The Computer Chronicles - Virtual Reality (1992)

[Music] when you watch the weatherman on your local tv news that is a form of artificial reality there's no real map behind me it's just a plain blue screen a computer creates that illusion well the next step is virtual reality which allows me to interact with that artificial environment behind me as you can see here this is a virtual reality game called continuum and i can actually move inside that space and turn around and see it from all kinds of different angles now if you think this stuff is just for fun and games you are wrong there are some important and serious applications using this new technology as we'll find out today when we focus on virtual reality on this edition of the computer chronicles [Music] computer chronicles has been made possible in part by pc connection and mac connection mail order software and hardware peripherals for the pc and the macintosh and the software publishers association providers of educational materials to help manage software don't copy that floppy welcome to the computer chronicles i'm stuart chaffee and with me this week is jim cramer president of virtual technologies jim when we read about virtual reality these days it tends to be about arcade games you pay a certain amount of money and you put these goggles on your head and you shoot down aliens in three dimensions and so on you are developing a virtual reality application using your cyber glove which you call the talking glove that it's that's far more important and far more serious tell us how it works well the talking glove uses the gesture recognition capabilities of the cyber glove uh here i'm fingerspelling as uh the american fingerspelling alphabet and as i'm spelling those letters are being spoken and being displayed for us also so could you actually do words besides just the letters sure hello stuart how are you today that's fantastic so even though i can't understand sign language i know what you're telling me because you've translated it for me right the the talking glove allows a non-speaking deaf or deaf blind person to communicate with a hearing person jim what you're doing there i guess would be called gesture recognition what other kinds of applications would there be for gesture recognition in a cyber globe well you can use the same gesture recognition routines to control a graphic interface and we'll see some of that later in the program all right indeed we'll see several virtual reality applications today including the virtual hand the data glove the cyber glove and cybercad now you know a product category is maturing when it gets its own trade show well at the recent software development conference in santa clara california there it was the virtual reality show it's not quite comdex yet but it was the computer industry's first virtual reality exhibit ai expert magazine hosted the show which included six vr vendors and products that were still clearly in the development stage we're looking at the model t fords of virtual reality resolution is low the headgear is uncomfortable but what's exciting about the showcase is the promise of the technology crystal river technology was one of the exhibitors while everyone else seems to be focusing on the visual aspects of virtual reality their approach is to work on virtual audio since the visual systems that we're working with today are not very good it's very difficult to build a very precise stereo imagery system but we can build a very precise audio imagery system and we're closer to closing the loop all the way to perfection that is building systems that are almost mistakeable for real life you may think you need expensive equipment to experiment with virtual reality but one company here claims to have an inexpensive system that lets you turn cad drawings into virtual reality environments we provide full virtual reality functionality working on a standard ibm compatible pc all being done with no programming required by the end user so complete easy to use and i don't want to forget affordable virtual reality system that people can actually load on a stock pc but what can you actually do with the stuff at stray light corporation they're already planning the virtual shopping mall another application is marketing research where people are planning out store shelf plans and researchers will take hundreds of subjects through a store that's a virtual store and let them select packages and items on the shelves and try different arrangements to find out what the most attractive arrangement will be for a particular product for the computer chronicles i'm maria gabriel [Music] in these early days of virtual reality we tend to think of it in a game or adventure environment but virtual reality is also an important design tool here to show us some examples are chris alice cyberspace missionary with autodesk and also linda jacobson who is a computer writer and editor and specialist in the area of virtual reality and who put together this handy-dandy guide to virtual reality from the people who make ai expert magazine linda let me ask you there's so much hype about virtual reality and so much confusion about it what is the state of the art right now what is virtual reality what what is the where is the technology at it's coming out of the labs and into our laps almost almost stuart the technology that's called virtual reality has been around in the 40s and was mostly found in huge research institutions mostly government related military-related then moved into the giant educational institutions and is now moving down into the labs and offices of uh private businesses that are creating systems for people like doctors and architects and scientists to use to help them understand their and so we have cyberspace missionaries like chris at autodesk what's the philosophy at autodesk how are you using the concept of virtual reality well right now we're working on developing just the the basic software tools that software applications developers will use to to write these applications up until now people have pretty much been writing their own software no matter where