This is a fantasy documentary.
The pioneering work shown in "Hyperland"
however, is very real.
HYPERLAND
Ladies and gentlemen,
I had a dream the other night, as a result of a hard evening's dozing in front of the television.
I dreamt that I'd finally decided, just to get rid of the thing.
[Voices from television shows] I thought there must be a better way of spending my time,
[Voices from television shows] like walking to the nearest scrap heap and throwing the wretched object away.
...Win this... a Color TV...
... A television set which you would obviously like to have very much, then we'll go on to the next bend in the golden road, and there you could win ...
... we live in a television age and television is selective ...
... one camera shot of a pretty nurse helping an elderly patient out of an empty hospital ...
[Dialog from various television shows] ...It just needs a final mix. The dough must next be kneaded like this...
Stop!
You may think you only have unsocial body odors in your armpits, but are you "Pit Stop fresh"?
You need new environmentally safe "Pit Stop" ...
It seems such a waste of the technology ...
Maybe in the future ...
we'll find a better use to put it all to.
On the day that Japan has agreed to fix the dollar exchange rate at one cent to the yen, in return for the state of California,
we'll be gauging international economic reaction on the floor of the Moscow stock exchange.
Also, in tonight's program, the greenhouse effect really starts to bite...
Yes, but this isn't anything new...
It's still the same boring old television.
... the England cricket team is in deep trouble ...
Are you tired of linear non-interactive television, Mr. Adams?
Don't even know what linear, non-interactive television means, Mr. Adams?
Are you tired, Mr. Adams, of the sort of television that just happens at you?
That you just sit in front of, like a couch potato?
That doesn't involve you?
Come on. Interact with me.
Wait a minute.
Yes. What is it you want to know?
Who the hell are you?
Me? Oh, I'm just him.
My name is Tom and I'm your agent.
May I ask if you know what that means?
You want 15%?
It means that I am here to do your every slightest bidding.
To fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing,
no job too small or too menial.
Are you sure you mean "agent"?
I mean that I'm a software agent. I am merely a simulacrum, an artificial and completely customizable personality.
And I only exist as what we call an "application" in your computer.
I have the honor to provide instant access to every piece of information stored digitally anywhere in the world.
Any picture, or film, any sound, any book, any statistic, any fact,
any connection between anything you care to think of,
you've only to tell me and it will be my humble duty to find it for you and to present it to you for your interactive pleasure.
Is there anything I can do for you now, Mr. Adams, sir?
Well yes, you could stop being so obsequious for a start.
It will be my very great and profound pleasure to be less obsequious, oh master.
I am, as I humbly mentioned to you a moment ago, fully customizable.
Allow me to present you with my control panel.
Would you care to alter me in any way which takes your fancy?
Just touch the appropriate control.
Okay, Buster, What do you want now? Get bloody move on, can't ya?
Good. What would you like to find out about now?
Hang on, I'm rather enjoying this. What else can we change?
All lines to London are engaged. Please try later.
As you can see, there's nothing about me at all, at all, God bless ya face,
that isn't completely customizable, 110%,
in any way you like, Sheila ...
All right, boyo,
if you want me like that, You'd better find me a tank then, hadn't you?
Ah, there is a new version of the software due out any minute now, which will, of course, be completely reliable. Ahem.
Look, what is this thing? Does it have a name?
It has lots of names.
All right, who invented it?
Lots of people invented it. Do you want to hear about a few of them?
Eh, maybe. Just a little bit.
One of the first was an American government scientist called Vannevar Bush.
He thought of it as long ago as 1945.
1945?
Then there's Ted Nelson, who developed the idea of hypertext in the 1960s.
From the 1970s onwards, there's been a group of people working at what is now called the "media lab" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Then, in the late 1980's, came the "multimedia lab" in San Francisco.
In the early 1990s, Robert Abel developed a pioneering example of multimedia based on Picasso's painting "Guernica".
Can I just interrupt you a moment?
Oh absolutely, at any moment. That's the whole point.
What are those things?
They are called "Micons". They were invented by a Norwegian called Hans Peter Brandmo at MIT in 1989. Try touching him.
