Virtual Reality

FOSTER CITY, Calif. -- VPL Research, a small company that popularized a radical technology called virtual reality, has crashed amid squabbles that led to the departure of its founder and the shift of key patent rights to a large French electronics company.VPL, which once employed about 50 workers, ran out of cash last week and laid off its remaining staff of about a dozen. The departed include Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked Pied Piper of virtual reality, who started the company in his garage in 1985.

Baltimore County Public Schools has presented how it would like to spend the "Race to the Top" funds granted to the county — about $17.4 million. Its priorities are extremely disappointing and do not address the tremendous need for improved technology in many poorly performing schools. Within one category of $5 million, the BCPS proposals include another major expenditure on virtual learning at Chesapeake High School. Didn't this school receive a multimillion-dollar virtual learning center last year?

Despite what my geek-hipster friends say, I think you're still allowed to be of two minds about the computer revolution -- excited about its conveniences and possibilities, skeptical of its claims and potential. You're no troglodyte if you use a computer daily but remain otherwise detached. You're not a techno-trog if you think the need for computers in the classroom and the home has been overstated. Computer literacy might be important, but shouldn't literacy itself come first?Then again, isn't it wonderful how the Internet -- e-mail and all that -- has saved the written word?

The out-of-body experience: It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but researchers say that by scrambling visual and tactile signals in the brain, they can simulate and study the altered state with volunteers in labs. British scientists reported yesterday that they used special goggles, connected to video cameras, to make subjects feel as if they were outside their bodies when they were tapped on the chest. "I think it's a similar experience at least to being out of body. You feel that you are in a different place from where your physical body is," said Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist who conducted the research at University College London.

What Carroll County needs is a good fortune teller who could divine the county's future by reading crystal balls, tarot cards, even chicken entrails.Unfortunately, the county seems to have no spiritualists listed in the Westminster Yellow Pages.Instead of relying on the ancient arts of soothsaying, let's take advantage of the advanced technology now available. Lucky for us, we live in a time when super-fast computers can create a virtual reality. All we have to do is put on the headset, and we can see into the future.

Before him lay Siamese twins, their brains joined by an elaborate network of blood vessels. The myriad folds and planes came into view.He saw where the brains divided. He studied the features from every conceivable angle. He memorized the terrain. He planned his moves.This was Dr. Benjamin Carson's rehearsal -- done in the eerie space of virtual reality.Today, the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon is celebrating that two 11-month-old boys are recovering splendidly -- and separately -- in the South African hospital where he and more than 20 doctors and nurses performed an exhausting operation that lasted more than a day."

ANNAPOLIS -- "It's sort of like the old Viewmaster, only more sophisticated," said Kevin Teixeira, a spokesman for Intel Corp., co-developer of the computer program he was about to demonstrate.But comparing Mr. Teixeira's computer program to a Viewmaster is like comparing a Model-T to a Lamborghini: Each has a steering wheel and four tires, but it's hard to see many similarities after that.Don a special helmet and, with a turn of your head, you can fly along with multicolored fish in the direction of a floating swimming pool.

Raymond Tse is getting a taste of reality -- well, virtual reality.Three days a week, the 17-year-old Howard High School senior straps on a headset at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel. With a high-powered computer and graphics software, Raymond designs three-dimensional images that are projected into the headset.The Columbia student's foray into the computer field known as virtual reality is part of an APL mentoring program that has 14 students, including nine from Howard County, studying everything from rock climbing to asteroids.

High Techsplanations, a Rockville company that develops computer-assisted training programs, has been awarded a prestigious science grant to break a technological barrier so that the emerging field of virtual reality can be used to train doctors for surgery.In theory, the computer software tool the company hopes to develop might replace, or at least supplement, the tradition of training medical students on cadavers and patients in the operating room.Virtual reality, which is widely used to train aviators, uses computer graphics to simulate actual experience.

Anticipating sluggish holiday sales for home video game machines, one of the world's largest game manufacturers this week borrowed a page from the sports world: Wait till next year!Nintendo of America announced a "virtual reality" game system, to be called Virtual Boy, that should hit the shelves in the spring.The U.S. market for game systems is saturated with machines by Nintendo and its rivals, Sega of America, Atari Corp., 3DO Corp. and the latest entry, Sony Corp. Analysts say the buying public of mostly teen-age boys is bored with the current generation of games powered by 16-bit microprocessors and is waiting for something new.Nintendo, the Redmond, Wash.