they are but in order for an industry to to get started and to be widespread the the people who don't have expertise in real-time simulation need to have tools that they can buy pieces of code and so forth that they can put together so they only need to work in their particular areas of expertise and we have a fair amount of tools hardware here why don't you go through this whole setup for us chris and tell us what's here okay well first of all uh we're running these this software these the simulations on pcs a 386 here a 486 here uh we have a variety of i o devices remember vr is not about uh just exotic i o devices you can run it with a mouse regular old microsoft mouse uh up to the more exotic source of input devices yeah this is uh data glove uh this is one of the two items that the public seems to mostly associate with the goggles the other the goggles the head mounted display you have the computer tracks this as you wear it you have two small tv sets inside that uh show you what the computer is displaying and it really allows you to be in the middle of the computer graphics allows the graphics to surround you and gives you a real feeling of being there all right let's start out with what you have over there on the right what's on that monitor chris okay this is actually a uh something that we started working on when we wanted to get away from the feeling of vr having to have goggles and gloves so i'm controlling this display just with a mouse and eventually with a keyboard but it's still display is still i'm looking up i'm looking down and looking left and right and so forth so it's still governed from the viewpoint of somebody who's wearing a head mounted display so you are kind of moving around in that environment controlling it with a mouse i have balls here that are suspended in space now they're attached i can increase gravity decrease gravity and so forth i can you're not pulling that you're changing the physical parameters of that i'm changing the physical yes yeah and i can even let me move in here a little bit get a little closer and i can even maybe grab one of these and make it heavy uh-huh and then if i detach one end right you get the kind of interaction and now i can add energy to the system and you get the kinds of the kinds of movement that you might expect or if i reach down here perhaps and grab one of these let me see right i can move up so you can sort of play in that world right this is this isn't say a complete application this is merely a demo that that uh one of the programmers worked out to test out physics to test out well you have another one that maybe people can relate to which is a a billiards right so yeah let me bring that up this is when you add a little more uh little more complicated uh interactions to the to the simulation wait for it to come up here and again you've got now you're controlling where you are with the mouse with the mouse and this is actually another kind of view this is deciding that what i'm really interested in is the cue ball and and so i'm no matter where i look i'm going to be rotating around the cube and give that a little shot here and so here you've got to be simulating the real physics of this environment almost in if i just move this over here check it out maybe with an overhead all right chris what's going on over here on the left-hand monitor okay well actually what you're seeing here is the same simulation that we were seeing earlier on the other computer with different graphics hardware so the ball is hanging from the two arches right this looks different but the same software and so forth it's being controlled this time by the head mounted display so that as this moves the the picture moves excuse me chris yes oh you have a volunteer okay so linda will go into the world of virtual reality all right and we're seeing then on this computer monitor what she is seeing right and so she tilts her head left right move her in a little closer here and she actually can get much more of a feel of just how large this model is and as i uh change say now what are you changing chris i'm changing gravity there so that the pull on these on these tetras is slightly low uh smaller so actually your world is changing as he's adjusting this getting lighter and lighter so if if you uh just sight in on one of those whoa here just you're steady down and let's let's grab one okay how about that so you're going to make that object heavy yeah and it's it settles down a little more a little more and so you can see that actually more if we increase gravity here well so london has to bring your head down to keep up with you right and so that that uh adds in then that additional spatial sense okay now can we add the glove element now what does this do okay well actually to in order to add the glove i'm going to move over to another uh another demo this is actually older software than what we're not the latest working with not but it provides a good example of just how glove interaction might happen so put this on one finger per standard issue this is good that's good good good okay so now basically this glove is the input device and the goggles are the output device right so she can determine now what she's going to look at by by pointing by pointing where she wants to move within the model so at this point if you make a fist so you're going to calibrate the glove right here yeah tell that it knows what a fist isn't what an opening right and it's it's and now we can see her hand on the screen in this environment and linda tell us what are you doing now what's your experience well i'm definitely in in cyberspace and you can see i'm moving my hand you can see my hand in cyberspace also moving so now if you point someplace where you want to go let's go there let's go there let's go there and you just oh i just float right through here column there okay let's go in the other direction let's go up can i go up yes so you're in charge of this world linda okay we're gonna have to get out of this world guys sorry close encounter with a chair there all right chris linda thank you very much thank you all right here's a classic