A "Micon" is a motion icon. It's motion because it's a sequence of frames
that are run in a loop and it's an icon because it's a representation it's used in a representation for an idea,
or a concept, or a piece of information in some form.
Imagine, for example, that you are watching this interview with me, and I make a reference to Ted Nelson.
Now, Ted Nelson was the person who back in the 60s coined ...
I thought of the idea of hypertext in the fall of 1960, but not under that name, and for years I tried to explain the idea to people everywhere,
and apparently, most people thought I was literally insane.
But it seemed so clear to me from the very beginning that writing should not be sequential,
because the problems we all have in writing sequential prose
derive from the fact that we're trying to make it all lie down in one long string
and if we could only break it up into different chunks that the reader could choose,
why then we wouldn't have to decide what goes in and what goes out, we could just ...
Okay, so how do I find something? Like, how do I find my way back?
You just ask me.
I just did.
Or you can touch the "go back" button, which is a thing that looks like a minimalist fishhook.
So, what do I do now?
May I just make a point here...
Shall I stop you?
Of course. But the point I wanted to make was that you don't have to ask me what you have to do all the time. Do whatever you want.
I'm doing what I want. I'm telling you that I don't know what to do. I'm completely lost.
Then you need a guide.
Find me one.
Now you're getting the idea.
Look, why don't we just start at the beginning?
Well Bush, of course, was President Roosevelt's science advisor during World War II,
and so he was very much in communication with scientific thinking, and recent experiments
and the development of the nuclear bomb project all through the war ...
Well you had a good trip?
Very good.
Well, on the way back? Very smooth trip coming back.
What's this show?
This is Vannevar Bush himself recreating an historic breakfast for the American government film archive.
Strange notion of history.
I'm going to see the President tomorrow.
I'm quite sure that he agrees with us that the job has to be done and that we will have the support we need.
Bush conceived of a device he called the "Memex," and he wrote it up in of all places the "Atlantic Monthly," in summer of 1945,
when World War II was essentially won. He knew it was won, although we the public did not.
And this "Memex" was to be a device that would contain, essentially, all the writings and publications
of every field on microfilm, and he conceived it to be so handy and so small that every scientist would be able to have one.
... the modern way, micro film.
Of course, he rather underestimated how much people would be writing and publishing, but then we all tend to underestimate such things.
Well, I don't know what effect it had in general. I know that Doug Engelbart, who invented word processing and outline processing and the mouse,
and multiple windows on the computer screen,
Doug Engelbart read it in the South Pacific, and I suspect, although I vaguely remember it, of course, this is highly unlikely as a clear memory since I was eight years old,
but I think we read it at the dining room table when I was a boy, because we did take the Atlantic Monthly and we did read it a great deal aloud.
So what about ...?
Hello? Where've you gone?
Uh, oh I'm still here. Normally we agents prefer to hover discreetly in the background.
I noticed that when we went off on our ramble ...
The technical term is "browse".
Can we call it a ramble?
We can call it what you like, it's your system.
All right, let's call it an ice lolly.
Fine. You were saying we went off on our ice lolly ...
When I touch the ... the Norwegian Micon inventor, Micon ... where is it?
It's just here.
Oh yeah. Well, we went off on our ice lolly when I pointed at that,
but when we came back from our ice lolly, we seem to come back via Ted Nelson. Does it all interconnect?
Absolutely. The system is constantly at work in the background, sifting its data for connections.
Every time I show you something, I start to line up other things connected to it that you might want to see.
For example, think of something. Anything.
All right. Um. Well you've got the "Atlantic Monthly" up there. What about, just the Atlantic?
Your wish is my command.
Tom ... Yoh.
What's this?
What did you ask for.
A live feed from the Atlantic Ocean.
Well, you have just encountered the principle of WYAFISWYG
WYAFISWYG?
What You Ask For Is What You Get.
This is a live signal from MariSat west which is currently in geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic Ocean.
Do you mean that this is actually live?
Yes. Well, yes-ish. It takes 10 seconds for the pictures from the satellite to resolve.
The feed from the two submersible sources is absolutely live, well, give or take a few milliseconds.
That's astounding.
