Introduction to Virtual Reality

by Paul M. & Mary J. Summitt

This has been placed here on this web site to help others in their study of Virtual Reality. This essay covers fictional representations of virtual reality as they have been presented in some of the more memorable science fiction books. Future installments may cover the memorable film representations of virtual reality, some of the representations of virtual reality as seen on television, how newspaper and magazine journalism have covered virtual reality, the various types of virtual reality that exist today, the various levels of virtual reality that exist currently, the differences between VR and other forms of media and how the human senses react to media, in general, and to VR, in particular, and finally, what non-fiction books, magazines, discussion groups, and software programs that are out there for you to explore. We'll start by jumping right in to virtual reality and look at what science fiction authors have told us about VR and its applications.

Fictional Representations: Books

Science Fiction Applications of Virtual Reality

For many years, one of the methods we've been able to experience other worlds has been through science fiction books. Science fiction is a sub-genre of modern fantasy and grew out of the gothic romances of the later 18th century. The main difference, today, between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction is usually concerned with creating alternative realities, whereas fantasy aims more toward the suspension of disbelief in the unreal.

Science fiction, today one of the most popular genres of contemporary literature, mirrors society's attempt to deal with industrialization and mechanization. Evolving partly from the Renaissance focus on the terrestrial world and partly from the machine technology that this development ultimately made possible, science fiction began to flourish during the late 18th century. One of science fiction's first contributions was the Faustus story--Mary Shelley's Frankenstein-(1818). This story warned that there are areas in which man's science and technology should not transgress (see Figure 1).

During the late 19th century, science fiction turned its attention to the achievements of technology. Two basic themes emerged: adventures into space and adventures into worlds unknown. These themes emanated from what anthropologist Joseph Campbell called the hero myth. George Lucus based much of his 1970's Star Wars trilogy on this hero myth (see Figure 2). During this time frame, the late 19th century, imperialism and the European armaments race inspired stories of future warfare from some writers, while others turned their attention to the possibilities the new technology had for the creation of some form of utopia. At the same time H. G. Wells, with stories of ecological disaster and the breakdown of our society, was warning of our uncertain position in an indifferent universe.

The early and mid 20th century brought in what has been called the golden age of science fiction. These stories, written during this pre-hydrogen bomb era, despite a few ominous predictions, largely projected an optimistic outlook on a future where man and technology expanded victoriously throughout the universe.

Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man, and The Veldt

These stories of alternate worlds began to describe technologies for creating artificial realities in the 1950's. One of the authors responsible for one of the first was Ray Bradbury (see Figure 3). Born in 1920, Bradbury has long been recognized as an innovator in science fiction, both in his style and in his themes. Bradbury sold his first short story on his twenty-first birthday. His first book was The Martian Chronicles (1950), but it is his second book that is most interesting to us here. The Illustrated Man (1951) contained a story that is among the first to describe, although not name, virtual reality technology. Bradbury described the technology in the story The Veldt in the following manner:

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children," George had said.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color, reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

"Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong."

From The Veldt, 1951

If you haven't read this book, or this story for that matter, you should. Again, this is one of the first, if not the first, discussions of virtual reality technology in modern science fiction.

The book, The Illustrated Man (see Figure 4), is a series of stories all interconnected by the main premise of the book. This being that a tattooed man and the story teller chance to meet on the road. The Tattooed man eventually explains that his life is tormented because his tattoos come to life, causing him to experience them squirming and writhing on his body. As night falls and the two settle down to sleep under the stars, the story teller finds himself watching the individual tattoos as they come to life. The first illustration that comes to life is The Veldt.

This illustration is the story of a man, his wife, their two children, and the house they live in. The house does everything for the family. The house "clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them." One humorous aspect that dates this story dreadfully is the cost of the house; thirty thousand dollars, installed. Remember that half the cost of the house was the nursery, so this family bought a house for fifteen thousand dollars. Well, maybe Bradbury didn't see the future quite as clearly as he could have.

The story opens with the mother, Lydia, telling the father, George, that there is something wrong with the nursery. She takes George into the nursery to show him what is wrong. There, they are apparently attacked by lions, barely escaping, after which George explains:

"Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that's all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit - Africa in your parlor - but it's all dimensional superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It's all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here's my handkerchief."

