91-07/VR.Rheingold
From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson)
Subject: Howard Rheingold's VIRTUAL REALITY: A Review by Charles Tart.
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1991 01:39:07 GMT
Organization: HIT Lab, Seattle



	Some of you may remember Howard Rheingold as the first moderator 
of this newsgroup.  At the time, Howard, who is now editor of THE WHOLE
EARTH REVIEW, in Sausalito, California, was finalizing the manuscript for
his opus, VIRTUAL REALITY, two years in the making.  The book has now
hit the bookstores and is on its way to becoming a relative best-seller.

	I thought that, in honor of Howard's accomplishment, I would
share this clever review of VIRTUAL REALITY by the noted psychologist and
ethnologist, Charles Tart.  Tart, a professor at UC Davis, is best known
for his 1972 classic, ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, which became a
required text for most psychology students in the 1970s.  (Tart can how
be reached on The WELL at  cstart@well.sf.ca.us)  Here's Charlie's com-
mentary, in his own words, reposted from The WELL:




	Submitted to "Institute of Noetic Sciences Review"

                  Review of Howard Rheingold's
                         Virtual Reality

                         Charles T. Tart

                    University of California
                     Davis, California 95616

                               and

                  Institute of Noetic Sciences
                   Sausalito, California 94965


     VIRTUAL REALITY.  Howard Rheingold.  New York: Summit Books, 
a division of Simon & Schuster.  July 1991.


     If  you  care about the evolution of the human mind  in  our 
technological  civilization, this book is must reading.  Even  if 
you don't care that much, it's fascinating reading!

     Virtual  reality (VR) or cyberspace, as some prefer to  call 
it,  is one of the hottest new technologies of our  times,  still 
largely in the laboratory, but probably on the street before  the 
end of the century.  I agree with Rheingold when he comments:

     "Virtual reality brings with it a set of questions about the 
industries  and  scientific capabilities it makes  possible.   It 
also brings with it a set of questions about human uses of  tech
nology,  particularly the technologies that don't yet  exist  but 
are  visible  on the horizon.  VR vividly demonstrates  that  our 
social  contract  with our own tools has brought us  to  a  point 
where we have to decide fairly soon what it is we as humans ought 
to  become,  because we are on the brink of having the  power  of 
creating any experience we desire.  The first cybernauts realized 
very early that the power to create experience is also the  power 
to  redefine  such  basic concepts as  identity,  community,  and 
reality.  VR represents a kind of new contract between humans and 
computers,  an arrangement that could grant us great  power,  and 
perhaps change us irrevocably in the process."

     What is VR?

     We have had tiny tastes of technologically generated VR when 
we  get absorbed in a TV show or an eyes-closed  phone  conversa
tion, for we tend to think of ourselves as being in the  location 
shown in the video or where our telephone partner is.  Yet it  is 
easy for this feeling to fade into nothingness.  When you look at 
an  ordinary TV screen, for example, the screen occupies about  6 
degrees of our visual field.  Our vision ordinarily takes in  150 
degrees  or  so  horizontally, so you are immersed  in  the  real 
environment  surrounding  the TV, even if the screen is  more  in 
focus than the rest of your visual field.  

     Psychologically  and physiologically, modern research  shows 
that  our brain automatically produces a sense of embodied  self, 
and  that embodied self is experienced as being at  the  location 
where  our sensory input converges.  Untold millions of years  of 
evolution must have gone into hardwiring that into the brain, for 
it is very adaptive.  If someone throws a rock in your direction, 
it is vital that your brain automatically calculates the  trajec
tory of that rock, decide that it passes through the point  where 
you  are  embodied, and get you to duck,  fast!   Creatures  that 
don't  have  an accurate sense of bodily self when  the  rock  is 
thrown or the predator charges don't reproduce.

     Suppose  you are wearing a helmet or goggles that project  a 
binocular TV image to each eye, filling your visual field?   Here 
is  Rheingold's  experience in something closely related  to  VR, 
telepresence:

     "The  robot  itself looked like the bottom half of  a  large 
electric  light pole or a fire hydrant: its body is a  red  metal 
cylinder  about 9 inches in diameter.  The upper torso  began  to 
get anthropomorphic, with one arm, a two finger gripper where the 
hand  ought to be, a neck that is  cantilevered the  proper  dis
tance  behind  and below the visual sensors and which  turns  the 
same directions a human neck turns, and twin video cameras mount
ed  where eyes ought to be.  It looks like a machine.  The  huma
noid  resemblance doesn't come from the hardware, but in the  way 
the  thing moves when a human is operating it.  It was a  strange 
sensation for me, because I was very aware that I was observing a 
piece  of hardware.  The weird thing about the lubricated  stain
less steel joints, hydraulic tubes, wire bundles was how it moved 
in a way that I am accustomed to seeing humans move and I am  not 
accustomed to seeing machines move.  

