Every year, there are a few VR products and applications that
really
excite me. These are the realized ideas, the dreams come true, that
take
me back to the first demo of VR I ever saw. "This is going to be
big",
I whispered to my wife back then. The products that win our coveted
CyberEdge
Journal Virtual Reality Product of the Year awards (the CJs) are like
that.
They're exciting. You know they're going to be important. This year
we
are happy to be honoring eight of the very best.
This year is different that the other years when we awarded the CJ. This is the fifth anniversary of the Awards, the first, and only, awards in the VR industry. This year, we felt it was time to recognize the contributions of the individuals who poured the foundations on which Virtual Reality has been built. Many of these people are not making "products". They are researchers, inventors, and scientists, dreamers and investors. To begin to give these creators of VR their just due, we have added a new award. This year, for the first time, we will honor a Virtual Reality Pioneer.
Balloting for the Virtual Reality Pioneer was conducted both among our panel of 41 judges, and publicly, on our web site, CyberEdge Electric! Opening the balloting to the public was an experiment, and it worked well. Our web voters concurred with the expert judges, indicating the high degree of sophistication of our site visitors. The consensus was strong, with the leader running away from the pack in garnering votes.
There was really no contest for the first VR Pioneer honoree. The first name on nearly everyone's lips was Dr. Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland hasn't done VR work for many years. But his contributions at Harvard, and then at the University of Utah, were basic to computer graphics and immersive interaction. VR as we know it would not exist without these breakthroughs. Sutherland's Ph.D. thesis program, Sketchpad, showed in 1962 that a person could interact with a computer by drawing on the display surface with a lightpen. Late, his group developed the first algorithms to remove "hidden lines" in drawings of 3D objects, a technique essential to any sort of realistic rendering. Perhaps most notably, in 1967, he and a research group at Harvard were experimenting with the presentation of three-dimensional data through the use of a binocular display system which was coupled to the user's head � the head-mounted display.
By any account, Ivan Sutherland's insight and experimental work is the loam from which virtual reality has grown. Currently he is working a project aimed at designing and demonstrating computers based on asynchronous processor architecture. He received the prestigious Turing Award of the ACM in 1988. He is one of five Fellows at the Sun Microsystems laboratory, which is directed by his brother, Bert. The Sutherland brothers, and long-time friend and collaborator, Robert Sproull, joined Sun Labs when it acquired their consulting business. We are extremely happy that Dr. Sutherland is the first winner of the CyberEdge Journal Virtual Reality Pioneer award, and doubly pleased that he has consented to it being called the Sutherland Award for Innovation in Virtual Reality from now on. The Sutherland Award will be presented annually to a person deemed to have made major contributions to the advancement of virtual reality.
All of our CJ winners owe a debt to Ivan Sutherland. More importantly, they are each taking his inspiration and building on it. Every year, we see better and more useful products in the winners' circle. This year is no exception. Prices continue to fall, usability continues to improve. Applications are providing bottom-line contributions at the same time that they bolster human sprits. 1995 was a good year for VR. Our CJ winners show the very best of 1995.
Tracking head and body movement is essential for VR to work. Every year tracking technology gets faster, cheaper, and better. 1994 saw major improvement in the speed of tracking, 1995 saw the price fall below the $1,000 threshold. But our judges felt that the most significant advance in tracking last year was the new design of the magnetic transmitter in Ascension Technology Corporation's SpacePad.
Ascension's engineers found a way to replace the three perpendicular coils in a traditional tracker transmitter with one flat loop of wire. The new system is simpler, more versatile, much less expensive to produce, and vastly more scaleable. The construction of a SpacePad transmitter is so simple that Ascension suggests that users "roll their own", by creating a coil of wire up to sixteen feet in diameter. The transmitter and up to four receivers plug into an ISA board that provides the interface to the VR system. With a base cost of only us$995, the SpacePad represents a major improvement in tracking systems. Congratulations to Ascension Technology Corporation for pulling in their first CJ!
Returning to the CJ honor roll for the second time is one of the great innovative companies in display design. The quality of the display system makes or breaks a VR application. High-resolution, full color, motion tracked, wide-field-of-view: these are the components of everyone's dream display. One company comes close to building the perfect display, as evidenced by their presence in virtually every serious VR lab. The newest display from Fakespace, the Push, stretches the concept of Fakespace's ubiquitous BOOM, by providing a smaller, simpler system with the same high-end optics and display.
