INTERVIEW:
Domanda 1
What do you think the future of virtual reality will be like?
Risposta
In many ways virtual reality is only now being born. Virtual reality is a technology in
which people have to invent the content of a virtual world in order to express themselves
or create useful tools. So it's different in a fundamental way from many other media of
the past. For instance, with motion pictures you can point a camera at the real world and
all of a sudden have content. With virtual reality there has to be this element of
invention. And what that means is that the media of virtual reality will take a long time
to develop; it can't happen instantly. So the real drama of the future of virtual reality
is not the improvement of the technology because that will happen in a fairly predicable
way. The real drama is the invention of the culture of the things that we'll put into
virtual reality; that could take a long time because of this process of invention.
Now, we're starting to develop some new technologies that do have the capability of
grabbing, as it were, the three-dimensional real world and putting it into a virtual
reality automatically, analogous to a camera. So we'll start to see a bit of the same
phenomena of instant content and virtual reality at some point. But even so, the core of
virtual reality is not that instant content but this invented, created sort of content
that people have to come up with from their imaginations. Now, in order to do that we need
to develop new kinds of tools that we haven't been able to think of yet. Right now in
order to create a virtual world, you have to sit at a computer - usually an old-style
conventional computer with a keyboard and a screen - and you have to design the virtual
world piece by piece. We'll put one surface here, we'll paint this texture on it, we'll
have something move around, and it's so much more detail that actually there's very little
good quality work done in designing virtual worlds. It's just too much work for people. So
probably the most important thing for the future of virtual reality will be how good the
tools will become. And this question of making good tools is really a very open question.
I personally believe that in the future we'll have tools that do not look like
conventional computer program user interfaces as we're used to them, but we'll have a very
different quality. What I'm hoping to achieve is something that feels a bit like a musical
instrument. Some sort of interface that one is able to improvise with to make content
quickly. But this is a vision. It's very, very hard to realise, and it won't happen
quickly, but I do believe that it will happen eventually.
Domanda 2
Do you think that this interface will be easy to use?
Risposta
The question of how good user interfaces are or how easy they are to use is possibly one
of the most important questions, in general, for the future of mankind. Let me explain why
I'm saying that. We already know that people are capable of creating more and more
technology, and as we create more technology, we create more complexity. Now, in current
computer systems, the factor that limits the usability of a computer system is usually not
the underlying power of the computer, but rather the complexity of the computer or the
network of computers. The complexity is beyond the ability of the human brain to manage.
Computer programs become very large and then it becomes very, very difficult to change
them. A very good example of this is the year 2000 problem, where this very small, really
trivial issue of just how to represent years in computers has caused so much expense and
so much drama because it's hard for us to understand big complicated things such as
computer programs or computer networks or any of these other complexities that we have
found are necessary.
Now, at some point we're going to hit the limit of how much complexity we can
understand. But in order to even find that limit, we need to try to present the
information of a complexity as well as possible, and that's the role of the user
interface. In the future, we have to have a completely different way of looking at our
computers. We have to have some way of seeing what's going on on our computers that makes
this complexity comprehensible. I think that we're going to see something radically
different from what we've seen so far. If you think about the human mind, you have to
remember that the human mind evolved in nature; it evolved for certain tasks. We're very
good at running around in physical environments because that's what we are used to doing.
We have a memory that's very well associated with physical environments. There are other
things and other aspects of experience that are also very important for us in terms of
understanding and memory, such as smell, which can be very evocative of memories. The
physical environment is one that we're very good at, that we evolved for naturally, and is
capable of representing complexity, which smell, for example is not.
I have a feeling that in the future when we look at a representation of a computer
program or a representation of a computer network or a large database, we're going to see
is something that's like a city that we're able to inhabit; it's something that will be a
full experience in virtual reality. Right now that might sound like a radical idea. That
might sound like something that is more entertainment than business or science. However,
it is what the human mind is optimised for and, therefore, I think it's a reasonable
predication to assume that that is exactly what we'll be experiencing in the future.
Domanda 3
So the other question was a reflection about interaction inside virtual spaces in the
future.
Risposta
Based on my experience, virtual reality doesn't make any sense at all if it's experienced
by one person. If it's going to be only one person, then you'll have a much better time
just day dreaming or dreaming. It really doesn't make any sense to go to all the trouble
of using virtual reality, because no matter how good virtual reality technology gets, it
will never be as good as your own dreams in terms of just the sheer quality.