     The  human  operator  sits in a control station  that  is  a 
little  scary to observe and a little scarier to operate.  I  sat 
in  something  that  looked uncomfortably close  to  a  no-frills 
dentist's chair.  The display is head-mounted, but it is a "sword 
of Damocles" display that uses a mechanical device - a goniometer 
- to track head movements, rather than a magnetic sensor like the 
Polhemus.   Along with the mechanical linkages, there is  a  long 
arm  with  a counterweight attached to the  head-mounted  display 
(HMD).  The HMD is clunky and clamped onto my head fairly  tight
ly; the eyepiece was secured with a chinstrap.  When I was seated 
and helmeted, I stuck out my right hand and the arm-hand  control 
was locked around my limbs in a manner uncomfortably  reminiscent 
of handcuffs.  At that moment, I was blind to the world and  free 
to move my neck and arm but nothing else.  When I moved my  hand, 
arm, or fingers, the movements were reproduced almost  simultane
ously  by the robot across the room.  I wasn't able  to  transmit 
motion  in  every dimension I am accustomed to use: the  arm  has 
three degrees of freedom, the neck has seven degrees of  freedom.  
But the constraints didn't carry as much weight with my awareness 
as the possibilities.  Just being able to pick up a wand with  my 
robot body and thread it through a hoop 12 feet away and feel  as 
if I did it myself, was far more impressive than the fact that  I 
couldn't dropkick the wand through the hoop.

     When the apparatus was switched on, I began to look  through 
the  eyes  of the robot.  The world looked like the  world  would 
look  if I was located twelve feet to the left of my body,  where 
the  robot  was located.  I reached out my arm, craned  my  neck, 
opened  my gripper, and picked up a small rod.  It took me  about 
five  seconds  to figure out how to poke the rod  through  2-inch 
diameter hoops that were set around me at various intervals.   It 
took  about 10 seconds to be completely comfortable with my  con
trol of the robot......"How easy it is for a well-tuned human  to 
adapt  to  a  machine," I wrote in my notebook as  soon  as  they 
unstrapped me.

     The  strangest moment was when Dr. Tachi told me to look  to 
my  right.   There was a guy in a dark blue suit and  light  blue 
painted  shoes reclining in a dentist's chair. He was looking  to 
his right, so I could see the bald spot on the back of his  head.  
He  looked like me, and abstractly I understood that he  was  me, 
but I know who me is, and me is here.  He, on the other hand, was 
there.   It doesn't take a high degree of sensory  verisimilitude 
to  create a sense of remote presence......It was an out  of  the 
body experience, no doubt about it."

     What you see on the TV screens dominating your field of view 
tends to become not pictures on screens but visual reality.   The 
arm  you see in front of you may, at some intellectual level,  be 
the robot's arm, but it quickly becomes your arm.  After all,  it 
moves as you will it, you feel it move, you see it move.

     Consider now the images dominating your visual field.  There 
is  no reason that they have to come from cameras at  some  other 
real-world  location:  a  fast, powerful  computer  can  generate 
realistic, three-dimensional images too.  Suppose you find  your
self moving around in a room in your robot body (but remember, it 
quickly  becomes  your  body).  If the images  are  detailed  and 
realistic enough, does it matter whether a real set of cameras is 
focused on a real room in which a real robot moves a real arm  to 
grasp real objects?  The room, your hand, your body, the  objects 
in  the room may just as well be virtual objects, that  is,  they 
exist only as electronic patterns in a computer and as neurologi
cal patterns in your mind.  

     Technically,  the VR images I and most others  have  experi
enced  to date are just plain stylized and grainy, yet  experien
tially,  they are already fairly real, even  at this crude  state 
of  the art.  Yet they are good enough to trigger the feeling  of 
being there: our natural brain functioning helps out the  comput
er.    By  the  turn of the century the image  quality,  in  more 
senses than just visual,  will be very real indeed.

"Cognitive  simulation  -  mental model-making - is  one  of  the 
things  humans do best.  We do it so well that we tend to  become 
locked  into  our own models of the world by a  seamless  web  of 
unconscious beliefs and subtly-molded perceptions.  And computers 
are  model-making  tools par excellence, although they  are  only 
beginning to approach the point where people might confuse  simu
lations  with  reality.  Computation and display  technology  are 
converging  on hyper-real simulation capability.  That  point  of 
convergence is important enough to contemplate in advance of  its 
arrival.   The day computer simulations become so realistic  that 
people cannot distinguish them from non-simulated reality, we are 
in for major changes."