SAN DIEGO -- None of this is really happening, but the experience is almost overwhelming in "virtual Iraq." The Humvee plows along a desert road. The engine rumbles underfoot, and Blackhawk helicopters whirl overhead. A sandstorm blows in, and insurgents pop up and start to shoot with sickening blasts that shatter the windshield. Is that the smell of burning rubber? Those sensations of war are being fed into a special helmet, goggles and earphones. They are conjured by a computerized virtual reality developed in part by gaming engineers and psychologists at the University of Southern California and being tested, among other places, at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego.

The sci-fi dream of computer-generated virtual reality - so familiar to readers of Neuromancer and viewers of The Matrix - has finally come true. But, as is often the case with guesses about future technologies, it has not come true in quite the way that many people expected. While scientists developed sensory-input devices to mimic the sensations of a virtual world, the games industry eschewed this hardware-based approach in favor of creating alternative realities through emotionally engaging software.

His head almost completely hidden by a virtual-reality helmet, 12-year-old Eli Modlin plunged his hand into a vat of painfully cold ice water as his mind slipped into another aquatic world. Now a diver navigating the ocean floor, Eli watched sharks and giant sea turtles slowly circle above the swaying sea grass and colorful coral reefs just ahead. The only sounds he could hear were of his own breathing. The allure of buried treasure dominated his thoughts. Only later did Eli realize what he hadn't felt for a long stretch - the pain from the icy cold water.

NOVEL OLD TWENTIETH By Joe Haldeman. Ace, 257 pages By John Coffren If you were virtually immortal, what would you do with your greatest surplus -- time? Science-fiction master Joe Haldeman suggests that you might choose to do nothing more unusual than take a long cruise and watch the History Channel. That is the 23rd-century equivalent of what his immortals do in Old Twentieth. They sail away on a starship bound for a distant solar system, Beta Hydrii, and they while away the millennia-long voyage in a virtual reality / time machine that immerses them in human history.

When you combine the old comic master, Moliere, and the New Vaudeville clown, Bill Irwin, you're bound to tickle the funny bone, and the Vagabond Players' production of "Scapin" does just that. Working with playwright Mark O'Donnell, Irwin adapted Moliere's commedia dell'arte-inspired 1671 farce as a vehicle for himself. And though Mark E. Campion proves somewhat stolid in Irwin's role of the scheming servant, Scapin, an Irwin-esque spirit of anarchy surfaces in the looser, more madcap manner of Tony Colavito as his fellow servant, Sylvestre.

NEW YORK -- On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a remarkable new museum has been fashioned from the simplest of geometrical forms. Its exterior is a 12-story-high cube, with two outer walls made of colorless glass. Centered inside, as if it's floating on air, is a white aluminum sphere, 87 feet in diameter. The glass is so clear and the sphere is so large and luminous, especially at night, that it practically forces people to stop and look inside. The building is the Rose Center for Earth and Science, a $210 million exploratorium that opens tomorrow as the latest addition to the American Museum of Natural History.

Virtual reality, which uses computer graphics to simulate actual experience, is poised to go beyond its video-arcade role of enabling youths to zap space aliens. Instead of merely providing escapist entertainment, this emerging technology could revolutionize the inescapable art of architecture, enabling people to customize their homes and workplaces before a brick is laid.Virtual reality has been employed to simulate an Olympic race course for a U.S. bobsledder preparing for the 1992 Winter Olympics.

It first appeared on ESPN during a 1998 match-up between the Baltimore Ravens and the Cincinnati Bengals. Today, it's everywhere: Dressed in yellow on ABC, ESPN and Fox Sports. Outfitted in orange on CBS. Football fans call it The Line -- a ruler-straight pastel stripe across the television playing field to show where the next first down lies. Few who've seen it know what it's made of or where it came from (hint: think silicon). But the one thing on which nearly every fan agrees is that it would be tough to imagine a broadcast without it. "It's awesome," says armchair quarterback Randolph Court in Washington.