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<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.
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Series
The New Explorers. Series III
Episode Number
No. 311
Episode
Virtual Reality
Producing Organization
WTTW (Television station : Chicago, Ill.)
Contributing Organization
The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip-526-4x54f1nk13
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Description
Episode Description
This episode on virtual reality features Drs. Henry Fuchs, Fred Brooks, and Stan Williams, as researcher Warren Robinette and developer Jarron Lanier, who detail how virtual reality has transformed their work and what improvements they hope to see in the future.
Broadcast Date
1993
Asset type
Episode
Media type
Moving Image
Duration
00:27:49.501
Credits
Producing Organization: WTTW (Television station : Chicago, Ill.)
AAPB Contributor Holdings
The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia
Identifier: cpb-aacip-07c3043940d (Filename)
Format: U-matic
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Citations
Chicago: “The New Explorers. Series III; No. 311; Virtual Reality,” 1993, The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-526-4x54f1nk13.
MLA: “The New Explorers. Series III; No. 311; Virtual Reality.” 1993. The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-526-4x54f1nk13>.
APA: The New Explorers. Series III; No. 311; Virtual Reality. Boston, MA: The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-526-4x54f1nk13