LIVE TV shows can go wrong, but not this one. The station’s most experienced news reporter waved happily from her seat on the abbey wall as Leonardo da Vinci’s own helicopter flew overhead. Then it was back to the studio where Bugs Bunny was preparing to interview his first human, his elbows resting on the table between him and his guest. The documentary that followed the studio discussion showed a dolphin with a searchlight strapped to its back nosing at an old shipwreck. “They’re in here,” it said, waving its tail.
Great show, but a talking dolphin? Surely not. Yet everything else in the documentary was convincing enough – the sunlight streaming down through the water, the shadows and shapes, and the subtle shifts of colour. Just as convincing were the computer-generated abbey and helicopter in the location report, and Bugs Bunny’s rapt gaze when he stared into his interviewee’s eyes during the studio discussion.
Rabbiting on
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And yet it was all imaginary. Well almost. The reporter was real, though she was sitting on a blue box in front of a blue cloth as her live “location report” appeared on screen nearby. Bugs Bunny’s studio guest was sitting at a real table in a real studio, but staring into space opposite, as his live “interview” went out. Bugs Bunny was added into the picture between camera and TV screen.
Such doses of visual untruth were par for the course earlier this month in Monte Carlo, as the town played host to “Imagina 95”, a conference and exhibition on the latest developments in virtual reality. On this evidence, the virtual world is not creeping into our lives but threatening to overwhelm us. Soon, only experts will be able to tell whether the images on the screen in front of them are computer-generated or real.
If the only effect of the technology were to let film and TV producers make more thrilling or escapist movies, who would worry? For instance, there were the action thrillers True Lies and Terminator 2, and more recently, The Mask, which all drew heavily on computer-generated images. “Sometimes the director told us it was getting too cartoony,” recalls Scott Squires, special effects supervisor for The Mask, in which a real-life character acquires cartoon-like powers. “But we were all fans of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones [two animators who created cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and The Road Runner], so we were interested to see how far we could take it with a real-life person.”
But there are disquieting aspects of this constantly improving technology, admitted presenters and producers alike at Monte Carlo. The first is best illustrated by the film Forrest Gump, which tells the story of a simpleton, played by Tom Hanks, who recalls his life and involvement in historic events. Gump appears in clips from old newsreels and films in face-to-face meetings and conversations with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and with John Lennon. Gump shakes Kennedy’s hand, Johnson puts a medal around his neck, Nixon discusses hotels with him while holding a plaque made out to Forrest Gump, and Lennon swaps banter with him about China.
Of course, none of these events ever happened because Gump is entirely fictional. And yet so real were the images that some moviegoers thought that the film was a drama-documentary, depicting a real person. Such deceptions raise important questions, such as whether there is a limit on how far the truth can be stretched and who owns the copyright on a manipulated image. As Robert Zemeckis, who directed the film, admits: “Technology allows us to do wonderful things, but it will also be abused. I could take the image of a president and make him say the most monstrous things. Now the lawyers are scrabbling after protection clauses and this film could spur that whole process.”
Being able to manipulate life will not be restricted to Hollywood moguls for long, however. The technology for creating convincing virtual reality environments will be available by the end of the year for a few hundred dollars – a price tailored to the domestic pocket. The provider is Nintendo, the Japanese games giant, in a joint project with Silicon Graphics, a computer company from Mountain View in California.
The key to this rapid development is the dramatic evolution of computer technology, which is halving the price/performance ratio of processors every 18 months. In virtual reality, Silicon Graphics is the star of the show: it dominates the supply of systems for two or three-dimensional simulations. Prices of a “Reality Engine”, as Silicon Graphics aptly calls its generation of commercial systems, start at around $80 000. The systems, which are painted purple and stand about as high as a fridge-freezer, are capable of animating virtual worlds in real time. They update a picture more than 24 times a second, which is as fast as film and TV require, so the image appears to move smoothly.
Creators design virtual worlds by defining the starting conditions – the position and intensity of light sources, the size, colour, curvature and spatial relationship of objects. They decide where they want the objects to move, and how quickly. The computer then takes over. It turns each object into thousands of interlinked triangles, known as polygons, and then calculates how each polygon’s colour, shading and position will change in each subsequent frame.
Deceptive ride
Reality Engine2, Silicon Graphics’ latest system, is able to generate two million polygons per second, or more than 80 000 polygons in each of 24 frames, and can draw on a palette of 16 million colours for each frame. It may still be some way from real life – our eyes perceive about 100 million polygons in any scene – but advances in technique are helping to make up the difference. Putting the observer at the centre of rapid motion, such as a rollercoaster ride, means the eyes can focus on only the slower-moving polygons at the centre of movement and less detail is needed to fool the user. Furthermore, software companies have sprung up to create the algorithms that let animations mimic features of the real world – heat haze, ripples, shadows and curves.