Tis, rather, isn't it.
Water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink ... Man the mastheads...call all hands.. [many voices reading]
In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree ...
hang on, hang on, hang on.
Yes?
Why have we suddenly got what's his name, again?
Ted Nelson?
Yes.
Well, I rather like to arrange meaningful coincidences and this is quite a good one.
Ted Nelson has invented a vast system for unifying all of the world's literature,
and there's a very specific reason why that system is related to ... well, let him explain it himself.
The project I've been working on, which has taken, which really began with my term project in the Fall of 1960 and has gradually become something far larger,
is now intended as that unifying world. So it would be a storage mechanism and indexing structure
by which anyone can add documents to the ever-growing pool, and their own style of indexing.
This repository needs to be a place we can all reach electronically, through the telephone, perhaps through laser beam and satellite,
but through various electronic means so that to our computer screens we can bring the material we want
As fast as we need it.
And this has to be available to everyone, everywhere.
And of course, because of its literary tradition and because it means the magic place of literary memory, it has to be called Xanadu.
... where Alph, the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man,
down to a sunless sea. So twice six miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But Oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place!
... miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice
A damsel with a dulcimer, In a vision once I saw ...
Hold on.
Yes? Problems?
No. I'd just like to know a bit more about the dulcimer, I'm very interested in music.
What do you want to know about it? Its history?
Thought to have originated in Persia in the 10th century. One of its descendants is the piano.
The sort of music people play on it, or its shape is very interesting. Are you interested in shapes?
Yes I am. I'm very interested in shapes in music.
After all, music is shape, or rather, shape over time. The shape of a wave form gives you pitch ...
Like this?
Yes. Then if you lay an envelope shape over that, you get timbre. Like this.
Very good.
Yes. If you then extend the time axis... You got rhythm.
Then you impose a shape on the rhythm and you get... A more interesting rhythm.
Well, slightly more interesting. If you then put a shape on the pitch axis, you get ... The melody.
Sorry, that was my Louis Armstrong impression. Good, isn't it? I got it straight off compact disc.
Now, here's a shape for you. What do you think it looks like?
Ah, it looks like an alpine mountain range, with a river, a flock of birds flying over it, small birds down there, a few clouds ...
Do you want to hear it?
Hear it?
It's the opening of Bach's Fugue in C Minor.
But this is very interesting. If you can handle shapes and sounds so well, it might be a very good way of studying music.
One of the problems of music is that you can't actually see the structures though you know they're there.
Aha.
Oh. You're way ahead of me again, are you?
Not just me. There's an American professor of music called Robert Winter
who published an interactive version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1989 to help people see its structure.
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony exhibits a very profound structure.
Music is structure over time, and in one sense, this is the natural flow of life, which after all takes place in time,
but this also creates great obstacles for the listener.
Because unlike a painting, for example Picasso's "Guernica", where you can take in the entire canvas
at one look and focus on that portion which you wish to study or peruse, with music you haven't got that liberty.
However, imagine that we were able to freeze time and to create, as it were, a kind of picture of the piece,
as here. And here we have, for example, the various movements, all four of them, the portions of the movements, the exposition,
the development, the recapitulation, and so forth. And that we can at will, for example, pick on any of them.
Unlike any composer before him, rather than presenting us with a full blown theme,
Beethoven takes us back to the very process of creation. We kind of come out of this void,
and this little unit of energy, a "ta-tam" figure, which all there is there at this hushed beginning,
grows gradually in intensity, and little by little it is as if we are watching the 20 year growth of a mighty oak tree,
compressed into 40 seconds, so that finally it just bursts out of the texture and explodes.
If we jump to a point, six minutes later in this movement, many years later in this character's life,
we think we hear an echo of this theme, some portion of it, but it seems to be locked in a mighty struggle,
to be, in a sense, at war with itself.
Not until the very end of this massive movement does Beethoven permit this theme in essence to find itself, to reach a kind of equilibrium.
And he does this, curiously, not by having some sort of external force come in, but by having the theme grow from within, that is a kind of growth or maturation in character.
And this expansion on the inside is exactly what enables us, for the first time in the movement, to hear the last note be the last note.
