Virtual reality as metaphor.

Virtual reality has caught people's imaginations and inspired fantasies far out of proportion to what the technology can actually deliver, now (1995) or in the foreseeable future.

Virtual reality technology promises to immerse you in an exotic computer-generated world. You put on the helmet-like headset, slip on the data glove, perhaps get on a treadmill, and connect to a computer. (Ultimately you will wear an entire body suit.) Pick your reality-generating software -- the planet Venus, perhaps, or a Wild West scenario with bad guys to shoot. As you move, the environment alters to create the illusion that you are moving around within it. Other people can also enter the environment, you can "interact."

To the virtual reality user, the experience is one of being "in" the new environment. To the outside observer, there is only the strange spectacle of a person wearing a bulky helmet waving a gloved hand around and moving in weird, unpredictable ways.

I have not yet tried "VR" technology myself, although I am told that the graphics are rudimentary and the illusion is partial. There is a slight time delay between your movement and the corresponding movement of the environment. The head-mounted display is bulky and heavy. And after a while, some users start to feel queasy and ill.

In fact, despite glossy depictions of VR in movies like "Lawnmower Man" and "Disclosure," researchers are having difficulty reproducing realistic sights, sounds, and touches. The small TV sets in the eyepieces of the helmets don't have the same power to resolve details as the human eye, so high-resolution images still look like they are composed of little dots ("pixellated"). Realistic sounds are also proving difficult to simulate, despite the invention of a machine called the "Convolvotron" to generate sounds that will vary with the movement of the subject. And it has proven surprisingly complex to simulate the touch of a real object by computer. Illusion is never easy.

As an article in Technology Review concluded, "...it will be many years, if ever, before a computer simulation will be in-distinguishable from physical reality." (1) Still, the article held out hope for useful applications in training pilots (where VR has been used for many years), assisting architects and designers, training surgeons, and devising various forms of entertainment.

So why has virtual reality technology become so glamorous? Why does its future seem so promising? I had occasion to think about this at a conference in Miami Beach, Florida. Several panels were discussing VR technology (actually a more accurate name is "VE" or Virtual Environment, one panelist said). In VR there is the possibility of the virtual act, the act without consequences. (2) We may blur the boundaries between real and illusion even further, and may import acts from VR environments into real environments, posing new ethical questions.

The panel presentations were interesting, but I had the nagging feeling that we were all missing something. And then I had an "aha" experience. The technology we call virtual reality is a miniaturization, a model, of something that already exists. We have a massive virtual reality machine already in place. We call it "the press," "radio and television," "the newspaper," "the news."

I had a perfect example right there. I had flown into Miami Airport, which had been in the news lately. Some German tourists had apparently been trailed from there, robbed and murdered by enterprising Americans. The American criminals would bump into their rental cars, and then rob them when they got out to discuss the incident. In a couple of recent cases, this had led to the murder of the tourists.

The "murdered German tourist" stories were spread all over the world. And I was planning to fly into Miami Airport -- I wondered if I should put an American flag on my luggage. Added to this, I received a notice from the organization sponsoring the convention which had some helpful tips for survival in Miami. These included not answering your hotel door if someone knocked, and screaming out loud if you thought someone was a pickpocket. Throw into the mix the regular diet of stories of violence in Miami's streets, and I had quite a picture of Miami built up in my mind. In fact, I was flying into a Virtual Miami of murderous thieves and dangerous hotels.

When I got to the real Miami, of course, there was no violence, no discernible tension or fear, just a warm city with people of many colors racing around to indeterminate (to me) destinations. There were no mysterious knocks on my hotel door, no pickpockets approached. The real Miami was considerably more peaceful than the Virtual Miami.

"The News" creates for us a virtual reality every day. We assume this reality, we talk about it with others, occasionally it might even affect what we do. For us, it is "reality." But this media-generated virtual reality is an abstraction, a distortion. It centers upon the sensational, the gory, the exceptional. It leaves us thinking the world is a more dangerous place than it really is, and that our fellow human beings are more crazy and irrational than they really are.

At least with "virtual reality" technology, we know we have a headset on and we've chosen to have this experience. With the virtual reality of the news, there's no headset and we get the experience whether we choose it or not.

My realization did not stop there, with the insight that the news media apparatus is a gigantic virtual reality generator. Our senses themselves, the initial mechanisms of the body for constructing reality, create for us a sensory virtual reality. We walk around in a virtual reality all the time, and mistake it for"reality."

As pointed out by various philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists, there are no "colors," there is no "hot" and "cold," there are no sounds beyond our bodies in "reality." These phenomena are constructed by our sensory systems, using energy and information they receive. If our eyes could see heat, for example, the world would look quite different than we assume it "really" looks, as one can see in a photograph taken with heat-sensitive film, where many strange zones of color appear on "ordinary" objects.

So virtual reality technology is itself a metaphor. It models a process which occurs on a sensory level, as we perceive "reality," and which also occurs on the social level as we get the "news" from afar.

What can we call such a metaphor? It is a miniaturizing metaphor, one which embodies and models a larger process in a smaller form. By examining and interacting with the miniaturizing metaphor we can draw conclusions about the larger processes. As with any other metaphor, our knowledge is extended, our ability to see is enhanced. And, as most metaphors do, it structures the unknown domain, this new computer-human interface, in terms of the "realities" we already (think we) know.

If virtual reality technology is used to help us appreciate the virtual reality systems of our senses and "the news," then it will enrich our lives and our culture. If it is used as a further escape from our senses and "the news," it will just be another delusional drug.

REFERENCES

(1.) Sheridan, T., & Zeltzer, D. "Virtual Reality Check." Technology Review, October, 1993, p. 27.

(2.) I am indebted to Charles Larson of Northern Illinois University for this formulation.

Dr. Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the Television-Radio Department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York