More from Blair, dir. of _WAX_: very Pynchonesque
John M. Krafft
jmkrafft at landru.ham.muohio.edu
Sun Apr 2 10:01:05 CDT 1995
From: MX%"jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu" 1-APR-1995 22:12:49.42
To: JMKRAFFT
CC:
Subj: obj-6585.
SGI
4 SGI
Which brings us to Jurassic Park, the potential virtual reality.
Several weeks after seeing the movie, two days after Disneyland, I
found myself at Discovery Park, part of the Silicon Graphics booth at
SIGGRAPH '93. It was here I had a chance to reconsider what I had
thought to be one of the most sublime elements of the film... the
overarching, fractionally dimensional and ultimately recursive theme
best expressed by the main scientist in the phrase: "you'll never look
at birds the same way again."
If I remember correctly... at the beginning of the film, we're in the
Badlands with the main scientists, digging fossils. The shotgun shell
has gone off, revealing the subterranean velociraptor skeleton on
their outdoor but not particularly mobile computer screen. In the
midst of a violently imaginative fleshing out of the dinosaur bones'
previous body and behavior, the scientist says "You'll never look at
birds the same way again". This phrase, stranger than it seems, and
well aware of it's effect, echoes through the film in hundreds of
ways... becoming, as if by default, a main theme. Moments after the
fatal pronouncement, Richard Attenborough arrives by helicopter to
take them to Jurassic Park, where it is their job to judge whether
this high entertainment concept can fit in our world. The park
implodes, the dinosaurs riot, and the scientists barely escape... but
they do, in the belly of a helicopter. At the film's wordless end, the
main scientist looks through the clear window, or dead eye, of his
artificial bird, and finds what appears to be the sublime in the image
of a pelican winding its wings over the ocean beneath him, which,
except for an exterior shot of the helicopter in flight, is pretty
much the last shot in the film. Despite all the emotion on his face
and in the sound track, I have to say that I really don't know what it
is the scientist sees, but it certainly is a bird.
At SIGGRAPH, the day before I actually did find my way to SGI's
"Discovery Park", I was standing two halls away in line at The Virtual
Reality Laboratory, part of a VR museum ride created for an exhibit
called "Imaging, the Tools of Science" to be installed at the Chicago
Museum of Science and Industry. The visual interface was the Fakespace
Boom 2C, a boom-suspended periscope-style cube with a high resolution
stereoscopic display inside... more vividly, something like a large,
swivelable , realtime Viewmaster at the end of a very fancy
articulating lamp-stand. Virtual Reality Lab was essentially a
fly-ride through several surreal and constructed worlds. First you
found yourself in a bare, circular room, with your pre-grabbed
portrait on the wall, and a polgonally crude Fakespace Boom 2C
recursively in front of you. Back in the real world, with the real
boom, you could swivel around and look at the room, all the while
inexorably advancing toward your portrait, which, at a certainly
distance, shivered into fragments that flocked together and flew
through the hole left by their disassembly. You had to follow them,
through the hole, to find yourself floating in the clouds. The birds
that were you departed ahead and above. To the side was a girder-thick
red wireframe cow, a sort of surrogate cloud, and directly ahead was a
structure that once again you were inexorably heading towards and then
through, a sort of open ended floating skyhouse made of 4 circuit
boards in extreme perspective, and a fifth right ahead. The moment
before colliding with the fatal frontal board, you could see the image
of a flower, and by the miracle of modal change, you found that you
had passed through to emerge out of a patch of flowers in the center
of a park, main natural space in a Potemkin city made of texture-map
flats.
This, seen from the particular angle chosen by the FakeSpace user, was
all projected on a video screen behind the person standing with his
head up to the swiveling box. I didn't actually get to put my head up
to the box that day, as the line was quite long. Time is always a
consideration at SIGGRAPH, and since I didn't have a watch, I turned
around to ask the fellow behind me what time it was. Before he started
to speak I could see he didn't have a watch, and so I stopped in mid
sentance, just as he started to say something that I couldn't hear.
Being polite, I said "What?" and he said "Right now", so I said
"What?" and he said, "You asked me what time it was, and I said it's
right now". I agreed.
