The New Explorers. Series III; No. 311; Virtual Reality

<v Bill Kurtis>We're at the edge of the 21st century, and it's happened. <v Bill Kurtis>Mind and machine have merged to create a new world inside <v Bill Kurtis>the computer. A world we can step into. <v Bill Kurtis>[video breaks up] Touch. <v Bill Kurtis>Explorers are probing and expanding this new world to see what its limitations <v Bill Kurtis>are, if it has limitations. <v Bill Kurtis>If they're successful, who knows what discoveries await us inside this world of <v Bill Kurtis>virtual reality. <v TV Announcer>Major funding for The New Explorers is provided by Amoco, celebrating

<v TV Announcer>the adventure of scientific discovery for the year 2000 and beyond. <v TV Announcer>Additional funding is made possible by Waste Management Inc., providing <v TV Announcer>recycling and other waste services around the world. <v TV Announcer>And by Duracell embracing the power of science education, <v TV Announcer>the source of future technology and innovative growth. <v TV Announcer>Duracell, the copper top battery. <v Bill Kurtis>Hello, I'm Bill Kurtis. This is what most of us think of when we hear virtual reality: <v Bill Kurtis>games, in which the player is totally immersed in an interactive, <v Bill Kurtis>computerized world. <v Bill Kurtis>In this episode, we're going to leave the world of games and follow our New Explorers <v Bill Kurtis>to a place where virtual reality is used as a tool of science <v Bill Kurtis>that could change exploration [tape cuts out] forever. <v Bill Kurtis>The campus of the University of North Carolina.

<v Bill Kurtis>Michael Jordan went to school here. <v Bill Kurtis>In 1993, the Tar Heels won the NCAA championship for the first time <v Bill Kurtis>since Jordan left the team. <v Bill Kurtis>But today is just an ordinary day of learning here. <v Bill Kurtis>Or is it? These students are going to class. <v Bill Kurtis>But so is this one. <v Bill Kurtis>And this one. [background chatter] Instead of a pencil and paper, they use a helmet <v Bill Kurtis>and trigger. They're studying virtual reality at the United States' <v Bill Kurtis>foremost research facility, all in the name of science. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>I'm deeply committed to the belief that a machine plus a mind can do more than <v Dr. Fred Brooks>either a machine or a mind on most problems. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>And to me, a central issue has always been how do we <v Dr. Fred Brooks>build mind-machine collaborative <v Dr. Fred Brooks>systems? And then how do we get the information from the machine into the <v Dr. Fred Brooks>mind and from the mind into the machine?

<v Speaker>[background chatter]. <v Bill Kurtis>Dr. Fred Brooks started the computer science department in 1964. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Well, I was 13 years old when I read it in a- in a <v Dr. Fred Brooks>magazine in this small town in eastern North Carolina where I grew up, about the Harvard <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Mark 1 computer that Howard Aiken had built and that had- that <v Dr. Fred Brooks>captured my imagination then. That was what I wanted to do. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>And I've been on that track ever since. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>We know we want to look around in that room [fade out]. <v Bill Kurtis>In 1978, Dr. Henry Fuchs joined him. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>I think that Fred and I have been excited about what is now called virtual reality <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>since the late 1960s, early 1970s. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>What I find when- what I found I came here in '78 was that he had been working in <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>molecular modeling and enforced feedback arms since, I think, '70 or '71? <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>And I had been working in the image generation and tracking uh since the early 70s. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>So there was an instant match. <v Bill Kurtis>Today with a staff of computer scientists and students, they've built their own virtual

<v Bill Kurtis>reality system to use as a tool for scientific exploration. <v Bill Kurtis>To help chemists visualize atoms. <v Bill Kurtis>Or surgeons see inside the human body. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Computer scientists are tool smiths. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>I think the ability to really help surgeons with their procedures <v Dr. Fred Brooks>and really help scientists understand their data. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Help chemists understand how to do drug design better. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>I think these have the greatest potential for helping people. <v Bill Kurtis>If it can be done, they believe this is the place to do it. <v Bill Kurtis>Nowhere else offers the view from inside the computer-generated 3-D <v Bill Kurtis>world of virtual reality. <v Bill Kurtis>To see every corner, every detail as if you'd stepped inside. <v Bill Kurtis>And this is how the tool works. It starts with a sophisticated computer program to <v Bill Kurtis>generate 3-D graphics in what's called real time, displaying a new

