If there is one '90s geegaw whose supposed wonders have been underwhelming and oversold, it must be virtual reality. The popular press, Fox's VR.5 series, and the movie The Lawnmower Man have all created the impression that this technology is here, now, and the greatest thing since, well, yesterday's greatest thing. The spellbinding qualities the evangelists of VR promised us, however, are as elusive as vaporware. Jerky screen motions, sluggish response times, and crude cartoonish graphics have buried the medium faster than you can say headmounted display.
"The reason the term virtual reality has worn out its welcome is that so far, there are very few commercially useful applications for it," says Mike Smoot, vice president of sales and marketing for Paradigm Simulation Inc. But while the buzz has turned to shrugs, snickers, and snipes, firms like Smoot's keep trying to put virtual reality on the map.
Paradigm, founded in 1990, is a Dallas-based firm that develops digital-simulation programs for training pilots and for building virtual prototypes. The company's top people seem well poised for this task. All have high-tech backgrounds with such companies as Xerox, Silicon Graphics Inc., and Merit Technology. Paradigm's bid for a share of the VR market is a remarkable piece of software called Vega. It does most of the things you've been hearing about all along. Walk or fly through a house that hasn't been built yet; navigate a virtual oil tanker; fly an F-18 fighter without ever leaving the ground. Are you yawning yet? Don't. This time it's different, for two reasons. Number One: The images you see when you use Vega on a Silicon Graphics workstation (the only platform the program runs on) are not built from the crude polygons of yesteryear. Instead, advanced texture mapping techniques help Vega approach the realism of video. If your workstation is powerful enough, you'll see smokestacks puffing, waves pitching and rolling, and trees swaying in the wind - in so much detail you may have to pinch yourself to believe it.
Number Two: Users can customize the product "without ever having to look under the hood," Smoot enthuses. Vega simply presents nonprogrammers with a Windows-like user interface full of rows of screen buttons, slider bars, and pop-up menus. Want to change those sunny skies to near-zero visibility while flying your Hornet? Adjust the vantage point in your virtual car from the eye level of Michael Jordan to that of Dustin Hoffman? No need to write a few thousand lines of code. A couple of mouse clicks is all it takes.
Don't try this at home - yet. The most affordable Silicon Graphics computer, the Indy, costs about US$5,495. Factor in the price of the Vega software ($3,500 and up), and some quality VR goggles at $8,000 (to achieve more realism than a mere monitor can give you), and even the most generous parents might opt to buy Junior a nice crayon set for Christmas. It gets worse: high-end systems can run as much as a quarter of a million dollars.
Virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier believes Paradigm is "definitely a company worth supporting," although he points out that other firms, such as Division Inc., Superscape Inc., and Criterion Software Ltd., are pushing the VR envelope in much the same fashion. According to Lanier, a Silicon Graphics Indy is hardly fast enough to enjoy the benefits of Vega's high-end qualities. So, it would seem that, with apologies to McLuhan, "the medium is the moolah." Immersive worlds require lots of it.
Smoot, however, expects that will change dramatically in the near future. He even sees desktop VR as right around the corner. "With PowerPC or Pentium computers, soon all you'll need to do is install a special add-in card," Smoot predicts. "Probably by the end of this year, your desktop machine will deliver high-performance graphics with realistic photo-texturing capabilities for under a thousand dollars."
Paradigm will likely go after a piece of that pie, but Smoot is betting on the cartridge games market, too: the company signed an agreement with Nintendo of America Inc. to develop a game for Nintendo's new 64-bit home videogame system, available in stores in early 1996. "It's like pouring a cup of water in a fresh-dried diaper," says Smoot of the future of VR technology. "It spreads out so fast in so many directions, for us to try to say exactly where it's going is a dangerous thing. If you pick the wrong path, the parade goes down another road, and you're left high and dry."
So far, so good: Paradigm projects sales of $7 million this year - up from $3.5 million in 1994.
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Getting Real: VR Grows Up
