Complete Book of Everyday Christianity
An A-Z guide to following Christ in every aspect of Life. Here in one book, is the complete guide you need for every part of your life—family, money, relationships, job, church, entertainment and more. The editors, Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens, combine decades of ministry, scholarship, church leadership, parenting, and other sorts of practical wisdom.VIRTUAL REALITY
Imagine that you are on trial. The prosecutor rises, and the judge instructs the bailiff to place helmets and gloves on the jury. The prosecutor speaks: “What you are about to experience, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the prosecution’s reconstruction of the malicious behavior of the defendant on the night of the crime.” You watch in horror as the jury gasps and groans at what they are experiencing. You can only imagine the sights, sounds, smells and touches-so real, and yet completely false-that will convince them you are guilty of a crime you did not commit.
Both the promise and the danger of virtual reality can be seen in its name. It is virtual: the set of sense experiences you have is contrived using computers and output devices. What you experience is entirely synthetic. It can be changed subtly or dramatically by changing the programs that create it. Yet it seems to be reality: the experiences are so convincing that, in some cases, they seem really to be happening.
Basic Character
Virtual-reality systems work by providing sensory perceptions, to multiple human senses, that closely mimic those provided by “real” experience. Just as Renaissance artists worked to give the illusion of three dimensions to a flat canvas, so engineers of virtual-reality systems use computers to mimic our visual, auditory and tactile experience.
The most important factor in making virtual reality seem real is its ability to simulate the sensory results of movement on all six of the axes along which it might take place: forward/backward, left/right, up/down, pitch, roll and yaw. By manipulating visual and auditory input, virtual-reality systems can give the user a remarkably effective sense of moving “through” the world constructed by the computer.
By contrast, current graphical computer displays are quite flat in their aesthetic approach. They have no interest in portraying perspective or movement. It is instructive that the symbols such displays use are called icons, for they are very similar in intent to the iconic paintings of a millennium ago. Display icons intend to communicate a message rather than a rendering of reality. They are symbols, albeit only of 64 by 64 pixels.
Just as a Byzantine iconographer did not think Saint John “really” looked like the icon (halo and all), so conventional display designers do not think a wastebasket “really” looks like the icon in the corner of a Macintosh computer. Both are icons; the visual rendering is subordinate to the message they bear. Exact sensory correspondence to reality is of secondary importance.
Virtual-reality systems use a different set of criteria. Whereas ordinary graphic displays are highly stylized, virtual-reality systems try to look real. Fidelity to ordinary lived experience is crucially important. When you move in a virtual-reality system, your perspective must change as when you move in the world. When you hear something in a virtual-reality system, you must hear “normal” aurally complex sounds rather than single-frequency beeps and boops.
Creating such synthetic realities, however, is a technically difficult project. Human sensation uses redundant information provided by several of the senses to construct the picture we have of reality at any given time. When sighted people are blindfolded, for example, they naturally behave as blind people are accustomed to behaving. They attend more closely to sounds and smells and touch to fill up the information missing from the sense they normally rely upon.
The most effective virtual-reality systems try to provide synthetic reality to more than one of our senses. Merely providing visual reality is unconvincing because the ears and fingers are still in the normally experienced reality of whirs and clicking keys. The more virtual-reality systems can interact with multiple senses, the more effective they become.
Virtual-reality software tries to expand the monopoly of the visual to touch all the senses and make them part of the feedback loop between person and machine. To do so, they need capabilities that allow them to “fool” the senses into behaving as if they were receiving real stimuli. So, iconic and stylized visual displays give way to realistic ones in which perspective and shadow heighten the illusion of depth and movement.
This problem becomes a substantial engineering challenge, especially for the sense of touch, for the sense organ is distributed over the entire surface of the human body. The current state of the practice of virtual reality has concentrated almost entirely on visual and audio implementations. Only a few dedicated, and hence very expensive, systems have accepted the challenge of creating a true virtual reality that encompasses the senses. The Star Wars simulation at Disneyland or Disney World is, for many of us, as close to virtual reality as we will get.