Twenty six hours later, just before finally getting to Silicon
Graphics' "Discovery World", I found myself waiting in line to pay for
my lunch at the International Food Court. Again I needed to know what
time it was, so I turned around and asked the person behind me. I
recognized it was the same fellow just before he inevitably said "I
said, it's right now, don't you remember?", surprising both of us, as
it had been estimated there were 10,000 other people with us in the
Anaheim convention center. So, to be polite, as we obviously had
something in common, I read his tee-shirt, which said "The Virtual
Museum", and asked "What's the Virtual Museum?". He didn't really want
to answer, and I didn't really find out until the next day, when I
came across the actual Virtual Museum, back in Machine Culture, as the
art show was known during this SIGGRAPH year. The Virtual Museum being
sort of a common interface for inexpensive, individually created
virtual worlds, a sort of museum atrium through which one could enter,
under arches, any compatible virtual world module you might pick up
from the Internet, or a floppy disk. The Virtual Museum describes
itself as therefore allowing anyone to explore ancient Egypt,
pre-Columbian Peru, and Atlantis. None of this information being
offered by my space-time companion at the International Food Court, I
decided to push the situation, so I read his convention badge, which
always has name and job function printed on it at SIGGRAPH...
apparently he worked for a company called Earth. So I asked, "What's
Earth?", and he said "That's where I live".
After that and lunch, I was off to "Discovery Park", where the line
was too long, so I talked my way in the back door. "Discovery Park is
an Interactive Entertainment and Virtual Reality Experience!" was
written on the brochure, and inside, there were birds.
First was a pterodactyl-shaped, user-mountable ride, where a canyon
enviroment appeared on 3 large hi-definition screens ahead of the
person who steered the flying machine from it's virtual back, with
wing tips and pterodactyl-head visible ocassionally . Everyone in the
room could see the screens, and there was a bit of ambiguity whether
or not the rider was actually the bird having an out-of-body
experience, with the annoyed bird-body continuously attempting to
catch the eye of the floating oversoul. Networked to this was the
private, 2 million pixel Fakespace Boom 3C, which apparently allowed
you to look around while the pterodactyl-person did the steering
through the inevitably progressing air. Noone else could see what the
person at the Fakespace boom saw. Third node on the network was yet
another viewpoint, embodied in a high resolution and also resolutely
private head-mounted display from Kaiser Electro-Optics.
People were also looking at birds differently in the Evans and
Sutherland booth, which had SIGGRAPH's other user-mountable flying
demo ride, a sort of Sports Simulation Gym where your body was a
hang-glider space ship in an extraordinarily complex and enclosed
high-definition city space. In the Reagan/Bush years, we would have
immediately thought of the military as the buyer or maker of such
flying rides, as well as flying things, and uncontrollable carnivores.
But now is the time when we instead remember that Link, inventor of
the flight simulator, came to that device from his work designing
rides for amusement parks.
Link's flight simulator took the rollercoaster off the ground using
pneumatic motion, making the rider into a bird in a box. Before
computer graphics could match the realism of that motion, miniature
landscapes were built, reconstructions of appropriate countrysides,
which the flight-simulator pilot could see through a motion-controlled
camera that floated on a grid above the model board. In this time
before computer graphics, many people identified visual simulation
with such physical miniatures, so that there it was no great
associative leap from the model board to Disneyland. Of course, at
that time, one of the logical associative paths leading out of
Disneyland was the idea of goverment-inflicted simulation, presented
"In Technical Stimulation", as the Firesign Theatre put it. And
certainly, visiting Anaheim's ancient Disneyland, it is very easy to
arrive at an idea of the intimate linkage of entertainment and death,
especially in New Orleans Square, where Pirates of the Carribean
begins, after establishing the cave, with skeletal pirates guarding
gold, then proceeds through torture and rape to end with a
ecstatically drunken pistol duel held in a gunpowder storage cellar.
In Jurassic Park, the one skeptical scientist hears Richard
Attenborourgh say that a mechanized tour of Jurassic Park is as safe
as any amusement park ride, and in repsonse volunteers: "But on the
Pirates of the Carribean, if the Pirates get loose, they don't eat the
tourists". So what should we see when we look at birds flying free as
a tyranosaurous rex through the air?