problem your architect is designing a new home and you're trying to decide whether to spend more money for some extra goodie but what will it look like you say with a virtual reality product called walk through you can get an answer it's very hard to show clients what something's going to look like if you're trying to represent it on on a piece of two-dimensional paper architect larry mortimer has solved that problem by using a new virtual reality program called the vertice walkthrough it lets the client actually see a proposed design the other thing that this that vertis allows us to do is to change things very easily even while we're having a session with the client we can we can change parts of the model we can add windows very easily we can add furniture to the model we can do what ifs and until we're just tired of doing them while the virtual reality software can't replace the real thing it does help the client to visualize the architect's plans you're spending an awful lot of money in a project like this and if there's a way that you can see the space and feel the space before it's built then i think it makes the client feel more secure about the money that's being spent changing the design is easy you simply point click or drag in other words you don't have to be a computer expert to use the software you have the ability to walk through a drawing almost in real time when we show a model to a client quite often the client will will ask well can we look at this viewer can we look down there or can we turn around and look at what we just walked through and with vertice you can do that you can you can tailor what you're seeing to what the client is asking you right on the spot with just moving the mouse and clicking in in various directions vertice walkthrough is available for the macintosh for under 300 for the computer chronicles i'm maria gabriel [Music] one virtue of virtual reality is that it lets us communicate with a computer in three dimensions rather than just two dimensions here to show us how is jim cramer president of virtual technologies jim your glove is called the cyber glove and you've just put it on tell us exactly what's going on in that glove and what we're seeing in the screen here right this is a 22 sensor cyber glove it has sensors over each of the three main knuckles of the main four fingers it also has abduction sensors between each of the fingers in addition to a wrist pitch and yaw sensor and a thumb rotation sensor all right so as we look at the screen what's happening well this is a fairly simple hand model although it does show the functionality of of the cyber glove and it's following the movement of all the joints in your hand right now right so as i flex my fingers the the different colored fingers on the screen are also flexing what i'd like to draw attention to is the accuracy that we can actually uh control the fingers actually touching touching touch the fingertips and again the thumb can rotate fully across the palm and give you a lot of different articulations of the hand now jim what are the sensors in the glove that can do this so finely the it's a resistive technology that is it's linear and it gives a very high resolution output and that's that's a big advantage because uh a different size hand for example wearing the same glove they it will produce the same outputs from the center so it's unnecessary to calibrate uh when when you change hands yeah exactly notice you didn't calibrate when we began but if i want i mean can you calibrate that glove to fine tune it even more yes yes you can we have a a slider menu here where you can change just the offsets and gain of each sensor as i said they're linear so just so you can adjust every one of those the two parameters uh are for each of the sensors and so if i needed to fine tune it i can just grab on one of these sliders here and change that so you really have fine control over that calibration there right all right now jim over here on this monitor we're looking at what's called a joint histogram now what is that that's connected to this glove i take it right yes it is and i'll put that on put that on okay each one of those histogram bars represents the value of a sensor from the glove uh what we have up at the top of the screen uh zero to 255 directly from the a to d converter and so i've got the glove on now and it's showing the status of each of my joints so i'm bending my index finger right and the joint names on the side or thumb outer thumb inner index etc and i can sort of spread that's the what you call the abduction right uh-huh okay now what what is the point in this particular histogram is this how you would really develop it and fine-tune it well these are the actual values that the computer is seeing and from that we're generating uh this graphic hand model that we're displaying here on the screen so the actual hand model that is drawn is dependent upon the graphics processing capability of the computer although in any case those are the values that the computer receives all right jim i want to ask you next to show me what you can actually do now with the glove and how you can interact with the computer all right we're going to be using a silicon graphics workstation for our graphics processing we have a standard pc that's doing gesture recognition we have a couple instrumentation units one for each of the cyber gloves that we're wearing and some instrumentation units for various electromagnetic position sensors okay now the glove you have on i see you have a black switch and an led what's that for well that actually enables the gesture recognition capability of the glove okay so your glove is on now show us what you can do what what's what do we see on the screen here well this is our virtual workspace where you could use a head mounted display to actually be immersed in the graphics but instead we're just displaying it here on the flat screen monitor what i'm able to do and rather than using a mouse i'm able to just make a hand formation for example the fist here and the screen will actually follow where i'm moving my hand and doing different hand