ONLINE: New Scientist article on 'Imagina 95'

[Ian CR Mapleson]

Thought you might all find the enclosed article interesting. The article will
always be available for reference at:

http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/sgistuff/ultra64/ultra64.html

My VR Links page is at:

http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/vrinfo.html

Ian.

The Doom Help Service (DHS).
Co-ordinator of rec.games.computer.doom.help.

Stop S.314 & HR1004!! See: http://www.phantom.com/~slowdog/

WWW addresses:

Home page: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/
DHS: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/doom/doom.html
Help Archive: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/doom/doomhelp.zip
Dissertation: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/diss/diss.html
SGI Stuff: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~mapleson/sgistuff/sgindex.html

************************* Included article follows... *************************

New Scientist, February 18th 1995, Issue 1965, pp 23 to 25.

TOO REAL

What happens when you just can't tell
whether the images you're watching on
TV are fact or fiction? Charles Arthur
reports that the latest in virtual
reality is looking disturbingly good

TO BE TRUE

Live TV shows can go wrong, but not his one. The station's most experienced news
reporter waved happily from her seat on the abbey wall as Leonardo da Vinci's
own helicopter flew overhead. Then it was back to the studio where Bugs Bunny
was preparing to interview his first human, his elbows resting on the table
between him and his guest. The documentary that followed the discussion showed a
dolphin with a searchlight strapped to its back nosing at an old shipwreck.
"They're in here," it said, waving its tail.

Great show, but a talking dolphin? Surely not. Yet everything else in the
documentary was convincing enough - the sunlight streaming down the water, the
shadows and shapes, and the subtle shifts of colour. Just as convincing were te
computer-generated abbey and helicopter in the location report, and Bugs Bunny's
rapt gaze when he stared into his interviewee's eyes during the studio
discussion.

Rabbiting on.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And yet it was all imaginary. Well almost. The reporter was real, though she was
sitting on a blue box in front of a blue cloth as her live "location report"
appeared on screen nearby. Bugs Bunny's studio guest was sitting at a real table
in a real studio, but staring into space opposite, as his live "interview" went
out. Bugs Bunny was added into the picture between camera and TV screen.

Such doses of visual untruth were par for the course earlier this month in Monte
Carlo, as the town played host to "Imagina 95", a conference and exhibition on
the latest devlopments in virtual reality. On this evidence, the virtual world
is not creeping into our lives but threatening t overwhelm us. Soon, only
experts will be able to tell whether the images on the screen in front of them
are computer-generated or real.

If the only effect of the technology were to let film and TV producers make
more thrilling or escapist movies, who would worry? For instance, there were
the action thrillers True Lies and Terminator 2, and more recently, The Mask,
which all drew heavily on computer-generated images. "Sometimes the director
told us it was getting too cartoony," recalls Scott Squires, special effects
supervisor for The Mask, in which a real-life character acquires cartoon-like
powers. "But we were all fans of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones [two animators who
created such cartoon characters as Bugs Bunny and The Road Runner], so we were
interested to see how far we could take it with a real-life person."

But there are disquieting aspects of this constantly improving technology,
admitted presenters and producers alike at Monte Carlo. The first is best
illustrated by the film Forrest Gump, which tells the story of a simpleton,
played by Tom Hanks, who recalls his life and involvement in historic events.
Gump appears in clips from old newsreels and films in face-to-face meetings
and conversations with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and
with John Lennon. Gump shakes Kennedy's hand, Johnson puts a medal round his
neck, Nixon discusses hotes with him while holding a plaque made out to
Forrest Gump, and Lennon swaps banter with him about China.

Of course, none of these events ever happened because Gump is entirely
fictional. And yet so real were the images that some movie-goers thought that
the film was a drama-documentary, depicting a real person. Such deceptions
raise important questions, such as whether there is a limit on how far the
truth can be stretched and who owns the copyright on a manipulated image. As
Robert Zemeckis, who directed the film, admits: "Technology allows us to d
wonderful things, but it will also be abused. I could take the image of a
president and make him say the most monstrous things. Now the lawyers are
scrabbling after protection clauses and this film could spur that whole
process."

Being able to manipulate life will not be restricted to Hollywood moguls for
long, however. The technology for creating convincing virtual reality
environments will be available by the end of the year for a few hundred
dollars - a price tailored to the domestic pocket. The provider is Nintendo,
the Japanese games giant, in a joint project with Silicon Graphics, a computer
company from Mountain View in California.

The key to this rapid development is the dramatic evolution of computer
technology, which is halving the price/performance ratio of processors every
18 months. In virtual reality, Silicon Graphics is the star of the show: it
dominates the supply of systems for two or three-dimensional simulations.
Prices of a "Reality Engine", as Silicons Graphics aptly calls its generation
of commercial systems, start at around $80000. The systems, which are painted
purple and stand about as high as a fridge-freezer, are capable of animating
virtual worlds in real time. They update a picture at more than 24 times a
second, which is as fast as film and TV require, so the image appears to move
smoothly.

Creators design virtual worlds by defining the starting conditions - the
position and intensity of light sources, the size, colour, curvature and
spatial relationship of objects. They decide where they want the objects to
move, and how quickly. The computer then takes over. It turns each object into
thousands of interlinked traingles, known as polygons, and then calculates how
each polygon's colour, shading and position will change in each subsequent
frame.

