Summary of "Virtual Interface Environments" by Scott Fisher

In this article, Scott Fisher begins by giving the definition of two terms, virtual reality and virtual environment. He stated that virtual reality was the experience of one's sensoria being immersed in interfaces that would be closely matched to human sensory and cognitive capabilities. The ability to completely immerse a subject in a stimulated space with its attendant realities is called being in a virtual environment.

Some of the earlier works that were in research during the evolution of personal simulation and telepresence environments were the development of stereoscopic movies, Cimerama,and the Omnimax projection systems. All of these works were geared towards representing real experiences through the use of visual dsiplay technology. The "Tour of the Universe" in Toronto, and the "Star Tours" in Disneyland were enteratinment applications of simulation technology and virtual display environments. In addition to these two works, the "Senserama" was another example and was of the first examples of a multisensory simulation environment.

Technology advanced to where the viewers were now able to control there own viewpoint through a virtual environment. An example of this was the Aspen Movie Map, which we saw and discussed in class. As these research projects were being developed, ther ewre many description by science fiction writers. On of them describes it as being a telepresence, which is a technology that allows remotely situated operators to receive enough feedback that gives them the sense of being at a remote location while doing different tasks. The Philco Corporation was one of the first companies to develop a telepresences visual system thatmade use of a remote camera on a CRT and mounted on the head to control the camera's viewpoint.

The article continues with a detailed description of the Virtual Environment Workstatoin (VIEW) project, which was conducted at NASA Ames. This project was based on helmet-mounted display technology, and provided auditory, speech and gesture interaction within a virtual environment. One of the developments that were of interest to me within this project was the development of the dataglove. This was a lightweight, flexible glove that was created with flex-sensing devices to measure the amount of bend of each joint of the fingers and the amount of abduction. With the commerically avaiable dataglove, the amount of bend was measured by light attenuation within the fiber optic bundles covering the fingers. The position and orientation of the hand within the 3-D space was by magnetic tracking devices. This allowed the user to pick up virtual objects in the surrounding virtual enviroment.

In my opinion, this project was very interesting, high-tech and forward moving in its construction during that time. It was the begining of our virtual experiences today.