"I'm afraid." She came to him and put her body against him and cried steadily. Did you see? Did you feel? It's too real."

From The Veldt 1951.

The room was too real. They decide to find out why the room is different than they had remembered it. It turns out that the children, Wendy and Peter, "live for the nursery". They were spending too much time, as far as the parents were concerned, in the nursery. As Bradbury writes:

Too much of anything isn't good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could feel it on his neck, still, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children's minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun - sun. Giraffes - giraffes. Death and death.

From The Veldt 1951

Again, it is interesting how Bradbury does foretell the future in this instance. Here, he is bringing to light one of the most prominent social concerns in regard to virtual reality.

It is estimated that the average teenager spends about five to seven hours a day in front of the television set and communication researchers Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi in a 1990 paper suggest that people spend about seven years of their lives watching television. The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill's Frank Biocca proposed in a 1992 special issue on virtual reality of The Journal of Communication that if people use VR in the same manner they are currently using TV and computers, "some users could spend 20 or more years inside virtual reality."

Yes, Bradbury, even in 1951, anticipated some of the social questions that surround virtual reality applications today. One should keep in mind the questions raised about video games, by such communications scholars as San Francisco State University's Arthur Asa Berger and the University of Missouri's Michael Porter, concerning the impact of video games on children's perceptions of life and death in the real world. We discussed video games in the book Cyberlife! and raised similar questions concerning stereotyping, violence, and sexual issues.

Back to The Veldt now: George decides to turn off the nursery after he tries, and fails, to change the world it portrays. He and Lydia suspect that Peter has set it to stay on the African veldt scene. Again, here Bradbury intensifies, to a degree, the stereotype that young males are the ones who spend the most time hacking into computer systems. The parents immediately have suspected Peter with tampering with the programming yet, when confronted, it is Wendy, the daughter, who changes the African veldt to "a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her hair."

In a chapter we wrote concerning computer hackers in Cyberlife!, we traced the history of hacking. It has been the young male who has predominantly been responsible for hacking in the past. During the late 1940's and early 1950's, it was males who were known to be into computer hacking. Yet, Bradbury is suggesting that females, too, can take part; a bold step in 1951. And today, women are beginning to attain equality, even in the computer hacking arena.

Back in The Veldt: after a confrontation with the children, the parents lock the nursery, but during the night the children break in and the parents hear screams coming from the room. The next morning George and Peter have another confrontation after which ten-year-old Peter threatens his father if he continues to think about turning off the nursery. The parents call in David McClean, a psychologist, to take a look at the room. As the three of them walk down the hall toward the nursery they hear terrible screaming. The lions are feeding as the children watch. George sends the children outside and talks with David. David suggests turning the whole house off, especially after finding a bloody scarf of Lydia's and George asking if the lions could actually become real.

We're not going to tell the whole story here, you should read the original. What happens next, however, does raise questions concerning the level of exposure to virtual reality that children should be allowed.

We need to take another look at the description of the virtual reality technology. The room "was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house." The room is further described as the walls being "blank and two dimensional" until the characters (users) reach the center of the room when "the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color, reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun." These last two sentences are very reminiscent of Ivan Sutherland's discussion of virtual reality technology as the ultimate display. Sutherland created the first head mounted display (HMD) in 1965. In a paper written that year, Sutherland described not only what Bradbury had written about in 1951, but a technology that television viewers would come to know in the 1980's as the holodeck.

The ultimate display would . . . be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland in which Alice walked."

Sutherland, I. (1965). "The ultimate display."
Proceedings of the International Federation of Information Processing Congress, pp. 506-8.

An early form of this technology was created in 1969 by Myron Krueger, pioneer of artificial reality and author of Artificial Reality II. This early form was called GLOWFLOW and consisted of a rectangular room constructed with tubes containing phosphorescent particles suspended in water attached to the walls (see figure 5). The system was described as "a computer-controlled light-sound environment that had limited provision for responding to people within it."

Bradbury's 1951 description of virtual reality technology seemed very prophetic as the usable technology began to take shape during the 1960's. In chapter two we'll be taking a look at the 1969 film based on Bradbury's book. For now, let's move on to The Shockwave Rider.

