Lanier’s new idea was a computer programming language for the masses, a piece of software called Mandala that used graphics and sound instead of esoteric lines of code. This visual programming language took the rough form of a piece of music. Users arranged icons on a screen like notes on a musical staff, and their relative positions and order would tell the computer what to do. It was an exciting idea, and in September 1984, when Scientific American published a special issue about computer software, the editors decided to use an illustration of the Mandala language on the magazine’s cover.
Shortly before the issue was due to go to print, an editor called Lanier on the phone and told him they needed to know which university or company he was affiliated with, in order to give him proper credit in the magazine. Since Lanier was working solo, he decided to make something up.
“I said, ‘Oh, VPL, standing for Visual Programming Languages, or maybe Virtual Programming Languages,’” Lanier told a reporter in a 1993 Wired magazine interview. “Mainly it was just this spontaneous thing to get this guy off the phone. And then I told him to put a comma and ‘Inc.’ after it and never gave it a second thought. And then when the issue came out months later, all these people called up wanting to invest!”
Flush with interest in his project, Lanier doubled down on development of Mandala, but he had a big problem: Since the new programming language depended heavily on graphics and imagery, it required the use of large, colorful, sophisticated displays. A standard computer terminal of the era wouldn’t be adequate for the task. Furthermore, since the exact placement of each icon on the screen directly translated into the language’s instructions, Mandala required a simple and accurate way to move graphics around. Standard keyboards weren’t right for the job, and even though the computer mouse had been invented decades earlier, in the early 1980s the pointing device wasn’t in wide use.
Lanier’s solution to these problems was to return to Ivan Sutherland’s idea of a virtual display. A head-mounted 3-D system like the Sword of Damocles could present a huge, immersive canvas for users to paint Mandala’s pictorial arrays. And to complete the interface, some kind of hand-tracking implement would work best—perhaps a glove like the one his friend Thomas Zimmerman was building to allow people to play computerized air guitar.
So Jaron Lanier’s imaginary company became reality. With the help of Zimmerman and a few other friends, VPL Research began developing new hardware—a head-mounted display and a wired glove for viewing and manipulating objects in a virtual space.
“All of a sudden we had a company,” Lanier said. “It was just something I fell into, it was crazy.” Initially, he thought that hardware would be a side business, and VPL’s primary focus would be to develop his programming language. But as soon as people saw the simulator they were building, it was all they cared about.
“Potential investors would come around and I would show them this thing, and I’d say, ‘Now look at this neat language,’ and they’d say: ‘Language! You’re using a glove! My God!’ So suddenly the whole focus shifted,” Lanier said.
At some point, Lanier coined the term virtual reality as a marketing term to describe what VPL was building—or perhaps, he admits, he heard the phrase somewhere else and then repeated it until it entered popular use. The company also branded its headset (the EyePhone) and its controller (the DataGlove), and started work on a full-body input device (the DataSuit). VPL was creating a new industry from the ground up.
In October 1987, just a few months after VPL released a commercial version of the DataGlove, a photograph of a hand wearing the high-tech gadget appeared on the cover of Scientific American. A line of text explained that the subject of the issue was “the next revolution in computers”—and that advanced interfaces like the DataGlove would “transform computing into a universal intellectual utility.”
The hype was on.
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The world was primed and ready for someone to invent a way to enter the world of computers. In 1982, Walt Disney Productions released Tron, a science fiction adventure film about a software engineer who gets sucked into a mainframe and must do battle with evil programs. The film was well received by critics, and its depiction of a glowing high-tech computerized landscape helped it develop an immediate cult following. Then in 1984, science fiction author William Gibson further popularized the idea of virtual reality when he published his dystopian science fiction novel Neuromancer. In that story, computer hackers known as “console cowboys” transfer their disembodied consciousness directly into a “consensual hallucination” known as the Matrix in order to steal data and sell it for profit.
When actual products like the DataGlove and EyePhone started hitting the market, these fictional depictions of futuristic realities suddenly seemed excitingly plausible, and the next big revolution in technology following the invention of the personal computer: a May 1987 article in The Washington Post declared that virtual reality researchers were “doing nothing less than inventing a new relationship between humans and machines.”
More businesses rushed into the space to fill demand for VR products, including Autodesk, a $100 million software firm best known for making a computer-aided design application called AutoCAD. Inventor Eric Howlett founded a start-up called Pop-Optix Labs, and worked with the NASA Ames Research Center to develop a 1985 VR demonstration called the Virtual Interface Environment Workstation, or VIEW; in March 1989, that company started selling a version of his hardware as the LEEP Cyberface, one of the first commercially available head-mounted displays.