<v Bill Kurtis>picture 30 times each second. <v Bill Kurtis>The user sees the image through a head-mounted display that houses 2 small <v Bill Kurtis>television screens, 1 for each eye. <v Bill Kurtis>Your eyes are tricked into thinking you're looking into a 3-Dimensional world. <v Bill Kurtis>As you turn your head, a sensor on top of the helmet tracks your head movements and <v Bill Kurtis>tells the computer what pictures to generate. <v Bill Kurtis>UNC researcher Warren Robinett explains. <v Warren Robinett>My take on the whole field of virtual reality and related things is that it's a way <v Warren Robinett>to expand human perception, to let you see the invisible, to transport <v Warren Robinett>you to distant places so that you can see what surrounds you and talk to people that are <v Warren Robinett>there or transports you into microscopic worlds. <v Warren Robinett>It lets you perceive things that you cannot perceive with your built-in senses. <v Warren Robinett>In a way, you're boldly going where no man has gone before. <v Speaker>[background chatter]. <v Bill Kurtis>That's an invitation hard to pass up. <v Bill Kurtis>I joined Dr. Fuchs at UNC, where he took me on my maiden voyage into

<v Bill Kurtis>virtual reality. <v Bill Kurtis>I'm looking at it. Let's- oop. <v Bill Kurtis>There it- there we go. I'm moving in. I can kind of miss that particular <v Bill Kurtis>green ball and hold it right there so I can study. <v Bill Kurtis>Now and- oh, I missed that 1, too. <v Bill Kurtis>Now, I'm swinging, just- I'm just gonna hang out here. <v Bill Kurtis>I could be on a coral reef also going down. <v Bill Kurtis>You know, we dive down the walls and you're weightless. <v Bill Kurtis>Now I'm going to go under and I think I'll go under it and swing back. <v Bill Kurtis>[fade out] <v Bill Kurtis>I floated through those molecules and then did some virtual artwork. <v Bill Kurtis>Yes. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>So that means you're in box mode. Build a box right here. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Yeah. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Yeah, that looks good. <v Bill Kurtis>Okay, how's that? <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Perfect. <v Bill Kurtis>All right. Okay. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Yeah. Make another box somewhere. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>There you go. That was great! Perfect. <v Bill Kurtis>We'll just put a top on it right there. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Yeah, put it on top. Right. <v Bill Kurtis>Okay. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Try uh the shaving thing. <v Bill Kurtis>Okay. <v Bill Kurtis>Like that. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>There you go, good. You're good. Okay. Now, right here. If you push it down, you will

<v Dr. Henry Fuchs>start generating shaving cream. [fade out] <v Bill Kurtis>What's it like in virtual reality? <v Bill Kurtis>I felt sort of like a ghost. Able to walk through walls, fly at will, <v Bill Kurtis>go wherever I could dream. <v Bill Kurtis>And if you don't like it, you can just-. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>You can just erase it. <v Bill Kurtis>The potential for what can be done inside virtual reality is being tested and explored <v Bill Kurtis>all over the world. <v Bill Kurtis>The Air Force came up with a VR simulation to train pilots for bombing missions in the <v Bill Kurtis>Persian Gulf War. <v Bill Kurtis>VR teaches you how to drive. <v Bill Kurtis>A virtual world has been created to teach seamen how to navigate inside Rotterdam <v Bill Kurtis>Harbor. City planners in Minneapolis came up with a visual map of <v Bill Kurtis>the downtown area. It can be used to identify streets at ground level <v Bill Kurtis>or an entire area with an aerial view. <v Bill Kurtis>The military even looked into the possibility of creating a virtual reality helmet

<v Bill Kurtis>that will allow soldiers to locate the enemy's hiding place or identify landmines. <v Bill Kurtis>The exciting new world of virtual reality started in the 1960s with a computer <v Bill Kurtis>scientist named Ivan Sutherland. <v Bill Kurtis>He believed the computers should have the capability to create an image that looks, <v Bill Kurtis>sounds, and feels real enough to draw the user inside. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>The whole notion that Ivan Sutherland originally came up with is that <v Dr. Fred Brooks>the computer graphicist should think of the screen as a window through which <v Dr. Fred Brooks>one looks into a virtual world. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>And then the object is to make the picture in the window look reeal, sound real, feel <v Dr. Fred Brooks>real. And then that led him- this is back in the 60s- to <v Dr. Fred Brooks>the notion that you really want to put a display in front of the eyes and be immersed <v Dr. Fred Brooks>in the synthetic environment.