Deceptive Ride
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Reality Engine 2, Silicon Graphics' latest system, is able to generate two
million polygons per second, or more than 80000 polygons in each of 24 frames,
and can draw on a palette of 16 million colours for each frame. It may still be
some way from real life - our eyes perceive about 100 million polygons in any
scene - but advances in technique are helping to make up the difference.
Putting the observer at the centre of rapid motion, such as a rollercoaster
ride, means the eyes can focus on only the slowe-moving polygons at the centre
of movement and less detail is needed to fool the user. Furthermore, software
companies have sprung up to create the algorithms that let animations mimic
features of the real world - heat haze, ripples, shadows and curves.

But Silicon Graphics is not satisfied selling just to companies., Later this
year, with Nintendo, it will launch the Ultra64 system in the US. The prime
target is the home user. "We've squeezed the Reality Engine into a $250 box,"
says George Zachary, manager of consumer electronics marketing at Silicon
Graphics.

Basic essentials
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The system has been stripped to the essentials needed for playing games. For
instance, there is no operating system, which provides many home computer
users with the flexibility to program their own machines, notes Zachar. It
just runs a set program. Even so, the Ultra64 will have a 64 bit processor,
similar in power to Intel's Pentium chip, to control the system, and another
processor, to be unveiled later this year, that the company calls the world's
first "media processor". There will also be a central memory able to read and
write 500 megabits per second.

Into this Silicon Graphics box, users will plug a Nintendo cartridge that
stores about 8 megabytes of data and program code on ROM chips. Nintendo has
long maintained that CD-ROMs, despite a storage capacity of around 600
megabytes, are unsatisfying for games players because it takes too long to
upload the data from them. If the processors can create a virtual world from a
minimal amount of data read from the cartridge, Nintendo will have stolen the
march in the battle for the children's market. Certainly, the commercial
incentive is high: the worldwide sales from video games exceed Hollywood's
returns from box offices and video cassettes.

Nintendo's role has been to remind Silicon Graphics that the important element
is not the hardware per se. "Consumers want great experiences, they don't want
technology for its own sake," says Zachary, clearly one of Nintendo's converts
at Silicon Graphics. "I think that in the next Christmas season there's going
to be a lot of happy people," he adds, though without making it clear whether
it means the children and their parents, or the accountants at Nintendo and
Silicon Graphics, which expect to sell hundreds of thousands of Ultra64s.

The two companies are not alone in pursuing the home market. Virtuality, the
British company which makes arcade systems, has linked with Atari to develop a
consumer system, called the Jaguar, with a CD-ROM player and a 64 bit
processor. Meanwhile Sega, Microsoft and Martin Marietta, a defence contractor
that has made VR simulators for the US armed forces, are also chasing the
consumer market.

As far as 3D simulation kits go though, this will not lead immediately to a
generation of children stumbling blindly about their bedrooms in clumsy "total
immersion" headgear as they play the latest game. First, good quality helmets
with a tiny TV screen for each eye are expensive, about $1500. Secodnly, the
health and saftey aspects of prolonged, unsupervised use of such helmets by
the public makes potential distributors edgy. "There will be some warnings,"
says Jean Preau, a director of the French games company Chronofolie. "That's
because there will be problems for epileptics, and for people whose eyes
aren't perfect."

Though manufacturers can avoid these problems by selling helmets that are not
completely immersive, noted Preau, there were rumours at Monte Carlo that fears
about the side effects of totally immersive headgear had pursuaded the
Japanese government to investigate the health and saftey aspects of the
technology very closely before approving it for consumers. In the meantime,
home VR will be delivered via the TV screen.

Virtual Pong
^^^^^^^^^^^^

What will be in these virtual worlds? Initially, the video games will be much
like the present ones that involve flying, fighting and shooting, according to
Phillippe Ulrich, head of the Drench games company Cryo Interactive. Why is
this such a common theme? "Computers are good at collision testing," he says.
Programming them to compare the coordinates of a point in space to determine
whether two objects have impinged is relatively straightforward. "Remember
Pong, the first video arcade game?" asks Ulrich. "It just tested if the ball
hit the bat or walls. We don't want to put violence into our games, but..."

Yet change could be on the ay. Rebecca Allen, a creative director at Virgin
Interactive Entertainment, criticised the settings of many current games that
are "so often in spaceships and castles". She said Virgin had begun work on a
3D real-time game in "surreal, bizarre worlds". Other developers made more
extravagant proposals.

One of them is Karl Sims, a computer engineer at Thinking Machines, which
designs parallel processors. He has been developing "virtual animals" that
evolve in simple virtual worlds by beating others to "food". At present, they
consist only of blocks linked together that can crawl or flop around their
world. But Sims is hopeful that they can be enhanced and develop an artificial
life of their own by a form of natural selection. They could be imbued, in
their virtual worlds, with size, strength, and perhaps rudimentary
intelligence. Then, he asks, why shouldn't humans join them and interact with
them in their worlds?

"Shouldn't we understand how they work first?" asked one critic. Sims was not
put out. "If we have to understand artificial life before we develop it then
we won't get so far with it," he replied. "Of course there's a downside, which
is that you might not trust these things for a while. But that's the same with
people, isn't it?".

- End