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 t u a l R e ality
a b o u t Vir
h
The trut
 nd Tesselation
Sex Drugs a

I
 Dedicated to
Dave Blackburn, Mark Delaura, Eric Howlett, Randy Pausch
and the other VR pioneers who gave so much.
 Sex, Drugs and Tessellation
The Truth About Virtual Reality, as Revealed in the Pages of
CyberEdge Journal

© 2014 CyberEdge Information Services, Ben Delaney

All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1500893293 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-63443-194-1 (Kindle version)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918681

The publisher encourages and grants permission for the distribution and reproduction of copies
of excerpts of this work, up to 200 words, for non-commercial purposes. Such copies, in whatever
form, must be unmodified, in their entirety, including copyright notice and full attribution. Any adap-
tation, derivative work, or any other modification requires prior written approval by the publisher.
To order additional copies of this book, please visit Amazon.com, or contact the publisher.
Bulk discounts are available.
CyberEdge Information Services
510 419-0800
www.CyberEdge.com, [email protected]

Cover design: Ck Kuebel Design, www.kuebel.com

Interior design consultation: Ck Kuebel Design
 edgements
Acknowl
CyberEdge Journal was my baby, but many people helped to make it happen. Over
the six years it was in publication, dozens of authors contributed or collaborated on articles.
People working in industry, universities, government, and the military opened their doors and
showed me and our many corespondents their labs. We saw projects we weren’t allowed to
write about for months. We saw many good ideas and frankly, a few pretty wacky ones. But
there was never a lack of imagination, vision and excitement surrounding VR in the 1990’s.

Much of the excitement was generated by the great people at the Human Interface Tech-
nology Lab (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am honored and thrilled that
the Founding Director, Thomas A. Furness, provided an insightful introduction to this book.

Several people deserve special thanks for the extraordinary assistance they provided.
They include CK Kuebel, who designed this book, as well as my previous one, and all of my
websites for the past decade. Her great design sense and her ability to work with my some-
times cryptic instructions, has made everything she touched better than I would have hoped.

During the years that CEJ was being published, Sherry Epley provided financial and
operational support. Without her behind me, CEJ would never have reached as far as it did.
Likewise, Robin Doody, our more-than-able Operations Manager kept the office running for
several key years and enabled me to seem as if I knew what was happening.

Special thanks also to Francis Hamit, Jeffrey Aboauf, Kenny Meyer, and Doug Faxon,
Team CyberEdge, who worked with me to cover conferences, build websites, and write and
vet articles. I’ll never forget the SIGGRAPH in New Orleans that we covered together.

Finally, I want to thank and acknowledge the many contributors to CyberEdge Journal.
These are the people who were my eyes and ears around the globe, and whose reporting
enabled CEJ to be the most read and most trusted publication on VR for the six years it was in
existence. Their names are on the next page.

V
 Acknowledgements
Thanks for the important contributions made to the virtual reality industry and
CyberEdge Journal by these generous contributors.

• Jeffrey Abouaf • Sean Dunn • Ralph Lamson • Toni Schneider

• Joanna Alexander • Sherry Epley • Roy Latham • Mischa Schwartz-
• Chris Allis • Dog Faxon • Brenda Laurel mann
• Hugh Applewhite • Thomas Furness • Bowen Loftin • Gilles Scotto de
• Ronald Azuma • Eben Gay • Mark Long Carlo
• Christian Bauer • Robert Gelman • William Martens • Jack Scully
• Sunil Bhoyrul • Patty Glovsky • Tom Mastaglio • Ralph Shapiro
• Louis M. Brill • Nicola Green • Shoshana McVey • Tom Sperlich
• Grigore Burdea • Walter Greenleaf • Michael Macedonia • Scot Steele
• Ian Capon • Bill Griffith • Kenny Meyer • Nicole Stenger
• Patrice Caire • Francis Hamit • Ken Milburn • John Stokdyk
• William Chapin • Sandra Kay Helsel • Diego Montefusco • Robert Stone
• Bill Chernoff • Kari Hintikka • Kenneth Nemire • James J. Thomas
• Garth Chouteau • John Hough • Max M. North • Barbara Thomason
• Aaron Cieslicki • Jerry Isdale • Paul Paray • Linda Trefz
• Rosy Clarke-Leong • Linda Jacobson • Jon Peddie • Christine Treguier
• Amanda Cowell • James P. Jenkins • Marc Pesce
• Jon Waldern
• Bob Cramblitt • Barbara Joans • Tom Piantanida
• Paul S. Cutt • Rob Johnston • John Wann
• Howard Rheingold
• Mark Deloura • David Kahaner • Penny Weiss
• Guiseppe Riva
• Jeffrey Donovan • Ian Kallen • Misty West
• Shelli Roberts-
• Robin Doody • James Kramer Jurado • Kevin Williams
• Daniel Duncan • Myron Kreuger • Bernie Roehl • Michael Zyda

VI
 Introduction
By Thomas A. Furness
In the 60’s I became one of the original inventors of Virtual Reality, although we didn’t call it
that at the time. I was joined by Ivan Sutherland, then a professor at the University of Utah. Ivan’s
motivation was to build an ‘ultimate interface’ that would allow people to interface with computers by
being inside 3D computer graphics and to use direct interaction with those graphics through hand-
held devices. My motivation was different. I was trying to solve several problems in fighter cockpits
for the United States Air Force. These problems centered on cockpit complexity, night vision and
weapon-aiming issues in military aircraft. In our separate ways both of us pioneered what we know
today as Virtual Reality….or the idea that people can experience as real an alternative reality of a
computer-generated world that only appears to exist.

Unbeknownst to us at the time was an earlier pioneer: Mort Heilig. Mort was a cinematographer
and filmmaker. He felt that traditional films and theaters did not involve the ‘whole person’ from a sen-
sory standpoint. Driven by his desire to create experiences that involved the whole body, Mort built
the Sensorama, an arcade ‘ride’ that would propel the customer through an immersive three-dimen-
sional world that included wide field-of-view visual effects, sound, smell and vibration that together
made the user’s experience more realistic, engaging and enjoyable. He was way ahead of his time.

We were joined later in the 70’s and 80’s by such legends as Jaron Lanier, Fred Brooks, Henry
Fuchs, Myron Kreuger, Michael McGreevy, Scott Fisher, Jonathan Waldern and others who, like us,
became infected with VR fever. Sadly, I can attest that such an addiction never subsides and makes
one wish and hope for better and better quality virtual worlds to inhabit.

For two decades after those beginnings, I orchestrated for the Air Force and other military
services the development of many configurations of helmet tracking and display systems while also
venturing into 3D binaural sound, speech and gesture input. My work in the Air Force culminated
in the development of the super cockpit concept…”a cockpit that the pilot wears.” It essentially was
a control/display medium that organized and fused information from aircraft subsystems and por-

VII
 Introduction
Introduction
trayed that information in the form of a virtual visual, auditory and tactile circumambience for rapid
assimilation by the pilot.
The simulators we built in support of the super cockpit project (such at the ‘Darth Vader’ hel-
met) represented the first viable multisensory interactive Virtual Reality. But others were also doing
amazing things. Jaron Lanier was working on a way to program computers with a visual program-
ming language that used ‘eyephones’ and ‘data gloves’ to manipulate objects. In fact, it was Jaron
that gave us our name: Virtual Reality. This at least is the name that stuck. About the same time
Jonathan Waldern was making arcade games
through his company, W Industries. Bob Stone
was working on virtual interfaces for robots.
Those early days were heady times. When we
began to realize the implications of what we
were doing we became even more intoxicated
by this VR thing.
In 1989 I left the Air Force to become
a professor at the University of Washington
and start the Human Interface Technology
Laboratory. I wanted my education, which had
cost the taxpayers millions of dollars, to teach
the next generation of students about Virtual
Reality and its power. About this time Howard
Rheingold authored his book: Virtual Reality
and many of us were ushered into the public
spotlight. We speculated about futures where
Virtual Reality could be used for everything —
medicine, training, education, design and not Ivan Sutherland’s mechanically-tracked, head-coupled display.

VIII
 Introduction
the least —entertainment. We were on fire. Amongst this excitement Fred Brooks, Jaron Lanier and
I were asked to testify before the Senate regarding the future of VR within the context of the Informa-
tion Highway that was being promoted by Senator Al Gore.
During the early 90’s Ben Delaney emerged as a bellwether for our art. Ben took the satellite
view across the sandboxes of our collective Virtual Reality community. Through the pages of the
CyberEdge Journal we began to network and feel a part of a larger community of not only believers,
but doers. This became a boon for us, especially as a forum for those involved in the business side
of this fledging revolution. In 1991 Tom Sheridan (MIT) and I started the journal Presence: Teleop-
erators and Virtual Environments, which was the first academic journal for serious investigators of
virtual environments. In parallel, I worked with colleagues David Mizell and Tom Caudell in 1993 to
start the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS) that morphed into the IEEE
Virtual Reality conference that still exists today.
At the turn of the millennium things began to cool down… we entered into ‘VR winter’. Unfor-
tunately, in our enthusiasm of the 80’s and 90’s, we had set high expectations for VR and its appli-
cations. The reality was that we were a long way from anything practical. The delivery technology
could not keep up with the worlds that we could build. When you went into an immersive virtual
world, you were practically blind, and there was a high probability that you would experience motion
sickness brought about by long latencies and slow update rates of the virtual scene. These were
show-stoppers.
Many of us kept working on these more difficult problems. Fred Brooks, Henry Fuchs and others
worked on the computing and tracking technology while my colleagues and I were working on better
ways to make worlds and the display delivery mechanisms using retinal scanning. From my HITLab
we were launching start-up companies from inventions and via graduates who also had become
infected. Many VR applications were emerging. The Virtual Worlds Consortium that helped to sup-
port my lab had a membership of 50 companies. The Media Lab at MIT, who were also players in this
world, had many more.

IX
 Introduction
Even though we had many ups and downs, we learned a lot. We felt that we had split the atom.
We explored what it took to create a sense of presence in virtual worlds and discovered that in
the process of making our worlds immersive we created a deep coupling to memory: that by put-
ting people in virtual places, we ended up putting those places into people. Our studies showed a
huge impact on learning and retention and the ability to teach complex subjects experientially. We
also found a new way to design spaces, visualize data, manipulate atoms and molecules. Equally
important, we discovered the problems of sensory conflicts between visual and vestibular cues that
bring on motion sickness. In spite of all of the good applications we envisioned for Virtual Reality,
we found that Hollywood and filmmakers would create negative scenarios… like splitting the atom,
there could be destructive applications and consequences.
Today… with the timely publishing of Ben’s book, we are experiencing a rediscovery of vir-
tual reality. This reawakening has been fueled by the march of computer graphics and imaging
technology that solve many of the problems we first experienced. Most of the new adventurers in
virtual space are probably not aware that we ‘gray ones’ have been there before. As an old head, I
don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm, because they will be the ones that really make it happen.
They too will be pioneers. But it might help for these youngsters to learn from the crude maps we
made… and this is what this book provides: a window into an equally exciting time when we were
on a steep learning curve, developing and promoting VR as a paradigm shift that would change the
world forever. Ours may be an old performance but the music lingers on.