<v Dr. Henry Fuchs>If you look in these standard textbooks in interactive computer graphics, in the 1980s, <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>the work on head bound displays of Ivan Sutherland is relegated to a paragraph <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>in the back near stereo and alternate forms of displays. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Nobody recognized that this was 1 of the major branches <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>of interactive computer graphics, and the really strange thing was, it was relegated to <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>the dust heap. <v Bill Kurtis>Other scientists worked on virtual reality over the next 20 years. <v Bill Kurtis>But it wasn't until the 1980s that a dread locked computer whiz kid named Jaron <v Bill Kurtis>Lanier discovered its entertainment capabilities. <v Bill Kurtis>And the video game craze began. <v Jaron Lanier>Everything about virtual reality that's powerful and beautiful happens because of <v Jaron Lanier>how human beings are at the center of all of its conception and the way it's designed. <v Jaron Lanier>I think that's a very humanistic approach to designing technology because <v Jaron Lanier>in the future, they'll be many cases where people are inside a virtual world and they

<v Jaron Lanier>want to design something in that virtual world. <v Jaron Lanier>So the question is, how will they do it? <v Jaron Lanier>And sometimes they might sculpt, sometimes they might build things out of <v Jaron Lanier>pieces and put them together. But I think for a lot of things, they'll be using things <v Jaron Lanier>that are like musical instruments that you play because musical instruments are the most <v Jaron Lanier>powerful user interface that's ever been created for anything so far. <v Bill Kurtis>Today, Jaron has created a world of musical instruments for the virtual operator to <v Bill Kurtis>play. <v Jaron Lanier>These virtual worlds are created through a new type of design. <v Jaron Lanier>It's a combination of sculpting and programing. <v Jaron Lanier>These are musical instruments that I created for a piece called The Sound of 1 Hand. <v Jaron Lanier>They're meant to be played with a single hand and a glove. <v Jaron Lanier>We'll start with one called a rhythm gimble, and it looks kind of like a gyroscope. <v Jaron Lanier>And now what I can do is by spinning it in different ways and get different qualities of <v Jaron Lanier>sound. I'll spin it very gently. [music plays] So <v Jaron Lanier>there's sort of a very gentle and kind of eerie background.

<v Jaron Lanier>And I'll just leave that going. Then right here we have a sort of a bizarre thing, which <v Jaron Lanier>is a mallott instrument called the cyber xylo. <v Jaron Lanier>And uh you can sort of play it. <v Jaron Lanier>And then over here we have something called a cyber sax. <v Jaron Lanier>The idea is that in the future, all of our culture, our music, our <v Jaron Lanier>writing, our art is gonna be stored in computers and we're going to read it through <v Jaron Lanier>computers and see it through computers and hear it through computers. <v Jaron Lanier>And so um what's really vital is for people to be able to control <v Jaron Lanier>those computers in order for the culture to remain fluid and alive. <v Doctor 1>Now, I'm going to point the 1 point finger. <v Doctor 2>First finger. <v John>Hello, my name is John. <v Bill Kurtis>One of the most promising applications is to explore what virtual reality we'll be able <v Bill Kurtis>to do to help the disabled. To speak. <v John>Can you please help me? <v Doctor 3>Uh you click your jaw to begin.

<v Bill Kurtis>To play VR music with the move of an arm. <v Bill Kurtis>The hope is that virtual reality will 1 day help the disabled turn on lights, <v Bill Kurtis>switch on nurses' called buttons, or turn on heaters. <v Bill Kurtis>UNC is working on its own contributions to medicine of the future. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>This is our dream again of how head mounted display might be used <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>for needle biopsies, in which the surgeon wearing a head mounted <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>display would be able to see into the patient <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>as she thrusts the needle to get a sample of cells from a <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>tumor that's deep in the patient. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>Now, the other exciting part of this is that if she needs some consultation <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>during the time of this procedure from somebody far away, information <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>of scanning the patient could be sent to a remote consultant, either wearing <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>a head mount or using it through a standard workstation and the <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>ability to consult during the procedure itself, you could imagine, would help a local <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>physician, and presumably the local patient.

