From: BOB@advanced-robotics-research-centre.salford.ac.uk
Subject: Re: SCI: Independent on Sunday Report on VR

Just to put the record straight on a number of issues (I promise this
will also be my last comment on this...it's turning out to be more
fun than the Roscoe vs. the world series in Human Factors a few
years ago!).

Both Wann and Rushton have now questioned my "qualifications" to
pass judgement on these issues.  Just for the record, I happen to be
an experimental psychologist with Chartered status (plus an Associate
Fellowship of the British Psychological Society), not to mention
having a postgraduate degree in Ergonomics, with over 8 years of
working in both applied psychology/human factors design and
experimental work at British Aerospace and, more recently at ARRL.
Two Ergonomics Society awards for my efforts in the fields of
teleoperation and VR also speak for themselves.  I also have
one of the best collections of sensori-motor sourcebooks in the UK,
some of which even the Edinburgh guys would not even have heard of.  I
actuallly use these on a daily basis to pursue the perceptual-motor
work I do within ARRL, as will be seen later.

My only handicap, as far as I can tell, is that I am stereo blind, but
my life isn't too badly affected. Perhaps the difference between the
emphases I place on the way my team works and that of Wann lies in
the fact that we (ie. ARRL) are answerable to industry.  Having said
that, the proposal I put forward to the UK's Health & Safety
Executive contained not only a thorough review of academic work to
date, but also a systematic plan of attack for generating results
which would tell us what to do about the problems, not just a p<0.05
significance statement about the fact that they merely exist (yes,
yes, I included all the appropriate guff about null hypotheses,
dependent and independent variables, appropriate use of inferential
and non-parametric stats., etc.).

As I mentioned, sadly, and for cost reasons I expect, we did not win
this contract (however, the "sorry" letter was highly complimentary
about the effort put into generating the proposal's contents).  If we
had won the contract then I would have been in a position to generate
academic results which would have taken Wann's work further,
delivering data of direct use to future users and developers.
Nothing would make me happier than to get back into experimental
psychology.  Sadly, there is a limit to the number of hours in the
day when you're trying to sell the vision of VR to future key users.
On this point, if there are any of you out there who are carrying out
empirical studies which are focused on the generation of practical
guidelines for, and solutions to problems in the use of immersive VR
technologies, please contact me, as I am keen to ensure that such
results are incorporated within our VRS Initiative and would be even
keener to support further bids for academic work which could make use
of the real VR applications we are developing.

The Robotica paper quoted by Wann is but one of a number of
publications for which we were asked to review the important aspects
of VR for Telepresence.  I'm sorry to disappoint you, John, but we
were very successful in making that project work.  The paper did
not do credit to the enormous effort that went into getting the
remote vision side of our work right.  If I had not been right in my
understanding of stereopsis and had not adopted a rigorous "human
factors by doing" approach, an alien concept to some academics, I
accept,  then:

(a) we would never have met the deadlines for demonstrating our work
to the British Department of Trade and Industry,

(b) we wouldn't have demonstrated, as we did, that our ideas and
approach worked in practice and are now being adopted by parts of the
UK Nuclear Industry, amongst others, and

(c) we wouldn't have secured the confidence of British Industry in
launching our VRS Initiative.

I agree that anecdotal reports are not worth a great deal in the
eyes of those who spend considerable time in laboratories.
Nevertheless they have given us a useful insight into the range of
problems being experienced by VR users.  What we normally do on our
travels, lectures, etc., not to mention with the hundreds of
visitors we have through our doors, is listen to, and catalogue, what
people have to say and then tally this with the findings of previous
related research from the sources I mention above.  I have a human
factors review report of immersive and desktop VR systems which I have
been updating for about 3 years now.  It hasn't been published...
yet...but will act as a key reference in (a) drawing the attention of
our VRS Collaborators as to what they should be doing to ensure the
effective uptake of the technology in the real world, and (b) as a
discussion document - open to further refinement and criticism (yes,
I can take it) - for a human factors and VR working group I am hoping
to establish in the UK, along with a Professional Society (the
Edinburgh team will most definitely be invited to join this).  The
one thing that anecdotal evidence has given us is the broad range of
within- and post-immersive symptoms which seem to exist.  For many of
these there can be found reasonably robust psychological and
physiological explanations.  They are not all related to visuo-motor
or vestibular conflict issues.  There are a range of other issues,
including those related to the personality and cognitive style, blah,
blah, blah.

The bottom line (and something that is supported by a lot of
colleagues throughout industry, particularly recently) is this. If
this kind of work gets you an SERC Grade 5A rating, based on peer
reviews, prestigious scientific publications, etc, etc, great...carry
on relentless, if that's what you want.  But at the end of the day, we
in the real world have to be answerable to a wide number of
industries who wish to use this technology in the near future.  They
have neither the time nor the patience to read academic papers.  The
"so what" statement I came across last week after the Independent
article was not stimulated by an attitude Wann seems to think
dominates the "industry", namely that VR developments are driven by
$$$... and who cares about the H&S of the user, anyway?  I am sure
this attitude does exist - I saw it with one speaker at the IEE
Reading Conference last week.  In the main, however, and certainly
with the enthusiastic industrialists with whom we deal, people want
VR to work.

The "so what" response was in fact an exasperated industrial sigh of
"so what's new?" (this was hinted at in my previous message).  In
other words, the message I was getting very strongly (and, as it
happens, not relaying myself, for a change) was, why don't these
insular academics stop telling us what we already know (albeit couched
within the usual "I want my work accepted in a prestigious journal"
terms) and tell us what we ought to be doing about it?

Come out of the Lab and give us the guidelines and solutions, guys.
They may not get you columns in the popular press, but you'll be
doing a lot more for those out there who believe in VR and want to
use it.  Scare people off and you could set the UK's embryonic VR
efforts back a few years.

By the way, John...have a good time in Australia (will you be there
in January, when I visit?)!  And Simon...I've directed a couple of
potential PhD students your way over the past couple of weeks...I'm a
nice guy really!

Finally, thanks to those who monitor email entries and let me know
about these healthy debates.  Thanks to those industrial types who
have sent me messages of support, too!  Due to commercial pressures, I
don't have time normally to read sci.vw-worlds, and if my boss worked
out how much this message cost the Company for me to enter, I'd be in
trouble!

See a good few of you at the Meckler East Coast VR'93 in November!

Prof. Bob Stone
Technical Manager (ARRL)