In "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees", Jacob Maker
works on a simple, local network of flight simulators, a 1983
precursor to what in 1986 or so became SIMNET, a wide area simulation
networking scheme that allowed a group of pilots in sitting in flight
simulators somewhere in Tennessee to train with people driving tank
simulators in California, all together in the same limited, synthetic
enviroment. This sort of networked simulation prepared the way for the
raid on Libya, the invasion of Panama, and ultimately for the Gulf
War. The proposed successor to Simnet is called DSI, or the
Distributed Simulation Internet, if I have the correct acronym, which
combines broader bandwidth with new graphics and networking standards,
literally allowing an army of linked individuals, spread across the
globe, to join each other in that military amusement park. Not
formally different from what some people propose for interactive,
navigable, immersive cable-tv games. Of course, what does program
content mean in the context of this DIS?
Or what is history? One of the first implementations of the DSI was a
minute by minute, foot by foot reconstruction of a Gulf War skirmish
known as the Battle of 73 Easting. As you might expect, it plays the
battle forward and backwards, and allows you to view it from any
angle. It also allows you to create alternate battles from this
reality base. Considering how much history has already been prepared
in cyberspace, it is truly meta-fictional that 73 Easting was
presented to the Senate as the first example of virtual history.
Unfortunately, this is a normal theme in the history of the history of
technology. Television is an excellent example. According to evidence
presented in Steven Spielberg's earlier "Raiders of the Lost Ark", it
was possibly the God of Israel who invented both television and
virtual reality. But according to the Nazi's and some others, it was
Paul Nipkow who discovered it in Berlin in the 1880's. His fascinating
electro-mechanical telephone for the eyes coupled unique spinning-disk
spiral scanners, known as image dissectors, with
magnetically-controlled crystals that occultly served as light-valves.
Nipkow worked for city railroad company during the electrification and
transportification (which is a deliberate rhyme with fortification) of
Berlin, designing a street-car semaphore signal system. It is a not so
odd fact that his television system mainly resembled the axles and
wheels of a railroad car... 2 spinning disk scanners sychronized by an
fixed axle between.
By the1890's, apparently the signal system was in place, the job had
probably settled down, and in his private inventing life, Nipkow had
moved on, bypassing further development on the television to focus on
his new next obsession, the invention of a working helicopter.
More than thirty years later in Weimer Berlin, contruction began on
the Funkturm, the the Eiffel Tower of Radio, defining what became the
communications heart of Berlin, an area so important that it later was
given the name of Adolf Hitler Platz. Nipkow was an old man, and
practical, low-resolution mechanical television systems based on his
scanning scheme had come into existence in Germany, the UK, the US,
and elsewhere. This was television with less than 40 lines, but it was
a commercial television, with regular scheduled broadcasts from the
Funkturm by 1929. At that moment, it became clear that the real
challenge for television engineers lay in high resolution television;
breakthroughs in high frequency research promised broadcast systems
and receiver sets with over 400 image-lines.
Certain people knew that this same technology would also make possible
a practical system of radio-wave based detection and ranging of
distant flying objects... what we know as radar. As a result, as
mechanical television died a natural death, due in part to the
worsening financial situation world-wide, a decision was made in the 3
main tv countries to promote the creation of a popular,
entertainment-oriented high-definition television system; the goal,
never publically stated, was to create both the industrial and human
resource base neccessary to design and manufacture a practical air
defense system.
Which created a peculiar situation. Germany provides the best example.
First, Hitler declared all German television research a state secret.
Then the public search began for facts that would establish German
priority in television research... historical priority. Paul Nipkow
was snatched from obscurity to become a new national hero... the
Father of Television. England replied... or maybe they started it all
with the Edisonification of John Logie Baird, who became the Other
Father of Television.
In every country, television history, like television itself, was
discovered, or invented. Books were written, and in other places,
factories were built. In 1941, not long after the radar machines were
switched on in England, Holland, Germany, and elsewhere, Paul Nipkow
died, which triggered his greatest honor... Paul Nipkow's funeral was
broadcast live on Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, the Nazi high definition
tv station named after him and broadcasting from atop the Funkturm in
Berlin.
paper
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The author of this node is: WAX
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© Copyright Sat Apr 1 22:02:04 1995 EST, all rights reserved.
John M. Krafft, English | Miami University--Hamilton
Voice: 513-863-8833, ext. 342 | 1601 Peck Boulevard
Fax: 513-863-1655 | Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
E-mail: jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
jmkrafft at miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
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From: "John M. Krafft" <jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu>
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Subject: obj-6585.
John M. Krafft, English | Miami University--Hamilton
Voice: 513-863-8833, ext. 342 | 1601 Peck Boulevard
Fax: 513-863-1655 | Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
E-mail: jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
jmkrafft at miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
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