<v Dr. Fred Brooks>It is an exceedingly promising, exciting technology, else we wouldn't be doing <v Dr. Fred Brooks>what we're doing. And we think it's great. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>But. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>The hype occasionally outruns the uh <v Dr. Fred Brooks>reality. I'm very concerned that the field has had so much hype <v Dr. Fred Brooks>because it leads people to believe that we're promising things that we <v Dr. Fred Brooks>can't deliver or that we're promising things tomorrow that <v Dr. Fred Brooks>maybe we'll be able to deliver in 10 years. <v Bill Kurtis>What virtual reality can deliver today besides video games is a new way to build <v Bill Kurtis>and decorate homes. <v Bill Kurtis>The Japanese are using VR to take prospective buyers on a tour of their new <v Bill Kurtis>home. <v Tester>Wall. <v Tester>Door. Accept. [fade out]. <v Bill Kurtis>Autodesk, a company in Sausalito is using VR to take the idea of a blueprint <v Bill Kurtis>to a new level.

<v Tester>Chair. Table. <v Tester>Shazam. <v Tester>All the lines are drawn in at 90-degree angles <v Tester>at the same distance and size that they would be for an architect to uh <v Tester>prepare plans of the building. <v Test Assistant>Now, this has audio [fade out] <v Bill Kurtis>I'm getting ready to enter a virtual reality kitchen that I can walk around <v Bill Kurtis>and even change if I don't like something about it. <v Bill Kurtis>Looking at a door, ceiling, wall. <v Bill Kurtis>Yes. Well, I have a kitchen and I have a little stove. <v Bill Kurtis>And I also-. <v Test Leader>Walk here if you like. <v Bill Kurtis>So if I were looking to remodel a house, I could come into a house that's already <v Bill Kurtis>been created for me and look at the cabinets, the kinds of cabinets. <v Bill Kurtis>Look where they will go. <v Test Leader>You can now take several steps, walk 5 to 6 feet. <v Bill Kurtis>Well, I think I'll- I'm going to go by the counter right over here. <v Bill Kurtis>And um I think uh we should leave the refrigerator right there, 'cause it <v Bill Kurtis>looks nice and the brown and the blue is terrific.

<v Bill Kurtis>I'd put a painting on that wall right there. <v Bill Kurtis>And then as we come back here, why, um yeah, that's a nice <v Bill Kurtis>workspace. So that you're right by the frying pan right here. <v Bill Kurtis>See the frying pan? <v Test Leader>Do you get a different feel in this kind of world? <v Bill Kurtis>Well, it's a real world. I mean, you're not weightless. <v Bill Kurtis>You're not uh tilted. The world isn't changing around you, so I feel like <v Bill Kurtis>I'm really in a kitchen. <v Test Leader>Good, that's what we want- that's what we were hoping for. <v Bill Kurtis>You know, in fact, I'm hungry now. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>I find after I've been in the imaginary kitchen for about 20 minutes or 30 minutes when <v Dr. Fred Brooks>I come out, I'm surprised to be back in the laboratory. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>It's there's a little bit of an emotional shock of being here <v Dr. Fred Brooks>again instead of where I have been. <v Bill Kurtis>But the challenge Dr. Brooks and Dr. Fuchs had set up for their lab was to see how <v Bill Kurtis>virtual reality can help scientists take their work to a new dimension. <v Bill Kurtis>The opportunity to test their system came from an old college friend of Mr. Robinette's,

<v Bill Kurtis>Dr. Stan Williams, who's a materials chemist at UCLA. <v Bill Kurtis>He's probed molecules in every conceivable way to find out how they interact. <v Dr. Stan Williams>Chemists are well known for building models of the compounds and the substances that <v Dr. Stan Williams>they look at. We do this in order to be able to see the- the spatial arrangement <v Dr. Stan Williams>of at- that atoms have toward each other and to be able to visualize the- <v Dr. Stan Williams>the complete structure of what it is that we're interested in. <v Dr. Stan Williams>That helps for a lot of reasons. It tells us a lot about the uh <v Dr. Stan Williams>behavior of the material, its- its physical properties, uh its- its strength <v Dr. Stan Williams>or its- its lack of strength, the uh way in which the <v Dr. Stan Williams>molecule participates in chemical reactions all come <v Dr. Stan Williams>from being able to visualize uh the molecule. <v Bill Kurtis>He wanted to be able to study the structure of molecules in minute detail. <v Bill Kurtis>So he built a scanning tunneling microscope that allowed him to see molecules