We can explore a piece of music like Beethoven's Ninth because it's stored digitally and the computer can control it with absolute precision.
Another example is the interactive version of Picasso's painting, "Guernica", that I mentioned earlier. Would you like to see that?
In a minute.
Do you mind coming back? I'm fed up with talking to a disembodied voice.
Absolutely.
Close up?
Mid shot?
Lounging unobtrusively in a panoramic wide shot?
Mid shot will be fine.
Now, you were saying that computers let you see structure.
I suppose that once any information is stored digitally,
you can start to look for shapes yourself in the data. I remember a piece I once read by Kurt Vonnegut ...
I remember it well.
I haven't told you what it is, yet.
But everything is instantly accessible to me.
And the moment you mentioned Vonnegut, I scanned through all his published work and found an essay on shapes in stories
and assumed that was what you were talking about. Correct?
Eh, well, yes.
Vonnegut says that stories have shapes which can be drawn on a graph,
and that the shape of a given society's stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its parts or spearheads.
'G' stands for good fortune, 'I' stands for ill fortune, 'B' stands for the beginning of a story, 'E' stands for its end.
The late Nelson Rockefeller, for example, on his wedding day, would be very close to the top of the "G-I" scale.
A shopping bag lady waking up on a doorstep this morning would be somewhere nearer the middle, but not at the bottom, since the day is balmy and clear. Ha ha.
A much beloved story in our society, says Vonnegut, is about a person who is leading a bearable life,
who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterwards for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength.
Almost all creation myths are staircases like this:
a god of some sort gives the people a sun, the moon, the oceans, the animals, the trees, and so on.
The Old Testament creation myth is unique, in that here, as you can see, he takes it all away again, ejecting Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
The shape of Kafka's metamorphosis, in which an already hopelessly unhappy man turns into a cockroach, looks like this:
But then ...
So the point I was trying to make is that, since you can find shapes in all kinds of information,
if that information is stored digitally, the computer can find them, yes?
Exactly!
Searching by shape is a very powerful tool.
Here. Pick a shape. Any shape.
The trapezoid is a four sided shape with two parallel faces.
The dulcimer is trapezoid-shaped, right?
So are the timber houses built by Neolithic people living on the banks of the Danube.
The carved stone windows in the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu,
the sails of Thor Heyerdahl's Ra, The pressure-time curve of a well-designed rocket ...
Picasso's painting "Guernica" is a special case of a trapezoid, i.e., a rectangle.
Now hold on, hold on, that's a huge jump. Why are you constantly trying to push "Guernica" at me?
Well, it's ever so good ...
All right, let's see it.
You'll be glad you did. It was one of the first ...
Let's just see it!
All right, all right, don't get impatient.
The Guernica project is about Picasso's painting, the famous painting of "Guernica", which occurred at the time of the Spanish Civil War.
But it's really much more than that. It is, as we used to say in Art School, is that art is a mirror held up to life.
And for us, what we wanted to do was to choose the most simple of databases, if you will,
because we're running off a computer, that would allow us a window into a much bigger world.
So that by simply accessing the painting we could open doors to a thousand different types of experience.
So what you see down below here is the subject, of course,the painting Guernica, and up above it, a series of tools whose basic function
is to answer the who, what, when, where why of how we would get to any subject.
Spain. 1937. Pablo Picasso's homeland is divided by a brutal civil war.
First pictures from the vast republic of the holy city of Guernica, scene of the most terrible air raid
our modern history yet can boast. Hundreds were killed here: men, women and children.
Four thousand bombs were dropped out of a blue sky into a hell that raged unchecked for five murderous hours.
This was a city, and these were homes like yours.
Picasso was appalled by the massacre at Guernica.
He expressed his deepest feelings in a vast canvas populated by distorted figures.
The painting is considered among his greatest work.
What's interesting is that we have just seen a very serious and very sad description of what happened to Guernica on that day,
but interpretation is everything, and interpretation as we know is that everything is correct.
Picasso's interpretation is correct, the newsreel we just saw is correct.
It would be very interesting for me to be able to reach out or reach back in time and talk to people who were there at that time.
