MAT200A 03W		Trevor Vass Video Games: Virtual Reality and the Future of Cinema
"The Cinema of the Future" - Morton Heilig - 1955 "Virtual Interface Environments" - Scott Fisher - 1989		For a brief overview of the articles and their relavence to computer and video games, see the Flash Presentation below: Flash Presentation For an intense overview of the articles with extensive quotation, see the text below:
"The Cinema of the Future" by Morton Heilig		Heilig begins his article decrying the state of cinema at the time of the article's writing (1955). Motion Picture studios at the time were seeking to develop techniques to fully engage the audience in a movie via technologies such as Cinemascope, 3D, and Stereophonic sound. To Heilig these experiments by the studios were half hearted and misdirected at best.
		Next he lays out what he believes to be humanity's three most basic endeavors, stemming from our most ancient survival instincts: Observation - "the reception of isolated impressions or facts". - (The physical observation of danger, using sight, hearing, etc.) Integration - "the combining of these isolated facts with the inner needs of the life force into an emotional unity that prompts and controls action." - (The recognition of danger) Action - "a change in the creature's physical relation to the world." - (Any action taken to avoid harm.) Heilig then maps these three endeavors into what he sees as the three concentrations of modern man and lists their duties to humanity: Observation = Science - "bestow the maximum knowledge on humanity" Integration = Art - "digest this knowledge into the deeper realms of feeling, generating emotions of beauty and love that will guide the crude energies of mankind to constructive actions" Action = Industry - "act on the material world so as to procure more living energy for mankind"
		In Heilig's opinion, Science, and Industry have made the biggest strides in fulfilling their duties to humanity. "Science has come the closest because it has uncovered the individual's scientific thought processes and codified it into a clear and systematic method of experimentation. Consciously applying this method, it makes more discoveries in one year than previously were made in millenniums." "Industry, within the last one hundred years, has also made great strides toward its goal because production geniuses like Ford have rationalized it to the last degree. They have instigated assembly line, mass production techniques that pour out more food, machines, and fuels in one year then were produced in centuries." Art was "furthest from its goal" as the world is "barren of peaceful, tolerant, humanitarian feelings and the art that should create them." Heilig believes that Art lacks the methodology that Science, and Industry have developed, and seeks in the article to lay a foundation for the creation of such methods.
		Heilig begins his foundation by describing what he terms as the "pure" arts, forms of Art that focus on creating an emotional response in the spectator via the manipulation of one of their senses. Arts such as Painting, Music, and Poetry fall into this category. Next Heilig outlines what he calls the "combined" arts, artforms that combine two or more of the "pure" arts, using opera, theater, and ballet as examples. Helieg also notes that until the invention of mechanical aids, artists could never exactly reproduce their creations from showing to showing. Even a expert cast of performers could never recreate the same play exactly the same way twice. "In the form of the printing press, lithography, radio, phonograph, and noe television, the machine has rapidly solved the second part of art's age-old problem - distribution."
		With the problem of distribution solved, Heilig believes that all that Art lacks to fully acheive its goals is a "clear, efficient methodology". Heilig's Art methodology can be broken down into a number of laws: "The nature of man's art is fundamentally rooted in his particular psychic apparatus and is limited by the material means at his disposal." "Consciousness is a composite of all the sense impressions conveyed to the brain by the sensory part of the nervous system which can be divided into the great receiving organs - the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin." "The brain of man shifts rapidly from element to element within each sense and from sense to sense in the approximate proportion of sight, 70%; hearing, 20%; smell, 5%; touch, 4%; and taste, 1%, selecting one impression at a time according to the needs of individual and racial development." "In his creative process, man is imposed on by outer impressions. He learns the secrets of their basic principles through imitation and then subjects these to the needs of his own expression. He goes from reception to imitation to creation, i.e., from portraying the outer to portraying the inner world."
