It is not immediately easy to fathom what Brenda Laurel is trying to do on a mountain above this resort town. Her goal is to create a “virtual environment for two.”
She wants to take audio and video recordings of this landscape and put them into a computer at the Banff Center for the Arts so that two people can experience jointly the Canadian Rockies without the inconvenience of going outdoors.
All they have to do is put on some gloves, magnetic coils and helmets tethered to the computer. It will monitor their movements as they swivel their heads and walk around the room, adjusting the sights and sounds inside the helmets to simulate a real walk in the mountains-just the sort of experience that virtual-reality devotees have been promising for years.
But ordinarily, when talking about virtual reality, you expect to be talking to a pallid male with a love of electronics and a lack of social skills, the kind of person Laurel describes as “very industrious, very smart, raised by wolves.”
You do not expect to be talking to someone like Laurel, an actress with a doctorate in drama who has become a leading philosopher on computers and virtual reality.
She has produced commercial video games and written treatises relating computers to Aristotle’s “Poetics.”
Now based at Interval Research Corp., a computer-research laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif., Laurel variously describes herself as a “research artist,” a “recovering structuralist” and a “nerd hag.” She is also one of the few people in Silicon Valley who could get away with appearing on the cover of the Mondo 2000 cyberpunk magazine in the pose of an extraterrestrial vamp.
Nor do you expect her to be in a place like Banff National Park, surrounded by limestone cliffs and white peaks. As she hikes up past deer and wild roses, along a brook emanating from a hot spring in a cave, one wonders: What’s wrong with plain old reality? Why build a virtual environment when you have Banff?
“Because we can’t all live here,” Laurel says as she trudges uphill, a little out of breath but never out of answers in describing this experimental project. “Because it’s a way to help us see what’s around us all the time, again, anew. It’s a classic function of art: `Oh, look! God, that’s a beautiful apple. Jeez, I haven’t really looked at an apple lately.’
All this represents an impressive technological feat, what people in Silicon Valley inevitably refer to as cutting-edge. But perhaps what’s most revolutionary about this computer adventure is what you won’t be able to do: You won’t shoot anything, bomb any targets, drive in any races or learn any practical skills. No one will confuse it with the flight simulators and games that other virtual-reality pioneers have been producing.
“This is really non-boy stuff,” Laurel says. “We’re taking for our sources materials that are almost never used in traditional boy games: mythology, natural environment, physical movement of a more open and free kind rather than these very targeted adrenalized shooting games. I’m hoping that every flavor of person will enjoy this piece, but we’re making a special effort to involve verbal skills and delight in words, which tend to be higher among girls than boys.”
The computer gender gap has been an unavoidable issue for Laurel ever since she got involved in the industry.
“I was the token girl for a long time,” she says. “When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the `lady programmer.’ They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket.”
Laurel, 42, grew up in Indianapolis and studied drama at Ohio State University, where she became intrigued by computers through a part-time job at a friend’s new computer-game company. She went to Silicon Valley to produce video games and software for Atari and became one of the most-quoted experts on ways to make computers more appealing to the masses.
She now lives in the mountains near Santa Cruz, Calif., with her husband, Eric Hulteen, a researcher at Apple Computer, and their daughters, aged 8 and 5.
She is the editor of a collection of essays, “The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design,” and just has published a new edition of a book she wrote in 1991, “Computers as Theater.” One chapter is titled “Post-Virtual Reality: After the Hype Is Over.”
Laurel, who was a consultant for “Wild Palms,” a television mini-series this year that dealt with virtual reality, already is so uncomfortable with virtual reality’s sudden popularity that she would like to get rid of the name. She prefers “telepresence” or “augmented reality” or “immersion technology”-anything that doesn’t promise a truly realistic experience, which is still way beyond today’s computers.
“We’re stuck with these lousy optics in VR where things sort of look like fuzz balls,” Laurel says. And she proceeds to prove the point when she gets back to the arts center computer and shows a virtual waterfall that programmers are working on.
The programmers are using state-of-the-art technology-a $500,000 Silicon Graphics computer, the kind that did the special effects in “Jurassic Park”-and have developed techniques for mapping videotaped footage into a three-dimensional, 360-degree panorama. But when you put the $30,000 helmet on, it takes a moment to realize that the blurry white sheet in front of you is a waterfall.
Once you get used to the low video resolution, though, you start to appreciate the waterfall. What’s most impressive is the roar of the water, a sound that realistically shifts in direction and volume as you go above or around or straight through the falls. This “spatialized” sound effect was accomplished by recording the waterfall from four locations, then processing the audio through a remarkable-and nicely named-new machine, the Convolvotron.
“I learned in the computer-game business early on that all senses are not equal,” Laurel says.
“The best example is, you’re listening to a radio play and you’re driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven’t seen the road in five minutes. It’s because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically. But when you’ve got the television’s sound turned off, you don’t get an imaginary audio interview.
“Well, in the game business we discovered that really high-quality audio will actually make people tell you that the games have better pictures, but really good pictures will not make audio sound better; in fact, they make audio sound worse. So in the world that we’re building, one of the features is a rich auditory environment.”
For now, this world is inaccessible to the masses, except to those attending a brief public exhibition at the arts center, which co-sponsored the test project along with Interval Research.
But Laurel expects that to change as hardware becomes cheaper. Some virtual-reality helmets and gloves are already aimed at the home market, and Laurel says that virtual reality-or immersion technology, or whatever it’s called-could be available in living rooms in two to five years.
She envisions people at home hooking up their helmets and gear to computer networks, which would enable them to meet up with friends from all over the country for walks in Banff or the Grand Canyon or the Lascaux cave in France. She doesn’t know what people will want to do there, but she does have two aspirations concerning these new worlds.
One is for greater human harmony:
“The whole course of our development-of words and writing and stories and art and theater-has been a march toward finding better ways to share the contents of our imaginations with each other,” she says.
“In the VR field, there’s kind of a naive belief that once we’re able to do that even better-what Tim Leary calls screen each other’s mind-we’ll suddenly get a whole lot better at understanding each other. I know this sounds squishy, but I really believe it.”
The other aspiration is more specific:
“It’s something we people in VR don’t want to talk about,” she says, “but everybody wants to create something that’s so intense it would make you lose your balance. We haven’t done it yet, but we have a secret desire to make somebody fall down.”
