From: david@c-cat.UUCP (Dave)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: John P. Barlow Article in Microtimes Magazine Pt 2 of 5
Date: 24 Jan 93 23:31:44 GMT
Organization: Intergalactic Rest Area For Weary Travellers



The Next Big Thing
Money from Nuthin'

"I think this is the biggest thing since we landed on the Moon," says 
Jaron Lanier, the dread-locked CEO of VPL Research.  (Who was 9 
years old at that time.)  I don't choke on that one.  Indeed, I'd take it a 
bit farther, guessing that Columbus was probably the last person to 
behold so much usable and unclaimed real estate (or unreal estate) as 
these cybernauts have discovered.

At Autodesk, the Sausalito publisher of AutoCAD drafting software, 
they spent the summer of T89 in product development heaven, talking 
telephone, automobile, airplane, computer.  They invoked Edison, Bell, 
Ford, and Jobs.  And there was that loincloth-and-machete sense of 
enterprise which one might have experienced in the Wright Brothers' 
Akron Bicycle Shop or Paul Jobs' garage in Mountain View...as well as 
countless less-chronicled shots at perpetual motion or baldness cures.

Neil Armstrong's small step ran about 70 Billion Real Dollars, but 
when John Walker, the Hacker King of Autodesk, committed his 
company to creating the first commercially-available "world in a can," 
he figured that the prototype "gizmo" could be built for about $25,000.     

VPL, the other trading post on VR frontier, isn't much fatter, although 
internal synergy seems to magnify output.  Since their incorporation in 
1985, they've had two Scientific American covers and produced the 
DataGlove, DataSuit, the PowerGlove, Swivel 3-D and VPL 
EyePhones, the only commercially available head-mounted display.  
They've been in a couple of big lawsuits (one, just concluded to their 
satisfaction, with Stanford University), and create, at a distance, the 
mirage of a fair-sized company going at it pretty hard.  

But up close, one can get on a first-name basis with every VPL 
employee in the course of an afternoon. They have yet to outgrow the 
third floor of their slightly tacky building at the Redwood City yacht 
harbor.

While Apple's research gazillions yield such dubious fruit as 
multimedia and the AppleFax Modem, while IBM replicates methods 
for chaining bureaucrats to its mainframes,  it begins to appear that the 
Next Big Thing will begin its commercial evolution as humbly as the 
personal computer.

As usual, the Big Guys have neither the means nor the desire to engage 
in such open-ended creation as settling the virtual universe will 
require.  Like the Union Pacific Railroad awaiting the fact of empire, 
they prefer to let the rag-tag pioneers die all over the frontier before 
they come out to claim it.  

When the Altairs and Osbornes of Virtual Reality have made their fatal 
errors are headed for Chapter 11, IBM probably will issue forth the 
SolutionStation VR Network or some such and accelerate natural 
selection in the field.

But as I write this, VPL and Autodesk still have  it to themselves.  
Actually, they are not the first to make virtual landfall. They are only 
the first at financial risk. Unlike the first automobiles or telephones 
their commercial fledglings had the advantage of long incubation by 
government and Academia.

Virtual Reality, as a concept, found first form at the University of Utah 
over twenty years ago in the fecund cranium of Ivan E. Sutherland, the 
godfather of computer graphics and the originator of about every  Big 
Computer Idea not originated by Alan Kay or Doug Englebart.  In 
1968, he produced the first head-mounted display.  This was the 
critical element in VR hardware, but it was so heavy that it had to be 
suspended from the ceiling...at some peril to its wearer.  Damocles was 
mentioned.

Besides, once you got it on, there wasn't much to see in there.  There 
wasn't a computer in existence which could churn out enough 
polygons per second to simulate a reality much more full-bodied than 
a game of Pong. 

So Virtual Reality passed a generation waiting for the equipment to 
arrive.  In 1985 the Japanese finally (and unintentionally) provided us 
with the right video displays when NASA's Mike McGreevy happened 
to notice that the Citizen Watch Co. LCD displays in a Radio Shack 
mini-TV were small enough to fit two in a head-mounted.  

I hardly need to detail what happened to CPU horsepower during that 
period.  By 1985, graphics engines of appropriate juice were almost 
within financial range of entities not involved in the defense of our 
nation.

Also by this time, NASA had made a strong commitment to VR 
research, though mostly in the service of "telepresence," the ability to 
project one's judgement and actions into a robot located some real 
place you'd rather not be, like space.  They were less persuaded by the 
attractions of unreal places.

The Air Force was also conducting research at Wright-Patterson under 
the direction of Tom Furness, but most of this was directed at the usual 
dismal purpose, simplifying the annihilation of non-virtual humans.  
Heads up displays and looks that kill were their speciality.

For all this expenditure of tax dollars, Virtual Reality still lacked two 
critical elements: a sense of whimsy and a fluid, three-dimensional 
method for "grabbing" and manipulating the furniture of cyberspace.  
VPL was on the case.  

