Inside the Headset, Virtual World Meets Reality

Inside a clunky black suitcase, inventor Bob Ferris carries a full-size Buick LeSabre, several cows and pro golfer Ben Crenshaw.

This feat isn’t as difficult as it sounds. The suitcase is one of several new wrinkles in virtual reality. Flip the switch, put on the computerized goggles and suddenly you’re aboard the Buick on a surreal voyage.

As the car zooms past someone mowing a lawn, the scent of cut grass wafts toward your nose through tiny tubes in the headset. When a passenger offers you a mint, that odor fills the air.

Unlike most virtual reality contraptions, this one doesn’t use animated scenery. It plays video that’s shot outdoors with a 360-degree panoramic camera. So if you twist to the right, you see and hear golfer Crenshaw jabbering in the back seat. If you turn to the left, you watch livestock and buildings whiz by.

Buick commissioned the gadgetry to advertise a car, but others are using virtual reality to cure phobias, erase Vietnam flashbacks, meditate, teach chemistry, train soldiers and create books with scenery that readers can climb inside.

After years of hype and millions of dollars in research, virtual reality is slowly making its way into the real world.

In the San Diego office of psychologist Brenda Wiederhold, patients who are afraid of flying can buckle themselves into a real airline seat, don a VR headset and take off on a simulated plane trip. A subwoofer underneath the seat mimics the vibration of a flight.

Nearby, people who dread public speaking work on overcoming their fear by rehearsing in front of a cartoon audience that can be programmed to listen politely or get unruly and throw spit wads.

Other VR programs deal with fears of spiders (complete with a hand-held toy arachnid), heights, social situations and driving.

“Some drivers are afraid of cops, so I have [virtual] cops chase them,” says Wiederhold, a former civil servant who is now one of a handful of therapists using virtual reality.

Although these images are all animations, therapists say the technique works. “A good approximation of reality is just as powerful as reality itself,” says Larry Hodges, the Georgia Tech computer expert who helped launch virtual phobia treatment.

It’s also cheaper. Curing someone’s fear of flying is much simpler when it doesn’t involve real jets and airfares. Virtual therapy also gets around the traditional method of having the patient visualize whatever situation inspires terror. “Not everyone has a strong enough imagination,” Wiederhold notes.

On the other hand, even the best virtual worlds require a certain suspension of disbelief. To increase realism, Wiederhold is collaborating with Phoenix-based Ferris Productions, the virtual Buick people, to add smell-o-vision.

One possibility: piping in the scents of gunpowder and helicopter fuel to a virtual Vietnam that helps veterans defuse post-traumatic stress disorder.

Wiederhold also wanted a napalm scent but says, “We don’t know exactly how to re-create that.”

Despite its success in psychotherapy, virtual reality hasn’t yet lived up to the utopian forecasts of science-fiction writers and engineers. They envisioned something on the order of the holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which could reproduce fantasy worlds in full sensory detail.

One of the biggest roadblocks to such realism is limited field of vision. Human eyes are able to take in about 180 degrees of the world around them, but few virtual reality devices can duplicate that range.

However, the eyes can be tricked. In 1981, the military developed a flight simulator that could display a 120-degree-wide picture. As researchers began experimenting with it, something startling happened.

The tests started with a narrow field of view and gradually widened it, says Tom Furness, who helped pioneer VR while working for the Air Force and now directs the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Lab: “Around 60 to 80 degrees, it was like a switch went off in your head. Below that, it was like looking at a picture. After that, it was like someone reached out of the picture and pulled you in.”

The military is still deeply involved in virtual reality research. For example, the Naval Research Laboratory recently teamed with Columbia University to create a virtual reality gizmo in which players fire missiles at evil pink rabbits dropped from a UFO.

This apparently ensures that U.S. troops will be ready for any attacks by extraterrestrial bunnies.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Air Force helped finance a $4-million virtual reality chamber called “the cave.”

It’s a 10-by-10-foot room in which the walls, floor and ceiling are giant projection screens that immerse visitors in a computer-generated doppelganger of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

“When you go inside, we project exactly what you would see in Notre Dame,” says Adrian Sannier, associate director of Iowa State University’s Virtual Reality Application Center.

Stereoscopic goggles complete the illusion. “If you walk toward a column, it appears to move off the wall and into the middle of the room until you can reach your hand out to try to touch it,” Sannier says.

To get from one part of the cathedral to another, visitors wave a wand, and the scenery shifts. Otherwise, a computer tracks the person’s movements in the room and adjusts the view accordingly.

