Whither CyberSpace
Part One: A Virtual Odyssey
From 1988 to 1995 I had the great privilege to work at Autodesk Inc as a Systems Administrator dedicated to the support of the Advanced Technology group. I had been given the opportunity to work with many brilliant people and to have a front row seat to their efforts on some cutting edge technologies. One of those was a well funded Virtual Reality project focused on producing and releasing the “AutoDesk CyberSpace Developers Kit”. My job focus eventually moved from being a Unix Admin in the IT department to managing the second incarnation of the Advanced Technology departments hardware lab affectionately known as Cyberia. It seems that Every Science Fiction writer and every Rock N Roll legend who visited the Bay Area found a way to score an invitation to experience a demo of the Technology.
Cyberpunk Author Rudy Rucker was working on a project based on James Gleick’s CHAOS and his close friend Bruce Sterling was a frequent visitor. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Tim Leary was pretty much a fixture as was Stewart Brand and Todd Rundgren. John Perry Barlow has written about his own visit to the first incarnation of Cyberia. The group required someone capable of a right brain focus on the technology and the sales skills to develop a “Demo Script” and then perform it for the constant stream of Luminaries who came knocking on the Lab door. As I mentioned, the technologists in this group were brilliant, and one of the reasons why they were able to apply their talents spinning code into gold is that most of them had two left brains. I was the guy in the group who had a right brain and knew how to use it! My background demonstrating Trick Card Decks to tourists visiting attractions owned by the Ripleys corporation came in handy too.
The technology ran on relatively primitive X386 computers but required a pair of expensive Matrox Graphics boards to drive the graphics to the VPL “Face Sucker” head mounted Display rig. Add in the serial connected Polhemous 6D motion tracking system and the fiber optic Dataglove and the cost of these systems ran up to between $25K and $30K. Eventually, other more comfortable Head Mounted Displays became available, and we started taking our system on the road as a significant feature in our Booth at SIGGRAPH. The Inevitable long lines at such events gave way to long days of what I called “Schlepping Heads.” It was also where we discovered the need to disinfect the head mounted display after each Demo after hearing of a lice breakout at another vendor Booth. Demo Nerds of the future take note of this free clue — Lysol is your friend! You don’t want to be the outfit that learns this lesson the hard way.
It became clear that requiring a pair of ultra high-end graphics cards that cost around $7K each was one of several limiting factors to making the technology widely available. And then the era of Software 3D rendering occurred. I had befriended a wild bunch of San Francisco VR hackers with a small company named Ono Sendai. These folks made use of a groundbreaking set of Software Libraries that rendered real-time 3D graphics at 30 frames per second without any hardware acceleration at all. It was comical to watch industry experts looking under tables for hidden SGI machines when they were shown these capabilities for the first time. The Software rendering platform was called RenderWare and was developed by Canon UK. I managed to get an introduction to the RenderWare Team and subsequently arranged for them to Demo their stuff to our CyberSpace Project management and staff. To complicate matters I was then introduced to yet another group of people who had also developed a software 3D rendering platform called RenderMorphics which was actually better than RenderWare. This was also the era of the first release of DOOM which itself employed a more primitive software 3D rendering capability. This led me to coin the Term “Rendering Happens”. Research and development had to plug along trusting that the capabilities to bring this technology to the masses would eventually be there for us to utilize. We couldn’t sit around waiting for all the gating factors to be resolved.
And Then THIS happened
“As if by magic, The World Wide Web changed everything we thought we knew about using the Internet. The Web quickly integrated existing content, and traditional Internet services were rapidly adopted.”
I wrote those words twenty years ago and at this point, they don’t make any sense unless you were a Silicon Valley engineer from that same era. We witnessed the web swallowing the net and here in the second decade of the twenty-first century hardly anyone refers to the “World Wide Web”” anymore because “The Web” became “The Net”. We filled the Web with our words, our sounds, our history and our hopes for the future. This new territory was opened to subsequent waves of colonizing hordes and expanding applications at a near exponential rate. It was destiny.
Competition for mindshare and attention was and still is fierce. We witnessed a broad range of effort employed in the quest for online fun, popularity, and profit. Some online efforts gained a mythic presence in less time than the lifespan of our more fragile insects. Wonder tales that grew more wondrous with each new release were spun by Web Weavers, Hero hackers and Digital Dragons that won the day. Truly it was and still is possible for anyone with a good idea, a diligent attitude and some talent for this new medium to become moderately famous — or at least infamous.
Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi are two such heroes who blazed a brazen trail leading us off our two-dimensional screens and flat graphic web pages into the pioneering world of VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). Like a modern Lewis and Clarke they were not satisfied wondering what it might be like with a ubiquitous system of 3D representation, they made it happen. For the record, Mark Pesce was the founder of Ono Sendai and was the person who had introduced me to the Canon UK RenderWare team mentioned in the previous section. Tony Parisi was lured from Boston to San Francisco and took on the job of knitting those RenderWare Libraries into the first VRML app Labyrinth.
Those early efforts launched some other initiatives and inspired other explorers to continue their efforts, refine their methodology and make progress in the quest to fold the Physical world and Virtual world together into a unified whole
So once more into the breach we go. The pioneers of Cyberspace didn’t disappear; we are still here. Older but wiser and with clues about navigating the trail for all. We are the GHVR.
