The surprising leader in the commercial VR sweepstakes is Matsushita?!
Trip Hawkins has a story he tells about Matsushita, Japan's largest electronics firm and a leading backer of his 3DO company. Hawkins had read the requisite business etiquette books, and when he went to Japan in 1991 to solicit funding and manufacturing support for the fledgling interactive multimedia player venture, he knew that it would be bad form to come right out and ask his hosts for money. So, over endless cups of green tea, Hawkins traded pleasantries and said nary a word about business. This went on for several meetings, until the men from Matsushita could stand it no longer. "Please tell us, Hawkins-san," they begged of him, "what is it that you want us to do?"
Looking to others for guidance is very much Matsushita's style. This cautious approach has served the company well: in terms of sales, Matsushita is approximately twice the size of archrival Sony. But whereas Sony prides itself on innovation, Matsushita's idea of R&D, one analyst comments, "is to analyze competing products and figure out how to make them cheaper." This is so apparent that the Japanese often joke that the company's name should not be Matsushita (after founder Konosuke Matsushita), but Maneshita, which means "they copied."
Yet, when it comes to the commercial application of virtual reality, it is Matsushita that leads the world. Even more surprising is that within the Matsushita group of companies, it is not the flagship firm, Matsushita Electric Industrial, that is blazing the trail, but fuddy-duddy Matsushita Electric Works. This is a firm that specializes in housing fixtures and appliances, of which it is Japan's largest producer. Matsushita Electric Works also manufactures the lower end of Matsushita's National and Panasonic product lines, making items like shavers, hair-dryers, and electric toothbrushes.
Late last year, Matsushita shelled out more than US$500,000 for a big virtual reality system from Division, a British VR start-up. Then in mid-April, Matsushita Electric Works paid a further $1 million-plus for an upgrade from Division that turns Matsushita's machine into the world's fastest virtual reality system. These sums may sound like peanuts compared with the huge amounts the Pentagon pours into VR, but, at least according to Division, they are the largest investments made by a commercial company in virtual reality to date.
The new installation includes the real-world debut of pixel planes, a leading-edge VR technology developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that puts a dedicated processor behind each picture element of a simulation to produce extremely realistic images. The massive pixel planes rack (6 feet tall by 19 inches wide) looks like a mainframe, but its performance goes way beyond any commercially available computer graphics box. The machine cranks out tens of millions of polygons per second, and if something smoother is more your style, it can do spheres, too.
Matsushita Electric Works's motive in making this investment is pure marketing. The company believes that VR simulations will encourage house buyers and renovators to equip their dream homes with items from Matsushita's catalogue of 88,000 household products.
The system draws upon all the tricks of the immersive simulation trade to allow Japanese consumers to design the interiors of their own houses. It lets prospective buyers see what rooms will look like, what kind of furniture goes best where, what sorts of effects different kinds of lighting will produce, how air will flow if the air conditioner is installed in the ceiling instead of the wall, and where the best place to put the hi-fi will be.
The first fruits of this investment went on display at Amenity & Intelligence, a huge show put on by Matsushita Electric Works in Tokyo in late April to mark the company's 75 years in business. Attendees formed long lines for the chance to take a tour around a "virtual house." The scale of the demo was impressive: 3-D images were projected onto a curved 30-by-10-foot screen and viewed through goggles. The tour began outside of the house, then proceeded inside through the front door. All rooms in the house were open to inspection, including the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and (upstairs) study and bedrooms. Thanks to texture mapping, wooden doors, wallpaper, and furniture coverings were realistically modeled. But the illusion of reality was undercut by the guiding device, a crudely rendered disembodied hand. Nonetheless, taken together with two smaller, PC-based systems that Matsushita was also demonstrating at the show, this was an impressive effort.
Matsushita Electric Works was founded by Konosuke Matsushita in 1919 to commercialize an invention the 22-year-old entrepreneur had made in his spare time while working as an inspector with the Osaka Electric Light Company. This was a Y-shaped adapter that allowed an electrical appliance to be plugged into a light socket. Having established a platform (and having pawned his wife's kimonos to provide working capital), young Konosuke set out to provide appliances for it.
Fast forward to Japan today: no matter what the product, if it runs on electricity, you can be sure at least one Matsushita group company makes it. There are about 100 companies within the group, each of which operates more or less autonomously. The characteristic management style is slow and bureaucratic. Nonetheless, within Matsushita, says consultant Peter Rawle of the Tokyo branch of the brokerage Smith New Court, "surrounded by acres and acres of mud, there are enormous pearls." Matsushita Electric Works's virtual reality group is one such pearl.
Matsushita Electric Works has already demonstrated the power of VR as a marketing tool. Since October 1990, thousands of customers have flocked to the company's showroom in Tokyo's Monolith Building to strap on the headmounted display and slip on the data glove to get a feel for what their kitchen might look like. Based on their experience with VR, almost 400 home builders made their decision to buy, according to Matsushita Electric Works spokesperson Kumi Sugiura. At an average price tag of 1,200,000 Yen (US$11,800) a kitchen, that's not bad going.