On the other hand, if you think of virtual reality as a medium that exists between
people, then it becomes extremely interesting. One of the ways that I try to explain this
is by considering the psychology of children. I believe that when children are very young
they don't distinguish fantasy from reality. And one of the effects of that confusion is
that whenever they imagine something it seems real, so there's a tremendous reward for
imagination. And that gives children a wonderful quality of imagination that's very
inspirational. It also makes them into egomaniacs in a way because they become the centre
of their universe, and that double quality of imagination and ego is often found in adults
artist as well. But there comes a certain time in each child's life when a terrible,
terrible piece of information becomes known and that is that of all the possible worlds
that the child can imagine, there's only one that they can experience in which their
mother is real, food is real, where they're not alone. And this world is the physical
world. Of all the possible worlds, it happens to be the only one in which the child is a
helpless, little pink wet being that soils itself and is very embarrassed. It is a
humiliating, terrible, unacceptable piece of information. It's a terrible piece of bad
luck.
Now, when kids hear about virtual reality, they think: Hey, here is a path through this
dilemma. On the one hand, virtual reality is shared between people just like the physical
world, as something that's objective. On the other hand, virtual reality is fluid like the
imagination, and it's the only reality that has those two qualities at the same time. If
you understand this interesting combination of qualities, I think you can understand the
future of the way virtual reality will be used by people socially. The purpose of virtual
reality will be to help people share a sense of imagination, a sense of their internal
experience that can't be fully expressed with words or images, that has to be understood
as whole shared experience. And that's something that hasn't existed before. I hope that
it will give people a new sensibility, where certain aspects of the creativity of
childhood are carried through into adulthood.
Domanda 4
What about the VPL project bought by Sun.
Risposta
When I was in my early twenties, I was doing research in virtual reality and without
really intending to I started the first virtual reality company, VPL Research. We made the
first gloves and sold the first head-mounted displays, which we called eyephones; the
gloves were called data gloves. We made all these other devices and we sold many of them
around the world. We served as the point of origin for literally hundreds of laboratories
setting virtual reality. We provided them with their first tools. It was an enormously
rewarding, crazy experience. Essentially, I didn't have my twenties; everyone else was
having fun and I was just working and making this happen. Then I had a conflict with
French investors that had put money into my company. To make a long story short, I decided
to leave because I decided my French investors were insane. And then things were
complicated and there was a lot of legal action when I was gone. Then about six years
later, SUN Computers bought my old company and now owns it. I'm pretty happy about this
turn of events because I think that the combination of my old work with virtual reality
and what Sun is doing with Java is extremely interesting, so I'm hoping that some new
fusion might emerge from that.
Domanda 5
What do you think of the virtual peripherals, the gloves and the clothes, for travelling
inside virtual reality?
Risposta
In a virtual reality system what you want to do is design technology that is like a
perfect mirror of the biology, the physiology, and the cognition of the human being. One
way to think about this is to imagine aliens that come down and visit an office at night
looking at the tools that people use and they try to use those tools to find out what
people are like. They would probably think that each person has one big square eyeball
that sticks on the screen and they have a hundred little pencil-like things that hit the
keyboard. There's nothing about a regular computer that teaches us about the fundamental
characteristics of the human being. On the other hand, if they looked at a virtual reality
system, they would know a lot and in detail about exactly how a human being is built, how
we're structured, how we perceive the world. For each sensory and motor organ in the human
ideally there would be a corresponding device for virtual reality. Now, that's not fully
possible because the human body is rather complex. And we're able to get away with only
doing the partial job, because the human brain loves the illusion of reality.
Let me explain that. I presume that there's a real world out here. But I also know as a
scientist that we can never know this real world perfectly, and that the human sense
organs don't perceive it consistently. Each of your eyes has a big blind spot where you're
absolutely unable to see and yet you're never aware of this blind spot, because your brain
guesses and fills in the spot. This is just one of just many examples in which the brain
works hard to make its perception look better than it is. So what we have to do is give
the brain enough information from our various devices, like the gloves and the goggles, so
that the brain believes in the virtual world. As long as we can reach that standard, then
the brain does the rest of the work for us and we can get away with devices that are not
perfect.
Domanda 6
Do you think that in the future we will have the possibly to see peripherals moved by our
minds?