Current Uses
At the moment most virtual-reality systems are toys or dedicated training devices. For example, training devices such as flight simulators allow airline pilots to experience flying an aircraft under emergency conditions without actually risking either an airframe or passengers to give them this experience.
These virtual-reality simulations are different from other computer modeling efforts (such as climate modeling or collision impact simulation) in that one of the important dimensions of the simulation is the opportunity people have to interact with what they perceive. Virtual-reality systems give their human participants a certain set of perceptions and let them respond to them. Pilots and others are happy to be able to learn from synthetic reality in such a way. Computer gaming is the only other serious use of virtual reality at present. For a number of years gaming systems have been evolving toward greater and greater fidelity to ordinary perception.
Conventional computers involve their operators with one or two senses at most. Visual, and in the last ten years graphical, displays are the key intersection between current computers and people. Sound plays a smaller role at the moment, though audio interfaces have an enormous potential. Even though in the near future computer interfaces will doubtlessly become more “natural,” that is, multisensory, virtual-reality techniques will probably have their most important impacts in two related areas.
The first is in simulation. Many military and commercial applications deal with situations that are either too dangerous to humans or too costly for personnel to train for directly. Airline pilots, for instance, should train for engine fires and emergency dives but shouldn’t do so with real planes full of real people. In cases like these, virtual-reality simulations are currently very important and will become more important in the future. But simulations using virtual-reality systems need not be confined to military types of applications. Architects and facilities managers have for centuries used drawings and models to communicate their ideas to customers. Virtual-reality systems can allow clients to “walk through” buildings before they are built or allow facilities managers to experiment with various equipment and furniture layouts without actually creating them.
The second application area, gaming, will also be important for new virtual-reality systems. One trend in contemporary computer games is to increasingly involve the player’s senses. The gaming situation takes on new excitement as more dimensions of sense are included in the game. In order to take increasing advantage of virtual-reality techniques, however, gaming will need increasingly to use specialized hardware, which will limit its market penetration.
Even apart from these two applications, simulation of the real world using virtual-reality techniques has some potential. Michael Chrichton’s description of a virtual-reality database in the novel Disclosure, for example, shows some of the power that virtual-reality systems might give us. Mundane tasks such as file access and communication might end up being influenced by virtual-reality techniques developed for other applications. But everyday tasks will probably benefit only from spin offs of virtual-reality programs created for and applied in other domains.
Reality and Virtual Reality
Virtual reality might seem to us as a perspective painting must have seemed to our pre-Renaissance forebears. When one’s whole lived experience of representations of life has been flat, it is hard to express the effect of experiencing volume and color in a mere representation. Photography created this same kind of transformed experience of representation in the nineteenth century. Virtual reality has brought the same transformation to us.
But though perspective painting and photography brought transformations of the representation of reality, they brought nothing inherently demonic with them. Each transformation had its detractors and even prophets who railed against it. Each might have seemed to be a violation of the sanctity of reality because its representation of reality was complete in a previously unparalleled way. Yet we now view the previous transformations of representation with equanimity. Now we are concerned about the capabilities we have to reengineer photographs so that they are not a close representation of reality. Computer retouching and enhancement have made a picture less than trustworthy evidence of reality in a profoundly new way.
Theologically, virtual reality is a new direction in our representation of reality. Like other representations, it will have both uses and abuses. We need to guard against attempts to substitute virtual reality for lived reality. But we need not be overly concerned that this new representation will undermine that reality. Any representation of reality-a novel or play, a painting or photograph, or virtual reality-can be pressed to become a substitute reality. In some ways virtual reality is more open to this abuse-partly because it involves multiple senses. But, at least at the current state of the practice, it is less open to this abuse because it requires highly contrived equipment and situations to be effective.
The transformation of a representation of reality into a substitute reality is a perpetual problem and a form of idolatry. This is the abuse of representation that the iconoclasts fought against. Their solution, however, was excessive. One need not destroy the representation to keep from worshiping it.
-Hal Miller
Originally published in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity by Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens. ©1997 by Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com
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