Preface: Virtual Reality's Moment xiii
Introduction 1
What Is It? 1
What Can a Book Do That VR Can't, at Least as Yet? 2
How to Read This Book 3
Meeting My Younger Self 5
1. 1960s: Terrors Of Eden 9
Border 9
Window 10
Trifecta 11
Mood 12
Spun 13
Beyond Recall 14
Sound 15
Outlasting Cruelty 17
First Experiment 18
Burned 20
2. Rescue Spacecraft 22
Landed 22
Where in the Universe? 23
Whence 25
Permission 26
Build 29
Habitat 29
3. Batch Process 33
From Atoms to Bits and Back Again 33
Access 34
The Nasty Bits 36
Goats 37
Pixels in Real Life 39
Stacks 40
Prize 41
Pestering Strangers About Ivan 44
4. Why I Love VR (About The Basics) 47
The Mirror Reveals 47
Verb Not Noun 51
A Vice to Avoid 52
The Technology of Noticing Oneself 54
5. Bug In The System (About The Dark Side Of VR) 57
Paranoid Android 57
Terror Equation 58
Bipolar Bits 60
6. Road 63
Dome Done 63
Film Flam 65
First Time in the City 66
Down Spiral 68
Back in Flames 70
Aztec Outpost
Wheels 73
Inquests 75
Consensus and Sensibility 77
7. Coast 80
Casual Enrollment 80
City on a Pill 82
Rainbow's Gravity 83
Protogoogle 84
Audience 86
Transcript 88
8. Valley Of Unearthly Delights 91
El Paso del Cyber 91
Optimal Us, and Them 93
Finite and Infinite Games 95
Loop Skywalker 97
You Have to Get Awfully Weird to Avoid Becoming a Behaviorist 99
Grounded 100
A Club That Would Have Me as a Member 101
Code Culture 102
9. Alien Encounters 104
The Essential Bug 104
Rent-a-Mom 106
Young Guru of Loneliness 108
Realization 110
Despite Myself 112
Math Against Loneliness? 114
10. The Feeling Of Immersion 116
Woman as Social Stem Cell 116
Impossible Objects 118
Triptych 119
Reality Engine Engine 121
Much Touch 123
Haptic Antics 125
11. To Don The New Everything (About Haptics With A Little About Avatars) 127
Blind Bind 127
Hand-Waving Demo
Digital Interface 128
Passive Haptics 129
Bearing Arms 130
Haptic Lemonade 131
First VR Consumer Product 132
Interspecies Gastric Haptics 133
Octopus Butler Robot 134
Lick the Problem 138
Deepest Time Machine 139
Haptic Intelligence 141
As If One Obsession Weren't Enough 143
Harm and Heal 145
12. Nautical Dawn 147
Other Sighs 147
Other Everythings 149
The Previous Everything 150
Stim City 155
Legitimacy, Hair, a Giant's Shoulder 157
Dixie-Futurism 162
Ants on a Mission 163
On Track 165
13. Six Degrees (A Little About Sensors And VR Data) 168
The Eyes Must Wander 168
The Brain Integrates 170
A Moving Experience 171
Sea Legs, Virtual Legs 174
Virtual Realism Versus Virtual Idealism 176
14. Found 180
Bite Before Hook 180
Peanut Sauce Gallery 182
Dotted Lines 185
Round Horizon 186
Deputy Top Suit 187
Footprint 188
We Shipped! 189
15. Be Your Own Pyramidion (About Visual Displays For VR) 192
Remembering the EyePhone 192
That Thing on Your Head 193
When to Take a Pass 195
The Ridiculous Mistake That Floats in the Air All Around Us 196
A Gadget Spectrum 199
The Inner Extreme on the Spectrum 200
The Outer Extreme 201
Scope. Is the Thing with Feathers 203
Étendue 204
The Duplex Problem 205
16. The VPL Experience 209
In-Spiral 209
Veeple 210
What VR Was For 213
Surgical Training 214
Tradewinds 215
A Few of Our American Projects 217
Soldiers and Spooks 218
Characters 221
Spin-Offs 223
17. Inside-Out Spheres (A Little About VR "Video" And Sound) 226
VideoSphere 226
AudioSphere 226
18. Scene 230
Demolition 230
The Art of the Demo 232
The Art of the World 234
Advice for VR Designers and Artists 235
Flags Planted 237
Moniker an the Loose 239
The Party 242
Ricochet la Femme 243
Dark Lineage 245
Flattering Mirror 246
19. How We Settled Into A Seed For The Future 249
Virtual Rights, but Not Virtual Economic Rights 249
The Easy Road to World Domination 250
Microgravity 252
The Invisible Hand Improves When It Is Made Visible as an Avatar Hand 254
Birth of a Religion 257
Love the Work, Not the Myth 264
Alien Virtual Reality 265
20. 1992, OUT 269
MicroCosm 269
VR, Trapped in the Movies 271
Voluminous Possibilities Lost 273
In Slickness and in Stealth 275
The Sound of One Hand 276
The End of One Finite Game 279
21. Coda: Reality's Foil 282
Afterword 289
Appendix 1 Postsymbolic Communication (About The Reveries Of One Of My Classic VR Talks) 291
More Transcript 291
Kind of Blue 294
Speak, Tentacles! 295
Poïesis 296
Fascination Versus Suicide 297
Rue Goo 300
Appendix 2 Phenotropic Fevers (About VR Software) 301
Mandatory Metamorphosis 301
Grace 302
Picture This 303
Sleight 304
Editor and Mapping 305
Variation 306
Phenotropic Trial Run 307
Scale 309
Motivation 311
Role Reversal 311
Expression 313
The Wisdom of Imperfection 315
Resilience 316
Adapt 317
Swing 318
Rubble Fills Plato's Cave 321
Many Caves, Many Shadows, but Only Your Eyes 322
Appendix 3 Dueling Demigods 323
Not Artificial, but Imaginary 323
The Banality of Weightlessness 326
The Invisible Hand on a Multitouch Screen 326
The Absurdity of Demanding That Al Fix Itself 332
The Humane Use of Human Systems 333
Acknowledgments 337
Index 341