Visitors can also walk--or fly--through virtual replicas of Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb in Egypt and several other buildings, which were converted into digital images based on archives, blueprints and other records.

The military is involved because it hopes to adapt the technology for training and combat.

Carolina Cruz-Neira, the brain behind Iowa State’s “cave,” is now working on a virtual Hindu temple, modeled after one in India. Unlike the other projects, this one will contain virtual humans taking part in temple rituals.

“So we won’t just have the building, but also what goes on inside it,” she says.

At first blush, synthetic reality might seem pointless, and a poor substitute for the real thing. Consider the virtual car. Buick has two trucks crisscrossing the country offering “virtual reality test drives,” in which visitors experience a vicarious road trip while sitting in actual LeSabre seats equipped with seat belts.

Why not just have people drive the real car? Answer: Because the average LeSabre owner is 67 years old, and Buick is trying to reach younger customers who might otherwise never set foot in a Buick dealership.

“It can be tough to get people in to test-drive a car, so we decided to take the test drive to them,” says Marcus Vinson of Buick. The strategy seems to work. Buick traced 1,200 LeSabre sales to the gimmick during its first 10 months on tour.

In some ways, virtual reality is an ancient concept. Humans have a long history of creating artificial representations of real objects --from cave drawings and primitive sculptures to Astroturf and Nutrasweet. There’s even a Hasbro CD-ROM Easy-Bake Oven that isn’t an oven at all. It’s a picture of an oven on a computer screen that lets kids “cook” without actually cooking.

In October, Red Baron Pizza will hit the road with a virtual reality suitcase (also designed by Ferris) that puts visitors in the cockpit of a Steadman stunt plane.

And Chevrolet will shadow this fall’s 60-city Olympic torch relay with a virtual ski jump. Users can fly down the slopes without having to worry about lift lines, broken bones or avalanches.

Ferris also envisions a vicarious voyage over Niagara Falls in a virtual barrel and a simulated helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon.

“We could swoop down and give [the viewer] smells, which you can’t get in a real helicopter,” he says. “And we could eliminate the engine noise.”

Other uses for VR technology turned up at last month’s SIGGRAPH expo in Los Angeles, an annual showcase for cutting-edge computer graphics.

At one booth, Georgia Tech unveiled its virtual meditation chamber, which combines biofeedback and virtual reality to help people relax. “Breathe deep, and clear your mind,” intones a voice emanating through the headset’s earphones.

The VR goggles display a moon that rises or sinks in accordance with the viewer’s pulse and perspiration rate.

“I foresee this at airports,” says Diane Gromala, an associate professor at the school.

Another booth enabled four people wearing computerized goggles and gloves to play catch with miniature virtual dolphins and stingrays.

On a more serious note, a workshop on the medical uses of virtual reality explained how introducing burn victims into a virtual “ice world” reduces pain while their wounds are being treated.

“Pain requires conscious attention,” says Hunter Hoffman, who works with burn patients in Seattle. Because the virtual world is so distracting, pain drops dramatically.

The same technique works for chemotherapy and extraction of bone marrow, Furness says.

Virtual reality also holds promise for schools. At the University of Washington, a program called “chemistry world” allowed children to “shrink” to microscopic size, then grab protons and electrons to make atoms. According to studies, the slow learners caught up with bright students while using the program, Furness says. “That is the power of this medium.”

Furness is teaming with a Seattle company called Microvision on an invention called “virtual retinal display.” Whereas most virtual images are projected onto tiny screens inside goggles or headsets, Furness’ invention beams images directly onto the retina.

Why bother with the middleman, he figures. A device the size of a cigarette pack feeds the imagery to a pair of clear goggles. From there, miniature mirrors harmlessly scan the image onto the retina. And because the wearer can still see the outside world through the goggles, the virtual images can mix with the real world. Thus, a pilot could have instrument panel readouts superimposed over his view out the cockpit window. Or a surgeon could see an X-ray as he operates on a patient.

Another intriguing project still in development is the “magic book.” It looks like an ordinary text, but when read through a virtual reality headset, the scenery jumps off the pages. It’s like a pop-up book, except that readers can actually “enter” the images. “It’s just boggling,” Furness says. “You can flip a switch and go inside, say, Cinderella’s castle. Or, if it’s an anatomy book, you could see the images and climb inside them.”

Then again, maybe that’s not a good thing. Virtual reality shouldn’t take the place of a rich imagination, he says: “Sometimes science can do too much.”