John Brunner and The Shockwave Rider

While science fiction continued to describe future worlds and alternate realities during the 1970's and 1980's, there were few actual references to the specific technologies of virtual reality. World-wide computer networks were beginning to be discussed however.

The year 1975 saw the publication of John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (see Figure 6). While this book did not discuss virtual reality, it did present a world-wide computer system through which the lives of the people of this planet are controlled. The basic story line centers in one character's attempt to break out of this systematic control over his life. Published shortly after the Watergate scandals, the book also carries with it a certain cynicism. This cynicism includes a lack of trust for politicians and government officials that was significantly present in the science fiction of the 1970's. That same cynicism remains, to a degree, today.

When reading The Shockwave Rider one is reminded of George Orwell's 1984, especially during the interrogation scenes, yet the overall concept of the book has more in common with Aldus Huxley's Brave New World because of its positive view of technological enslavement. Overall, Brunner's book does, and should, have a significant place in any discussion of the social implications of virtual reality, multimedia, and cyberspace in general.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1928 that "Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery." German playwright Max Frisch defined technology as "the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Perhaps it is this lack of experience of the world that enables the machines to impose slavery. Communication scholars Shapiro and McDonald suggested in 1992 that virtual reality will be "at least as likely to shape our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as other forms of mass media." VR, therefore, may have more potential for either empowerment or enslavement than television or any other previous medium of communication. Yet, little interactivity research has been done in the communication or computer science fields. It seems that science fiction, and playwrights such as Frisch, have been the first to grapple with the moral implications of social and political action and inaction as they apply to virtual reality.

Stephen King, Night Shift, and The Lawnmower Man

Stephen King, the master of horror, published a collection of short stories called Night Shift in 1978 (see Figure 7). Contained in this collection was a short story titled The Lawnmower Man. It should be noted here that King's story is nothing like the movie version. The story, having nothing to do with virtual reality, is basically about Pan, of Greek mythology fame, running a lawn mowing service in a small town. The movie, which does portray virtual reality, will be examined in the next installment of this discussion.

William Gibson and Neuromancer

Coming almost ten years after The Shockwave Rider, William Gibson's Neuromancer was published in 1984. Gibson (see Figure 8) is the man most often given credit for coining the term cyberspace. As he states in the television mini-series Wild Palms (discussed in a future installment), no one is ever going to let him live it down. Cyberspace is a virtual reality. It is the location where virtual worlds exist. It is the location where all electronic communications take place, that virtual room where a phone call, between two or more people, takes place.

Here's how Gibson described cyberspace in his novel:

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . ."

From Neuromancer 1984

In an interview in Benjamin Woolley's book Virtual Worlds, Gibson stated:

Cyberspace has a nice buzz to it, it's something that an advertising man might of thought up, and when I got it I knew that it was slick and essentially hollow and that I'd have to fill it up with meaning . . . a consensual hallucination . . . the point at which media [flow] together and around us. It's the ultimate extension of the exclusion of daily life. With cyberspace as I describe it you can literally wrap yourself in media and not have to see what's really going on around you.

This concept of "wrapping yourself in media and not hav[ing] to see what's really going on around you" perfectly describes putting on the HMD and experiencing a virtual world. Gibson's first description of his main character in Neuromancer stepping into this virtual world he calls cyberspace is a very colorful description of what entering a worldwide web of virtual reality might be like.

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now -

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now -

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding -

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

From Neuromancer, 1984

Putting on a head-mounted display, or HMD, in an isolated one user, or limited user, virtual reality system has many similar qualities to Gibson's description. On the front left underside of the VictorMax Stuntmaster (see Figure 10), a low-end HMD designed for use with the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis that can be adapted for use with the PC, is a button that, when pushed, resets the visual orientation of the HMD. The screens in front of your eyes blank and darken, slowly to be replaced by flashes of color that slowly resolve into parts of the virtual world the user will be experiencing. Gibson's description carries this current reality into one possible future.

That possible future is a very dystopic look at the possibilities of humanity and our world. Neuromancer is the story of a small-time criminal, a hacker, an interface cowboy on the earth's computer matrix. The cowboy's name is Case. The story begins with Case being contacted for a job. Unfortunately, because of a previous punishment for past crimes, Case can no longer enter the matrix. The people who hire Case provide an operation that allows Case to re-enter the matrix. Just what the job entails is part of what makes this book a must-have for any VR student. Gibson masterfully weaves his characters and plot into an unusual and involving narrative that will keep you reading to the very end.