Tom Furness
Seattle
October 10, 2014

X
 Forward
Virtual Reality has hit the headlines again. Since the purchase of Oculus in March 2014 by
Facebook, people around the world are looking at head-mounted displays and wondering what they
can do with them. As Mark Zukerberg said in his post announcing the purchase, “The incredible
thing about the technology is that you feel like you’re actually present in another place with other
people. People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives.”
Had those people had been around in the 1990’s, they could have experienced it then.
People often ask how I got into virtual reality and how CyberEdge Journal got started. It all
started in October 1990 when Scott, a colleague at PC World, asked me if I’d ever heard of virtual
reality. He said that there was an demonstration of it happening that night in San Francisco, at the
Palace of Legion of Honor. We talked a little bit about what virtual reality was. Neither of us knew
very much, but it sounded like an interesting event. Later we found ourselves taking our seats in a
jam-packed auditorium and waiting to see what this virtual reality stuff was all about.
Pretty much on time, Timothy Leary, the guru of LSD and other drugs, came on the stage. Tim
had moved on to technology, and he thought VR was the next mid-blowing opportunity. While his
talk was disjunct and rambling, his charisma held the crowd enthralled. Soon Tim petered out, and
a thin, scraggly, hippie-looking dude with blonde hair and beard and his much more put together
female companion took the stage.
There wasn’t much to see other than a big projection screen and a table on which they had
placed a portable computer – a Dolch 386, one of the most powerful luggables of the time. It turned
out that this was Eric Gullichsen and Patrice Gelband, who had recently founded Sense8, one of the
first commercial VR developers. They proceeded to show a demonstration of virtual reality, which for
most in the audience was the first time we had ever seen this technology. It was mind blowing.
The quality of what we saw was crude, even by the standards of the day. None the less, at one
point I turned to my wife and said, “This is going to be big. I’m going to be involved with it.” I didn’t
know how, I didn’t know what it was going look like, but I was determined that VR was the next big

XI
 Forward
thing, and I was going to be part of it.
I thought I’d get a job as a marketing director for virtual reality company. After all, I had done
a lot of high tech marketing, including for medical devices and computer software. I had a techni-
cal background, having been a programmer and systems analyst in the early 70s. I had even done
process software development while I was in Dahlgren Engraving, before I became the marketing
director there.
I started looking for virtual reality companies. There were only two that I could find, Sense8, in
Sausalito, and VPL, in Redwood City.
I gave George Zachary, the Director of Marketing at VPL, a call and we talked a bit about the
state of the art of virtual reality, the commercial aspects of virtual reality, and whether or not there
was a job for me at VPL. There was not.
So I called Tom Coull, CEO of Sense8, and he agreed to have lunch with me. We had a good
chat. I liked Tom and we got along well, but Tom didn’t see a place for me in his company. The
Virtual Reality companies at that time were just too small. They didn’t have room for another posi-
tion, nor the money to pay someone. I was getting depressed. But as we were getting up to leave,
Tom casually remarked, “You know what we do need? We need a newsletter. Nobody knows what’s
going on in this business.” I mulled that over on the way home from lunch.
As a marketing consultant I had done newsletters for many clients. I had done newsletters for
myself. I’d written, I’d done layout, I knew how to do circulation, and because I was still working at
PC World magazine, I knew a bit about the publishing business, from watching how it happened at
a big computer magazine. I thought to myself, “I can do a newsletter.” The big question though, was
whether or not there was any demand. If I wrote it would they come?
So I spent the next few weeks gathering up a mailing list. Remember, this was pre-Internet,
and so I was searching on USENET groups and the WELL (where there was an active cyberspace
discussion group). I was grabbing cards at trade shows and asking people if they knew anybody

XII
 Forward
else involved in the virtual reality business. Pretty soon I developed a list of about 200 names
and (postal) addresses. I mailed these people a survey, asking if they saw a need for newsletter,
how often it should come out, what it should include, and what they would pay for it. I hoped I get
enough results to be able to make an informed decision on whether or not to publish.
Much to my amazement, I got a near-75% response on the survey! There was a huge demand
for a newsletter. People wanted to hear about news, the new products, the people, and events.
People offered to pay and they wanted it as frequently as possible. With this survey in hand, a ton of
enthusiasm, and some financial backing, I put together issue number one of CyberEdge Journal —
eight stunning, two-color pages that hit the mail in January 1991.
I’ll never forget the night I was preparing the first issue for mailing, sitting at a card table in the
living room in front of a television. On TV, CNN featured the bombing of Baghdad. It was the first
Iraqi war — trying to get Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait — and America was pounding the stuffing out
of Baghdad. Oddly, it seemed like an auspicious moment to be launching a new venture. Now, 23
years later, I still remember that night, and I still remember the many adventures, great people, tre-
mendous ideas, and the amazing inventions that I got to see and experience, thanks to Tom Coull’s
suggestion that the virtual reality business needed a communications channel.

Link Trainer at the Western Canada Aviation Museum. The

Link Trainer saved thousands of lives in WWII. This one is
equipped for instrument flying.
Uploaded to Wikipedia by William “Bill” Zuk. Released into
the public domain (by the author).

XIII
 Forward
In the pages that follow you’re going to see some of the best articles from CyberEdge Journal
(CEJ), from the very first issue, the January/February 1991 issue, through the last issue, number
35, January/February 1997. During those six years we published hundreds of pages of commen-
tary, reporting and pictures, chronicling the exciting times, the daring adventures, the wacky ideas,
and the great people who made virtual reality real in the early and mid-90s.

This was one of the biggest adventures of my life. Not only did I get to see technology that
seemed to have come right out of a science fiction movie, but I met some of the smartest and most
interesting people in the world. I was welcomed in laboratories and universities and institutions
around the world, where people generously shared their inventions, their ideas, their opinions, their
beer, and their hospitality. I’m still friends with many of these people 20-plus years later, and I value
that friendship hugely.

What I hope this book provides

My hope is that this book will help today’s Virtual Reality developers skip some of the steps
that would slow them down, and avoid the mistakes others have already made. There isn’t much
history taught in computer science courses. I hope Sex, Drugs, and Tessellation will provide some
small piece of the foundation upon which great new Virtual Reality developments will be built.

This book celebrates the important work that was done in the 90’s, which now seems like an-
cient history. I hope it will help those working today to understand what came before them. Most of
today’s exciting work in virtual reality is based on the foundation of work done by the people whose
stories you are about to read. Their work in turn was based on the work of others who preceded
them. After all, simulation got its practical launch during World War II with the first flight simulator,
the Link Trainer, developed to reduce the number of the fatalities during the War, when there was
not enough time to train pilots. The Link Trainer was a mechanical device that looked like a small
airplane cockpit with stubby wings. It looked like a toy, no question. But this “toy” trained hundreds,
if not thousands, of pilots to fly before they ever stepped into a real airplane. These early flight simu-

XIV
 Forward
lators were the roots from which all virtual reality has grown.

The path to today’s Virtual Reality runs from the Link Trainer, to Ivan Sutherland’s work with 3D
interactive graphics at the University of Utah, through Andries van Dam’s work on 3D graphics at
Brown University, on to Mort Heilig’s Sensorama, through Tom Furness’s breakthroughs in interface
design at the Wright-Patterson Air Force lab in Dayton Ohio, and then the HIT Lab in Seattle, by
way of Myron Kreuger’s Video Place interactive systems, and many other labs around the world.
Many other inventions and inventors, content creators and even philosophers created the founda-
tion upon which today’s virtual reality is based. Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, developers of the
Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD), would never have happened if it were not for the pio-
neers and those who built upon their work. In the pages that follow you’ll read some of their stories,
you’ll see some of the early inventions, listen in on the philosophical discussions that took place in
conference halls and late at night in hotel bars, and get a sense of how the virtual reality of today
came to be.

The story is not over, of course. Today’s virtual reality systems have better graphics, faster
responses, and most of all, a much lower cost than any systems of the 1990’s. However, the chal-
lenges of virtual worlds are not merely developing better hardware, better programs, and better
displays. Many of the old philosophical questions remain: What is the meaning of a virtual reality
application? What does it mean to enter cyberspace? If a theft or an assault occurs in a synthetic
environment, what impact does that have on the real world? How long does it take to get from one
place to another in a virtual world? What is “virtual reality?” These are all questions that were first
asked in the 1990’s. Most of them have not been answered yet.

Many technical challenges have not yet been solved, either. You cannot yet smell a flower in a
virtual world. You cannot taste anything that you might eat in a virtual environment. Haptic and force
feedback are still elusive sensations. You cannot feel the weight of the object you pick up, nor its
texture. Simulator sickness still plagues many users.

XV
 Forward
The senses are not easily satisfied with the simulation technologies of today. For years sci-
ence fiction writers have been suggesting that we would jack-in to virtual worlds, directly connect-
ing our nervous systems with the computers controlling the simulations. Even on Star Trek, the
Borg — half machine, half human creatures — required an intimate physical connection between
computers and their biology in order to have the full synthetic experience that mankind has sought
almost from the beginning of technology.

We are still a couple of decades away from the ability to jack-in to a computer, to interface our
nervous system directly with a machine. But I am sure that this will happen. We’ve already have
very crude interfaces between the brain and the computer. We have synthetic retinas, we have
artificial hearing, and we can stimulate the sensory neurons in a way that replicates traditional
sensory input. While we have not yet productized artificial sensory input, there is no question in my
mind that we will, and that it probably won’t be long before we see it. Many of us alive today will live
to see, and perhaps experience, a live, real-time direct connection between an electromechanical
device and our nervous systems. Until that time comes we’ll have to make do with the crude virtual
reality, synthetic environments, tactile feedback devices, 3-D audio, and other accoutrements of
virtual reality systems of the 21st-century.

I hope you enjoy this book. The title comes from some of the most common issues of the
1990’s Virtual Reality developers: cybersex, simulation of “trips,” and how to best build 3D models
for real-time presentation. You will find all of these issues discussed in these articles.

It’s been a blast for me putting this book together. I have to thank all the hundreds of people
who helped me while I was publishing CyberEdge Journal, when I was working on my virtual reality
market studies, and most recently as I put this book together. Without their contributions at so many
levels, virtual reality wouldn’t exist, you wouldn’t be reading this book, and I would have had a re-
ally different job during the 90’s. It was a great time and I hope this book gives you a sense of how
exciting it was to be there.

XVI
 Forward
About the book
This book is arranged chronologically. Reading it straight through will give you a sense of the
development of VR as a science and industry through the mid-1990’s. The articles included here
are printed with only some light editing for grammatical corrections and length. Many pictures are
included here that were not in CEJ due to space limitations. Interspersed with the original articles
from CEJ you will find contemporary recollections of some of the pioneers who helped make VR
real. The book concludes with some additional material, including a round-up of the best-known VR
personalties contributed by my long-time associate and friend, Kenny Meyer.
Originally, CyberEdge Journal included contact information for almost every organization and
person mentioned in the articles. I debated including that info in this book, but decided against it, as
most of it is decades obsolete.
Ads that are reprinted here suffer from a similar problem – very few of the companies are still
in business. However, I think it is both fun and informative to see these old ads, and so have reprint-
ed them without alteration.
All unattributed articles were written by me. Articles written by others or by more than one per-
son include the original byline. Likewise, most of the photos in the book were taken by me, but many
are publicity photos provided by the product developers and old pictures that are in the public domain.
The cover photo is from NASA, which used it in promoting their VR experiments of the late 80’s
and early 90’s. It quickly became an icon of the era.