So, if we select "witness", I suggest that we can select any one of these Germans or Spaniards
who could tell us from their point of view their personal experience of this moment.
When I see the animals and the dead people in the picture, I remember that night when I went along the road to Guernica, after we left the air raid shelters.
It was full of dead animals, and people covered in sacks. Dead.
I have always been filled with emotion to see that woman burning on the balcony, with her arms outstretched. I think she could be my grandmother.
Having selected the timeline tool, which is very powerful, because we can look at all of Picasso's life,
or we could examine the twentieth century and all the things that influenced him and in turn he influenced.
And if we can zero in for instance on a particular area, let's say six years later in 1943, and using an actor to actually read from Picasso's diary,
we can come upon a piece of philosophy that maybe is equally as important as the painting itself.
Picasso continued to live and paint in Paris. He was still so incensed that he continued to print propaganda leaflets of the Guernica painting.
One day, in 1943, at 8 AM, there was a knock at the door. Picasso stumbled out of bed and there was a German officer at the door,
and he was waving one of the photographs of Guernica. He was very angry, and he said to Picasso:
"So you did this?"
And Picasso calmly looked him in the eye and said, "No, you did!"
Now imagine that you've been through this whole experience. The database is four hours long.
But we want people, to be able, in multimedia, to take away their own unique experience. So what we'd like to share
with you is what we did, in encapsulating our personal experience, of what we discovered in the Guernica project in this 90 seconds,
is a preview of what you, the viewer, might be able to do with the very same material.
Whew!
Better?
Yes thank you.
In fact, Bob Abel calls that a "synapse sequence," it's intended as a high speed action replay of everything you've explored.
It seems to me that if people are going to make sense of all this, there's a kind of language that has to be invented.
Yes. Like films have a grammar that someone who'd never seen one would probably have difficulty following.
The jump cut, the sudden juxtaposition of scenes and images, time jumps, zooms, hand held shots, fades...
all the sort of things that make a modern movie much richer than just a camera stuck in front of a play.
Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith invented a lot of these techniques way back at the early part of the century, but they became ...
No! Oh! Agh! Oh, oh, ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh ...
You see the sort of thing I mean?
Yes, but that grammar has to evolve gradually, doesn't it? Or people will just get lost.
Yes. And a lot of thought has been going into exactly how it should work.
Have a look what the Multimedia Lab have been up to while I get myself cleaned up.
[ahem] We're trying to explore the area of multimedia. The idea is that in a computing environment you have images and sounds,
and you want to think about what you can do with those.
You want to think about what you can make with them, and you want to think about what you can understand with them. [ahem] And we're finding the rules for doing that.
The group is itself made up of a lot of diverse and very rich [ahem] talents and backgrounds and I think [ahem] there's a lot to be learned from how you ...
One of the interesting features of multimedia is that it allows you to put together many different stories,
so it's not just one story; but it's really a multiplicity of interwoven stories or representations.
And it's that multiplicity that makes the difference, [ahem] the fact that it can really hitchhike from one to another,
bounce around, and compare [ahem] different points of view ...
I think people, as they're watching a drama, will be motivated to find out more about it if it's a good drama.
What we need [ahem] to provide for them is a simple way to quickly get to that information if they have the urge to do so.
And then they'll find their own idiosyncratic path. We don't need to prepare that path for them.
I think "Life Story" is a good example of that, where people can leave a drama and dive into more information about DNA or about the...
We are looking at a demonstration prototype that we built around a film called "Life Story" produced by the BBC
about the discovery of the DNA double helix by Jim Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.
One of the things that this prototype allows us to do is to play back key scenes from the drama.
For instance, the first encounter between Jim Watson and Francis Crick.
You're interested in genes?
Certainly.
All yours.
Where would you look for a gene, if you were looking?
Oh, excuse me, my hunch is the nucleic acid. I mean, if you ask me what's fun, right now, I'd say DNA.
Me too. I'm sorry, is it Francis?
Yes.
Jim.
Hi. Hello.
Now that we've been introduced to the key characters, we can explore other scenes in the drama, using this plot map.
For instance, let's select the next scene down, "Why DNA?".
