promised to be twice as good and half the price of Version 1.0, what incentive was left for customers to buy Version 1.0? And, if enough customers didn't buy Version 1.0, the manufacturers had insufficient revenues to advance the state-of-the-art. Yet, the manufacturers had to promise higher resolution, lighter, and cheaper HMDs lest they lose the public's interest. Real advances came in the mid-1990s with the general acceptance of non-intrusive technologies. Beginning with the University of Illinois's CAVE and the Worldesign's WorldSpace , users began to discover that the feeling of presence, of being in a well-crafted immersive environment employing projected images was as good or better than it was with the various existing HMDs. Moreover, projection-based virtual worlds could be shared with others in real- time, thus heightening the enjoyment of being in a virtual world. Expensive and movement-limiting head-tracking and stereoscopic images also were used less frequently as their necessity became less clear. Projection systems manufactured in quantity for Virtual Theaters ultimately became price competitive with HMDs. Enhanced by spatialized 3D sound systems already well-developed in the 1990s, Virtual Theaters became all-inclusive venues for presenting both entertainment and educational experiences. Over time, the two types of experiences became nearly indistinguishable. Finally, in the late 2000s, the Virtual Theater in its ultimate form also used kinesthetic devices enabling their patrons to haptically experience Entertainment drove the early development of virtual worlds technology in a technically favorable direction. It required applications in the business sector, however, to reveal just how powerful the Virtual World Paradigm could be. Virtual Worlds and the Reengineering of Business The changes that occurred in entertainment business were paralleled in other industries. These changes have been just as dramatic, too. In design and manufacturing, for example, our problem was not overcoming facile, overly simplistic conceptions of our technology. Instead, we had to make another beginning, building the case from the ground up for the application of virtual worlds to the needs of industrial and commercial firms. Early on the more innovative companies saw the benefits of virtual worlds for improving their business processes. The first Virtual Retail Store was constructed in a market where inventories were too great in number and variety to physically display. Using a Virtual Catalog and Virtual Showroom, customers -- who clearly preferred public markets to staying home and ordering from TV -- now could see their choices and visions assembled before items were delivered. Sales soared. With the success of the Virtual Theater and the technology ensemble that it called forth from hardware and software manufacturers, design applications that had previously daunted architects and designers because of their high cost now became practical. Sometime toward the end of the 1990s it became common practice for architects, engineers, and builders to pass "virtual blueprints" (dynamic volumetric renderings, complete with internal structures and external landscapes) among them, speeding the process of translating ideas into structures. Just as importantly, clients and regulators could join the professionals in the Virtual Design Environment to evaluate designs and constructions prior to the actual laying of foundations and erection of walls. These systems incorporated GIS and GPS technology. This integrative package of technologies, melded into virtual worlds systems, extended augmented design techniques to larger public projects like freeways and ports. By 2000, similar systems were regularly employed to virtually prototype automobiles and aircraft, replacing less flexible and more difficult to use conventional CAD technology. These systems seamlessly unify design, production, distribution, and sales, so that many products designed in a VDE are immediately delivered to or even built at customers' businesses and homes. Almost everything constructed in the last decade contains many components that were designed using VDEs. Many products are actually built in factories where continuous processes are monitored and controlled using virtual worlds technology, for greater efficiency and higher quality. Fortunately, public demand in the industrial world for cleaner, ecologically respectful products has helped to reduce the waste occasioned by still too frequent overproduction, a human condition that virtual worlds have yet to eliminate. But there is hope that we may yet see virtual worlds systems employed to better manage our finite resource, through situation realization. The first "Realizers" were created for the world's largest and most complex companies. Trillions of dollars had been lost because executives couldn't see the bottlenecks in their operations, employees were ignorant regarding their role in meeting corporate goals -- and neither group could effectively share with the other their respective visions and goals. Now, using immersive Realizers, executives and employees can visualize, understand, and participate in corporate management. They