The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Are Making Virtual Reality a Reality - Rilegato

Fred Moody is the author of I Sing The Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. He is an editor and writer for The Seattle Weekly and a columnist for abcnews.com. His work has appeared in, among other publications, The New York Times, Fast Company, Graphis, and the Utne Reader. He lives on an island near Seattle, Washington.

This book has distant origins in two conversations I had years ago--one with Intel's Andrew Grove, the other with Microsoft's Bill Gates. I had asked each of them why he and his company had succeeded so spectacularly, and discovered that neither man seemed to feel particularly successful. Grove said, "Well, there was a certain amount of historical inevitability to it," and Gates said, "We tend to focus more on our failures here than on our successes."

I went on to discover at Microsoft--arguably the most successful company in history--a culture thoroughly steeped in feelings of anxiety and failure. And the histories of both companies eventually made it clear to me that if they had not parlayed a combination of skill, determination, luck, and timing into their positions of dominance, someone else would have. It was as if technology itself were marching forward, and the people fated to develop and profit from it were simply soft machines exploited by progress to help move things along.

Gates's disgruntlement and Grove's humility eventually led to more questions: What is success? Does real success ever feel like success to the successful person? And in industry, where does the individual leave off and the zeitgeist begin?

I had scarcely begun work on this book when I encountered a visiting Japanese engineer, the Fujitsu Research Institute's Dr. Masahiro Kawahata, here to study and meet with some of the researchers and entrepreneurs whose work I was chronicling. Kawahata is an unabashed lover of the United States, which he regards as a vibrant, turbulent, and productive dream factory. "Every day a new company is born, but every day some other company is dying, right?" he said to me. "So it is activating the U.S. economy!"

Kawahata described the essential difference between the United States and Japan as one of aptitude and level of imagination. Japanese primacy in manufacturing, he said, arose because "the U.S. engineer didn't recognize the importance of product engineering. Or quality engineering. The idea is fine, but product engineering is poor. In Japan, the idea is poor, but product engineering is very nice." Although the Japanese industrial complex built a massive economic machine out of its ability to turn American inventions into products, this disparity has caused more crises than complacency in Japan. "We in Japan now are saying that we are very poor in generating ideas. And the idea is very important now. So we have a lot of talk about why the U.S. is better at generating new ideas, and why Japan is poor. That's a kind of big issue in Japan in recent years. We are very well trained, but lack creativity."

There does seem to be something uniquely American in the niche we have in this country for what might be called the shamans of engineering--visionaries who struggle to realize a more distant and less immediately profitable future than the rest of us have the time or imagination to contemplate. As I went on in the course of this project to watch visionaries spin fantasies for money, and to watch young industrialists flare up and burn out in the course of trying to get their outlandish ideas off the ground, I grew thoroughly amazed at the American worship of the American dreamer. I was to learn that there is an unacknowledged and in large part accidental appreciation in this country for the restless soul who is determined to find a different, or better, or more exciting way to do things. These people are never of practical mind and often seem not to be of particularly sound mind, yet their fellow citizens indulge them again and again in their fantasies. I came to see the group in this book as exemplars of the American spirit that has engendered so many industries (automobile, aerospace, oil, cola, personal computer, entertainment . . . ) that have gone on to dominate the world. I was to come away from my research convinced that I had watched an archetypal exercise: the messy, troublesome birth process of a new American industry, a process identical in its dynamic to the origins of countless previous passages from dreamy vision to multibillion-dollar enterprise.

For as long as engineers have dreamed of building faster and more powerful computers, some among them have dreamed of displaying computer-stored and -generated information in three dimensions, with users walking through information landscapes the way they walk down grocery-store aisles and city streets. Among the earliest and most persistent of these dreamers was Dr. Thomas A. Furness III, an electrical engineer who began working on such display technology in 1966 (twenty-three years before the term "virtual reality" was coined by Jaron Lanier), in a secret laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio. After more than twenty years of largely classified research into what he called the "visually coupled system," or the "virtual world interface," Furness left the air force and set out on an avowed mission to turn his new interface into a powerful weapon of moral and social change for the better.

