VR emerges from its cave

Amsterdam, 11 November 97 Carolina Cruz-Neira, better known as the 'cave woman', because she built the first Virtual Reality cave, came straight to the point at the November Euro-VR Mini-Conference in Amsterdam. She stated that the term Virtual Reality has been severely abused lately. Her prime concern is to lift the VR concept out of the cave into the real world and to see how it can be implemented in a useful manner.

Switching between true Virtual Reality and interactive 3-D graphics Cruz-Neira points out essential differences. If a user finds himself inside the experience of a 3-D space with the possibility of direct manipulation and mapping of his actions, able to perform both simultaneous and transparent interactions in a multi-sensory way, the designers are unquestionably thinking true 3-D in a virtual environment.

At present, Cruz-Neira works as an associate scientist at the Iowa Centre for Emerging Manufacturing Technology which started out in 1990. Companies are invited to organise pilot projects at the centre and it appears that Virtual Reality is turning into an efficient tool for scientists as well as engineers. At the start however, some scepticism had to be overcome because people felt uncomfortable in a VR situation. Now they gradually become convinced of the advantages of a multiple simultaneous participants viewer-centred perspective which combines real and virtual objects with minimised encumbrances and high linearity.

Software is the greatest challenge as well as the continuity and the extensibility. There is a growing need to move to other systems and to create rapid prototyping. In fact, companies do not always realise what their expectations are, so applications, proof of concept in an early stage and end user feed back can be of enormous help. Projects in the fields of architecture, veterinary medicine, statistics and molecular modelling are being developed at the centre.

The centre also conducts interface studies to compare user performance across various interfaces such as desktop and head mounted display in order to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Testing has resulted in complaints about the efficiency of the head mounted display and about mobility in the cave. Ongoing research is being organised in experiments with mechanism design such as projection screen versus monitor and with virtual versus real performance. Haptic feedback still is very experimental as well as force feedback which requires very specialised software.

Is Virtual Reality a tool for the future? Before we can answer this question, we first have to understand Virtual Reality better, according to Cruz-Neira. But then again, it took humans a long time to leave the cave and set out to build a real village.

Leslie Versweyveld