can avoid to some extent through virtual scenario building the usual series of trials-and-errors that have characterized industrial practices since the earliest days. In the last decade a new group of professionals, the facilitators able to compare and synthesize points of view revealed in Realizers, has emerged. Many of us believe that their skills may be applied in the not too distant future to better-informed stewardship of the earth's natural treasures and its ecosystem. For the moment, virtual worlds ideas have achieved their highest form as televirtuality -- the sharing of distributed virtual worlds via global and local telecommunications networks. The first true televirtual conferencing systems -- fairly expensive technology requiring broadband communications networks -- were installed in the mid-1990s to serve situations where considerable human or economic costs were at stake: for example, to enable transcontinental telesurgery and closer management of the global financial system. In the late 1990s, islands of applications were everywhere, as they were in the early days of the computer industry, back in the 1960s and 1970s. From the very first days of the virtual worlds industry, however, it was apparent that networked virtual worlds drawing on the power of network technology would eventually make possible both the standardization of virtual worlds technology -- a dynamic standardization, of course, subject to change -- and the sharing of virtual worlds and their object components. In turn, the applications of virtual worlds would become much more useful. Unfortunately, despite the promising experiments organized by the early proponents of this televirtuality, in Europe, Japan, Singapore, and the United States, the essential infrastructure to support virtual worlds transmissions (several gigabits per second and higher speeds were required for quality shared worlds) was not yet in place. Only in the mid-1990s did providers of telecommunications begin seriously to install broadband fiber and data-capable radio links. So, by the late 1990s, while televirtuality was gaining ground, it was not as widespread as the telephone or television and it certainly hadn't replaced either, despite the slogan of the Virtualists to "Kill TV." Virtual worlds technology was still too exotic. High quality virtual worlds were too expensive for most businesses and homes, although some larger firms had installed dedicated systems for very specific purposes. The industry was suffering from a failure to break down the acceptance barrier, a barrier that personal computers had blasted through two decades before. There were virtual rides, virtual stores, virtual exploration, and the Virtual Theater. But despite these and a host of hyped nonsensical applications, televirtuality had not yet occurred on a universal basis. The communications companies, who had put money on every option from home shopping to interactive games held all the cards. They had helped to bring information transceivers into every home in the form of computers or game machines. They finally paid for the "last mile" of the global information infrastructure, mainly with the revenues from well anticipated successes like video-on-demand. They also had a few major successes investing in content producers who met an ever-increasing demand. The difference now was that all of the pieces were in place. The technology and content that the Movie Giants developed could fill the information highways instead of only being localized in Virtual Theaters. Ever more powerful and cheaper processors, and the long- awaited appearance of large, reasonably-priced flat-panel displays meant that customers finally had the computing and display power to maintain virtual environments in the workplace and at home. The success of non-intrusive technologies based on projection screens paved the way. Instead of narrowcasting a single channel of high- definition video and audio, two channels could give 180 degrees of surround. Three channels could provide a fully immersive virtual environment anywhere. People could buy whatever level of immersion they wished. Even HMDs based on the legendary "virtual retinal scanner" had by now developed to a point where the single- or double-participant experience made sense. The Communications Giants finally began to fully realize the power of virtual worlds. "Virtual worlds are the essence of communication," they proclaimed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s they converted their 2D information and communication services into true virtual worlds-based services, replacing telephones and computers-with-modems in the workplace and home. Not surprisingly, their customers preferred to share information in the WorldSpace, the virtual global village. Just as electronic mail by now had largely replaced surface mail for correspondence, so had virtual communications replaced the telephone and television -- not only because of its speed but also for its naturalness. No one called it "virtual this" or "virtual that." Just as with TV when it was the dominant mode of home entertainment, virtual worlds were called, simply, Communication. Social Impacts and Transformations