Ben Delaney
October, 2014

XVII
 Contents

Acknowledgements............................................................................. V
Introduction........................................................................................ VII
Forward............................................................................................... XI
1991: Takeoff.......................................................................................27
What is VR?............................................................................................ 33
VR in San Francisco............................................................................... 35
Big Kids Play With VR............................................................................. 45
Brenda Laurel Recalls............................................................................ 55
W Industries............................................................................................ 61
Senate VR Hearing................................................................................. 63
Jon Peddie Recalls................................................................................. 69
The Holodeck.......................................................................................... 73
Feedback................................................................................................ 77
Tomorrow’s Realities............................................................................... 79
VR in the UK........................................................................................... 83
Bob Stone Recalls.................................................................................. 87
SF VR II.................................................................................................. 93
Bill Chernoff Recalls............................................................................. 101
Zippy in VR!.......................................................................................... 107
VR on $5 a Day.................................................................................... 109
1992: Thank you, Mort!.................................................................... 117
Product of the Year................................................................................119

XVIII
 nts
Conte

A Little VR Trivia................................................................................... 123

Nicole Stenger Recalls......................................................................... 125
Online VR Resources........................................................................... 127
CyberSpace: 1st Steps......................................................................... 131
Life on the Edge.................................................................................... 135
Informatique ‘92.....................................................................................141
Legend Quest........................................................................................147
Lawnmower Man....................................................................................151
Rheingold Recalls................................................................................. 155
VR: The Miracle Cure?......................................................................... 157
Force Feedback Glove.......................................................................... 165
The Horvitz Test.................................................................................... 167
SIGGRAPH ‘92..................................................................................... 169
Wheelchair in VR.................................................................................. 175
Metaphor Mixer..................................................................................... 177
The Fall of VPL..................................................................................... 179
Bill Chapin Recalls................................................................................ 185
Art in Cyberspace................................................................................. 189
Mike Macedonia Recalls....................................................................... 193
1993: Best of VR............................................................................... 195
Military VR............................................................................................ 201
NASA’s Crystal Ball............................................................................... 203
Jim Kramer Recalls............................................................................... 209
VR in DC............................................................................................... 213

XIX
 Contents

VR and Disabilities................................................................................ 219
Informatique ‘93.................................................................................... 225
NASA’s Training Vision.......................................................................... 231
Sex in VR.............................................................................................. 239
Caterpillar VR Tests.............................................................................. 243
New HMD Tech..................................................................................... 245
Virtual Worlds Center............................................................................ 249
Toni Schneider Recalls......................................................................... 253
Assistive Technology............................................................................ 255
The $1200 VR system........................................................................... 259
SIGGRAPH ‘93..................................................................................... 263
Mirror World Review.............................................................................. 269
Issues with HMDs................................................................................. 273
Other HMD Issues................................................................................ 279
Art, Mind & Tech................................................................................... 285
1994: Howdy Hubble!.......................................................................291
VR and Epilepsy................................................................................... 295
Virtual Therapy .................................................................................... 297
Solving Real Problems.......................................................................... 301
Cyberhead — VR Art............................................................................ 305
Handling Nuclear Waste........................................................................311
Virtual Brewery..................................................................................... 315

XX
 nts
Conte

VR Tests Best....................................................................................... 319

1995: VR Pioneers............................................................................327
Autistic Children.................................................................................... 333
The New CyberEdge............................................................................. 337
NTT’s CyberCampus............................................................................ 339
Jon Waldern Recalls............................................................................. 343
1996: Fear of Flying.......................................................................... 347
Simulator Sickness .............................................................................. 351
Sutherland Speaks............................................................................... 357
Gorillas in the Bits................................................................................. 363
Walk Anywhere..................................................................................... 367
Truck DriVR........................................................................................... 373
1997: In the Boiler.............................................................................377
Jack Scully Recalls............................................................................... 381
The End................................................................................................ 383
Saying Goodbye................................................................................... 385
Lest We Forget..................................................................................... 389
Every CJ Winner................................................................................... 397
Index..................................................................................................402

XXI
 Illustrations

Ivan Sutherland’s mechanically-tracked, head-coupled display............. VIII
Link Trainer at the Western Canada Aviation Museum. ........................ XIII
The “No VR Hype “button....................................................................... 26
This was our original and only mission statement.................................. 27
CEJ #1. Oh, to be so young.................................................................... 30
Eric Gullichsen and Pat Gelband, founders of Sense8........................... 35
The original HIT Lab logo, 1991.............................................................. 45
Brenda Laurel on a panel at Informatique ‘91, Montpellier, France......... 58
W Industries’ sit-down Virtuality system offered multi-player gaming..... 61
Simulation through the ages, by Barbara Thomason.............................. 67
Enterprise class starships may hold two or more Holodecks................. 74
Tom Furness looks on as Fred Brooks describes the features of
UNC’s exhibit.......................................................................................... 80
An early Superscape demo. .................................................................. 84
The ProVision system from Division....................................................... 85
Professor Bob Stone looks on during an experiment at ARRC............... 87
Bill Chernoff ran this ad for many issues ............................................. 102
Even Zippy got caught up in the VR excitement................................... 107
Randy Pausch wowed the CHI ‘91 crowd with VR for $5 a day.............113
Mort Heilig developed Sensorama in 1961............................................118
The first VR Product of the Year Award was a beauty.......................... 120
Virtuality’s stand-up system provided multi-player VR gaming in 1991..121

XXII
 Illustrations

The invitation to the first CEJ Product of the Year Award party............ 122
Ada Lovelace........................................................................................ 123
In Nicole Stenger’s “Angels” one can touch the heart of an angel........ 125
Nicole Stenger prepares to play with Angels in this picture from 1991. 126
The VR bookshelf................................................................................. 130
CyberSpace: First Steps....................................................................... 130
Ian Capon, Sherry Epley, Ben Delaney, and Jon Waldern.................... 137
Superscape VR systems with networked connectivity.......................... 140
Ben Delaney joins Susan Wyshynski and Vincent John Vincent.......... 144
Things get steamy in the Lawnmower Man’s virtual world. ...................151
Colonel Richard Satava, MD................................................................. 160
Dave Warner, Ben Delaney, and Francis Hamit.................................... 163
The Rutgers FFB Glove........................................................................ 166
Jannick Roland, Henry Fuchs, Richard Satava, Walter Greenleaf,
Steve Ellis..............................................................................................174
Metaphor Mixer..................................................................................... 177
Metaphor Mixer..................................................................................... 178
Jaron Lanier, VPL co-founder, and George Zachary,........................... 181
Eric Howlett, developer of the seminal LEEP Optics ........................... 184
Inside a BattleTech pod from Virtual Worlds Entertainment.................. 189
The DataSuit from UK firm TCAS......................................................... 193
Wheelchair VR helped people design accessible spaces.................... 197
The CyberTouch glove helped one feel virtual objects......................... 209
The Haptic Workstation set up for a driving simulator........................... 210

XXIII
 Illustrations

Myron Kreuger, William Chapin (seated), and James Kramer...............211
The Grimes Input glove, patented in 1980............................................ 221
Kenny Meyer, Walter Greenleaf, Francis Hamit.................................... 224
Training for the Hubble Telescope repair mission................................. 235
Zippy © Bill Griffith................................................................................ 248
The Virtual Worlds Center..................................................................... 250
The pod bay.......................................................................................... 250
VWC published this pseudo-history of the Virtual Geographic League...... 251
Toni setting up a Virtual Reality demo at a WinHEC conference.......... 254
KEO’s SIM EYE HMD provided high res for only us$145,000.............. 265
Straylight’s CyberTron may look familiar. ............................................. 267
Overview of HMDs, featuring 12 commercially available systems........ 272
Brenda Laurel and Howard Rheingold.................................................. 284
Mission specialist Jeffrey Hoffman, Thomas Akers, Kenneth Bowersox,
Claude Nicollier, Richard Covey and Kathryn Thornton........................ 291
The astronauts did a great job on the Hubble repair mission............... 293
Artist Rita Addison suffered severe brain trauma................................. 305
Welcome to Sapporo’s Virtual Brewery................................................. 315
Scott Fisher oversees demos of the Virtual Brewery............................ 316
Motorola University’s Virtual Assembly Line......................................... 319
One of the robot assembly stations...................................................... 321
Figure 1: Average Errors per Student................................................... 325

XXIV
 Illustrations

Drawing by Scot Steele......................................................................... 327

CyberEdge Electric was a leader in internet presence and
website design...................................................................................... 332
Subject S quickly accepted the bulky HMD.......................................... 334
The “new-look” Cyberedge Journal...................................................... 338
CyberCampus is entered at the Visitors Center.................................... 339
Ben Delaney presents Ivan Sutherland with the first CyberEdge Journal
Virtual Pioneers award.......................................................................... 356
Sutherland makes an emphatic point.................................................... 356
Ivan Sutherland’s early head-coupled display....................................... 362
Interacting with virtual gorillas is a lot less scary.................................. 365
The Omnidirectional treadmill at the naval Postgraduate School......... 367
An earlier test of the ODT..................................................................... 370
I had a lot to learn about driving an eighteen wheeler.......................... 373
The Virtual Boiler enables fine tuning of burner emissions................... 378
Number 35, the last issue of CyberEdge Journal................................. 383
Fred Brooks always seemed to enjoy himself....................................... 389
Char Davies, winner of the 1995 Art and Event CJ for Osmose, right..400
The 1995 Virtual Reality Pioneer Award............................................... 401

XXV
Throughout the book you will find pictures of the
buttons we distributed free at conferences. Over
a period of a few years, ten different designs
were created. The “No VR Hype “button was the
first, and by far the favorite. It both shouted out
our reporting standards, and gave everyone a
chuckle over the hysterical reporting of the time.
These button went “viral” and many people
would visit our show booth just to get the latest
one and many collected the full set. The buttons
are reproduced at actual size.
 27
1991: Takeoff
What is CyberEdge Journal?
When I was a kid, I used to wonder what it would be like to live in
the future. I craved a modern version of Tom Swift’s laboratory, filled
with anti-gravity cars, talking robots, electron microscopes. I never really CyberEdge Journal
thought I’d get to see it happen. is dedicated to this
It isn’t here yet, but the work being done in Virtual/Artificial Real- mission:
ity, Hypermedia and the like is darned exciting. That’s what CyberEdge • To provide an informa-
Journal is about. tion channel for those
involved in advancing
CyberEdge Journal will promote communication and synthesis the state of the art of
among those working to improve and optimize the human-computer inter- human-computer inter-
action.
face. The line between people and computers is the line that remains to
• To promote the open
be crossed, the demarcation of machine and mind. That line, that edge, and free exchange of
the cyber edge, is where the most exciting and important work in com- ideas and information
related to the role of cy-
puter science, and art, is occurring. CyberEdge Journal is going to cover bernetics in the future.
that beat. • To encourage the
synthesis and growth of
Hello new ideas and devices.
• To assist in the devel-
We have seen that many of the most influential developments in
opment of commercial
computing are those which affect the person/computer interface. When products incorporating
ENIAC and UNIVAC were invented, the way you talked to a computer these new concepts
and technologies.
was in binary;

01001000010001010100110001001100010011100010000001010 This was our original and only

mission statement.
means HELLO.

It was a big step when Teletype keyboards and printers were hooked
up. Finally we were talking to the computer in English. That is if MOV
28 1991: Takeoff
1FB3 116C looks like English to you.

Dr. Grace Hopper did the interface a big favor when she invented COBOL, the first important
“English-Like” programming language. It’s still the most popular language, when measured in lines
of code extant. That’s because “Add Monthly_Payroll to Yearly_Payroll” makes sense. At about the
same time, speedy (for their time) Selectric typewriters were being hooked up to computers along
with card reader/punches, tape drives and early disk pack drives. These improvements made a big
difference on the interface by making it easier, more accurate and a lot faster – closer to “real-time”.

Talking cows
Now, for the first time, hardware and software are rapidly approaching the capability to provide
a virtually infinite selection of interface designs and operating environments.

You like to swim? How about a aquarium/workspace. You’re the top orca, your data is repre-
sented as guppies and the programs as sharks. You want talking cows? You got it. For the highly
competitive, how about an interactive, multiuser operating environment that keeps score? (That
memo’s worth 10, the spreadsheet model scores 128, plus 50 difficultly points.)

Totally customizable operating environments for everyday use are tantalizingly close. Windows
3 has a nearly infinite variety of color combinations available, and supports virtually any device an
office worker could need. Voice recognition/synthesis is available now, and its pretty good. Light
pens, digitizers, mice, trackballs, isopointers, scanners, voice mail, FAX boards, LANs; they all
make the computer easier to use, more customizable, more person-able.

Some of the most exciting options available now are the hyper/multimedia systems we’re
starting to see. Integrating live and recorded video, CD-ROM, audio input and output, “hyper” front
ends and true color displays, these systems are here, today, and they’re affordable. These types of
systems will be among the “standard” operating environments of the mid ‘90’s.

Office workers will be interconnected through hyperlinks that allow them to connect and inter-
 1991: Takeoff 29
act in a natural, simple fashion. But they’ll do it at their desks, not just at
the coffee station.

Does it run WordPerfect?