Even toy companies wanted in on the action. In 1987, Mattel released the Power Glove, a $75 wearable controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System video game console. The accessory was based on VPL Research’s DataGlove and codeveloped by the company. It sold poorly, but its prominent appearance in the Nintendo-produced adventure comedy film The Wizard helped hook the interest of an entire generation of young gamers, getting them thinking about how cool it would be to manipulate objects in virtual reality.
Meanwhile, Tom Furness’s lab at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had boomed to include nearly a hundred researchers, and the increased visibility of VR products in the marketplace and on the news meant that his once-obscure military projects suddenly were attracting interest from all kinds of industries.
“The most remarkable thing was the phone calls I started getting,” Furness said. “A mother called me and said . . . ‘My child has cerebral palsy. Is there anything you can do with that technology to help my child?’ A surgeon called me . . . he said, ‘Is there any way you can help me with navigating inside the body? I have all this information from a CT scan, but it’s on a light box on the wall. Is there any way you can project that into the patient so I can find my way around?’ . . . I was getting three or four phone calls a week from people thinking about the applications of this technology.”
So Furness decided to beat his swords into plowshares, and in 1989 he left the Air Force and started the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. “I realized we needed to get this technology out in the world where it can really do some good,” he said. “I wanted to build upon all we had learned.”
With so much new development under way in the nascent industry, researchers like Furness and Lanier were in high demand in the media, and VR became a hot subject of discussion on TV news shows and in newspaper and magazine articles. A February 1990 article in the Chicago Tribune proclaimed that Lanier “may someday send the world crashing through the looking glass.” In April, an article in The Guardian crowed that “we are witnessing the birth of Virtual Reality—the total electronic environment which will change our perception of the real world as surely as books or television.”
But excitement for a product doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue. In 1990, if a company wanted to use VPL’s products, even a single installation would be hugely expensive: $8,800
for the DataGlove and its tracking sensors, $9,400 for the EyePhone headset, and $7,200 for the necessary software. If you really wanted to go all in, you could buy VPL’s flagship product: an all-in-one system called RB2, or “reality built for two,” which included all the hardware, software, and accessories needed to set up a VR environment where two users could interact with each other. It cost $45,000. Truly advanced users might want to drop another $50,000 for a full-body DataSuit. And none of these prices included the massive cost of the high-end computer graphics workstations required to run a virtual reality simulation—anywhere from $75,000 to a quarter of a million dollars or more, depending on how powerful the system.
Unsurprisingly, there weren’t that many customers. VPL sold a few thousand DataGloves and EyePhones to fellow VR developers, researchers working on cutting-edge applications like remote surgery, and governmental clients like NASA and the US Department of Defense. But demand was never high enough to cover the immense costs of development and production, which included a brand-new factory in Silicon Valley to produce the company’s uniquely high-tech products.
It didn’t help that CEO Lanier had little experience in business and was actually the youngest person at the company. He described himself as a “babe in the woods,” and made frequent beginner’s mistakes that cost the company dearly: “One time I signed an important contract for VPL that I thought had been vetted by the lawyers without checking the backside of the paper, where the other party had snuck in additional language that ended up screwing us,” he wrote in his memoir.
By the end of 1990, even though virtual reality was a hot emerging technology, VPL ran out of money, and while the company kept operating, it had to file for bankruptcy protection.
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But even if VR businesses were struggling, the ideas behind virtual reality continued to gain ground in popular culture. In 1991, Howard Rheingold published a book about the industry, Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds—and How It Promises to Transform Society, and it became a bestseller thanks to readers clamoring to find out more about the emerging technology.
In 1992, VR went fully mainstream as the subject of a high-profile science fiction horror film called The Lawnmower Man. The movie—which was advertised as based on a Stephen King short story but had very little to do with that source material—follows future James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Lawrence Angelo, a researcher who is programming chimpanzees to become super-soldiers using virtual reality training simulations. When a test subject breaks out of his lab and kills several bystanders, Dr. Angelo shifts his focus to experimenting on his intellectually disabled gardener, only to find that the VR treatments work a little too well: The titular “lawnmower man” develops genius intelligence, telepathic abilities, and eventually his own murderous intentions. By the end of the film, the gardener has evolved into “pure energy” inside virtual reality, and announces his presence to the world by causing every telephone on the planet to ring simultaneously.
The movie was a modest hit, grossing over $32 million domestically, even though reviews were terrible. Audiences were taken by the special effects and vivid computer-generated depictions of life (and sex) inside VR, and the film developed a cult following of sci-fi fans and computer enthusiasts who were eager to try out the technology.
Later the same year, a much more successful work of fiction outlined another vision of life inside a virtual environment. In Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash, users controlled personalized avatars inside a shared space called the Metaverse. Unlike the depiction of VR worlds in Neuromancer and The Lawnmower Man, which were largely abstract geometrical spaces, the Metaverse was built around a hundred-meter-wide road known as The Street that ran the circumference of an otherwise featureless planet. The Street was lined with buildings, houses, and businesses, and users experienced it in first person just as they would an actual urban environment. Their avatars shopped, visited bars, and spent time with friends. There was more to this world than just hacking computer networks and fighting security programs—the Metaverse imagined a vivid alternate reality, a place where ordinary people might want to visit.
