IICS Monthly Meeting: Virtual and Augmented Reality
This is an (edited) transcript of a segment of David Drascic's address
to the Toronto Chapter of the International Interactive Communications
Society's Wed 6 April 1994 meeting. This segment was broadcast around
the world on the CBC radio program "As It Happens" on Wed 13 April 1994
as one of their "For the record" clips.
CBC Announcer BARBARA BUDD:
First, we all had to learn what reality was. That was bad enough.
Then, off the science fiction B-film screen lunged "virtual reality",
the high tech wizardry that allows us to experience someone else's
world. Virtual reality is what the International Interactive
Communications Society is all about. The society wants to explain its
futuristic world to those of us who still think of the information
highway as a paved road with a lot of signs along it. At the meeting
of the Toronto chapter, afficionados explore some of the current
studies being done in the world of virtual reality. Okay, so, helmets
on? Here's David Drascic of the University of Toronto's Ergonomics in
Teleoperation and Control Laboratory, addressing the Interactive
Society, for the record:
DAVID DRASCIC:
... As far as education goes, there is the virtual physics lab, which
was developed by the University of Houston and NASA where you can
create various experiments in physics, all of which are well behaved.
I heard one of the authors speaking about it, and he said that one of
the problems with any kind of experiment done in high school is that
you follow all of the directions and you do everything right, and it
never turns out the way you want it to. He says that this is a problem
in education, because then students don't really believe that the rules
are true. So, what he wants to do is give them a virtual world which
is well behaved, so that when you run these experiments you actually
get the right results. This to me seems frightening from a
philosophical point of view: are we trying to teach people that
the equations are more real than real life? I think this could be one of the
abuses of virtual reality.
On the other hand, if you are just using virtual reality as an
educational tool, a chance to explore some of the rules that you've
encountered as a supplement to real experimentation, then it
could be okay, because (theoretically) it is cheap to create a new
experiment, once you have all the technology in place and you've paid
for it, that is. With virtual reality, it's easy to put everything
together, it's easy to create complicated, impossible things that you
couldn't actually create in real life.
There's also planetary exploration, where you can fly around and
zoom in and explore the various planets. I saw a nice stereoscopic
display of flying through the Great Trench on Mars, which was very
exciting.
Figure 1: Virtual versus Augmented Reality, showing the
NASA Immersion Head Mounted Display, and the University of North
Carolina's See-Through Augmented Reality Display.
(This image was borrow from "Silicon Mirage: The Art and Science of
Virtual Reality," by Steve Aukstalnis and David Blatner, who in
turn borrowed it from papers published by both of those
institutions.)
Figure 2: Surgery Simulation, where people can experiment
on virtual people in a virtual environment.
(This image was borrow from "Silicon Mirage: The Art and Science of
Virtual Reality," by Steve Aukstalnis and David Blatner, who in
turn borrowed it from one of several papers published by the
four listed authors.)
Another potential application of virtual reality is surgery simulation,
being developed by a whole bunch of people. This is the latest idea: to
create computer generated images and mix them in a with real body lying
on a table, so that you can actually see the CAT-scan data
super-imposed on the real object; so you can actually see the bones
beneath the face, and the tumours beneath the skin. Will it work? I
don't think so, not with this approach. They want to use a see-through
stereoscopic display, using half-silvered mirrors to super-impose
stereoscopic graphics on real objects. Unfortunately, there are many
problems with this type of display: first, the optics for creating a
good, undistorted stereoscopic image have not yet been developed.
Second, as with any stereoscopic display, there is a conflict between
the convergence of your eyes and the focussing action (accommodation)
when viewing objects off the display surface. And for this particular
type of Augmented Reality display, there is a mismatch in
accommodation between the virtual images and the real ones.
Maybe we'll see something like this 10 or 20 years down the road, perhaps,
but not for the next little while.
[Silent cut to another segment of the talk]
Figure 3: Autodesk Corporation's Virtual Racquetball and
"High Cycle", two early examples of entertainment applications
of virtual reality.
(These images were borrow from "Silicon Mirage: The Art and Science of
Virtual Reality," by Steve Aukstalnis and David Blatner, who in
turn borrowed it from Autodesk Corporation, who used it in many
different places.)
The main application of virtual reality is entertainment. This is
what will pay for it, this is what will drive it, this is where it is
really going to get the most use.
These are two applications developed many years ago. (Well, not "many
years ago"; "many years ago" in virtual reality means perhaps five.)
"Virtual racketball", where I think they had a 2D display on their
helmet, and they had a sensor that measured the position in space of
the racket, and you played a game of ... maybe you remember "Pong"?
The very first computer game? Basically, that's what you were
playing, Pong. You have to be able to hit a bouncing ball. Because it's
moving slowly you could actually do it without having too many calibration
problems. To actually play a real game of racketball, however, you
would have to have extemely good calibration between where your hand
goes and what your eyes see. If you don't, people are not going to be
able to do their job. Being able to create a VR simulator that has
that kind of accuacy is still another 3 to 5 years down the road, I
think.
The other think they had was what they called their "High Cycle",
where you ride on a bicycle, and as you ride, the faster you go, the
more quickly the scene moves. You can steer, and if you go fast
enough your bicycle will take off and you can start flying through the
air. [laughter from the audience]
People really really enjoy this sort of thing.
It gives you a very vivid sense of whatever it is you are doing.
It's very engaging. And it's a lot of fun.
BARBARA BUDD:
For the record, David Drascic, of the International Interactive
Communications Society, speaking at the Toronto Chapter's monthly
meeting.
(Time: 4 minutes 48 seconds)