The next step? We think that it’s going to be a form of Virtual/Arti-
ficial Reality. The promise of today’s nascent technology is to transform
the world in ways that we can hardly imagine. The Holodeck on the
starship Enterprise is just one example of the sort of applications that
will be developed. Surgeons will practice operations on virtual patients.
Students won’t read about the assassination of Julius Caesar, they’ll be
there. You’ll be able to see if you like a new hair style, nose, or butt tuck
before taking the plunge.
But what’s going to be the winning technology? Our bet is on All-
Of-The-Above. We’re going to see an exciting fusion; Kreuger’s form
tracing combined with Lanier’s polygons, running on something outra-
geous from SONY, controlled by an neural-net-based expert system,
with hyper links to the world’s great information repositories. It’s going to
be Technicolor, 3D, Surround Sound, touchy-freely, real time, live and in
person. It’s going to be you, me, them, everybody, now and up close.
Why bother? Aren’t keyboards and CRTs and boxes with disk
drives good enough? Does it run WordPerfect?
There are two big reasons for all of this. The most compelling, and
the reason that pulls us most strongly, is because it’s there. We build
better computers because we can; to see what they can do. We do it for
the same reason we build faster race cars or climb mountains, ‘cause
it’s fun, it’s challenging, because it’s there.
30 1991: Takeoff
The second reason? Obviously, money. Big MONEY. The reason PCs and Macs are ubiqui-
tous in the workplace is because they increase productivity. The new environments/interfaces are
going to increase productivity even more. That will drive the market, indeed create the market, for
these future technologies. And that market is going to be huge.
In the information age, the new labor-saving devices will be the appliances that store, cook,
process, slice and dice data, turning it into information, entertainment, knowledge. The technolo-
gies we see emerging today will become so com-
monplace that you won’t even notice them, like the
dome light in your car.
Just as every home has a TV, phone, toilet and
refrigerator, in the not too distant future, every home
and office will have an unseen, powerful, unobtru-
sive computer, HDTV display, and broad-band, high
speed, two-way, links to the world.
Every information worker will have access to
more information than they can possibly handle,
and handling that information will demand tech-
niques and technologies far beyond those available
today. The seeds of those technologies are being
sown today in the labs and universities where virtual
reality, multimedia, hypermedia and all the accou-
terments are being developed.

CEJ #1. Oh, to be so young...

 1991: Takeoff 31
Brought to you by...
CyberEdge Journal will be chronicling this great adventure, provid-
ing a forum and sounding board, evoking discussion and, hopefully,
debate. The synthesis of ideas spawns better ideas, so we will work to
encourage dialogue among disparate disciplines. Just as Edison’s wax
cylinder led inevitably to today’s CDs and music videos, what we see
now may be unrecognizable in these future technologies, but will form
the foundation for them. We intend to report objectively on what’s hap-
pening in this brave new world. We will keep you informed. We’ll let you
know what is on the horizon and what has recently happened. But most
importantly, we’ll follow your trail, because you are the pioneers.
Let us know how we’re doing and what you’re up to. We welcome
your articles, announcements, complaints, suggestions, points of view,
photos, schedules, drawings, and especially, your vision of the future of
people and computers. We’re on the edge: the CyberEdge.
 33
What is VR?
Congratulations! You won ZiffNet’s “Quote of the Week” last week!
Below is what will appear on ZiffNet: Quote of the Week: What Exactly
Is Virtual Reality?

“Virtual reality” is one of those terms which gets applied to every-

thing from cybermalls to games like DOOM. Last week ZiffNet member
Ben Delaney offered a precise definition of the term, greatly illuminating
an Executives Online Forum discussion and earning him this week’s
Quote of the Week.
• “How about a definition of Virtual Reality (VR)? Let me provide
the definition we have adopted as a starting point. It has three
parts.
1: VR is an interactive experience created and mediated by
a computer.
2: VR is comprised of worlds which are made up of 3D objects.
3: VR provides random interactivity.

This definition excludes dreams, reading, going to the mov-

ies, great sex, and a myriad of other `virtual’ experiences that I
have heard people call VR. It demands 3D models,
so one can interact with them in a `natural’ man-
ner. Finally, the requirement for random interac-
tion eliminates common multi-media applica-
tions which let you move only in a pre-defined
path, though that path may be quite complex.”

As this week’s winner, Ben will receive a

ZiffNet mug. Once again, Congratulations!
 Francisco 35
VR in San
The first annual Virtual Reality Conference was held in San Fran-
cisco on the 10th and 11th of December. An all-star line up of speakers
discussed the theory, practice and promise of Virtual Reality. Spon-
sored by Meckler Conference Management, the show was well attend-
ed, with 320 paid attendees and more than 30 press representatives.
Adjacent to the auditorium a small exhibit hall housed nine exhibi-
tors, notably Sense8, showing their new WorldToolKit interface to Intel’s
DVI, Virtual Technologies, demonstrating a new, high-precision glove,
and Bio-Control Systems, who showed their Eye Controller system
which allows hands-free interfacing by detecting eye movement.
The conference lasted two-days, and featured many of the best-
known luminaries in VR, including Myron Kreuger, the keynote speaker,
Conference Chairperson Sandra Kay Helsel, Randal Walser of Au-
todesk, Eric Gullichsen from Sense8, and Michael Benedikt from the Eric Gullichsen and Pat Gelband,
University of Texas. founders of Sense8, at SF VR1,
December, 1990

Day One – Theory

Kreuger sets the
tone
Day one of the conference
was devoted to theory. Keynote
speaker Kreuger recounted
some of his early work and
emphasized the importance of
the human/computer interface.
He pointed out the plasticity of
36 VR in San Francisco
our perception of reality as he explained the work he did with his famous Videoplace. Kreuger is
optimistic about the promise of the new technology. Emphasizing what he believes will be the ubiq-
uity of VR applications he said, “The challenge is to come up with something for which it will not be
[used]. People will want to take their dogs with them into artificial reality.”

Kreuger’s talk was interesting and set the tone of muted enthusiasm that pervaded the entire
conference. For those who have heard him before, there were few surprises, but he is an engross-
ing, articulate speaker.

Interactive training, today’s VR

Following Kreuger to the podium was Joseph Henderson, MD, from Dartmouth Medical School.
Dr. Henderson showed an interactive, multimedia training program developed for the US Navy.

Very involving and dramatic, it uses live-action video and computer graphics to simulate a
battlefield hospital situation. The user/student is a new medical officer. The student is evaluated on
the speed and correctness of response in a very stressful situation. With location shots and dozens
of actors, this is a very convincing application of multimedia with hyper links.

A souffle before lunch

Nicole/Natalie Stenger, who works at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, concluded
the morning session. Stenger’s entertaining talk encompassed the lighter, sensual side of cyber-
space; its potential as human potentiator and plaything. She titled her talk “Cyberspace: a souffle
called home”. The point of the title, she explained, is that cyberspace is a lot like a souffle, since a
souffle is so fragile that it is more like an illusion than a reality, and like many contemporary artificial
realities, a souffle is liable to collapse at any moment.

Defining VR, knowing what’s real

After lunch, Michael Spring, from the University of Pittsburgh, discussed “Being there, models
for virtual reality.” His highly academic presentation stressed the importance of definitions and stan-
 VR in San Francisco 37
dards for these emerging technologies.
Spring offered a number of preliminary definitions, including, Cyberspace: “a place where the
human nervous system and mechanical-electronic communication and computation systems are
linked.” He went on to assert that future definitions will be based on three dimensions:
• The nature of the Interface
• The nature of the reality [data] base
• The nature of the control [system]
Spring’s thoughtful discussion concluded with an overview of the many models of virtual/artifi-
cial reality, and suggestions for new models.
The next speaker brought a different point of view to the colloquium. Michael Heim, from Cali-
fornia State University at Long Beach is the VR’s resident philosopher.
Heim emphasized that reality is relative, context-dependent and ephemeral. He offered what
he called existential attributes of human existence, which gauge if a world is “real”. They are:
• Natality/Mortality – things are born and die
• Historical carry-over – continuity between what has been, what is now and what will be
• Care/concern – does it matter? Are there potential detrimental consequences, pain, punish-
ment, danger?

The theatrical model

Brenda Laurel, a partner in Telepresence Research of Los Gatos, California discussed the
theatrical and dramatic components of cyberspace. She stressed that like movies, artificial realities
will likely not flourish until artists take over production.
She compared VR to a multi-sensory version of photorealism, and urged the audience to use
the arts, and particularly movies, to understand what VR participants will demand. Pointing out that
it “is not enough to imitate life”, Laurel explained the parallels between performance art, theater,
film, dance, and the fine arts, and the activities of VR producers.
38 VR in San Francisco
Hard questions about access
Sandy Stone concluded the day one’s formal presentations with the most provocative presen-
tation of the day, entitled “She was asking for it: Sex and death in the virtual jungle”. Stone works
at the University of California at San Diego. She discussed the importance of culture and gender in
our vision of virtual reality.
Stone observed that there are already many high-tech artificial realities available, like phone
sex, other 900 services, and computer bulletin board systems where one may adopt any desired
persona. Most of these, she asserted, were male designed and oriented.
Stone challenged the audience to arrive at VR for everyone – non-discriminatory, color blind,
gender aware but not gender biased, available to rich and poor. .

Issues of concern
The closing discussion was a panel of all the day’s speakers accepting questions from the
audience. The speakers agreed that VR will first be used for entertainment, but struggled with the
questions of who makes the rules, who writes the scripts and who gets to play. Nicole Stenger sug-
gested that VR will constitute a “new space where the rules are not written at all, and perhaps will
never be written”. Michael Spring advocated an “information act” similar to the law which guaran-
tees access to telecommunications, assuring that everyone can have access to information.
Sandy Stone expressed her concern that since most of the research and development in
these technologies is being done by men, women may be implicitly or explicitly excluded from full
participation. Her comments fomented a spirited discussion. Joe Henderson felt that telepressence
could eliminate gender, and associated prejudice as an item, since the participants would be free
to define their preferences. Many others agreed, but Stone demurred, stating her belief that without
gender, there is no identity.
These questions were not resolved. But it was important that they be asked. These issues are
at the core of what will be an ongoing controversy concerning the philosophy and mores of life in
 VR in San Francisco 39
virtual worlds.

Day Two – Practice and Promise

The second day of the conference addressed the practice of VR in the morning, bringing ev-
eryone up to date on the current state of the art. The afternoon session suggested where the future
would lead us, through real and other spaces.

New TRIX from Autodesk

The day opened with Randal Walser’s visually stimulating presentation. Representing Au-
todesk, he explained that they are in the tool business, supplying the cyberspace “industry” with
ways and means to build worlds. For that, Autodesk has developed TRIX, a software tool for build-
ing cyberspaces.

TRIX is a cyberspace development environment which, according to Walser, is interactive, fast,

compact and extensible. It has the look of C++ and the feel of LISP, is object-oriented, modular and
usable for low or high level programming.

Autodesk, one of the few companies with virtual world production tools, tests them by develop-
ing simulations. Walser presented a thorough, though brief, view of how they do it, from the concep-
tual design of a cyberdeck, through the actual process of using TRIX to create a cyberspace.

Virtual anatomy

Following Walser’s talk Suzanne Weghorst spoke about her work at the University of Washing-
ton’s Human Interface Technology Labs. They are experimenting with computerized medical mod-
els, using 3D modeling techniques and a simple VR front end.

This is an interesting application, though hardly state of the art. But the UW HIT Lab is only a
little over a year old and is just getting up to speed, so expect to hear more from them.
 40 VR in San Francisco
The first cyberdeck?
The last speaker before lunch was Eric Gullichsen of Sense8 in
Sausalito, California. He discussed what he thinks VR is (3D multi-
media) and isn’t (goggles, gloves and other trappings) and spoke of
Sense8’s direction and projects. He explained that they see software as
the difficult part of VR and intend to concentrate in that area. Stressing
the need for device independence and versatility, he pointed out that
The UW HIT Lab is Sense8’s WorldToolKit software can interact with many platforms and
only a little over a programs

year old and is just Gullichsen then demonstrated Sense8’s newest project; linking
their WorldToolKit with Intel DVI boards to bring real-time texture map-
getting up to speed,
ping to PCs. He said he sees a market for about 100 such systems in
so expect to hear 1991. Luckily Sense8 was also showing their new system in the exhibit

more from them. hall, because problems with the video projector made it difficult for
those in the auditorium to see the effect.