		Cinema, with the inclusion of sound, was the artform with the greatest potential in Heilig's eyes to successfully fufill the duty of Art for humanity. As a "combined art" it brought together performance, sight, and sound to try and directly portray life but without the failing of previous combined arts, their lack of permenance and control. Due to the mechanical nature of film, cinema could be created, reproduced, distributed, and performed exactly the same way each and every time. Because of this Heilig believed that cinema "had set itself the task of expressing in all its variety and vitality the full consciousness of man."
		Heilig shows how the cinema of the future can be the first artform to fully realize its potential via wide distribution, and application of his methodology. Using his third law as a basis he shows how modern cinema could be improved to meet his methodological demands: Sight - "The screen will not fill only 5% of your visual field as the local movie screen does, or the mere 7.5% of Wide Screen, or the 18% of the "miracle mirror" screen of Cinemascope, or the 25% of Cinerama - but 100%. The screen will curve past the spectator's ears on both sides and beyond his sphere of vision above and below." Sound - "Stereophonic sound will be developed so that the spectator will be enclosed within a sphere, the walls of which will be saturated with dozens of speakers. Sounds will come from every direction - the sides, top, back and bottom - as they do in real life. Smell - "The air will be filled with odors" Touch - "(W)e will feel changes of temperature and the texture of things." "Open your eyes, listen, smell, and feel - sense the world in all its magnificent colors, depth, sounds, odors, and textures - this is the cinema of the future!"
		Heilig in closing, paints a picture of what the future of cinema might hold if his methodology were fully embraced. "The theatre will provide for for the full exercise of the social instincts. It will incorporate a promenade and cafe around the theatre proper. The film will not be presented as "entertainment" but as an evening of community culture. A speaker will review the personalities in the history of the film being viewed. After the performance the audience will criticize the film in a discussion facilitied by television relays and led by a moderator. The audience will be able to continue the discussion in the cafe-lounge or on the promenade where they can see, be seen, and enjoy the evening in a thoroughly social fashion. Thus, individually and collectively, by thoroughly applying the methodology of art, the cinema of the future will become the first art form to reveal tthe new scientific world to man in the full sensual vividness and dynamic vitality of his consciousness."
"Virtual Interface Environments" by Scott Fisher		Scott Fisher was a researcher at NASA-Ames Research Center, where during the late 1980's he worked on the Virtual Environment Workstation (VIEW) project, a bold project which set out to provide virtual environments in which a person could work and manipulate with objects in a 3D world. This project developed and refined many of the objects we currently associate with virtual reality such as the HMD (head mounted display), data glove, and body tracking systems.
		Fisher begins his article with a brief description of how virtual environments might be employed by future workers to help them visualize and remotely control objects related to their work. A few examples he employes are that of the mocular chemist building and manipulating molecules with his hands in 3D when trying to create a new drug, and the surgeon who practices for a critical surgery from home via her virtual operating room. Fisher believes these sort of simulations will become common place when true virtual environment systems become available for widespread use.
		Next Fisher gives a brief history of personal simulation and telepresence. Fisher links the root of virtual environments to the film-industry's experimentation in the 1950s with ultra-wide screen formats and 3D filming techniques. Most recently he sights the Omnimax format as providing a sense of surround due to its "huge hemispherical dome... the audience is now almost immersed in an image surround." Following the sense of immersion that widescreen cinema can provide Fisher notes that modern motion rides take this a step further encompassing "a motion platform that moves in synch with computer-generated and model-based image display of a ride through a simulated universe." Personal uses of this technology began with projects such as Fisher's own "Aspen Movie Map" completed at the M.I.T. Architecture Machine Group during the late 1970s. "Imagery of the town of Aspen, Colorado, was shot with a special camera system mounted on top of a car, filming down every street and around every corner in town, combined with shots above town from cranes, helicopters, and airplanes and also with shots inside buildings. The Movie Map gave the operators the capability of sitting in front of a touch-sensitive display screen and driving through the town of Aspen at their own rate, taking any route they chose, by touching the screen, indicating what turns they wanted to make and what buildings they wanted to enter." Fisher also notes Morton Heilig's "Sensorama" machine as being an inspiration for the VIEW system. The Sensorama was an arcade-style machine that allowed the viewer to take a simulated bike ride through the streets of New York City, complete with three-dimensional sound, vibration cues, a fan for wind simulation, and a chemical smell bank to generate simulated smells. Telepresence as Fisher describes it is "a technology that would allow remotely situated operators to receive enough sensory feedback to feel like they are really at a remote location and are able to do different kinds of tasks." One of the first attempts to develop such a technology was at the Philco Corporation in 1958. With their system "an operator could see an image from a remote camera on a CRT mounted on his head in front of his eyes and could control the camera's viewpoint by moving his head." Ivan Sutherland later developed a variation on this head-mounted display concept in the late 1960s while working at M.I.T.'s Draper Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the University of Utah. His HMD "had a see-through capability so that computer-generated graphics could be viewed superimposed onto the real environment."