     To create VR or cyberspace, then, you visually surround your 
cybernaut with a coherent visual space that is interactive.  This 
interaction is vital to give the feeling of presence.  You  don't 
just see a canned image of some object in VR, you can move around 
it and inspect it, stereoscopically, from all sides.  If you have 
lots  of money you can build a special room whose walls  are  all 
rear  projection screens.  Or, much more cheaply, your  cybernaut 
wears  special goggles (Eyephones [TM], as VPL, one of  the  pio
neering  companies calls them).  The goggles contain  a  position 
sensor  (such as the Polhemus sensor mentioned above) which  con
stantly tell the computer what direction you are looking in.  The 
computer then gives you the appropriate view whenever and wherev
er you turn your head.

     How  do you move around?  In your virtual body,  of  course.  
In the simplest form, as in the description of Rheingold's  expe
rience teleoperating the robot given above, all the virtual  body 
you  have is an arm and hand.  The most widely used device  today 
is the Dataglove [TM], also made by VPL.  In addition to a Polhe
mus  sensor which tells the computer where your hand is in  three 
dimensional  space and how it is oriented, sensors in  the  glove 
indicate how much each finger and the thumb is bent.  Thus at any 
moment  the computer knows where your hand is and whether  it  is 
pointing, making a fist, releasing, etc.  This translates into  a 
hand  you see in VR, and hand that psychologically  becomes  your 
hand  because it does what you want and matches your  sensations.  
Make a fist: you not only feel your hand making a fist, the  hand 
you see in VR makes a fist.  Open your hand and turn it palm  up: 
the VR hand opens and turns palm up.  It is yours.

     Full  body sensing suits are under development,  though  not 
yet  commercially available, so the computer will know the  posi
tion of all your arms and legs, and your virtual body will  mimic 
all your major body actions.  

     Rheingold spent two years traveling around the world to find 
the various strands of research and development that are converg
ing to make VR such a powerful technology, as well as tracing its 
history.   In a fascinating vignette, we see how Hollywood  could 
have  pioneered VR twenty years ago, but it didn't have  the  vi
sion.  Now we have major research projects in Japan, England  and 
France,  to name just a few, as well as in the United States  and 
in  the  place we would most expect to find it,  California.   In 
Japan we see VR technology being linked to telecommunications  to 
open the way to seeing each other on the phone as well as hearing 
each  other.   In Franc ewe metaphorically listen  to  a  virtual 
violin played, movements in the air that will lead to the  devel
opment of new virtual musical instruments beyond what any  physi
cal instrument could ever do.  

     I  shall  mention just two practical applications of  VR  to 
date:  I  have proposed new psychological  ones  elsewhere.   In 
North Carolina Rheingold tells us about a practical  applications 
of  VR to research in developing new medicines through  molecular 
synthesis.   The molecules you would like to join literally  seem 
to  float in three dimensional space in front of you as you  push 
and  pull on them from various angles, feeling when  they  resist 
union and where you can join them.  Chemists who have worked with 
the  system find they can work about twice as fast as they  could 
before.  The first medical drug designed this way is now undergo
ing clinical trials.

     Also  in  North Carolina Rheingold tells us  about  the  new 
Computer Sciences Building which was designed with the assistance 
of  VR.  Consider an architect's job:  she has to have  excellent 
visualization  abilities to internally simulate what  a  building 
will  look  like  after it is done.   Are  these  abilities  good 
enough.   Perhaps  the architect is a good visualizer,  but  what 
about the client?  Do they share the same vision?

     The Computer Sciences Building was constructed in VR  before 
it  was built.  The people who were going to use it  then  donned 
goggles and walked on a treadmill that told the computer how  far 
they  had  walked,  which directions they had  turned  in.   They 
virtually  entered  the  building, walked  along  its  corridors, 
peered out its windows, entered its rooms.  A question like "Will 
this  room have too much glare when the winter sun is low in  the 
sky?"  could be immediately answered by shifting the sun  in  the 
virtual world containing the virtual building so you  experienced 
what  the  light  in that room would be like  then.   A  building 
feature  was  found to obstruct pedestrian traffic flow,  and  so 
altered  before  the actual building was constructed.   It  would 
have  cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make that  altera
tion after the building was literally set in concrete.