The token Fortune 500 representative

After lunch, Tom Barret, of Electronic Data Systems, spoke about
using VR in the workplace. Though characterizing himself as a “token
representative of a Fortune 500 business”, Barret had no problem con-
necting with the audience. Embodying a manager with bottom-line re-
sponsibility, he presented a fanciful but plausible vision of the Personal
Virtual Workspace (PVW).

The PVW isn’t a particularly novel concept; going to meetings in

virtual space, presenting concepts with virtual white-boards and hyper/
multimedia. But one idea we found amusing is the “concept cannon”, a
 VR in San Francisco 41
virtual device that fires ideas into virtual space before the eyes of your preoccupied colleagues.

Barret presented the knowledge worker’s dilemma:

• High rates of change presents huge volumes of data with which currency must be main-
tained.
• Information spaces can be extremely dense, and continue to become more so.
• Demonstrating the relationships between data becomes increasingly more difficult as the
volume of data increases.
• The increased rate of change and urgency in business further reduce the ability of the indi-
vidual to deal with the necessary information.

Discussing ways to deal with this dilemma, he described an experiment in 3D data represen-
tation conducted at Xerox PARC. Finally, he stressed the need for intelligent agents as part of the
PVW, virtual workers who will know what we need and when.

Education applications
David Traub of Center Point Communications, San Jose, California, made an intense, rapid-fire
dissertation on the educational implications of VR.

One of Traub’s main premises is that education and entertainment are not different. He pointed
out that emotion and cognition seem to be linked; we remember not just experience and informa-
tion, but also how we felt when we learned something. This suggests that VR, with its high enter-
tainment quotient, has significant educational potential.

Traub pointed out several challenges to VR use in education:

• User acceptance – educators are a conservative lot.
• Making the programs both educational and entertaining.
• Developing an interface which is psychologically acceptable.
• Fostering cultural acceptance of the new technology.
• Price.
 42 VR in San Francisco
Traub is optimistic that VR will meet these challenges and take its
place as a significant educational tool in the not too distant future.

Computers the size of index cards

The penultimate speaker of the conference was John Thomas, di-
The computer of
rector of NYNEX’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in White Plains, NY. Thom-
2020: About the size as’ speech was one of the most entertaining and among the simplest,
of an index card, as he eschewed the slides, overhead cells and video projections that
most of the other speakers employed. He shared his expectations of
solar powered, with
computers and computing in the future.
both handwriting
Thomas’ humor surfaced when he spoke about the problems of
and voice interfaces. using computers. He pointed out that maximizing the “gulf of execu-

It would include a tion” (how do I operate this device), and the “gulf of evaluation” (how do
I know what the device did), seems to be an important criteria among
camera and sound today’s designers. The result of this design strategy is that it could take
recorder, audio and about 52,000 lifetimes to learn to operate the hypothetical 2000 device
interfaces available in 2020. He suggested that we may want to avoid
eyeglass-based
this problem by standardizing operational metaphors.
display output, and
Thomas described the new technologies which he expects to
a full-surface display emerge. They include broadband phone networks, more application-
on the unit itself. specific computer architectures, and communication and cyberspace
specific systems. He also anticipates universal, wireless connectivity,
based on “spread spectrum” networks, encoding data not only tem-
Imagine that!
porally, but also across a broad band of frequencies. This enables the
network to overcome noise problems and recover data lost at one fre-
quency by extrapolating from intact data in another frequency.
 VR in San Francisco 43
He went on to describe the computer of 2020 as being about the size of an index card, solar
powered, with both handwriting and voice interfaces. It would include a camera and sound recorder,
audio and eyeglass-based display output, and a full-surface display on the unit itself. (This vision is
quite similar to Ted Nelson’s Walky-Thingy.)

Seven Principles of Cyberspace

The final speaker was Michael Benedikt of the University of Texas at Austin. In his presenta-
tion, titled Cyberspace, VR, and the Principle of Commonality, he presented a scholarly and con-
crete vision of how VR will really work, and of real-world problems to be solved.

Benedikt provided his definition of cyberspace as a public, consensual space, including many
different virtual worlds. In this he differed little from earlier speakers. But he raised the interest and
eyebrows of many when he elucidated his “Seven Principles of Cyberspace Design”.

These are a set of rules, a virtual constitution, for the design of cyberspaces. Though ada-
mantly debated by many in the audience, in our opinion these or similar rules will be essential to
any consensual VR experiences.

Benedikt’s Seven Principles of Cyberspace Design:

1: Exclusion – No two things may be in the same place at the same time
2: Maximum Exclusion – Each world contains fewer dimensions than itself
3: Indifference – The world is indifferent to the user
4: Scale – Motion through a cyberspace takes place at a rate inversely proportional to the
complexity of the space through which it occurs
5: Transit – Movement must traverse intervening space and involve some cost
6: Personal visibility – One may not enter a space invisibly
7: Commonality – Shared spaces exist by the consensus of those sharing them
44 VR in San Francisco
A spirited discussion
Day two concluded with Q&A for the final speakers. The emotional backlash surrounding
Benedikt’s Seven Principles was impressive. Many of the questioners felt that there should be
no rules, that as one speaker pointed out, “what we need here is a well-organized anarchy”. Oth-
ers joined Benedikt in defending his principles, agreeing that rules were inevitable and ultimately
beneficial. Benedikt pointed out that the principles were not simply his invention, but are drawn from
observation and analysis of interaction in the real world.
This discussion was a high point of the conference. Much of what had been said during the
two days was interesting, but not particularly novel, having been presented before, both in print and
at other conferences. But the debate fostered by Benedikt’s remarks, and to a lesser extent, Stone’s
comments on gender bias, will help us to create the consensus that will make our dreams real. That
was the greatest value in the Virtual Reality Conference.

The next conference

There will be another Virtual Reality Conference in San Francisco next fall. The dates are Sep-
tember 30 and October 1, 1991 at the Le Meridien Hotel.
 s Play with VR 45
Big Kid
Highlights of the First Industrial Symposium on Virtual Worlds
Technology
The first Industrial Symposium on Virtual Worlds was held at the University of Washing-
ton’s beautiful Seattle campus. The two-day gathering was sponsored by the Human Interface
Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab), a member of the Washington Technology Centers. The ob-
ject of the symposium was two-fold: First, to show off the new lab, Second, to solicit members
to the Virtual Worlds Consortium. We describe the Consortium below.

The Symposium was well-organized and smoothly run. According to Bill Wiseman, Plan-
ning and Design Analyst at the lab, the turnout “surpassed our expectations, both in numbers,
and in the quality of those who attended”. There were 260 attendees.

The symposium started with welcoming speeches and an informative and entertain-
ing video-taped overview of the HIT Lab, produced by US West Communications. The tape
traced human advances from tool-making
to virtual worlds technology. It explained the
HIT Lab’s goals and methods and presented
interviews with several staff members. It
previewed “Virtual Seattle”, a VR world the
HIT Lab had built for the symposium.

From Wright Patterson to

the HIT Lab
The man who is largely responsible
for the shape and direction of the HIT Lab,
its director, Tom Furness, Ph.D. He is well-
suited for his role. As one of the world’s most
experienced researchers in virtuality, he has The original HIT Lab logo, 1991.
 46 Big Kids Play With VR
spent years developing new ways of presenting complex data. He dis-
cussed, with warmth and humor, the history of VR, from a early attempts
to represent abstract information to the ambitious goals of the Lab.

Pilots ignored, Furness discussed the Super Cockpit project, begun in 1981 at
Wright Patterson Air Force Base. It is a science-fiction environment that
and then became
enables fighter pilots to manage an incredible amount of information. It
irritated with the
includes a high-resolution, virtual-world, heads-up display, 3D sound, a
various bells, “super glove” worn by the pilot, and a “god’s eye” viewer which provides
whistles and voices an “outside-in view”, showing the plane and its environment as seen
from above.
that warned them
In describing the 3D sound interface which is integral to the Super
of low fuel or
Cockpit, Furness cited the “low fuel” warning. He said pilots ignored,
similar emergency and then became irritated with the various bells, whistles and voices
situations. But when that warned them of low fuel or similar emergency situations. But when
a representative sound came from beneath them, they responded cor-
a representative
rectly. The 3D sound concept is now being applied to teleconferencing
sound came from applications at the Lab.
beneath them, Furness concluded by explaining how the groundswell of popular
they responded interest resulting from media coverage of his Wright-Patterson work
ultimately resulted in the HIT Lab. After taking a year-long sabbatical
correctly.
to study the feasibility, he proposed a national laboratory to facilitate
the transfer of the virtual worlds technology to the private sector. The
University of Washington and the Washington Technology Centers liked
what they heard, which lead to the founding of the Lab.
 Big Kids Play With VR 47
Boeing Builds Better
A.D. “Burt” Welliver, Corporate Senior VP of the Boeing Company,
gave the luncheon address. He discussed Boeing’s increasing reliance
on advanced technologies and experiments with new visualization tech-
niques.
“We’re looking for advanced technology to help us make some ma-
jor paradigm shifts in the future. We’re sitting on the edge of a new era
– an era of a new view of information and how we use it”, he explained.
Boeing has just embarked on its first 100% digital design – the 777
commercial aircraft. Boeing is also undertaking digital pre-assembly
and testing, as well as checking maintenance procedures with solid
models. Thanks to these procedures, Boeing anticipates major savings,
both in design and construction, and throughout the life of the plane.
Welliver concluded by pointing out that it is essential to consider
how one takes new technology from the technical breakthrough level to
a deliverable product. He cited the lost profit from camcorder technol-
ogy, which was invented in the US but brought to market by the Japa-
nese. Getting it from the lab to market is our challenge.

Organization of the HIT Lab

After lunch several staff members discussed how the HIT Lab is
organized and the focus of its work. Robert Jacobson, Ph.D, Associate
Director of the lab, talked about some of the philosophical underpin-
nings of the Lab.
Dr. Jacobson pointed out that cooperation is going to be more
valuable to the VR community than competition. He sees the Lab be-
48 Big Kids Play With VR
coming a “virtual salon”, providing cross-cultivation of ideas and information. This, he maintained, is
necessary to help prevent the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome from hobbling the young industry.
He urged the audience to see the Lab as a resource which will benefit all involved.
Then Tom Furness returned to the podium to explain the functional organization of the Lab.
This he divided into three thrusts; Infrastructure, Technology and Applications, and eleven projects.
(See diagram.) He designated target application areas: Design and Manufacturing, Scientific and
Medical Visualization, Telecommunication, Education, Prosthetics, and Entertainment. He was es-
pecially passionate when talking about the lost productivity of America’s disabled citizens. He feels
that VR technology may bring many of these people more satisfying lives.

VEOS and Other Tools

Following Furness, William Bricken, Ph.D, Principle Scientist, discussed the technical require-
ments for useful VR and outlined the functions of the Virtual Environment Operating System (VEOS).
He made the point that “psychology is the physics of VR. We are no longer in a material realm”.
Bricken listed his immediate objectives at the HIT Lab. They include:
• Inclusive 3D CAD: Designed to create worlds, not individual objects
• Persistent Objects: Whose “lives” continue when unwatched
• Integrated Cybernetic Interface: Permitting seamless, two-way interaction with the system
• VR Tools: Evaluating what is available and building what is not
• Standards: But which encourage diversity
• New Algorithms: Including experience and immersion in the expression
One new tool he postulated is a “magic” wand; a manipulator with which one would direct
movement in a virtual world, as well as pointing, measuring, connecting and grouping objects.
Dr. Bricken then briefly described the functionality of the HIT Lab’s VEOS. Central to this op-
erating system is “entity-based modeling”, in which each entity possess the resources of an entire
system, including processing power, memory, descriptive characteristics, combinational character-
 Big Kids Play With VR 49
istics and the like.