Today, we work, learn, and play in virtual worlds. Our ability to do more things in both the virtual and the material worlds surprises some critics who themselves were so little informed about the Virtual World Paradigm. It's no surprise to those of us who have worked to make the dream come true, however. We have learned over the years that as human beings become more acutely knowledgeable about the many worlds in which they live -- both the "real world" and the virtual world -- the better able they are to make decisions affecting the quality of their lives. Virtual worlds have helped us to understand that "reality" is really the interplay of ideas and actions in the social world, and that the social world is only one among many in which we live. More to the point, by making obscure but important data accessible to many billions of individuals, virtual worlds systems have revolutionized the nature of learning and vastly increased our ability to manage ourselves wisely. We owe a good deal of our knowledge to a loose coalition of artists, designers, and social scientists: the artists because they predicted what was possible, the designers because they gave form to these visions, and the social scientists because of the methods they developed to measure the experience of these forms. I still marvel at how many correct applications of virtual worlds were initiated in the early days strictly on intuition. In this field unlike some others, intuition has been a pretty good evaluator of the ways in which virtual worlds can be sensibly applied, since it is the most natural path to awareness -- and awareness is what the virtual world is all about. But without sound measurements of virtual worlds' effectiveness, subjective as well as objective, we might build ourselves into unsuccessful cul-de-sacs and even negative experiences, as was too often the case in the early years. I remember, for example, the first experiments with virtual sex, which to many sensation-seekers seemed the complete answer to a perceived lack of personal intimacy in society. To meet this apparent demand, some crafty entrepreneurs devised crude systems for sharing sensory stimulation; for awhile, every shopping mall had one. Sadly, all that came of these schemes, besides a few unfortunate dual electrocutions, was disappointment at discovering that human intimacy could not be produced simply by sights, sounds, and vibrations. "Cybersex," it seems, could not match the degree of closeness produced by the sharing of ideas and emotions that could already be experienced in conventional virtual worlds. The large number of partnerings that occurred among men and women who had together explored challenging and edifying experiences of the usual virtual variety, without the paraphernalia of the glorified sex toys, was evidence of this. Although some individuals, particularly those whose psychology is resistant to sharing under any circumstances, continue to dabble in cybersex, for the rest of us it seems a silly detour and trivial by comparison with, say, a mutual trip to the Andromeda Galaxy or immersion in the intricate mosaics of Mozart's finest compositions. Indeed, we have found that simpler types of virtual worlds, like those offered in books of poetry and inspired songs, still have a power to ignite passion on a par with the best virtual worlds. And, of course, there is no substitute for the warmth of another human being. Petty crime does occur in distributed virtual worlds: the worst computer virus we now believe to be the self-generating "Hyper Eraser," bred somewhere in the twisted mind of an unknown cracker,. It makes its appearance unexpectedly, cloaking exquisite virtual worlds with dross creations that, like grey curtains before a scenic window, conceal the appearance and operations of the virtual world. Although many remedies have been proposed to eliminate the Eraser and its predations, it always comes back to haunt us, like the unhappy part of some human psyches that cannot tolerate beauty. Well, one day we may have an answer. For now, we can only recommend regular backups. A more important danger we have yet to conquer is the implicit but faithless validity of some virtual worlds whose constitution is seriously in doubt. Through inadvertence, ignorance, or intention, these virtual worlds show us things as they are not. We believe them anyway, because they are otherwise so well-constructed that they seduce our sense of proportion and truth. I remember a magnificent bridge designed in an architect's Virtual Design Environment and built on a certain archipelago in Latin America. The model, complete with tidal surges and seagulls, was compelling in the virtual world, for which we had received assurances that all of the algorithms were right. Precautions were taken to ensure that the bridge would withstand even the strongest earthquake. Only two years after the bridge was built did we discover that a basic error had been incorporated in the suspension cables. It was a dramatic moment when the steel fibers snapped and the platform below tumbled into the sea. Fortunately, an inspection of the bridge conducted with sonic sensors converted into a visual field viewed within a