But Silicon Graphics is not satisfied selling just to companies. Later this year, with Nintendo, it will launch the Ultra64 system in the US. The prime target is the home user. We’ve squeezed the Reality Engine into a $250 box,” says George Zachary, manager of consumer electronics marketing at Silicon Graphics.
Basic essentials
The system has been stripped to the essentials needed for playing games. For instance, there is no operating system, which provides many home computer users with the flexibility to program their own machines, notes Zachary. It just runs a set program. Even so, the Ultra64 will have a 64-bit processor, similar in power to Intel’s Pentium chip, to control the system, and another processor, to be unveiled later this year, that the company calls the world’s first “media processor”. There will also be a central memory able to read and write 500 megabits per second.
Into this Silicon Graphics box, users will plug a Nintendo cartridge that stores about 8 megabytes of data and program code on ROM chips. Nintendo has long maintained that CD-ROMs, despite a storage capacity of around 600 megabytes, are unsatisfying for games players because it takes too long to upload the data from them. If the processors can create a virtual world from a minimal amount of data read from the cartridge, Nintendo will have stolen a march in the battle for the children’s market. Certainly, the commercial incentive is high: the worldwide sales from video games exceed Hollywood’s returns from box offices and video cassettes.
Nintendo’s role has been to remind Silicon Graphics that the important element is not the hardware per se. “Consumers want great experiences, they don’t want technology for its own sake,” says Zachary, clearly one of Nintendo’s converts at Silicon Graphics. “I think that in the next Christmas season there’s going to be a lot of happy people,” he adds, though without making it clear whether it means children and their parents, or the accountants at Nintendo and Silicon Graphics, which expect to sell hundreds of thousands of Ultra64s.
The two companies are not alone in pursuing the home market. Virtuality, the British company which makes arcade systems, has linked with Atari to develop a consumer system, called Jaguar, with a CD-ROM player and a 64-bit processor. Meanwhile Sega, Microsoft and Martin Marietta, a defence contractor that has made VR simulators for the US armed forces, are also chasing the consumer market.
As far as 3D simulation kits go though, this will not lead immediately to a generation of children stumbling blindly about their bedrooms in clumsy “total immersion” headgear as they play the latest game. First, good quality helmets with a tiny TV screen for each eye are expensive, about $1500. Secondly, the health and safety aspects of prolonged, unsupervised use of such helmets by the public makes potential distributors edgy. “There will be some warnings,” says Jean Preau, a director of the French games company Chronofolie. “That’s because there will be problems for epileptics, and for people whose eyes aren’t perfect.”
Though manufacturers can avoid these problems by selling helmets that are not completely immersive, noted Preau, there were rumours at Monte Carlo that fears about the side effects of totally immersive headgear had persuaded the Japanese government to investigate the health and safety aspects of the technology very closely before approving it for consumers. In the meantime, home VR will be delivered via the TV screen.
Virtual Pong
What will be in these virtual worlds? Initially, the video games will be much like the present ones that involve flying, fighting and shooting, according to Philippe Ulrich, head of the French games company Cryo Interactive. Why is this such a common theme? “Computers are good at collision testing,” he says. Programming them to compare the coordinates of a point in space to determine whether two objects have impinged is relatively straightforward. “Remember Pong, the first video arcade game?” asks Ulrich. “It just tested if the ball hit the bat or walls. We don’t want to put violence into our games, but …”
Yet change could be on the way. Rebecca Allen, a creative director at Virgin Interactive Entertainment, criticised the settings of many current games that are “so often in spaceships and castIes”. She said Virgin had begun work on a 3D real-time game in “surreal, bizarre worlds”. Other developers made more extravagant proposals.
One of them is Karl Sims, a computer engineer at Thinking Machines, which designs parallel processors. He has been developing “virtual animals” that evolve in simple virtual worlds by beating others to “food”. At present, they consist only of blocks linked together that can crawl or flop around their world. But Sims is hopeful that they can be enhanced and develop an artificial life of their own by a form of natural selection. They could be imbued, in their virtual worlds, with size, strength, and perhaps rudimentary intelligence. Then, he asks, why shouldn’t humans join them and interact with them in their worlds?
“Shouldn’t we understand how they work first?” asked one critic. Sims was not put out. “If we have to understand artificial life before we develop it then we won’t get so far with it,” he replied. “Of course there’s a downside, which is that you might not trust these things for a while. But that’s the same with people, isn’t it?”