From: Marc Bernatchez <mbernat@total.net>
Subject: Re: MISC: The Ultimate Virtual World in and around this one...
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 12:50:45 -0400


On Fri, 11 Apr 1997 16:22:26 GMT, macsi@spirit.com.au (Nicholas Macsi) wrote:

>HI, After just watching the movie Johnny Mnemonic (sp?) and its
>protrayal of the Internet of the future as being another world that
>you could actually submerge your self into throught HMD and gloves
>etc.  It got me thinking if it was actually possible for this to
>happen and wondered what you knowlegeable ppl had to say about it.  I
>mean the banwidth alone for something that graphically intensive and
>for it to be in real time would have to be enormous, no?  I guess the
>same is true for when at the end of the Lawnmower Man he up/downloads
>himself I wonder how much data a human is? memorys and knowlege and
>all.
[...]

Hi Nicholas,

	Well first off, the things related to virtual reality you see
in movies are more than often very hyped (can I say that that way? I
mean "contain a lot of hype" about VR). My belief is that we will
reach the level of immersion and realism "claimed" in these movies
someday. Someday soon we all hope but frankly, right now, we don't yet
have all the pieces of the puzzle put together to really get
there. It's not that much though. We have the CPU horse power to do
fairly close to what you see in those movies...at a price!  We are
looking at computer costing in the 100K$ range. The HMD industry is
improving slowly but surely. We can get a decent immersion and angular
resolution on some models...again, if we put the money on it. The
gloves have been there for a while too and work fairly well. Bottom
line is, if you have a large enough budget, you can _almost_ do what
you see in movies.

Don't jump to conclusions too fast though. None of what you saw in
those movies was even close to being called VR systems. These are what
I would rather call "simulated VR". Simulated in the sense that they
use conventional 3D animation techniques (like SoftImage and such
software) to produce sequences in the movie that "look like" a VR
experience. The actor never really experience VR while he was making
the film. A 3D animation sequence was superposed to the real scene or
something like that so that it looked like the actor was in control of
the 3D scene. He wasn't in reality.  That's where it stops to be VR.

I have used a similar technique to design a VR system. I have used a
3D animation software to build a small 3D animation sequence
representing what would be the real VR system (the VR system wasn't
born yet at that moment).  I could show people how the VR system would
act before it was actually coded into C/C++.

So you will ask "if we have almost all the pieces of the puzzles, what
stops us from doing it?". Well, it would be more a question of getting
"organized" and "standardized" in the field. The hardware is there
(almost). The software is also there and ready. The thing is to solve
the question: "what is a real VR system? How does it behave?". A lot
of people are doing VR all around the planet. Most of the time,
everyone implement VR the way he thinks VR should be. There is no real
standardized interface like we know it in the 2D desktop computer
world. I believe that once we reach that point, things will go much
smoother and faster as VR is concerned.

We also have to consider an other fact though: a lot of projects are going
on in high tech labs and we don't know what they are preparing. Considering
that fact, it's possible to think that such a high end system already exist.
The bottom line is that, even then, it will be a while before this
technology gets public.

All this is only my opinion. I'm sure other people have other point of
views. It would be fun to hear them.

Cheers


=====================================================================
         Marc Bernatchez         | www.imaginative.com/VResources
        mbernat@total.net        | www.gel.ulaval.ca/~mbernat
=====================================================================