Virtual Reality - A pleasant Fiction

Web3D Consortium is the web site for state of the art in Open Standards for 3D web content. The standards are descended from VRML of the 1990's. Looking at the site, it's sad to see such exciting technology reduced to such dry, academic language. Today, Web3d is presented as a specialty application for the academic and medical communities with nods to architectural and marketing applications. The problem is that all of these applications of the technology are either small, specialty fields or continue to develop the final product for a 2d presentation. By late 1996, 3D web sites were becoming the rage, with companies like Silicon Graphics, Blaxxon Technologies, and Sun Microsystems fighting for a foothold in the market. Personal computer hardware was just beginning to have the sheer processing power to present real 3d environments and the Internet was the method of choice for communicating them. At that time, the 3d worlds were just becoming interactive with VRML 2.0 and VRML 97 being developed to add JavaScript to the worlds and several companies were producing their own brands of mult-user interaction. And that's one of the major forces that killed it. In the rush to be the first to be the first to have a multi-user environment, no one worked together, no standards were produced, and no one's software could talk to anyone else's software any more. VRML died horribly. In the aftermath, a small group of engineers gathered the pieces of the VRML Consortium and it became the Web3D Consortium. They managed to continue expanding the standards for 3D content on the Internet and keep that dream alive. Places like the VRMLSite are a testament to how quickly interest tanked just before the tech bomb. In September, 1997, the monthly VR News magazine just suddenly stopped. No reason, no explanation. Looking at the web site makes you think you just stepped back 8 years in time. Most of the off-site links are broken or go to some hijacked domain or another advertizing whatever they are selling this time. Head mounted displays were fetching thousands of dollars and were being installed in cybercafes around the world, where you could drop some cash and have a virtual shootout against a friend or stranger. Today, they still cost a load, but really only the military and some brain surgeons use them. The technology hasn't improved much. In fact, in 1995 you could get a Forte VFX-1 visor that had 180,000 pixel resolution for under $1000. Today they sell on eBay for about half that, but no one has the ancient ISA slot needed to run it. A couple companies have recently begun marketing similar visors for "patient entertainment" so that dental patients can watch DVD's while their teeth get fixed. Now there are "3d shutter glasses" out there. Blah. That's not what we need. We need immersion! In eight years, with all the advances in computer technology, you would think that a head mounted computer display might have come out with a usable resolution or at least that the price would drop a little. A company called EyeTop recently released their ooh, so new wearable DVD player with a head mounted monacle. This thing sports a QVGA 320x240 (153,600 pixels) display that doesn't even handle the resolution of the DVDs it plays. I'm underwhelmed. But at only $599 for the set, it might be interesting to see if I could pipe my Palm PDA's display to it. What we really need is a stereoscopic HMD that boasts at least 1025 by 768 resolution, a head tracker, a VGA plug, optional (or adjustable) transparancy/flip action, and an affordable price tag. Make it immersive. Make a desktop environment where you can manipulate 2d windows, but otherwise interact in a 3d world, like the Unreal Engine. The P5 control glove is selling for an all-time low proce on ebay these days. Glove to manipulate objects, a Nostromo SpeedPad to move about, and the head tracker to look around and you're set. Why, in the name of all that is exciting about computers hasn't anyone done this? Add something like IBM's ViaVoice for speech recognition and you're done. You can but your ancient keyboard away and forget about repetitive stress injuries. I often pine that I went into System Administration rather than programming. I can make things work, but I still need someone else to make them in the first place. The industry has seen the bubble burst and is sticking to really boing things like HDTVs, USB storage media, MP3 Players, cell phones, digital cameras, and game consoles. Sometimes, they go way out on a limb and actually combine some of these. These things aren't exciting. They're marketing boondogles and they're all pretty generic. Do we really need yet another pocket device to lose, drop, or replace in 3 months? If so, then how about bringing back something like the now discontinued Xybernaut Poma? The Poma was the only wearable with a decently usable HMD monacle, but the price was still too high at $1500. So what does the wearable market do? They significantly lower their processor standards while upping the storage and you get things like the iPod. Wonderful. Another MP3 player. Nothing more than a walkman on steroids. Who really needs to carry 20GB of music on a walk in the park? Wearable computing, though is a rant for another time.