State of the Art in Virtual Reality Research
Principal Investigator: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Funding Agency: Office of Naval Research
Agency Number: N00014-98-1-0805
Abstract
The 1994 NRC report, Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges, N. Durlach and A. Mavor, editors, undertook to document the state of VR Research at the time of the study, to state the challenges, and to describe the promise of the field. By time of the IEEE VRAIS conference in March, 1999, five years of progress will have occurred, so it seems timely to assess how the promises of 1994 have been fulfilled, and the current state of the art, challenges, and promises.
No large study on the order of the original one is necessary or feasible at present. I propose to do a one-person review, culminating in a written paper and a keynote address for the VRAIS conference. This will take a good bit of my time during the Fall, 1998 term, and UNC will cover my salary for that period, as usual.
Much of the review can be accomplished by looking at the journals, especially Presence and SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings. More current work can be surveyed by working the Web, for VR people are visual people, and much work is posted on the Web.
A central question of interest for 1999 is the extent and variety of real, production applications of VR. Another central question is the degree to which the many technological imperfections that have plagued our demos and pilots have been solved by the evolution of VR technology. What really works, when one has to do work? How well?
Both of these central questions require personal observation of systems as a supplement to study of published and posted material. VR is fundamentally an experience, and it must be experienced to be assessed; not even videotape is an adequate substitute for personal immersion, personal sound, personal haptics. Moreover, most publications do not make the exact production status of the described application or technology unambiguously clear. I find that close questioning and observation is essential for determining that, for separating hopes and plans from actual status.
Therefore I propose to visit key advanced research sites, experiencing their VR. This proposal is for funds to cover the travel and living expenses of these visits.
Potential Sites to be Visited
I propose to do one or two tours of key sites in the U.S. and one or two isolated visits to key sites in Europe. The European visits would be adjuncts to a trip already planned to England in September, a trip whose transatlantic costs are already covered, so the only expense to ONR would the marginal costs of the extra visits.