Risposta
Answer This is an interesting question and it's something that many people have thought
about, including myself. Would it be possible to directly interface with virtual reality
through the brain, instead of through these devices like gloves and glasses? You know, the
first thing you have to understand is that our understanding of the brain tends to be
influenced by the media that we're used to. So we think of the brain as being like a
computer and the eyes being like a camera and the ear as being like a microphone. But that
metaphor is actually not correct because it's really not possible to just unplug these
things. What happens is that when you're born your brain is not fully formed, and it's
through the experience of the eye that the brain forms itself. What that means is that the
eye is not merely a device that plugs into the brain but rather the eye creates the visual
language of the brain. So what that means is that if you wanted to avoid the eye and
connect directly into the brain in order to be able to communicate visually, you would
still have to create a simulation of the eye, because the eye provides the natural
language of images. So what's the point?
There are times when it would be important to do that. For instance, to create an
artificial eye for someone who is blind, and that's already being done to very minimal
degree. It turns out in the case of sound that it's not so easy. Sound, since it's more of
a linear experience, actually does exist in the cortex in a fairly straightforward form,
whereas vision does not, so it might be easier to bypass the ear than the eye. But even
so, the important question is why. What do you gain by avoiding the sense organs? I have
never seen a compelling reason to avoid the sense organs.
Now at the same time, one thing that's extremely interesting to think about is what
fundamental experiences the brain might be capable of that the body simply doesn't give
it? I can give you a few very simple examples. There are some vestigial peripheral nerves
that exist in the body that used to go to some elements such as our tail, which no longer
exist because of the process of evolution. Presumably, if we stimulate those nerves, we
would feel something. And indeed this has been done on occasion, and there would be a new
source of physical sensation. I really know how to create to certain visual illusions. For
instance, there's an illusion you can create with buzzers on each hand that creates a
source of physical sensation that's outside of the body, directly in-between the hands.
This whole world of exploring sensations that have never been sensed by a person before
but still exist potentially in the brain is fascinating. It creates quite a compelling
philosophical dilemma in fact, but let me say that this is still all stuff on the side.
Everything that is really meaningful is still going to be in the language of the sense
organs because that's where our traditions are, so I'm not sure there's a compelling
reason to go around them.
Domanda 7
What about virtual reality and the handicapped?
Risposta
The community of scientists and engineers that are interested in the issues of people with
disabilities has always had a very strong overlap with the community of people interested
in virtual reality. Because we have to study similar things: we have to study the intimate
aspects of how a person interacts with the world, and so in many cases the devices that we
invent are useable by each group. Indeed there's a very strong spirit of collaboration
between the two research communities with a lot of common conferences. It is a hard area
to summarise, because in terms of applications there are so many different types of
disabilities and for each disability there are many different approaches, so you end up
with literally hundreds of different little stories, instead of one big story. But
certainly this is the field that's extremely important and it's one of the most gratifying
to be involved with.
Domanda 8
Do you think it will be possible using the new digital system to study the music of the
past, for instance the music from Egyptian times? Do you think it will be possible to
recreate the sounds of the past?
Risposta
For me the biggest lesson that virtual reality can learn from music is from the musical
instruments. I'm interested in creating machines which are not only powerful but eloquent.
If you want to look at the history of eloquent machines, the richest history is found in
musical instruments. Not only that, but it's important to point out that in many times in
human history the most advanced technology was actually found in musical instruments, not
in weapons or anything else. For example, the pipe organ, which was the most sophisticated
technology in Europe for many years, or the casting of bells which actually preceded the
creation of cannons. So when I look at musical instruments I see devices that fit the
human body perfectly, that allow people to create music so quickly that their conscious
brain can't even keep up with the logic that their unconscious brain is able to express.
This is very impressive. When someone plays the piano, they're able to invent very complex
logic for harmony that their conscious mind can't follow. This means that the piano is
harnessing an enormous reservoir of intelligence that we normally don't have access to.
This is exactly the kind of eloquence that I think computer systems, and virtual reality
in particular, need to be able to harness in the future. And so I find a lot of my
inspiration in musical instrument design.
Domanda 9
You also said that even computers have to follow the technology that is used for musical
instruments. Do you think you will try to create new worlds and new instruments for them?