The development of the virtual kitchen stems from a 1990 meeting between an unlikely pair of visionaries: VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and Junji Nomura of Matsushita Electric Works's Living Environment Systems Laboratory.
Nomura's background is in computer-aided design. A 22-year Matsushita veteran, he began using computers to design consumer products like electric shavers. From there, he moved on to apply computers to the problem of how to control Matsushita Electric Works's massive inventory. The trick here is to achieve a balance between the two contradictory objectives of keeping stock to a minimum while ensuring that there is enough product available to meet demand. Out of this experience sprang Nomura's basic concept: using computer-aided design as a tool to control inventory and as a marketing tool to capitalize on a growing preference among young Japanese for having their homes custom built instead of ready made.
Matsushita already had a database consisting of 30,000 CAD models of kitchens. What it needed now was a customer-friendly front end. Nomura came across the concept of virtual environments, made inquiries, and discovered that the only commercially available VR system was the one made by Lanier's firm, VPL Research. The US-made system was very expensive, but Japan's bubble economy had yet to burst – Matsushita had money to burn.
Using the CAD database as raw material, VPL developed a virtual world in which the user's disembodied hand can float about freely, opening drawers, turning on faucets, picking up plates, then (with active encouragement from the sales assistant) dropping them on the floor.
To this day, Lanier is delighted about the work he did with Matsushita. "What I love about the project," he says, "is the way it combines two things – the notion of customers designing their own products with the notion of experiential prototyping – and I think that's a great combination." An added attraction was the project's visibility: "It was just really wonderful to have (the application) in such a front-line sort of position, in a retail store."
Visibility did not extend to the dreadlocked, sartorially challenged Lanier himself, however. "I never felt like I could possibly be dressed well enough to be present at the place," he recalls, "because the customers are sort of upscale female heads of household, and these people are perfect – they're more perfect than we can be." But a video does exist of Lanier and Nomura being interviewed by Robert Reich – then an author and Harvard professor and now the Clinton administration's labor secretary – at the Matsushita showroom, as ultraproper Japanese women come in to design their kitchens using VR. It makes amusing viewing.
Three years on, VPL is gone, but Matsushita's virtual kitchens keep on cooking. In the interim, Matsushita has applied its core skills to VPL's cumbersome, uncomfortable, and extremely expensive heads-up display and designed a stylish visor that contains two tiny (0.7-inch) liquid crystal displays and weighs just 250 grams.
Out the window, too, has gone the Silicon Graphics machine used in the original VPL installation. In its place is a new rendering board that plugs into a regular IBM PC. The result is a system that costs two orders of magnitude less than the prototype. It is cheap enough that each of Matsushita Electric Works's 35 showrooms all over Japan can afford to rent one for about US$750 (about 76,200 Yen) a month.
In addition, the visor has opened up a new market for Matsushita in the form of health products. Last year, the company announced a shiatsu massage chair and an exercise bicycle, both of which are intended to be used while wearing the visor. In the chair, you get 3-D images that are intended to relieve stress. On the bike, you cycle through a virtual town made of computer-generated images, avoiding obstacles like cars by using handlebars and brakes. In the future, Matsushita hopes to provide virtual worlds based on real images. "They're really dedicated to making something like that work," says Lanier.
But the bulk of Matsushita Electric Works's use of VR is still in home design. Along with 36 other Japanese firms, Matsushita is participating in a housing development project sponsored by the Japanese government's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Called Wish 21, the aims of the seven-year project are to improve building materials and production technology, reduce domestic energy usage, and give people the chance to design their own houses. To what extent these aims will be realized by the time the project ends next year is unclear. What is clear is that Nomura has somehow persuaded the government to pick up the tab for half the development costs for Matsushita Electric Works's fancy new VR computer system.
The ultimate goal remains to construct and simulate "a total, integrated housing system." And for this, Nomura says, "existing computer graphics systems are not appropriate." In virtual reality, he explains, "you need a feeling of the real world." Achieving this sensation takes more than just assembling a collection of photorealistic images; the fourth dimension – time – is also very important. But existing approaches are not up to handling this extra dimension. What is needed, according to Nomura, is "to develop new rendering algorithms."
Which is where Division comes in. Matsushita Electric Works has been working with Division for more than two years, "because they build the most advanced VR systems in the world." The tiny firm, based in Bristol, England, started out as a spinoff from Inmos, a defunct semiconductor firm best remembered for its innovative transputer, a chip that lent itself to parallel-processing applications. Turns out that VR – all those pixels needing simultaneous looking after – is the mother of all parallel apps.
Meanwhile, as Matsushita pioneers new applications, elsewhere in the world other firms are demonstrating the sincerest form of flattery. At its Watford showroom in southeast England, for example, British Gas is attempting to boost appliance sales with a virtual kitchen demo that British Gas sales manager Tony Bernstein admits was a direct lift from Matsushita.
Perhaps next time Trip Hawkins comes calling, the Japanese will be able to tell him a thing or two.