<v Bill Kurtis>on an atomic scale, 2500 by 2500 angstroms. <v Bill Kurtis>An analogy would be looking at a postage stamp somewhere in the United States <v Bill Kurtis>and reducing the U.S. to the size of your thumbnail. <v Dr. Stan Williams>It operates not like a traditional optical microscope where you put your eye <v Dr. Stan Williams>up to a- a lens and see something that has been magnified. <v Dr. Stan Williams>It's more like a brail microscope or a tip is moving <v Dr. Stan Williams>back and forth across the surface. <v Dr. Stan Williams>And what you do is you monitor the amount of current that's flowing between the <v Dr. Stan Williams>bottom of the tip and the sample that you're interested in looking at. <v Dr. Stan Williams>Uh you can then create an image of a sample that you're looking at <v Dr. Stan Williams>by simply taking the amount of current that's flowing and <v Dr. Stan Williams>mapping it on a screen to show the intensity of the current. <v Bill Kurtis>But it didn't give Dr. Williams the detail he needed. <v Bill Kurtis>So he called his old college friend and the UNC team went into action.

<v Bill Kurtis>They hooked Williams' microscope up to their virtual reality system, came up with a name <v Bill Kurtis>for it, the nano manipulator, and started looking around. <v Warren Robinett>So the nano manipulator at University North Carolina is an example of we've hooked up <v Warren Robinett>this scanning tunneling microscope to a virtual reality system. <v Warren Robinett>All of a sudden, you can be transported down onto that surface so you can look around and <v Warren Robinett>uh a nanometer, a billionth of a meter, is this big. <v Dr. Stan Williams>It was a pretty much of a leap of faith on my part to to <v Dr. Stan Williams>take down a working scientific instrument and put it on an airplane and ship it off <v Dr. Stan Williams>to uh North Carolina, where I may never see it again <v Dr. Stan Williams>and have it set up in somebody else's lab so they can uh work on it and try it out. <v Dr. Stan Williams>You know, no guts, no glory. You've got to give it- got to give it a shot. <v Bill Kurtis>What Stan Williams saw as a result of the coupling of his microscope and UNC's virtual <v Bill Kurtis>reality systems was the surface of a graphite molecular structure in <v Bill Kurtis>incredible detail.

<v Lab Technician>A little tip is the thing that you have to aim at- <v Bill Kurtis>Is that the- the white? <v Dr. Fred Brooks>That's the little white triangle. <v Lab Technician>That's right. So if you go to where isn't any force you'll actually be on where the surface <v Lab Technician>is. <v Bill Kurtis>Oh boy. Well, I- I do feel like I'm walking <v Bill Kurtis>around in a new world. <v Bill Kurtis>In 1 image he saw, as I'm seeing now, peaks and valleys <v Bill Kurtis>he'd never seen before. <v Bill Kurtis>Well, you can see the advantage. We really are incredible shrinking people <v Bill Kurtis>that can now move down to the surface of almost anything you can get under the microscope <v Bill Kurtis>and explore, indeed. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>That's the idea, put the chemist on the surface as if he's there <v Dr. Fred Brooks>visually and with respect to how it feels <v Dr. Fred Brooks>in real time. <v Bill Kurtis>Well, a virtual world, you could almost make it whatever you want it to be, can't you? <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Yes, but in this one we've chosen to make as close an imitation of the real world <v Dr. Fred Brooks>as our instrument will produce. <v Bill Kurtis>And that's the point of science, isn't it? What you're trying to do is- <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Is model the real world. <v Bill Kurtis>Indeed. So you can take measurements, you can make an accurate observation.

<v Dr. Fred Brooks>And the thing the virtual world interface does for you is make it possible <v Dr. Fred Brooks>to understand what your measurements are telling you. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>All right. So we believe that actually being able to see it and feel it <v Dr. Fred Brooks>in real time will improve comprehension, understanding <v Dr. Fred Brooks>and memory of what the instrument is produced. <v Dr. Stan Williams>I think of it as- as a computer enhancement of my senses. <v Dr. Stan Williams>When I'm at UNC and I'm- I'm in the nano manipulator, I <v Dr. Stan Williams>can scale myself down to be the size of that <v Dr. Stan Williams>postage stamp on the United States. At that point in time, uh atoms become <v Dr. Stan Williams>the size of basketballs. There's something that I can see and experience <v Dr. Stan Williams>on a firsthand basis that I- I just can't do in any other <v Dr. Stan Williams>fashion. I can take my hand. <v Dr. Stan Williams>I can run it over the surface. And I- I can actually feel the atoms. <v Dr. Stan Williams>That gives chemistry a reality that even I hadn't appreciated before. <v Dr. Stan Williams>The fact that I can reach out and touch an atom and think of being able to pick it