He went on to discuss some of the challenges inherent in develop-

ing VEOS, including the incredible bandwidth required for transmitting
“experiences”.

OK, but try not to break anything!

Following Dr. Bricken’s talk, the assembly was set loose in what
one participant characterized as the “VR Playroom”. This was two large
spaces in the lab where various technologies were available for hands-
on interaction.

Demonstrated were Virtual Seattle, the lab’s full-immersion tour

of a synthetic Seattle, and a VEOS prototype linking several dispa-
rate workstations. Also shown was a 3D audio-conferencing system
developed by Gehring Research Systems of Toronto, a separate 3D
sound demonstration by the HIT Lab, a Flying (3D) Mouse shown by
SimGraphics of South Pasadena, California, tactile feedback devices
shown by TiNi Alloy Company of Oakland, California, and various video
tapes, toys, papers and T-shirts.

Day Two – Getting down to business

John W. McCredie, the Director of External Research for Digital
Equipment Corporation, made an engaging presentation to start the
second day. He spoke of the importance DEC places on supporting
outside research and on getting technology to market.

McCredie stressed the importance of finding new ways to deal with

massive amounts of data, and discussed their efforts to determine how
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 And the next moment Eileen found herself in the doctor's narrow
gig, wedged tightly between him and the side of the vehicle.
"Ye can sind her bits o' clothes over by Phelim," said Dr.
O'Shaughnessy, as he gathered up the reins, apparently in great
haste. "I'll not shtop now. Good-day t' ye, Dinnis! My respicts to ye,
Misthress Macarthy. Ye'll hear av the choild in a day or two!" And
whistling to his old pony, they started off at as brisk a trot as the
latter could produce on such short notice.
Poor Eileen! Was this the result of the fairy's gift? She sat still,
half-paralyzed with grief and terror, for she made no doubt that the
hated doctor was going to do something very, very dreadful to her.
Seeing that she made no effort to free herself, or to speak, her
captor removed his hand from her mouth; but not until they were
well out of sight and hearing of her parents.
"Now, Eileen," he said, not unkindly, "av ye'll be a good colleen,
and not shpake a wurrd, I'll lave yer mouth free. But av ye shpake,
so much as to say, 'Bliss ye!' I'll tie up yer jaw wid me pock'-
handkercher, so as ye can't open ut at all. D' ye hear me, now?"
Eileen nodded silently. She had not the slightest desire to say
"Bliss ye!" to Dr. O'Shaughnessy; nor did she care to fill his rusty old
gig, or to sprinkle the high road, with diamonds and pearls.
"That's roight!" said the Doctor, "that's a sinsible gyurrl as ye are.
See, now, what a foine bit o' sweet-cake Misthress O'Shaughnessy
'ull be givin' ye, whin we git home."
The poor child burst into tears, for the word 'home' made her
realize more fully that she was going every moment farther and
farther away from her own home,—from her kind father, her anxious
and loving mother, and dear little Phelim. What would Phelim do at
night, without her shoulder to curl up on and go to sleep, in the
trundle-bed which they had shared ever since he was a tiny baby?
Who would light her father's pipe, and sing him the little song he
always liked to hear while he smoked it after supper? These, and
many other such thoughts, filled Eileen's mind as she sat weeping
silently beside the green-spectacled doctor, who cared nothing about
her crying, so long as she did not try to speak.
After a drive of some miles, they reached a tall, dark, gloomy-
looking house, which was not unlike the doctor himself, with its small
greenish window-panes and its gaunt chimneys. Here the pony
stopped, and the doctor, lifting Eileen out of the gig, carried her into
the house. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy came out of the kitchen, wiping her
hands on her apron, and stared in amazement at the burden in her
husband's arms.
"Honor Macarthy's Eily!" she exclaimed. "The Saints protict uz! Is
she kilt, or what's the matther?"
"Open the door o' the best room!" said the doctor, briefly. "Open
it, woman, I'm tillin' ye!" and entering a large bare room, he set
Eileen down hastily on a stool, and then drew a long breath and
wiped his brow. "I've got ye!" he said. "Safe and sound I've got ye
now, glory for ut! And ye'll not lave this room until ye've made me
King av Ireland!"
Eileen stared at the man, thinking he had gone mad; for his face
was red, and his eyes, from which he had snatched the green
spectacles, glittered with a strange light. The same idea flashed into
his wife's mind, and she crossed herself devoutly, exclaiming,—
"Howly St. Pathrick, he's clane diminted. 'King,' indade! will ye
hear um?"
The doctor turned on her sharply. "Diminted?" he said; "ye'll soon
see av I'm diminted. I till ye I'll be King av Ireland before the
month's oot. Shpake, now, Eileen! Open yer mouth, alanna, and
make yer manners to Misthress O'Shaughnessy."
Thus adjured, Eileen dropped a courtesy, and said, timidly, "Good
day t' ye, Ma'm! I houp ye're well!"
 Hop! pop! down dropped a pearl and a diamond, and the doctor,
pouncing on them, held them up in triumph before the eyes of his
astonished wife.
"Div ye see that?" he cried. "That's a dimind! There's no sich in
Queen Victory's crownd this day. And look a' that! That's a pearrl,
an' as big as a marrowfat pay. The loike of ut's not in Ireland, I till
ye. Woman, there's a fortin' in ivery wurrd this colleen shpakes! And
she's goin' to shpake," he added, grimly, "and to kape an shpakin',
till Michael O'Shaughnessy is rich enough to buy all Ireland,—ay, and
England too, av he'd a mind to!"
"But—but," cried Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, utterly bewildered by her
husband's wild talk, and by the sight of the jewels, "what does it all
mane? Has the choild swallied 'em? And won't she die av 'em, av it's
that manny in her stumick?"
"Whisht wid yer foolery!" said her husband, contemptuously.
"Swallied 'em, indade! The gyurrl has met a Grane Man, that's the
truth of ut; and he's gi'n her a wish, and she's got ut,—and now I've
got her." And he chuckled, and rubbed his bony hands together,
while his eyes twinkled with greed.
"A Grane Man! The saints be good to uz!" cried Mrs.
O'Shaughnessy. "Sure, ye always till't me there was no sich thing
ava'."
"I lied, thin!" shouted the doctor. "I lied, an' that's all there is to
say about ut. Do ye think I'm obleeged to shpake the thruth ivery
day in the week to an ignor'nt crathur like yersilf? It's worn out I'd
be, body and sowl, at that rate. Now, Eileen Macarthy," he
continued, turning to his unhappy little prisoner, "ye are to do as I till
ye, an' no harrum'll coom to ye, an' maybe good. Ye are to sit in this
room and talk; and ye'll kape an talkin' till the room is full-up! d'ye
hear me, now?"
"Full-up?" exclaimed Eileen, faintly.
 "Full-up!" repeated the doctor. "No less'll satisfy me, and it's the
laste ye can do for all the throuble I've taken forr ye. Misthress
O'Shaughnessy an' mesilf 'ull take turns sittin' wid ye, so 'at ye'll
have some wan to talk to. Ye'll have plinty to ate an' to dhrink, an'
that's more than manny people have in Ireland this day. So lit me
hear no complainin'."
With this, the worthy man proceeded to give strict injunctions to
his wife to keep the child talking, and not to leave her alone for an
instant; and finally he departed, shutting the door behind him, and
leaving the captive and her jailer alone together.
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy immediately poured forth a flood of
questions, to which Eileen replied by telling the whole pitiful story
from beginning to end. It was a relief to be able to speak at last,
and to rehearse the whole matter to understanding, if not
sympathetic, ears. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy listened and looked, looked
and listened, with open mouth and staring eyes. With her eyes shut,
she would not have believed her ears; but the double evidence was
too much for her.
The diamonds and pearls kept on falling, falling, fast and faster.
They filled Eileen's lap, they skipped away over the floor, while the
doctor's wife pursued them with frantic eagerness. Each diamond
was clear and radiant as a drop of dew, each pearl lustrous and
perfect; but they gave no pleasure now to the fairy-gifted child. She
could only think of the task that lay before her,—to FILL this great,
empty room; of the millions and millions, and yet again millions of
gems that must fall from her lips before the floor would be covered
even a few inches deep; of the weeks and months,—perhaps the
years,—that must elapse before she would see her parents and
Phelim again. She remembered the words of the fairy: "A day may
come when you will wish with all your heart to have the charm
removed." And then, like a flash, came the recollection of those
other words: "When that day comes, come here to this spot," and
do so and so.
 In fancy, Eileen was transported again to the pleasant green
forest; was looking at the Green Man as he sat on the toadstool, and
begging him to take away this fatal gift, which had already, in one
day, brought her so much misery. Harshly on her reverie broke in the
voice of Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, asking,—
"And has yer father sold his pigs yit?"
She started, and came back to the doleful world of reality. But
even as she answered the woman's question, she made in her heart
a firm resolve,—somehow or other, somehow, she would escape;
she would get out of this hateful house, away from these greedy,
grasping people; she would manage somehow to find her way to the
wood, and then—then for freedom again! Cheered by her own
resolution, she answered the woman composedly, and went into a
detailed account of the birth, rearing, and selling of the pigs, which
so fascinated her auditor that she was surprised, when the recital
was over, to find that it was nearly supper-time.
The doctor now entered, and taking his wife's place, began to ply
Eily with questions, each one artfully calculated to bring forth the
longest possible reply:—
"How is it yer mother is related to the Countess's auld
housekeeper, avick; and why is it, that wid sich grand relations she
niver got into the castle at all?"
"Phwhat was that I h'ard the other day about the looky bargain
yer father—honest man!—made wid the one-eyed peddler from
beyant Inniskeen?" and—
"Is it thrue that yer mother makes all her butther out av skim-milk
just by making the sign of the cross—God bless it!—over the churn?"
Although she did not like the doctor, Eily did, as she had said to
the Green Man, "loove to talk;" so she chattered away, explaining
and disclaiming, while the diamonds and pearls flew like hail-stones
from her lips, and her host and jailer sat watching them with looks
of greedy rapture.
Eily paused, fairly out of breath, just as Mrs. O'Shaughnessy
entered, bringing her rather scanty supper. There was quite a pile of
jewels in her lap and about her feet, while a good many had rolled
to a distance; but her heart sank within her as she compared the
result of three hours' steady talking with the end to which the
rapacious doctor aspired.
She was allowed to eat her supper in peace, but no sooner was it
finished than the questioning began again, and it was not until ten
o'clock had struck that the exhausted child was allowed to lay her
head down on the rude bed which Mrs. O'Shaughnessy had hastily
made up for her.
The next day was a weary one for poor Eily. From morning till