formations like this we're able to change the modality of the system for example i'm able to move this little green cursor i can move it and by by making this hand formation i'm able to move it just in the x y plane uh moving uh changing a different hand formation i can move just in the z dimension or with a single finger single finger i'm able to move the the green cursor and the cutting plane anywhere in three dimensions at the same time i take it this is actually a design tool of some sort so you can manipulate that object and build something right i i can position the cursor inside the object and i can just by pinching my fingers together it's a very natural movement i'm i'm able to actually grab onto the object uh after we've positioned it i'm able to grab for example a face and you could change the object and the kind of thing you would do with a mouse pull and drag only in three dimensions right you're able to do uh tasks in three dimensions here which is something you can't do it with a mouse and you're kind of get a feel for graphic material by doing this and again i can i can change uh the view and if if i would like let me just grab it with a three-dimensional move and now i'm actually moving that edge off into the the third dimension you can see how i've really pushed that out and that's something you you can't do with a two-dimensional mouse i see you have a toolbox icon there what do you do with that well it allows us to pick uh from a subset of tools for example here is a pencil and as we move the pencil around in space we're able to generate a three-dimensional space curve which is something would be very difficult to do with a 2d mouse we can actually see the shadow of that line in space rotate the room right and then you can see it from the side okay what are the other tools there well the other uh for example we have a a saw which will actually separate the object we can take it over and just position it in inside the object and now i've just cut the part in two oh and there there's the plane through which you turn exactly yes and uh so let me just pull the the front piece away and you now have two pieces there we have two separate pieces so you saw it in half and you pulled it apart right yeah all right how do you actually start out making one of these figures uh with a oh i see yeah with a primitive shape right we're able to open the primitives box and then actually grab one of the primitive shapes for example this is just a box uh we also have cylinders and uh pyramids and then these are just the same as the other object that we started with you can start by just extending it shrinking it right grabbing on a face or an edge all right jim you're using the glove now for gesture recognition basically i mean what's the next step when can i actually go pick the piece up and get feedback on it well yeah we're just using a gesture recognition right now to interact with the objects but i think the real advantage of gloves is going to come when we're able to use incorporate the hand model that we saw earlier and actually put it in inside of an environment like this grab on an object twirl it between your fingertips be able to have two gloves bend an object test the compliance of the object okay thanks very much jim that's our look at virtual reality stay tuned now for this week's computer news on random access [Music] in the random access file this week this is a special summer edition with a focus on software here are last week's best-selling software titles for the pc according to pc connection stacker 2.0 is number one followed by the ms-dos upgrade emm 386 6.0 approach and after dark for windows rounding out the top 10 are windows 3.1 wordperfect 5.1 norton utilities in both procom plus for dos and windows next up paul schindler in our summer software review you ever have this problem two different kinds of rolodex cards meshing them can be tricky the same goes for pc databases now if you have data in both paradox and dbase files there's help from a windows database called approach this database allows you to manipulate files created by the two top pc databases dbase and paradox as well as corporate data in an oracle database use graphics to jazz up your forms approach makes it easy to switch from form design to form test and back here form design isn't a separate program it's just a click away behind the pencil click on the stack of papers and you're back looking at your data the walking fingers put you in search mode another set of buttons just like those on a vcr enables you to go to the start or the end anytime you double click on a field in design mode it brings up a menu that allows you to change any aspect of the appearance or content of that field approach is 400 from approach software in redwood city california for the computer chronicles i'm paul schindler that's it for this week's computer chronicles i'm janelle stelson computer chronicles has been made possible in part by pc connection at mac connection mail order software and hardware peripherals for the pc and the macintosh and the software publishers association providers of educational materials to help manage software don't copy that floppy video cassette copies of this program are available computer chronicles also publishes a companion newsletter containing details on products demonstrated plus background information on program topics to order a video cassette or a subscription to the newsletter call 1-800-366-9484 or write computer chronicles please specify program subject for tapes all orders include a free software program for auditing software use [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Computer Chronicles

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Keywords: the, computer, chronicles, stewart, cheifet, gary, kildall, cp/m, vintage, computing, computers, old, ms-dos, dec, vax, mainframe, unix, tv, show, public, access, pbs, bill, gates, ms, dos, microsoft, amiga, commodore, 64, vic20, vic, 20, episodes, full, high, quality, hd, danooct1, tct

Id: wfHMSqQKg6s

Length: 26min 59sec (1619 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2013