		Next Fisher proceeds with the meat of his article, the description of the Ames Virtual Environment Workstation. The most basic article of the VIEW system was the head mounted display. The HMD began as a motorcycle helmet sporting two 100x100 pixel lcd displays, and gradually progressed to become a lightweight visor with a headset microphone system for voice recognition, headphones for 3D sound, and a head tracking system to match the user's real-world head movement with that in virtual space. The LCD displays eventually ended up at a resolution of 640x220, and included a wide angle optics system that helped to create a wider field of vision that better mimics the human visual capabilities. The head tracking unit also plays a key role in the creation of a believable virtual environment. By utilizing "an electromagnetic device that measures where the head is within a magnetic field emitted by a source. Azimuth elevation and roll information of the head is combined with XYZ position at a resolution .03 inch and .10 degree accuracy. When this information is received by the host computer, it's sent to the graphics system or remote camera system so that, as you turn your head, the new position is recorded and a new image that matches that position of regard is displayed." Fisher notes that the VIEW project was also looking into the creation of an eye-tracking system that could be used as a cursor in the virtual environment, and a depth-of-field system that creates additional depth cues to further immerse the user in the enivronment.
		The visual data fed to the HMD was computer generated in the VIEW system, or created via a remotely controlled stereoscopic video camera system. The computer generated images were created at a resolution of 640X480 or 1000x1000 pixels, at a display rate of 30 frames per second. The VIEW system utelized "(d)ual independent, syncronized display channels ... to present disparate imagery to each eye of the viewer for true stereoscopic depth cues." For real-time situations dual CCD camera systems would be used to feed live stereoscopic data to the HMD.
		Another crucial element to the success of the VIEW system was its method of user interaction with the virtual environment, the DataGlove. The DataGlove works by measuring the amount of bend in the fingers of the user via "fiber optic bundles covering the fingers, and magnetic tracking devices give absolute position and orientation of the hand within the 3-D space." With this capability the DataGlove could be used to manipulate objects in the virtual space, or to control a remotely managed robot arm. Additionally the gloves were designed to recognize certain signs from American Sign Language to serve as additional control information in the virtual environment. "For example, pointing with one finger moves your viewpoint through the computer-generated environment as if you were flying through that space, withthe distance between your fingers and your body determining your velocity(.)" Fisher notes that additional work in the field will be required to give the users tactile feedback when he grasps an object, and force reflection when he pushes against it. Currently the VIEW system simply allows the user to push right through objects in their virtual environment, supplying only an auditory cue when penetration of an object has occured.
		Asside from the visuals, the auditory element of the VIEW system was integral to creating its sense of virutal space. "The VIEW project is capable of presenting a wide variety of binaural sounds to the user via headphones using sound-synthesis technology developed for music synthesizers." The audio system of VIEW would provide additional feedback information to the user creating an auditory responce in lieu of tactile feedback, or to alert the user when information outside the current display area required attention. Using a system called the "Convolvotron" the VIEW system was "capable of synthetically generating three-dimensional sound cues in real-time. These cues are presented via headphones and are perceived outside the user's head at a discrete distance and direction in the 3-D space surrounding the user. When it is integrated with the VIEW system, the position of the operator can be monitored in real-time and the information used to maintain up to four localized sound cues in fixed positions or in motion trajectories relative to the user."