     It  is well to remind ourselves too that it is not all  work 
and no play, but both:

     "As  Brenda  Laurel put it:  "Reality has  always  been  too 
small for human imagination.  The impulse to create an  'interac
tive  fantasy machine' is only the most recent  manifestation  of 
the age-old desire to make our fantasies palpable - our  insatia
ble  need  to exercise our imagination, judgment, and  spirit  in 
worlds, situations, and personae that are different from those of 
our everyday lives.  Perhaps the most important feature of  human 
intelligence  is the ability to internalize the process of  trial 
and error.  When a man considers how to climb a tree, imagination 
serves  as  a laboratory for 'virtual'  experiments  in  physics, 
biomechanics,  and  physiology.  In matters of justice,  art,  or 
philosophy, imagination is the laboratory of the spirit.""

     I  am particularly excited by the development of VR  because 
of my long standing interest in altered states of  consciousness.  
In the early 1970s I developed a systems approach to  understand
ing  states of consciousness like hypnosis, dreaming,  meditation 
and drug-induced states, but I lacked a good technological model 
to make it easier for people to understand.  VR is it, for what I 
proposed  was that we live in an internally produced VR, a  World 
Simulation,  produced by our physiology and our  particular  psy
chology.  Change some of the fundamentals of the World Simulation 
process and you have an altered state of consciousness.  I  shall 
be  writing about this extensively in the future, as VR opens  up 
many possibilities for exploring and inducing altered states,  as 
well as understanding them better.  

     I could go on at great length about Rheingold's book, but  I 
think I said enough to communicate the excitement.  Like  techno
logical  developments before it - the automobile, the  telephone, 
television,  as just three examples - VR is going to  change  our 
world in both good and bad ways.

     "The  advent of technology-generated hyper-reality could  be 
the  nightmarish "consensual hallucination" described by  William 
Gibson in the novel Neuromancer, where the word cyberspace origi
nated.   Or the result might be an increase in human freedom  and 
power,  akin  to the aftereffects of printing  and  communication 
technologies.   Which way it will go -dystopia or  empowerment  - 
depends in part upon how people react to the unmasking of reality 
as  a  cognitive-perceptual construct.  People tend to  react  in 
different  ways  to the news that reality might be  an  illusion, 
depending  on their personal emotional attachment to their  brand 
of reality.  Denial, cognitive dissonance, resistance, and satori 
are  all  possible psychological reactions to the  truth  we  are 
forced  to face in the illusory realm of cyberspace,  in  roughly 
descending order of popularity."


References:
        
(1)Tart,   C.   T.,  Multiple  personality,  altered  states  and  
virtual   reality:   The   world  simulation  process   approach.  
Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders, in press.

(2)Tart,   C. T., States of Consciousness.  El Cerrito,  Califor
nia, 1983.   Originally  published by Dutton, New York, 1975.

=====

From: madsax@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark A. DeLoura)
Subject: Re: Reading matter
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1991 17:12:04 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle


	I just picked up Howard Rheingold's "Virtual Reality,"
	which at first glance (all I have had time for so far)
	appears really good.  I thought that I would post the Table of
	Contents to the net, since it is of general interest to all.

	Table of Contents:

	Part One: A Microscope for the Mind
		Chapter 1. "Grasping Reality Through Illusion"
	Part Two: Breaking the Reality Barrier
		Chapter 2. The Experience Theater and the Art
			of Binocular Illusion
		Chapter 3. Machines to Think With
		Chapter 4. The Threshold of Virtual Exploraton
		Chapter 5. Entering Cyberspace
	Part Three: The Reality-Industrial Complex
		Chapter 6. Blastoff at NASA
		Chapter 7. The Birth of the VR Business
		Chapter 8. Cyberspace and Serious Business
		Chapter 9. Reality on your Retina
		Chapter 10. Cool Gadgets and Industrial Policies
		Chapter 11. "Visual, Intelligent, and Personal"
		Chapter 12. Out of the Body
		Chapter 13. The Origins of Drama and the Future of Fun
		Chapter 14. The Feel of Things
		Chapter 15. Homebrew VR
	Part Four: Virtual Reality and the Future
		Chapter 16. Teledildonics and Beyond
		Chapter 17. Cyberspace and Human Nature
		(References)	
		(Index)

	The book is 415 pages.  ISBN 0-671-69363-8.

===============================================================================
Mark A. DeLoura    madsax@milton.u.washington.edu      University of Washington
	"...the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible
	 angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane." 
					--William Gibson, _Neuromancer_