Furness's wanderings led him to Seattle, Washington, in 1989, where he set up shop on the campus of the University of Washington under the auspices of the Washington Technology Center (WTC). Established in 1983, the WTC was charged with licensing technology developed at the University of Washington to businesses headquartered and incorporated in the state as a way of hastening the transition of academic lab discoveries into the marketplace. Furness's new lab, which he dubbed the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Laboratory, commenced innumerable research projects into the development and use of VR hardware and software, with particular emphasis on "human factors"--the ways in which people assimilate and disseminate information through computer interfaces.

Although most of the work he had done for the air force was classified, Furness was well known in the worldwide VR community as one of a handful of pioneers. To the VR literate, his move to Seattle was big news, and before long a somewhat disorganized orbit of allies, enemies, followers, collaborators, competitors, exploiters, and exploited had moved to the Northwest and taken form around him and his lab.

Furness arrived in a Seattle that was going through the second gold rush in its history. Like the Alaska gold rush that preceded it by some one hundred years, the digital gold rush of the present age sent visionaries and hallucinaries flooding into the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By 1996--the year the technology sector officially passed the natural-resources-based sector of Washington industry as the leading employer of the state's citizens--what once had been a land of dropouts, drifters, lumberjacks, fishermen, and the occasional Boeing engineer now was almost entirely the territory of a new breed of prospector: the computer-industry entrepreneur.

There loomed in the imaginations of these prospectors a single overpowering model: the Microsoft Corporation. Ever since two local boys, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had made good in the process of taking their tiny start-up to the pinnacle of power in the software industry, digital dreamers in Seattle and its surrounding communities have been launching new companies, large and small, that seek to emulate Microsoft in one way or another. This start-up culture spread with shocking speed: It was reliably estimated in 1996 that the number of high-tech start-ups in the Seattle area had jumped from 85 to more than 1,100 in four short years, with 200 of the new enterprises launched by young Microsoft retirees.

From little refurbished Alaska-gold-rush-era hotels in downtown Seattle's Pioneer Square, to spiffy new office suites across Lake Washington in Redmond, to tattered second-floor walk-ups in northwest Seattle's sprawling Ballard district, computer-technology ventures of every imaginable genre were sprouting up daily. There were companies producing office software, games, multimedia software, digital animation, interactive movies, Internet software and hardware, switching technologies and other services, voice-recognition software, one-handed keyboards, and goggles that were said to be on the verge of replacing computer screens. Invariably, these businesses were founded by young people who dreamed not only of mining the miniature infinitudes of silicon for fabulous wealth, but also of "making a difference," "pushing the envelope," "having an impact," or "advancing the state of the art." For many of these adventurers, the glamour of the cutting edge was as alluring as the stock options their companies constantly proffered in lieu of legal tender.

By the time Furness arrived in Seattle, the PC revolution was in full swing. The VR discipline, however, was floundering. It suffered from an image problem that stemmed partly from an exaggerated media portrayal, partly from the eccentricities of its early advocates and developers, and partly from its own overhype. Thus in the popular imagination, the VR world quite reasonably consisted of a few mad scientists or game players wearing outlandish helmets and gloves from which extended a confusing, perilous tangle of wires. The late 1980s had brought no end of predictions that virtual reality was just around the corner; when by 1993 it had not yet arrived, public interest in it subsided almost to nothing. As far as most Americans were concerned, virtual reality was the lunatic fringe of the PC revolution.

Virtual-world interface designers, headset makers, architects, entrepreneurs, and other adepts, however, kept working away at their technological designs and business plans, and the mid-1990s saw the first tentative emergence of VR technology out of the laboratory and into the mainstream marketplace. It looked as if the steady increase in microprocessor computing power and the steady decrease in price of personal computers had finally conspired to bring virtual reality to the threshold of the ...