night she was obliged to talk incessantly, with only a brief space
allowed for her meals. The doctor and his wife mounted guard by
turns, each asking questions, until to the child's fancy they seemed
like nothing but living interrogation points. All day long, no matter
what she was talking about,—the potato-crop, or the black hen that
the fox stole, or Phelim's measles,—her mind was fixed on one idea,
that of escaping from her prison. If only some fortunate chance
would call them both out of the room at once! But, alas! that never
happened. There was always a pair of greedy eyes fixed on her, and
on the now hated jewels which dropped in an endless stream from
her lips; always a harsh voice in her ears, rousing her, if she paused
for an instant, by new questions as stupid as they were long.
Once, indeed, the child stopped short, and declared that she
could not and would not talk any more; but she was speedily shown
the end of a birch rod, with the hint that the doctor "would be loth
to use the likes av it on Dinnis Macarthy's choild; but her parints had
given him charge to dhrive out the witchcraft be hook or be crook;
and av a birch rod wasn't first cousin to a crook, what was it at all?"
and Eily was forced to find her powers of speech again.
 By nightfall of this day the room was ankle-deep in pearls and
diamonds. A wonderful sight it was, when the moon looked in at the
window, and shone on the lustrous and glittering heaps which Mrs.
O'Shaughnessy piled up with her broom. The woman was fairly
frightened at the sight of so much treasure, and she crossed herself
many times as she lay down on the mat beside Eileen's truckle-bed,
muttering to herself, "Michael knows bist, I suppose; but sorrow o'
me if I can feel as if there was a blissing an it, ava'!"
The third day came, and was already half over, when an urgent
summons came for Doctor O'Shaughnessy. One of his richest
patrons had fallen from his horse and broken his leg, and the doctor
must come on the instant. The doctor grumbled and swore, but
there was no help for it; so he departed, after making his wife vow
by all the saints in turn, that she would not leave Eileen's side for an
instant until he returned.
When Eily heard the rattle of the gig and the sound of the pony's
feet, and knew that the most formidable of her jailers was actually
gone, her heart beat so loud for joy that she feared its throbbing
would be heard. Now, at last, a loop-hole seemed to open for her.
She had a plan already in her head, and now there was a chance for
her to carry it out. But an Irish girl of ten has shrewdness beyond
her years, and no gleam of expression appeared in Eileen's face as
she spoke to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, who had been standing by the
window to watch her husband's departure, and who now returned to
her seat.
"We'll be missin' the docthor this day, ma'm, won't we?" she said.
"He's so agrayable, ain't he, now?"
"He is that!" replied Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, with something of a
sigh. "He's rale agrayable, Michael is—whin he wants to be," she
added. "Yis, I'll miss um more nor common to-day, for 'tis worn out I
am intirely wid shlapin so little these two nights past. Sure, I can't
shlape, wid thim things a-shparklin' an' a-glowerin' at me the way
they do; and now I'll not get me nap at all this afthernoon, bein' I
must shtay here and kape ye talkin' till the docthor cooms back. Me
hid aches, too, mortial bad!"
"Do it, now?" said Eily, soothingly. "Arrah, it's too bad, intirely!
Will I till ye a little shtory that me grandmother hed for the
hidache?"
"A shtory for the hidache?" said Mrs. O'Shaughnessy. "What do ye
mane by that, I'm askin' ye?"
"I dunno roightly how ut is," replied Eily, innocently, "but Granny
used to call this shtory a cure for the hidache, and mebbe ye'd find
ut so. An' annyhow it 'ud kape me talkin'," she added meekly, "for
'tis mortial long."
"Go an wid it, thin!" said Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, settling herself
more comfortably in her chair. "I loove a long shtory, to be sure. Go
an, avick!"
And Eily began as follows, speaking in a clear, low monotone:—
"Wanst upon a toime there lived an owld, owld woman, an' her
name was Moira Magoyle; an' she lived in an owld, owld house, in
an owld, owld lane that lid through an owld, owld wood be the side
of an owld, owld shthrame that flowed through an owld, owld
shthrate av an owld, owld town in an owld, owld county. An' this
owld, owld woman, sure enough, she had an owld, owld cat wid a
white nose; an' she had an owld, owld dog wid a black tail, an' she
had an owld, owld hin wid wan eye, an' she had an owld, owld cock
wid wan leg, an' she had—"
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy yawned, and stirred uneasily on her seat.
"Seems to me there's moighty little goin' an in this shtory!" she said,
taking up her knitting, which she had dropped in her lap. "I'd loike
somethin' a bit more loively, I'm thinkin', av I had me ch'ice."
"Jist wait, ma'm!" said Eily, with quiet confidence, "ownly wait till
I coom to the parrt about the two robbers an' the keg o'
gunpowdther, an' its loively enough ye'll foind ut. But I must till ut
the same way 'at Granny did, else it 'ull do no good, ava. Well, thin,
I was sayin' to ye, ma'm, this owld woman (Saint Bridget be good to
her!) she had an owld, owld cow, an' she had an owld, owld shape,
an' she had an owld, owld kitchen wid an owld, owld cheer an' an
owld, owld table, an' an owld, owld panthry wid an owld, owld
churn, an' an owld, owld sauce-pan, an' an owld, owld gridiron, an'
an owld, owld—"
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy's knitting dropped again, and her head fell
forward on her breast. Eileen's voice grew lower and softer, but still
she went on,—rising at the same time, and moving quietly, stealthily,
towards the door,—
"An' she had an owld, owld kittle, an' she had an owld, owld pot
wid an owld, owld kiver; an' she had an owld, owld jug, an' an owld,
owld platther, an' an owld, owld tay-pot—"
Eily's hand was on the door, her eyes were fixed on the
motionless form of her jailer; her voice went on and on, its soft
monotone now accompanied by another sound,—that of a heavy,
regular breathing which was fast deepening into a snore.
"An' she had an owld, owld shpoon, an' an owld, owld fork, an' an
owld, owld knife, an' an owld, owld cup, an' an owld, owld bowl, an'
an owld, owld, owld—"
The door is open! The story is done! Two little feet go speeding
down the long passage, across the empty kitchen, out at the back
door, and away, away! Wake, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy! wake! the story is
done and the bird is flown!
Surely it was the next thing to flying, the way in which Eily sped
across the meadows, far from the hated scene of her imprisonment.
The bare brown feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground; the
brown locks streamed out on the wind; the little blue apron fluttered
wildly, like a banner of victory. On! on! on! with panting bosom, with
parted lips, with many a backward glance to see if any one were
following; on went the little maid, over field and fell, through moss
and through mire, till at last—oh, happy, blessed sight!—the dark
forest rose before her, and she knew that she was saved.
Quite at the other end of the wood lay the spot she was seeking;
but she knew the way well, and on she went, but more carefully
now,—parting the branches so that she broke no living twig, and
treading cautiously lest she should crush the lady fern, which the
Green Men love. How beautiful the ferns were, uncurling their silver-
green fronds and spreading their slender arms abroad! How sweetly
the birds were singing! How pleasant, how kind, how friendly was
everything in the sweet green wood!
And here at last was the oak-tree, and at the foot of it there stood
the yellow toadstool, looking as if it did not care about anything or
anybody, which in truth it did not: Breathless with haste and
eagerness, Eileen tapped the toadstool three times with a bit of
holly, saying softly, "Slanegher Banegher! Skeen na lane!" And, lo!
and, behold! there sat the Green Man, just as if he had been there
all the time, fanning himself with his scarlet cap, and looking at her
with a comical twinkle in his sharp little eyes.
"Well, Eily," he said, "is it back so soon ye are? Well, well, I'm not
surprised! And how do ye like yer gift?"
"Oh, yer Honor's Riverence—Grace, I mane!" cried poor Eily,
bursting into tears, "av ye'll plaze to take it away! Sure it's nearly kilt
I am along av it, an' no plazure or coomfort in ut at all at all! Take it
away, yer Honor, take it away, and I'll bliss ye all me days!" and, with
many sobs, she related the experiences of the past three days. As
she spoke, diamonds and pearls still fell in showers from her lips,
and half-unconsciously she held up her apron to catch them as they
fell, so that by the time she had finished her story she had more
than a quart of splendid gems, each as big as the biggest kind of
pea.
The Green Man smiled, but not unkindly, at the recital of Eileen's
woes. "Faith, it's a hard time ye've had, my maiden, and no mistake!
But now 'tis all over. Hold fast the jewels ye have there, for they're
the last ye'll get." He touched her lips with his cap, and said,
"Cabbala ku! the charm is off."
Eily drew a long breath of relief, and the fairy added,—
"The truth is, Eily, the times are past for fairy gifts of this kind.
Few people believe in the Green Men now at all, and fewer still ever
see them. Why, ye are the first mortal child I've spoken to for a
matter of two hundred years, and I think ye'll be the last I ever
speak to. Fairy gifts are very pretty things in a story, but they're not
convenient at the present time, as ye see for yourself. There's one
thing I'd like to say to ye, however," he added more seriously; "an'
ye'll take it as a little lesson-like, me dear, before we part. Ye asked
me for diamonds and pearls, and I gave them to ye; and now ye've
seen the worth of that kind for yourself. But there's jewels and
jewels in the world, and if ye choose, Eily, ye can still speak pearls
and diamonds, and no harm to yourself or anybody."
"How was yer Honor maning?" asked Eily, wondering. "Sure, I
don't undershtand yer Honor at all."
"Likely not," said the little man, "but it's now I'm telling ye. Every
gentle and loving word ye speak, child, is a pearl; and every kind
deed done to them as needs kindness, is a diamond brighter than all
those shining stones in your apron. Ye'll grow up a rich woman, Eily,
with the treasure ye have there; but it might all as well be frogs and
toads, if with it ye have not the loving heart and the helping hand
that will make a good woman of ye, and happy folk of yer neighbors.
And now good-by, mavourneen, and the blessing of the Green Men
go with ye and stay with ye, yer life long!"
"Good-by, yer Honor," cried Eily, gratefully. "The saints reward yer
Honor's Grace for all yer kindness to a poor silly colleen like me! But,
oh, wan minute, yer Honor!" she cried, as she saw the little man
about to put on his cap. "Will Docthor O'Shaughnessy be King av
Ireland? Sure it's the wicked king he'd make, intirely. Don't let him,
plaze, yer Honor!"
Green Jacket laughed long and heartily. "Ho! ho! ho!" he cried.
"King, is it? Nothing less would suit him, sure enough! Have no
fears, Eily, alanna! Dr. O'Shaughnessy has come into his kingdom by
this time, and I wish him joy of it."
With these words he clapped his scarlet cap on his head, and
vanished like the snuff of a candle.