Consumer interest in the technology continued to increase, and peaked in 1995 when nearly a dozen VR-centric films (including Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, Strange Days, Cyber Bandits, Virtual Combat, and Terminal Justice) were released into theaters, and a TV series called VR.5 debuted on the Fox network.
The movies sold tickets, but the products continued to fall flat. Occasionally, excessive costs killed them in their infancy. In the early 1990s, Hasbro spent $59 million and more than three years developing a console and headset called the Home Virtual Reality System, before it gave up. At the time, CFO John O’Neill told the Associated Press that the gadget’s $300 price tag would have priced it out of the consumer market.
More often, VR was doomed by technical problems. In 1996, Nintendo released a $180 video game console called the Virtual Boy, but its promise of 3-D graphics fell flat. The headset’s red monochrome display, low resolution, and use of high-speed vibrating mirrors gave its users neck pains, dizziness, nausea, and headaches. Nintendo sold fewer than 800,000 units and discontinued the product after only a year.
In 1998, continually plagued by high costs, low sales, and unreliable manufacturing, VPL Research filed again for bankruptcy. This time the company didn’t recover; during the proceedings, all its patents were purchased by the Silicon Valley computer giant Sun Microsystems, which had its own plans to develop virtual reality hardware—but which soon gave up on the idea and never actually released any related products.
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Even though the virtual reality industry died, the dream survived. In the final years of the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first, small communities of VR enthusiasts and collectors stayed in touch with one another on the Internet to share their research, boast about their hardware collections, and plan for the future. A few late-breaking cyberpunk movies—particularly the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix—introduced new audiences of young technologists to the excitement of virtual reality. And a new generation of massively multiplayer online video games gave players a taste of what cyberspace might be like in the future—always connected, with users everywhere, and presented in high-fidelity 3-D graphics. All they needed was a way to get the games off the screen and into the world around them.
Chapter 4
INTO THE RIFT
It’s dark and creepy in the cargo hold of the Sevastopol; something could be hiding in here, and I’d never know it. It makes me nervous, and as I walk between the piles of crates, I stop and peek around every corner.
A noise makes my heart skip a beat. I tell myself it was just dripping water.
I shouldn’t be scared, since I know this is just a video game—a demo of a first-person horror adventure set in the world of Ridley Scott’s Alien film franchise. But I’m wearing a virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift, and the Rift makes it real: The game fills my entire field of vision, and when I turn my head to look around, the world moves with me. It feels like I’m actually on a space station being stalked by one of H. R. Giger’s xenomorphs. And that’s not a good feeling.
There’s another sound, this time off to the left, and I turn to see a heavy blast door slide open at the end of a corridor. Behind it, there’s a crouching, bipedal form, the size of a large man, covered in a shiny black exoskeleton.
The smart thing to do is run away. But inside the Rift’s virtual world, I’m hypnotized by the spectacle—or as less kind observers might call it, paralyzed by fear. So I stare, frozen, as the alien rises, closes the gap between us, and wraps its arms around my body. Its dripping mouth opens, and a set of inner jaws plunge toward my face.
I twitch in horror and emit an involuntary squeal of panic. From behind me—this time in the real
world—I hear a laugh. The creator of the Oculus Rift has been watching as I play. “You got eaten? You didn’t last very long,” he says.
Palmer Luckey has been waiting for a game like this since he was a kid—which wasn’t that long ago. Just twenty-one years old as of this meeting, he started making virtual reality headsets when he was sixteen, and founded his company, Oculus VR, only three years later. In less time than most of us take to finish college, he’s gone from tinkering in his parents’ garage to doing what generations of technologists before him tried and failed to accomplish: bringing virtual reality to the masses.
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The path to this new world began in a setting common to so many modern success stories, it’s almost become a cliché: a garage in suburban California. But Luckey wasn’t a striving Stanford graduate or dot-com refugee. He was a nerdy little kid who became obsessed with science fiction stories.
Born in 1992 into a middle-class family, Palmer Freeman Luckey grew up in a house on the ocean boardwalk in the Long Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles. His father, Donald, worked as a salesman and assistant manager at a car dealership; his mother, Julie, was a management consultant and stay-at-home mom for Palmer and his three younger sisters.
The Luckeys homeschooled their children and encouraged them to pursue their passions. Donald was an amateur mechanic and taught Palmer basic machining and electronics. “My dad taught me to solder,” he says. “He wasn’t very good at it, but he taught me. Mostly I learned from watching YouTube videos.”
Defying Reality Page 6