The Push puts a BOOM display system, with 1280 x 1024 pixel resolution, and 140� FOV, into a desk-top package that stands about 450mm (18") high. The optical unit sits on three legs. The legs provide six degrees of freedom of movement, so the Push can provide a completely immersive experience. This configuration is ideal for people working on workstations, who need to see how their world looks 3D. The Push connects to SGI and other computer systems, and cost only about half as much as a top-end BOOM. Kudos to Fakespace for pushing the display envelope a bit further.
Wherever VR products were on display last year, it seemed that there was always on modest table surrounded by a group of people pushing and shoving to try the new product on display. When you finally got close enough to see it, the strange-looking pantograph-like device and the neighboring monitor with an unassuming display were cause more for perplexity than awe. But upon grasping the stylus at the end of the arm, and feeling the virtual objects, large and small, soft and hard, smooth and ragged, one's perception of the device quickly changed to admiration.
The PHANToM, by SensAble Devices, is not the only force-reflecting haptic interface, but most observers feel that it is the best commercially available. The PHANToM provides 400 dpi (.07mm), 6 DOF resolution in a small-desk-top package that plugs into any computer's serial port. While it only provides feedback to one point, such as a fingertip or stylus, it has such smooth and fast response that with eyes closed one really believes the feelings it produces. SenseAble Devises are suggesting the PHANToM for medial and ergonomic applications, and it is rapidly being accepted as the standard for haptic feedback. We applaud SensAble Devices for letting us feel our virtual worlds.
Ed McKracken, Chairman and CEO of Silicon Graphics, Inc., told us at the introduction of a new computer that he and SGI feel "that customer requirements are far outstripping the performance of commodity systems." That's why, he went on, SGI spends so much on R&D. The new system McKracken was unveiling at that press conference last June was the Indigo2 IMPACT, a system which provided a new milepost on the price:performance continuum.
Three years ago we presented a CJ to SGI for the RealityEngine, a graphics rendering option that provided amazing performance. Recently, SGI introduced the successor to the RealityEngine, the InfinateReality graphics sub-system. While each of these systems produces stunning real-time graphics performance, their prices are equally stunning. The Indgo2 IMPACT series starts to make RealityEngine performance affordable for smaller operations. It can create a flow of 234,000 Garaud-shaded pixels per second, or about 100 times the performance of an Indigo2 Extreme. The IMPACT supports up to 4MB of texture RAM. IMPACT systems are available for less than US$50,000, and while that's still a lot of money, SGI has once again raised the ante in the performance poker game.
Our two Application Category winners have something in common. They both are intended for use by children. These aren't games, though, and they provide insight and information that may well help us better understand how and why VR provides a better interface to computers.Autism is one of the most heartbreaking words for a parent to hear. An autistic child is trapped in a cacophonous world of isolation and frustration. Often these children are of normal intelligence, but a brain disorder prevents them from easily realizing their potential. A pioneering group in North Carolina decided to try VR as a way to reach autistic children, and they made encouraging progress.
Dorothy Strickland and a TEACHC, group that works with autistic children and their parents built a system last year that was designed to evaluate the value of VR in training autistic kids to get by in the world. Using equipment donated by Division, and labor donated by the computer-science department, they set up a very simple scenario: crossing a not-to-busy street. One big question was if the children would wear the bulky HMD. They did. Could they adapt to and learn in the virtual environment? They could. After 40 tests with two young subjects, Strickland's group demonstrated the value of VR as a teaching tool for these children, and outlined a plan for further investigation. For finding a new way to use a powerful technology to help the least empowered, we are very happy to recognize the Training for Autistic Children project and Dorothy Strickland and her team.
Another child-oriented application debuted last year. This one had a lot more fanfare, and went on-line in November. Intended to provide solace to seriously ill and hospitalized children, the Starbright World Virtual Playground shows another innovative application of VR technology. Developed by the Starbright Foundation, with team-members Intel, Sprint, UB Networks, and Worlds, Inc., Starbright World provides an envelope for a whole bunch of great technology, and hides it behind an appealing and entertaining front-end.
The idea is simple. Give hospitalized kids a way to communicate with each other, give them games to play and places to go. Get them out of the hospital, if only in their imaginations, and provide some relief from the pain, fear, and boredom of a prolonged illness. Starbright World does this by providing fanciful terminals with high-speed connections and virtual worlds in which to play and share experiences. With five hospitals in five different US cities involved in the pilot program, Starbright will give hundreds of children some fun. This is one of the first goal-oriented applications of shared, or social, virtual worlds, and we applaud both the implementation and the sentiment.