Gibson's Next Steps in CyberPunk

A new style of science fiction was given a name during this period of time and Gibson's work was labeled as representative of it. This style was given the names TechnoPunk and CyberPunk. The later term won out and gave purpose to a small group of young people who received considerable press coverage during the late 1980's and early 1990's. We'll look at those people and the coverage they received in chapter four.

Two years after Neuromancer, Gibson published two other books in this cyberpunk genre; Burning Chrome and Count Zero. Burning Chrome is a collection of short stories concerning computer cowboys, biologically enhanced soldiers of fortune, and high-tech low-lifes in a world-wide, computerized and dystopic future. While three of the stories take place in the "sprawl" which is the locale of the majority of Neuromancer, the majority of this collection has little to say of cyberspace and virtual reality. Burning Chrome is the location of the original short story Johnny Mnemonic (see Figure 11). A film based on this short story was released in 1995. Gibson wrote the screenplay. We'll have more to say about this in a future installment of this series of essays.

Count Zero (see Figure 12), on the other hand, picks up where Neuromancer left off. The name of this book is taken from the computer term count zero interrupt which means "on receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero." What this means, in layman's terms, is that when the program receives an interrupt from the system, the program's counter is reduced to a zero and begins over. For the story, this title has considerable significance. While Count Zero, continues the story begun in Neuromancer, there is really nothing new in the way of descriptions of virtual reality here, so we'll move on.

Gibson and Mona Lisa Overdrive

In 1988, Gibson published the last part of his cyberspace trilogy. The book was Mona Lisa Overdrive (see Figure 13). As with Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive brings forward some of the same characters and locations described in previous books. Again, while interesting reading and a must include, as are the other Gibson books, for the VR student's fiction library, Mona Lisa Overdrive doesn't really add much to our search for new looks at virtual reality. Well, that's not entirely true. There is a female character, introduced in Count Zero, who can access the matrix (cyberspace) without a computer. This technique is definitely not one that the beginning VR student can use for getting into virtual reality.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

One of the most enjoyable and entertaining novels in this genre came in 1992. It took the form of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The story of a modern day samurai cyber-punk pizza delivery guy, this novel combines Sumarian myth with tongue-in-cheek, technology-gone-haywire. The result provides a unique look at what our future might look like.

The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes are half and inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost feel a breeze.

From Snow Crash, 1992.

With the Mafia delivering pizza and street gangs providing neighborhood police services, this book is one that you will have to read to believe. Two concepts grew into popular discourse as a result of this book. Those words were the black sun and the metaverse.

Gibson and Virtual Light

In 1993, Gibson published his most recent novel about cyberspace and virtual reality. Virtual Light (see Figure 14) continues Gibson's dystopic look at the future peopled by high-tech low-lifes, biologically modified soldiers of fortune, and technology enhanced criminals. One sometimes wonders, when reading Gibson's books, what the common people are like in his future world. Or are these the common people of the future?

Virtual Light does have a new piece of technology, a pair of glasses, that seem to have an instantaneous connection to the matrix. These glasses seem vaguely similar to the glasses seen in Oliver Stone's television mini-series Wild Palms. Again, we'll discuss this program in a future installment of this series.

Conclusions regarding Science Fiction accounts of Virtual Reality

As we've seen, virtual reality has existed in science fiction since the 1950's. Ray Bradbury's description in The Veldt, while sounding very much like the ultimate display described by Sutherland in 1965, recurs in Star Trek: The Next Generation as the holodeck. We'll discuss the holodeck and other television representations of virtual reality in our third installment.

The concept of the worldwide computer web was an integral part of John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. This concept was accepted in the world of science fiction and laid the groundwork for William Gibson's novels and short stories.

These novels and short stories laid the foundation for the general public's understanding of what virtual reality was to be. But they didn't do it alone. There were also movies, television programs, and so-called journalistic accounts. Together, these media have woven a tapestry that colors the way everyone sees virtual reality. It is difficult to tell the fiction from the fact when it comes to VR.

This article first posted May 5, 1996.

Copyright ©1996-2001, Summitt New Media/VREvolution.