Risposta
Eventually I want to have devices that are like musical instruments for creating serious
and practical virtual worlds and all kinds of virtual worlds. But for the moment, as a
first step, I'm trying to make musical instruments in virtual reality just to learn how to
do it. I've been doing a lot of experiments using virtual reality as a musical instrument
and also using physical musical instruments to control virtual reality; this is both
interesting to me as a creative person and it's something that audiences enjoy, so it's
something that makes sense as art right now. But at the same time it's part of a very
serious quest to discover new forms, new tools for expression. I don't believe that the
answers will come quickly. I believe this is very slow work but very important work.
Domanda 10
Do you use virtual images in your concerts?
Risposta
Yes. In this case I presented a band called Chromatophoria, that is named after the
capacity of the large cuttlefish found in the South Pacific to create images that move on
its skin, which are called chromatophores. This is the ability I want to give people, the
ability to have their thoughts turn into moving images instantly, instead of with some
trick. This is a group in which we experiment with the improvisation of virtual worlds.
And I do many different styles of this improvisation. In some cases I use conventional
instruments like a flute to control events in a virtual world. For instance, in one case I
used a flute to carve shapes in the virtual world, which is a very unconventional way to
use the flute. In other cases I use manipulation of the virtual world to create sound. So
I use the world as an instrument and many other combinations. We're also doing some work
with dance and the virtual world. I'm very interested in trying to discover the
improvisational aspect of computers. So far what we know about is the compositional aspect
of computers and we need to discover this improvisational way of using them, and that's
what we're doing.
Domanda 11
So interaction is very important in your work.
Risposta
Interaction is almost identical with the concept of meaning. Interaction is what people do
that makes their lives real. Without interaction we'd only live in absurdity.
Domanda 12
On the Internet was that you wrote a proof that computers don't exist. Why?
Risposta
This is a complicated topic and it's a little difficult because it involves some ideas in
philosophy, but essentially I have been a critic of certain ways of using computers. I
believe that computers essentially don't exist and information doesn't exist. And the way
in which computers don't exist is exactly the same way one can say that a book does not
really exist separately from people. If there's no one around to understand the language
of the book, if there's no one around who understands how a book is to be used, then
really it's just another object. The information content of the book is something that
only exists when there's a culture and a person who can interpret it. Computers are
exactly the same way. All of the bits in the computer don't mean anything by themselves.
If all of the people were suddenly to die, all the information on the Internet for
instance would longer exist because there would be no possibility of interpreting it. We
sometimes make the mistake of thinking that computers are really out there and they really
have their own integrity and they really have their own meaning by themselves. But they
don't. All of the meaning comes from us.
Now, I believe that that's an extremely important realisation because it changes the
way you think about computers. And I believe it can make the way you use computers more
clear. I'll give you just one example of this. There are many people who believe in trying
to make computers intelligent. They would like to create what's called an intelligent
agent that would be able to get to know you and be able to essentially have your taste for
you so you don't have to work of having you own taste. So they would say: this is the sort
of music this person likes, this is the sort of person this person might want to marry;
and these kinds of questions. The problem with that is that as soon as you make the
computer autonomous, as soon as you treat it as if it were a person, then it gets human
rights like all people do, and then you have to respect it. And as soon as you respect the
tool, you can no longer improve it. You can no longer say: this computer doesn't have a
good user interface, because people have a right to be strange. People have a right to be
quirky.
But what's even more dangerous, I believe, is that people make themselves stupid in
order to make computers seem smart. I believe that this process can happen subconsciously,
which makes it especially dangerous. Just one example, in the United States all of us have
to struggle to get credit ratings, which are the qualification for being able to borrow
money. But the credit ratings are determined by computer programs and these programs are
very stupid. So all of us change our behaviour to do things like borrow money at regular
times, whether we need it or not, and all kinds of other little things. We're essentially
behaving stupidly in order to please this program and at the same there are more
bankruptcies than ever, even though the economy is strong, so that means the program isn't
working very well. And yet everybody respects this program and treats it as smart. So this
is an example of where computers are being used badly, and it's because we respect them
too much.
The proper way to think about the computer is like a telephone. It's a channel between
people. And that goes for virtual reality as well. If you think of it as something that
does not have a life of its own, that serves as a channel between people who are alive,
then it makes sense. As soon as you think of the computer as something that's alive, as
something that's real in its own right, then you start to design bad computers.
|
 |