VPL's Tom Zimmerman had always wanted the ability to actually play 
air guitar.  It was the sort of desire his "boss," Jaron Lanier, could 
understand. Jaron had only gotten into computers after concluding 
that musical composition was not a reliable day job.  And his 
ownership of more than 300 musical instruments might indicate, if 
nothing else, a probing dissatisfaction with the limits of each one.  

Over a two year period, Zimmerman and Young Harvill (also of VPL) 
created the DataGlove, a hand with which to strum those invisible 
strings.  While they were creating this hardware interface (though the 
Spandex feel of the DataGlove makes "leisureware interface" seem like 
a more appropriate term), Jaron and Chuck Blanchard were writing 
Body Electric, the software necessary to map the actual movements of 
the DataGlove and eyephones onto the virtual landscape.

The commercial colonization of cyberspace was beginning.  VPL's 
strategy was to build the most powerful simulations current 
technology would allow, without regard to hardware cost, selling the 
spin-offs at increasingly affordable prices.  Once such item, the 
PowerGlove, is a Nintendo game controller based on the DataGlove 
which VPL has licensed to Mattel.  (Available this Christmas at a store 
near you for $85.00.)  

Another VPL spin-off product is Swivel 3-D, odds on the best 3-D 
modeler for the Macintosh.  Young Harvill wrote it as a tool to create 
an artificial reality quickly and easily on Mac before integrating it into 
Body Electric and sending it over the twin Silicon Graphics CPUs 
which blow it up to full size.       

In September of 1988, John Walker wrote an internal Autodesk white 
paper called Through the Looking Glass: Beyond "User Interfaces."   In it 
he proposed an "Autodesk Cyberpunk Initiative" to produce within 16 
months a doorway into cyberspace...available to anyone with $15,000 
and a 386 computer.  The project's motto:  "Reality Isn't Enough Any 
More."  (I wondered if they considered: "I'd rather have a computer in 
front of me than a frontal lobotomy...")

Since NASA's Virtual Realities were running in the millions and VPL's 
in the middle hundreds of thousands, Walker envisioned a significant 
discount over previous models, but he knew that his customers, if any, 
would be more bargain-conscious than, say, the U.S. Air Force.  

Autodesk's Cyberia Project was running hard by Christmas, 1988, 
staffed by William and Meredith Bricken, Eric Gullichsen, Pat Gelband, 
Eric Lyons, Gary Wells, Randy Walser, and John Lynch.  When I 
arrived on the scene in May, they had been keeping hacker's hours for 
a long time.        

And they were ready to make a product.  They'd made a promo video 
starring Timothy Leary.  Gullichsen had even registered William 
Gibson's term "cyberspace"  as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an 
irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term "Eric 
Gullichsen."  By June, they had an implementation which, though 
clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people 
with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level.  

Meanwhile, back in the real world, things were getting complicated.  
While everyone who went to Autodesk's Cyberia agreed that Virtual 
Reality was something, there was less agreement as to what.  

Part of the problem was the scale of possibilities it invoked.  They 
seemed to be endless and yet none of them was anywhere near ready 
to return an investment.  But when something has endless possibilities, 
each of them is liable to dilute down to a point where people start to 
say things like, "Sure, but what's it really good for."  At which point the 
devoted cybernut might lapse into random syllables, his tongue heavy 
with all that golden potential.  

Virtual Reality induces a perception of huge potency underlying 
featureless ambiguity.  There is a natural tendency to fill this gap 
between power and definition with ideology.  And the presence of 
such unclaimed vastness seems to elicit territorial impulses from 
psychic regions too old to recognize the true infinity of this new 
frontier.  Disputes appeared like toadstools in the rich new soil of 
cyberspace.

Thus, by mid-November, the Autodesk half of the Next Big Thing was 
down to one full-time hacker: Randy Walser.  The Brickens had headed 
to Seattle to join Tom Furness in a (non-lethal) VR research program at 
the University of Washington.  Eric Gullichsen and Pat Gelband had 
formed their own VR company, Sense 8.  (Get it?)

Within, VPL's soulful band remained as tightly bonded as a Hell's 
Angels chapter.  Without, they found themselves increasingly tangled 
in legal hassles.  They were in court with AGE (a group of New York 
toy developers who are not just in it for their health), trying to protect 
their rights to the PowerGlove.  They'd just settled a suit with Stanford 
University.  In general, they were having experiences which made me 
question the axiom that you can't cheat an honest man.           

Still, everyone realized that a baby this size would be bound to 
occasion some labor pains.  As the general media began to pick up on 
Virtual Reality, its midwives were preparing themselves for interesting 
times.  It would be worth it.  But why?

To the people who will actually make the future, such a question is 
beside the point.  They will develop cyberspace because, like Mallory's 
mountain, it's there.  Sort of.