<v Dr. Stan Williams>up and move it and do chemistry 1 atom at a time, I think is just <v Dr. Stan Williams>going to completely revolutionize uh the science of chemistry. <v Bill Kurtis>Other scientists are beginning to see how they can shrink themselves down to explore <v Bill Kurtis>what is too small to see in the real world. <v Bill Kurtis>Would it travel through space and explore planets too far away to reach? <v Bill Kurtis>Virtual reality is even taking NASA to places it's never been before. <v Bill Kurtis>The planet's surface has been measured by a satellite and the information has been fed <v Bill Kurtis>into a computer. <v Bill Kurtis>Instead of using a wind tunnel, virtual reality puts you on the wing of a new aerodynamic <v Bill Kurtis>plane designed to measure the force of the wind. <v Bill Kurtis>To the bottom of the sea, this VR-driven robot <v Bill Kurtis>is exploring regions inaccessible to man to collect samples under the sea. <v Bill Kurtis>For now, virtual reality will remain best known for taking entertainment

<v Bill Kurtis>to a new level. <v Bill Kurtis>But if the future is what the team at UNC guardedly dreams it to be, in 5, <v Bill Kurtis>10, 25, or 100 years, virtual reality will be entering our lives <v Bill Kurtis>in more ways than video games. <v Warren Robinett>If you carry this to the logical extreme, you get so good at the kind of things <v Warren Robinett>you can do by- you can see the invisible. <v Warren Robinett>You can perfectly remember anything that ever happened to you because you have it all <v Warren Robinett>recorded on the 22nd century equivalent of videotape. <v Warren Robinett>You just wouldn't want to function without all these machines, so really, you become kind <v Warren Robinett>of a cyborg. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>But if we had a postage stamp sized display in our glasses and effective <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>power, say, on a small Walkman size box that we put <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>on our belt, and then we have the possibility of a whole 3-dimensional environment that <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>we create, that when we put this thing on, uh we have bookshelves <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>in various places and they are in the places where we put them last week or last month or

<v Dr. Henry Fuchs>2 years ago, and we go and get them in the same way. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>And some of those are um encyclopedias and some of those are dictionaries <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>and some are uh stacks of transparencies that we put there 2 years ago. <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>But we carry that with us. And those are just data files that are inside the small <v Dr. Henry Fuchs>thing that hangs on our belt. <v Jaron Lanier>You can take kids on a field trip into a simulated primeval forest and <v Jaron Lanier>they can uh you know watch the big dinosaurs trumping around. <v Jaron Lanier>But what's great is they can become a dinosaur. <v Jaron Lanier>So a kid can take a turn at being a Tyrannosaurus rex and trying to uh step on their <v Jaron Lanier>friends. [laughs] <v Dr. Fred Brooks>A friend of mine once said many years ago, Fred, there are 3 great <v Dr. Fred Brooks>technical challenges of our time: sending a man <v Dr. Fred Brooks>to the moon, the conquest of cancer, and the computer revolution. <v Dr. Fred Brooks>Isn't it great to be part of one them? <v TV Announcer>Major funding for the new explorers is provided by Amoco, celebrating

<v TV Announcer>the adventure of scientific discovery for the year 2000 and beyond. <v TV Announcer>Additional funding is made possible by Waste Management Inc., providing <v TV Announcer>recycling and other waste services around the world. <v TV Announcer>And by Duracell embracing the power of science education, <v TV Announcer>the source of future technology and innovative growth. <v TV Announcer>Duracell, the copper top battery. <v TV Announcer 2>A videocassette and accompanying teacher's guide are available for each episode of The <v TV Announcer 2>New Explorers. To order call 1 800 6 2 1 0 6 6 0, or write <v TV Announcer 2>The New Explorers, 1 5 1 8 1, Route 58 South, Oberlin, Ohio. <v TV Announcer 2>4 4 0 74.