uld be difficult to describe the lump to the consultant over the phone. But when they can both see it simultaneously, explore it together, they can immediately intuit its significance. This gets into the most fundamental capabilities of human perception.
BYTE:
How might this be applied to business?
Lanier:
In VR applications with financial data, people can walk around a giant three-dimensional sculpture that represents very complex market data. Someone can point to an unusual dip and say, "Look at this." Nobody knows how to talk about it, nobody has even seen it in any other form, but here they can share it. That is where this philosophical idea comes down to real practice. You have something that is as intuitive as a physical environment. But instead of examining just ordinary objects, we're analyzing these products of our minds, such as medical data or financial data. The combination of basic intuition
and complexity, that's the big deal, that's where VR gets exciting. VR over a network is the first place where people can go that is both objectively shared like the physical world and also fluid and changeable like your imagination or your dreams.
BYTE:
You've said that VR can reveal new directions for human potential that we didn't know before. Can you elaborate?
Lanier:
The brain's model of what the body is like is not as fixed as we might have thought. If you change the sensory motor loop to reflect a different body, the brain adapts to its new body parts really quickly. People can learn to use these custom bodies or body parts. If we use VR as an interface to control different surgical instruments at the end of a fiberoptic channel in keyhole surgery, we can create a new body for the doctor where the doctor's fingers actually become the scissors in a virtual model. This lets the doctor use these microscopic tools more effectively, more relia
bly, and with less chance for error.
BYTE:
Will people really use VR, that is put on the gloves and goggles, as part of normal business practice?
Lanier:
They will when absolute peak human performance is required. If you want to see people thinking their best, you'll see them interacting physically with things. We interpret information much more efficiently when we have a physical model for it.
BYTE:
What hurdles do we need to overcome in VR?
Lanier:
One difficult area is software development. Software for VR applications is very complex and hard to write. In a typical Windows type application, at any one time there may be a hundred or so possibilities. You can copy something, save a file, delete, and so on, and the software needs to be able to predict those potential actions and carry them out. But if you are in a virtual room and you pick up a virtual ball, you can throw it in millio
ns of possible directions. The software needs to be able to foresee all these millions of possibilities and react. There are very few people at this time who can actually write software for VR.
BYTE:
When will VR become indistinguishable from the actual physical world?
Lanier:
I believe that will never happen because people co-evolve with the technology. When the first audio recordings were made, people could not tell the difference between these recordings and a real singer. These are recordings that we today would say are very low quality--we can easily distinguish them from the actual performer. The advancing technology has taught us to hear better, to use our sense organs in a more refined way. If you took a person from today's world and plugged them into a VR application of 200 years from now, it might fool them. But a person from the future would not be fooled, because their perceptual abilities would have advanced incrementally with the inc
reasingly sophisticated VR models.
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The interviewer was David W. Baum. You can contact him at
dwbaum@silcom.com
Beyond Goggles and Gloves