Why DNA?
Because it's there, ... ...doing nothing, ...in every single living cell...
... where as so far, the gene is entirely an imaginary entity... a function without a substance ...
we need a substance without function ...
Now, what's it's made of? Okay, we know that phosphates and four bases ...
What shape is it? I mean in all probability a helix... Bye bye helix.
This scene has piqued our curiosity, and yet there are words that I can't understand.
One of the tools that this example provides is ability to query the transcript of the scene.
Which allows us to select words we don't understand, such as, for instance, DNA.
I am then taken to a new pamphlet of information, this time about DNA,
and I can browse through animations that show me the molecular structure of DNA ...
Or select Fireside conversation to watch a documentary interview with the actual Watson and Crick, talking about their working relationship.
Francis, do you think we were lucky to have solved it, or was it real brain work?
Well, I guess we were certainly lucky, and of course you give the impression, Jim, we didn't really do too much thinking,
but we were lucky I think for two reasons:
We were thinking about the problem at the right time and then the two of us, by collaborating, when one of us got on the wrong track,
the other one could get us out of it.
I've often had the thought, in a slightly different way, that if either of us, you know, was either two years older or two years younger,
at least in my case, I would have never solved it.
So you see what happens? We jumped from a drama about Watson and Crick to this ...
So with all this jumping around, in what's supposed to be a drama, what happens to stories?
More to the point, what happens to authors?
Haven't you ever wished, in writing a story, that you could take several alternative paths through it?
No,...
Don't talk such rot. I happen to know you've written interactive fiction yourself. Shut up and don't be difficult. Push a button.
Who are the children? Are they playing a computer game?
No, they're far too old for that. They are playing at cat and mouse. It's a form of interactive story telling.
[children's voices] My stories are different from stories that a child would read in a book because, first of all, they are very much visually oriented.
A child actually moves the pointing device to an area that interests her
and there may be several on the screen at one time, and she can choose which one looks the most interesting to her.
And each object leads down a different branch of the story.
Each branch leads eventually to a happy ending.
[Don't press on the birds. Yeah. Do it. Awww. Poor birds! ]
It's possible to combine story telling with interactivity if you take the story apart
and make sure that each thread or each branch that allows a choice is a story in itself.
If you have three branches that all lead to the same ending, each one has to be an equally valid story, and that is the challenge.
It's similar to literature in the sense that a really good story has different levels.
You bring your own level of maturity to it. Kipling did that.
His stories were enjoyed by children and adults.
Knock Knock.
Ah, Who's there?
Tom.
Tom who?
Uh ... I haven't got a second name.
Oh.
You seem disappointed.
I thought you were trying to tell me a joke.
So did I. I'm not very good at it, am I?
Computers don't understand about jokes. Artificial intelligence engineers have been trying to understand how jokes work for years.
There's a worrying feeling that it's nothing to do with intelligence.
How many artificial intelligence engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
I don't know.
Ah. Neither did they.
Well that was quite a good one!
Good what?
Oh, never mind. So you haven't got a second name then, Tom.
Well, no. Not unless you give me one.
Well most people get their second names from their father. I suppose you haven't got one.
Oh yes I have!
Well, what's his name?
Ask him.
Hi. Or, let me put that another way:
Hi. My name is ... well ... I have a problem with my name.
The people who created me, Michael Wahrman and Brad DeGraf, did a pretty amazing job.
I represent one of the most astounding feats of real time computer animation to date.
I can talk, I can sing, I can ... well, all right I can't dance, because I haven't got a body, but who's perfect?
So, what did they call me?
Supremo, The Magnificent?
Zagarabanza, The Completely Astounding?
No. They called me ...
Mike.
I think people will get that skill to representing human faces that you will be able to make it indistinguishable.
In fact, when we first did our work, we had it to a point, where we had to back off in the lighting,
to make it clear that this is not someone who was shot, you know a real person, like Max Headroom, shot and then post-processed to make them look computer.
And so I think it is certainly very possible, in the near future, to represent things that well.
I think if you do the lighting right, we can do that today. We've got about 10 seconds in one of our rehearsals, which most people think is live.