CAVE-like supercomputing environment had alerted the authorities and the bridge was unoccupied when it plummeted to destruction. The images remain one of the most vivid reminders of the old GIGO acronym: garbage in, garbage out. Only, in a virtual world tuned to its audience's perceptions, sometimes even garbage can appear to have integrity. On the positive side, this type of cataclysmic malfeasance is balanced by a greater awareness that virtual worlds are fallible; today, multiple tests and observations of even the best-looking virtual worlds give us some assurance that we are eliminating the more obvious errors. Human beings seem supremely well-equipped to detect pattern anomalies such as those that virtual worlds show off so well: the slightly angled building, the molecules that do not quite fit together, and the sound-and-sight palette that looks slightly off-key are easy clues that something is wrong. It is common practice today to subject every important question of public policy for which data exists to virtualization and then testing by opposing parties, who get to alter the algorithms and see what happens. In many countries, the law requires this type of technology-assisted disputation. The fundamental alteration of consciousness that has resulted from adoption of the Virtual World Paradigm and its derivative applications in every area of human life is that we no longer take things for granted. Instead, having at hand the means for better understanding both the fundamental and more complex forces that bear upon our existence, more of us take responsibility for achieving this level of understanding. Oh, virtual games are still popular and parents still bemoan the hours after dinner spent by teenagers doing what seem to their elders the most boring thing possible in televirtual worlds: simply talking. There is always the temptation for people in business and politics to fudge the truth a little by shaving off significant details in the world models they trade with their competitors and the opposition; sometimes governments are complicit in the deception, and then things really are in bad shape. But not for long. There are always rebel hackers everywhere to create and distribute new imagery that paints another picture of what is and what can be. In this way at least, virtual worlds have a democratic dimension that so far has escaped the notice of business bullies and tinhorn dictators who still try to impose their "truths" on the rest of us. They learn. These are the worst things one can say about the virtual worlds industry. The power of the industry as the central engine of learning and, in turn, social progress, economic development, and ecological rearrangements is the best and a far stronger argument for the value of this now multi-billion dollar, multi-billion-person industry and its product, participatory experience. All in all, I would say that virtual worlds have proven a very nice invention all around. While they haven't created too many new jobs in their own right, they have made work more enjoyable and made possible new approaches to doing things that eventually show themselves as professional opportunities. For those of us engaged in producing virtual worlds, either as infrastructure or content, a few of us have gotten rich and the rest of us have a reasonable income; most importantly, we have respect for the work we do, which is essential to our sense of well-being. No, it wasn't always so. There was a time when information and knowledge were the property of a relatively few who were educated in decoding arcane data. There was a time when virtual worlds were scoffed at and their proponents derided for their foolishness in the face of allegedly more pressing "real-world" problems. In the end, it has been the Virtualists who have prevailed, who have demonstrated that the "real world" is sometimes the most unreal world, if we can see it, and that prior experience garnered in a synthetic environment can be just as valuable as a laboratory test or trial-and-error in the material world. Today we gather in New Vienna to review our accomplishments, of which we are rightly proud. Some of us are a little more grey than we were when we met in the Palais Ferstil nearly two decades ago, in 1993. Watching our students, children, and grandchildren playing and learning in virtual worlds-equipped classrooms and indulging ourselves in occasional jaunts to the far corners of the universe (including the mind), it's hard to remember when the most popular entertainment was a TV show or maybe a video on the weekend. Today we have our virtual worlds to explore and enjoy...and of course, with a friend, a good cup of coffee; a walk on the beach or a climb in the mountains; time to wrestle with an important question; and most importantly, the look in the eye and the touch of the hand. --------------- * Worldesign Inc., 5348-1/2 Ballard Avenue NW, Seattle, WA 98107- 4009 USA. Telephone, +1-206-781-5253; fax, +1-206-781-5254. Email: avi@worldesign.com, bob@worldesign.com Worldesign's designs software products for easier world-building; and uses these tools to create virtual environments for its primarily industrial and commercial customers.