Brenda Laurel can blow anything up.
"I think interactive television is doomed. It's a dead end."
When television's first "techno-shamanistic soap opera" needed a "wetware consultant," screenwriter Bruce Wagner turned to Brenda Laurel.
"We used Brenda to steer us away from anything resembling (Stephen King's) Lawnmover Man," Wagner said. Wild Palms, which airs on ABC this April, marks Oliver Stone's first entry into television. Set in a future in which virtual reality has supplanted TV, the story includes bits of a ghastly sit-com Wagner and Laurel dreamed up, which is holographically projected into living rooms. Laurel calls it "a horrible, monstrous marriage between broadcasting and VR."
But Wild Palms does not represent the future Laurel envisions for VR, since she thinks VR signals the eventual downfall of broadcast mass media. "Is it even possible to think of millions of people over the planet having an identical experience in a viewpoint-dependent medium?....The medium that VR points at is not interactive television a la six million people voting on the right answer to the Wheel of Fortune question. It points to networking," Laurel says. "It really points in a different direction than broadcasting.
I think interactive television is doomed. It's a dead end."
Those strong words are from a woman whose thoughts are shaping the way people think about the design of cyberspace. Editor of The Art of Human -Computer Interface Design, author of Computers as Theatre, and a producer, consultant, and researcher in computer games and virtual reality, Laurel last year accepted an invitation to join Interval Research, a closely watched company that has hired dozens of innovative researchers and given them freedom to explore new ideas. Formed in 1992 by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, and David Liddle, formerly of Metaphor, then the Patriot Partner joint venture with IBM, Interval is modeled on Xerox PARC. (Industry observers are dying to read Interval's e-mail.)
Theater is Laurel's metaphor for virtual reality. In a field with almost no historical perspective, she draws on thousands of years of theatrical analysis. To Laurel, the VR user is an actor, playing off other actors, taking action, exploring characters, experimenting with appearances, behavior, or gender. "Reality has always been too small for the human imagination. We're always trying to transcend," Laurel says.
Her attraction to theater is the same thing that makes her passionate about virtual reality; both offer "the chance to discover parts of yourself that you wouldn't have found in the course of everyday life. It's like shining a flashlight around the dark part of your brain. It's a way of becoming larger than you might have been."
Laurel was working on a theater Ph.D. at Ohio State in the late 1970s when a friend snuck her into a lab one night to show her some computer graphics. Imagery of planets, says Laurel, "blew my head off." When that friend started a software company, Laurel talked her way in. Games and educational software, she pointed out, were about characters and action; as an actress, she was already an expert. She later put her Ph.D. on hold and moved to Atari, where she produced videogames..
She still had "all these hunches about how theater and computers were alike, and how you could use theatrical theory and practice as a way to approach design." This became her dissertation, to the astonishment of the Ohio State theater department.
Not only has theater proven a powerful metaphor, it has given her the ability to get her ideas across. "It's like cybersex listening to her lecture," raves Wagner.
She became a consultant on interactive entertainment and virtual reality, and co-founded Telepresence Research, a VR consulting company. She moved to Interval last year.
Interval shuns publicity, and Laurel isn't ready to talk about her work there except to say she's designing interactive media for diverse populations. "We're trying to look at a lot of things - culture, age, gender - to understand what we need to do a better job of designing for people with really, really different characteristics."
"My whole career in this business has been about that. The refreshing thing is to actually have an opportunity to work on it in a concerted way," Laurel says. "I've been beating my head against the wall of adolescent-male-stereotype content for a very long time. And the interfaces that we've had have disenfranchised a very large number of people, because they are based around a set of cognitive abilities and learned skills that many of us aren't very good at.... For instance, the day is coming quickly, if it hasn't already arrived, where people in cultures that don't use folders and desks will have computers. Every metaphor that we come up with empowers some people and disenfranchises others."
Instead of abandoning the difficult interface, Laurel demands - and describes - a better one. "There's nothing sacred about the idea that people have to understand computers. If the cinema had that idea, we'd all go see projectors instead of movies."
This summer, co-sponsored by Interval, Laurel and videographer Rachel Strickland have a grant to build Placeholder - a virtual environment for two participants - at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Based on Native American stories, Placeholder will be an environment in which spatial contiguity and temporal causality are ambiguous. It will contain sketchy narrative guides, "little petroglyphs that slide around," and as an artistic experiment, "it has permission to fail. It doesn't have to be a hit movie."
With novel perspectives like these, Laurel sometimes feels out of place in the computer industry. "I do feel like an alien among more established business-as-usual communities," she says.
"Part of it is that in my life I've been able to turn a bug into a feature. I don't understand computers. I've been unable to construct a working mental model of how they do what they do. I can break software by looking at it. I can blow anything up. Without trying. It's sort of like being a dowser. And this extreme elaborate clumsiness on my part is actually something people will pay me for. It's quite wonderful."