At last year's SIGGRAPH, the buzz among the VR cognoscenti was about the new world-building system in a little booth at the side of the hall. The new tool was designed for a user wearing two input gloves, and with two-fisted impact, enabled that user to simply grab and place 3d objects from a palette in the virtual world. World-building from within the world has long been a desire for VR developers, and MultiGen's SmartScene shows how that can be done.
SmartScene (introduced as SmartModel) takes a giant step toward intuitive, obvious techniques for building virtual worlds. Wearing two gloves (they recommend the Pinch glove, from Fakespace) and HMD, the SmartScene user chooses objects, behaviors, textures, and other properties from an in-world palette. While building a world, the user can scale models simply by grabbing and stretching them. Likewise, the entire world can be moved relative to the viewer by activating a mode switch and grabbing the world. To get a closer look at something, the world-builder simple pulls the world closer, or shrinks or grows herself as appropriate. The software, which runs on SGI workstations, makes world-building easier, more obvious, and much faster. We expect to see many followers on this new path blazed by MultiGen.
In every era, artists and visionaries show the technicians the true value of their inventions and ideas. Cubism reflected the concerns of relativity. Novels revealed the true power of the printing press. Artistic directors proved the value of motion pictures. Virtual reality too, is being defined by the art it makes possible.
Last year we presented the first Art and Events CJ, to Rita Addison for her insightful, beautiful and disturbing Detour: Brain Deconstruction Ahead. This year, another fine artist and technician offers her vision of virtual worlds, a vision of beauty and uncertainty that beguiles and entrances.
Says this year's winner, Char Davies, of SofImage, about her creation; Osmose is "an immersive virtual space exploring the relation between exterior nature and inner self. Osmose is a work-in-progress exploring the potential of immersive virtual space as a medium for visual/aural expression and kinesthetic experience of philosophical ideas. " The worlds presented by Osmose look like natural setting, trees, meadows, and streams. However, control is through the breath and balance, much like scuba diving. Upon entering Osmose, one is beckoned to investigate the deepest workings of these denizens of the real world. But in the virtual world, one can, in a deeply mystical way, enter and know the tree, the stream, even the computer code that makes it all happen, and be connected to them. Osmose is beautiful and charming, and worthy of recognition for that alone. But we believe the greater value of Osmose will turn out to be in how it suggests new ways to see our surroundings. Thank you Char Davies!
That's it for this time! The 1995 CyberEdge Journal Virtual Reality Product of the Year Award winners accepted their trophies and the applause of the industry at a gala banquet presentation held on April 1, 1996, at the IEEE VRAIS conference in Santa Clara, California. Once again, in this, the fifth anniversary year for the CJs, a fine group of people and companies have shown us how to use VR to make our worlds, real or virtual, better places to be.
Contacts:
Ascension Technology Corporation
PO Box 527
Burlington, VT, 05402, USA
802 860-6440, FAX: 802 655-6305
www.world.std.com/~ascen
Fakespace, Inc.
4085 Campbell Avenue
Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA
415 688-1940, FAX: 415 688-1949
www.fakespace.com
MultiGen
550 S. Winchester Boulevard, Suite 500
San Jose, CA 95128-8526USA,
FAX: 408 261-4100
www.multigen.com
NCSU
Strickland, Dorothy
PO Box 8206
Computer Science
Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA
919 515-7971
dorothys@adm.csc.ncsu.edu
SensAble Devices
26 Landsdowne Street
University Park At MIT
Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA
617 621-0150, FAX: 617 621-0135
www.sensable.com/users/
sensable
Silicon Graphics
2011 N Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View, CA, 94039, USA
415 960-1980, FAX: 415 961-0595
www.sgi.com
SOFTIMAGE Inc.
Davies, Charlotte
3510 St. Laurent Boulevard
Suite 400
Montreal, QC, H2X 2V2, CANADA
514 845-1636, FAX: 514 845-8755
charlotte.davies@softima
ge.com
Starbright Pediatric Network
11878 La Grange Avenue
Los Angeles, CA, 90025-5230, USA
310 447-9090, FAX: 415 447-9091
www.starbright.org
CyberEdge Journal
#1 Gate Six Road, Suite G, Sausalito, CA 94965 USA
415 331-EDGE (3343), FAX: 415 331-3643
Home Page
Copyright 1996 CyberEdge Journal. All rights reserved. Used with permission of CyberEdge Journal.