Now, just about this time Dr. Michael O'Shaughnessy was

dismounting from his gig at his own back door, after a long and
weary drive. He thought little, however, about his bodily fatigue, for
his heart was full of joy and triumph, his mind absorbed in dreams
of glory. He could not even contain his thoughts, but broke out into
words, as he unharnessed the rusty old pony.
"An' whin I coom to the palace, I'll knock three times wid the
knocker; or maybe there'll be a bell, loike the sheriff's house (bad
luck to um!) at Kilmagore. And the gossoon'll open the dure, and—
"'Phwhat's yer arrind?' says he.
"'It's Queen Victory I'm wantin',' says I. 'An' ye'll till her King
Michael av Ireland is askin' for her,' I says.
"Thin whin Victory hears that, she'll coom roonnin' down hersilf,
to bid me welkim; an' she'll take me oop to the best room, an'—
"'Sit down an the throne, King Michael,' says she. 'The other
cheers isn't good enough for the loikes of ye,' says she.
"'Afther ye, ma'm,' says I, moinding me manners.
 "'An' is there annythin' I can du for ye, to-day, King Michael?' says
she, whin we've sat down an the throne.
"An' I says, loight and aisy loike, all as if I didn't care, 'Nothin' in
loife, ma'm, I'm obleeged to ye, widout ye'd lind me the loan o' yer
Sunday crownd,' says I, 'be way av a patthern,' says I.
"An' says she—"
But at this moment the royal meditations were rudely broken in
upon by a wild shriek which resounded from the house. The door
was flung violently open, and Mrs. O'Shaughnessy rushed out like a
mad woman.
"She's gone!" she cried wildly. "The colleen's gone, an' me niver
shtirrin' from her side! Och, wirra, wirra! what'll I do? It must be the
witches has taken her clane up chimley."
Dr. O'Shaughnessy stood for a moment transfixed, glaring with
speechless rage at the unhappy woman; then rushing suddenly at
her, he seized and shook her till her teeth chattered together.
"Ye've been ashlape!" he yelled, beside himself with rage and
disappointment. "Ye've fell ashlape, an' laved her shlip out! Sorrow
seize ye, ye're always the black bean in me porridge!" Then flinging
her from him, he cried, "I don't care! I'll be it! I'll be king wid what's
in there now!" and dashed into the house.
He paused before the door of the best room, lately poor Eily's
prison, to draw breath and to collect his thoughts. The door was
closed, and from within—hark! what was that sound? Something
was stirring, surely. Oh, joy! was his wife mistaken? Waking
suddenly from her nap, had she failed to see the girl, who had
perhaps been sleeping, too? At all events the jewels were there, in
shining heaps on the floor, as he had last seen them, with thousands
more covering the floor in every direction,—a king's ransom in half a
handful of them. He would be king yet, even if the girl were gone.
Cautiously he opened the door and looked in, his eyes glistening, his
mouth fairly watering at the thought of all the splendor which would
meet his glance.
What did Dr. O'Shaughnessy see? Oh, horror! Oh, dismay, terror,
anguish! What did he see? Captive was there none, yet the room
was not empty. Jewels were there none, yet the floor was covered;
covered with living creatures,—toads, snakes, newts, all hideous and
unclean reptiles that hop or creep or wriggle. And as the wretched
man stared, with open mouth and glaring eye-balls, oh, horror! they
were all hopping, creeping, wriggling towards the open door,—
towards him! With a yell beside which his wife's had been a whisper,
O'Shaughnessy turned and fled; but after him—through the door,
down the passage and out of the house—came hopping, creeping,
wriggling his myriad pursuers.
Fly, King Michael! stretch your long legs, and run like a hunted
hare over hill and dale, over moss and moor. They are close behind
you; they are catching at your heels; they come from every side,
surrounding you! Fly, King O'Shaughnessy! but you cannot escape.
The Green Men are hunting you, if you could but know it, in sport
and in revenge; and three times they will chase you round County
Kerry, for thrice three days, till at last they suffer you to drop
exhausted in a bog, and vanish from your sight.
And Eily? Eily went home with her apron full of pearls and
diamonds, to tell her story again, and this time to be believed. And
she grew up a good woman and a rich woman; and she married the
young Count of Kilmoggan, and spoke diamonds and pearls all her
life long,—at least her husband said she did, and he ought to know.
CHAPTER XIV.
"E GGS! eggs!" cried Toto, springing lightly into the barn, and
waving a basket round his head. "Mrs. Speckle, Mrs.
Spanish, Dame Clucket, where are you all? I want all the fresh eggs
you can spare, please! directly-now-this-very-moment!" and the boy
tossed his basket up in the air and caught it again, and danced a
little dance of pure enjoyment, while he waited for the hens to
answer his summons.
Mrs. Speckle and Dame Clucket, who had been having a quiet
chat together in the mow, peeped cautiously over the billows of hay,
and seeing that Toto was alone, bade him good-morning.
"I don't know about eggs, to-day, Toto!" said Dame Clucket. "I
want to set soon, and I cannot be giving you eggs every day."
"Oh, but I haven't had any for two or three days!" cried Toto.
"And I must have some to-day. Good old Clucket, dear old Cluckety,
give me some, please!"
"Well, I never can refuse that boy, somehow!" said Dame Clucket,
half to herself; and Mrs. Speckle agreed with her that it could not be
done.
Indeed, it would have been hard to say "No!" to Toto at that
moment, for he certainly was very pleasant to look at. The dusty
sunbeams came slanting through the high windows, and fell on his
curly head, his ruddy-brown cheeks, and honest gray eyes; and as
the eyes danced, and the curls danced, and the whole boy danced
with the dancing sunbeams, why, what could two soft-hearted old
hens do but meekly lead the way to where their cherished eggs lay,
warm and white, in their fragrant nests of hay?
"And what is to be done with them?" asked Mrs. Speckle, as the
last egg disappeared into the basket.
"Why, don't you know?" cried the boy. "We are going to have a
party to-night,—a real party! Mr. Baldhead is coming, and Jim Crow,
and Ger-Falcon. And Granny and Bruin are making all sorts of good
things,—I'll bring you out some, if I can, dear old Speckly,—and
these eggs are for a custard, don't you see?"
"I see!" said Mrs. Speckle, rather ruefully.
"And Coon and I are decorating the kitchen," continued he; "and
Cracker is cracking the nuts and polishing the apples; and Pigeon
Pretty and Miss Mary are dusting the ornaments,—so you see we are
all very busy indeed. Ho! ho! what fun it will be! Good-by, Mrs.
Speckle! good-by, Cluckety!" and off ran boy Toto, with his basket of
eggs, leaving the two old hens to scratch about in the hay, clucking
rather sadly over the memories of their own chickenhood, when
they, too, went to parties, instead of laying eggs for other people's
festivities.
In the cottage, what a bustle was going on! The grandmother
was at her pastry-board, rolling out paste, measuring and filling and
covering, as quickly and deftly as if she had had two pairs of eyes
instead of none at all. The bear, enveloped in a huge blue-checked
apron, sat with a large mortar between his knees, pounding away at
something as if his life depended on it. On the hearth sat the
squirrel, cracking nuts and piling them up in pretty blue china
dishes; and the two birds were carefully brushing and dusting, each
with a pair of dusters which she always carried about with her,—one
pair gray, and the other soft brown. As for Toto and the raccoon,
they were here, there, and everywhere, all in a moment.
"Now, then, where are those greens?" called the boy, when he
had carefully deposited his basket of eggs in the pantry.
"Here they are!" replied Coon, appearing at the same moment
from the shed, dragging a mass of ground-pine, fragrant fir-boughs,
and alder-twigs with their bright coral-red berries. "We will stand
these big boughs in the corners, Toto. The creeping stuff will go over
the looking-glass and round the windows. Eh, what do you think?"
"Yes, that will do very well," said Toto. "We shall need steps,
though, to reach so high, and the step-ladder is broken."
 "Never mind!" said Coon. "Bruin will be the step-ladder. Stand up
here, Bruin, and make yourself useful."
The good bear meekly obeyed, and the raccoon, mounting nimbly
upon his shoulders, proceeded to arrange the trailing creepers with
much grace and dexterity.
"This reminds me of some of our honey-hunts, old fellow!" he
said, talking as he worked. "Do you remember the famous one we
had in the autumn, a little while before we came here?"
"To be sure I do!" replied the bear. "That was, indeed, a famous
hunt! It gave us our whole winter's supply of honey. And we might
have got twice as much more, if it hadn't been for the accident."
"Tell us about it," said Toto. "I wasn't with you, you know; and
then came the moving, and I forgot to ask you."
"Well, it was a funny time!" said the bear. "Ho! ho! it was a funny
time! Coon, you see, had discovered this hive in a big oak-tree,
hollow from crotch to ground. He couldn't get at it alone, for the
clever bees had made it some way down inside the trunk, and he
couldn't reach far enough down unless some one held him on the
outside. So we went together, and I stood on my hind tip-toes, and
then he climbed up and stood on my head, and I held his feet while
he reached down into the hole."
"Dear me!" said the grandmother, "that was very dangerous,
Bruin. I wonder you allowed it."
"Well, you see, dear Madam," replied the bear, apologetically, "it
was really the only way. I couldn't stand on Coon's head and have
him hold my feet, you know; and we couldn't give up the honey, the
finest crop of the season. So—"
"Oh, it was all right!" broke in the raccoon. "At least, it was at
first. There was such a quantity of honey,—pots and pots of it!—and
all of the very best quality. I took out comb after comb, laying them
in the crotch of the tree for safe-keeping till I was ready to go
down."
"But where were the bees all the time?" asked Toto.
"Oh, they were there!" replied the raccoon, "buzzing about and
making a fine fuss. They tried to sting me, of course, but my fur was
too much for them. The only part I feared for was my nose, and that
I had covered with two or three thicknesses of mullein-leaves, tied
on with stout grass. But as ill-luck would have it, they found out
Bruin, and began to buzz about him, too. One flew into his eye, and
he let my feet go for an instant,—just just for the very instant when
I was leaning down as far as I could possibly stretch to reach a
particularly fine comb. Up went my heels, of course, and down went
I."
"Oh, oh!" cried the grandmother. "My dear Coon! do you mean—"
"I mean down, dear Madam!" repeated the raccoon, gravely,
—"the very downest down there was, I assure you. I fell through
that hollow tree as the falling star darts through the ambient
heavens. Luckily there was a soft bed of moss and rotten wood at
the bottom, or I might not have had the happiness of being here at
this moment. As it was—"
"As it was," interrupted the bear, "I dragged him out by the tail
through the hole at the bottom. Ho! ho! I wish you could have seen
him. He had brought the whole hive with him. Indeed, he looked like
a hive himself, covered from head to foot with wax and honey, and a
cloud of bees buzzing about him. But he had a huge piece of comb
in each paw, and was gobbling away, eating honey, wax, bees and
all, as if nothing had happened."
"Naturally," said the raccoon, "I am of a saving disposition, as you
know, and cannot bear to see anything wasted. It is not generally
known that bees add a slight pungent flavor to the honey, which is
very agreeable. Ve-ry agreeable!" he repeated, throwing his head
back, and screwing up one eye, to contemplate the arrangement he
had just completed. "How is that, Toto; pretty, eh?"
"Very pretty!" said Toto. "But, see here, if you keep Bruin there all
day, we shall never get through all we have to do. Jump down, that's
a good fellow, and help me to polish these tankards."
When all was ready, as in due time it was, surely it would have
been hard to find a pleasanter looking place than that kitchen. The
clean white walls were hung with wreaths and garlands, while the
great fir-boughs in the corners filled the air with their warm, spicy
fragrance. Every bit of metal—brass, copper, or steel—was polished
so that it shone resplendent, giving back the joyous blaze of the
crackling fire in a hundred tiny reflections. The kettle was especially
glorious, and felt the importance of its position keenly.
"I trust you have no unpleasant feeling about this," it said to the
black soup-kettle. "Every one cannot be beautiful, you know. If you
are useful, you should be content with that."
"Hubble! bubble! Bubble! hubble!
Some have the fun, and some have the
trouble!"
replied the soup-kettle. "My business is to make soup, and I make it.
That is all I have to say."
The table was covered with a snowy cloth, and set with glistening
crockery—white and blue—and clean shining pewter. The great
tankard had been brought out of its cupboard, and polished within
an inch of its life; while the three blue ginger-jars, filled with scarlet
alder-berries, looked down complacently from their station on the
mantelpiece. As for the floor, I cannot give you an idea of the
cleanness of it. When everything else was ready and in place, the
bear had fastened a homemade scrubbing-brush to each of his four
feet, and then executed a sort of furious scrubbing-dance, which
fairly made the house shake; and the result was a shining purity
which vied with that of the linen table-cloth, or the very kettle itself.
 And you should have seen the good bear, when his toilet was
completed! The scrubbing-brushes had been applied to his own
shaggy coat as well as to the floor, and it shone, in its own way, with
as much lustre as anything else; and in his left ear was stuck a red
rose, from the monthly rose-bush which stood in the sunniest
window and blossomed all winter long. It is extremely uncomfortable
to have a rose stuck in one's ear,—you may try it yourself, and see
how you like it; but Toto had stuck it there, and nothing would have
induced Bruin to remove it. And you should have seen our Toto
himself, carrying his own roses on his cheeks, and enough sunshine
in his eyes to make a thunder-cloud laugh! And you should have
seen the great Coon, glorious in scarlet neck-ribbon, and behind his
ear (not in it! Coon was not Bruin) a scarlet feather, the gift of Miss
Mary, and very precious. And you should have seen the little squirrel,
attired in his own bushy tail, and rightly thinking that he needed no
other adornment; and the parrot and the wood-pigeon, both trim
and elegant, with their plumage arranged to the last point of
perfection. Last of all, you should have seen the dear old
grandmother, the beloved Madam, with her snowy curls and cap and
kerchief; and the ebony stick which generally lived in a drawer and
silver paper, and only came out on great occasions. How proud Toto
was of his Granny! and how the others all stood around her, gazing
with wondering admiration at her gold-bowed spectacles (for those
she usually wore were of horn) and the large breastpin, with a
weeping-willow displayed upon it, which fastened her kerchief.
"Made out of your grandfather's tail, did you say, Toto?" said the
bear, in an undertone. "Astonishing!"
"No, no, Bruin!" cried the boy, half pettishly. "Made out of his hair!
Surely you might know by this time that we have no tails."
"True! true!" murmured the bear, apologetically. "I beg your
pardon, Toto, boy. You are not really vexed with old Bruin?"
Toto rubbed his curly head affectionately against the shaggy black
one, in token of amity, and the bear continued:—
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