From: Mark Lucas <mlucas@dante.nmsu.edu>
Subject: REV-CONF: VRAIS 93
Organization: Lucas Graphics Engineering

Just returned from VRAIS 93 and was glad that I went.  There were a
lot of good presentations and VR demos were provided by the HITLab at
the University of Washington.  Attendance in the tutorials and at the
conference exceeded expectations I believe there were over 500
attendees, 18 countries represented from every continent except
Antartica.  It was not possible to attend all of the presentations
since they were being run in parallel.  I'll try to cover some of the
high points from the sessions that I attended and I apologize for not
being able to provide information on the sessions that I was not able
to attend (perhaps someone else can provide additional information).
I thought the highlight of the opening ceremony was the speech by Dr
Tom Furness, he described the early days at Wright Patterson AFB and
the development of the original HMDs.  He talked about the importance
of field of view and relayed that the tests showed that you needed at
least 60 to 80 degrees FOV for immersion.  I thought he gave a very
inspiring presentation about the potential of VR.  As I recall, some
of his key points were that someone needs to develop a real time
operating system, the resolution of the HMDs needs to be improved
(current technology is equivalent to legal blindness), we need better
positioning technology.  He also talked about his experiences working
with children and VR.  He invited everyone to sign up for the demos at
the HITL.

Michael Deering gave a couple of good presentations throughout the
conference, the first was on various display interfaces that Sun was
working on.  They included the shuttered 3D glasses (they had a demo
throughout the conference) and an explanation of the Virtual Portal (a
cubicle using three Sun Systems to project images on the front and
side walls.

Kim Fairchild talked about a system developed at the National Univ of
Singapore to design the interiors of apartments and their experiences
with a wide variety of users.  The system allowed the user to fly up
to heaven to retrieve (copy) pieces of furniture that were floating
around in a circle.  The user could then drop it in the apartment.
They scaled down pieces of furniture when they were being held so that
the user could see around the furniture for better orientation.

Neal Pert ? from England gave an interesting presentation on trying to
objectively measure 'presence' in Virtual Worlds.  The user was given
tasks in the Virtual World and they looked for objective and
subjective measurements to determine how deeply immersed they were.
They observed them when they had to walk a gang plank over a great
height in the Virtual World.  The part I liked best was that the user
would encounter a HMD in the Virtual World.  If he put it on he found
himself in a new world.  There seemed to be a correlation between the
degree of presence and the number of helmets they had put on.  (Sort
of like going deeper and deeper during hypnosis - my observation).

Dr Eberhart stood in at the last minute and gave a quick presentation
on how his students put together a Powerglove and Radio Shack speech
synthesizer system for under $100 that could be connected to a laptop
and used as a hand gesture recognizer for the handicapped.

more later....
Mark Lucas
Lucas Graphics Engineering