I think we got lucky. But I think it was a mistake.
I think it will be possible for these characters and creatures to express feelings, and I think it could be truly and delightfully obnoxious.
I think if you go into your kitchen and you don't go to the refrigerator, the refrigerator could grimace at you and try to attract you over to the refrigerator.
Tom, I feel my whole working life has been a crusade against the mere possibility of talking fridges.
Is this really your idea of a great future? A world where fridges talk?
Because if it is, I'll wake up, then where will you be?
I'll still be here. Where will you be?
Back in the real world.
How will you tell?
Well ... walls, ceilings, doors, and so on ...
Can be very deceptive stuff.
Hmm. What do you mean by that?
This.
What this is in fact, is a package that holds two flat panel liquid crystal displays, a fairly, kind of medium resolution, and there is one for each eye.
We look at those through very wide-angle optics,
the idea is to try to match human field of view as much as possible.
We can see about a 180 degree field of view
these optics give us about a 120 degree with a true stereo image.
Okay I'm looking at a computer generated image of the actual lab that we're working in here.
I'm seeing a monochrome fairly simple database that we developed to see if we could do a life-size virtual environment.
It's set up so that I can actually look around in all directions.
I'm completely surrounded by the computer generated image. It's appearing in true stereo.
As I reach my hand out, I have an instrument, a glove on it,
with which I can control a computer generated model of my hand,
that appears to be where my real hand is in virtual space, so I move my fingers, the virtual hand moves ...
I can make various gestures with the glove that are recognized by the host computer.
For example, I can pick up virtual objects, I can make a gesture to fly through this space,
I can grab objects. To fly I have to make a particular gesture, like that, to make a menu come up
and make another gesture to trigger an item on the menu, to enable flying.
And then I make a very simple gesture of pointing, with two fingers, like this.
And I can actually move through this space, move my viewpoint around, and actually ...
I'm flying up out of the room, looking down from above, and if I just point my hand again,
pointing with two fingers, I can fly slowly back into the room.
Some of the more commercial applications of the technology we've developed here
appear to be certainly in the recreation and entertainment industry,
this idea of entertainment, or interactive fantasy where literally a game player could become a character in...
You could driving your own character, you could be creating your own character while you're playing the game.
Of course, you would have to be fairly unconscious so that you weren't spending all your time just thinking about that.
But you could be beautiful or you could be ugly, or you could be a single point of light.
If we're going to spend all our time reinventing ourselves in a computer, what's going to happen to families and things?
I know what you're trying to say. Hey, when I were a lad, we used to make our own entertainment.
We used to walk into living room and switch on the telly ourselves.
All right, so what do families do now, then?
My great theory with it is if it removes people too much from "real reality", from physical reality, from nature etc.
in the same way that living in a city does, somewhat, there's a lot of fascinating ...
People do it already. When people go together to go to a movie, they are in a virtual reality.
What's different is that it isn't interactive and isn't under their control.
When you read a novel, if everyone reads a novel, in a way they are sharing a virtual reality ...
visual environments, and lands, and characters, in a manner that is convincing,
and yet is totally fantastic.
I think that words are a poor way to show that. I think what you have to do is, you have to do it.
Tom, are you there?
Sorry. I was just having a virtual cup of tea. It's all right, I've virtually finished it now.
Tom, Michael Wahrman just said that in order to understand this, you have to experience it for yourself.
Yes, yes, very true. Bright man. He needs a shave, but he knows what he's talking about.
Well, I think I'd like to do that, please.
What? Shave?
No. I want to try it for myself. I want to see what the current state of the art in Artificial Realities is.
Oh, why be so modest?
It doesn't have to be the current state of the art, I mean this is a dream after all. Why not take advantage of it?
Very good.
Your glove, sir.
And sir's virtual reality helmet, sir.
You seem to have gone all obsequious again, Tom.
I know that sir secretly prefers it, sir.
If sir would just lean forward a little, I'd wish sir bon voyage.
[muffled voices] ... as we're good, we're also making a contribution, because we're not talking here about gizmos, we're talking here about changing the way ...
[Overlapping voices] In the medium... by which we can display this I would predict by the early 90s that this will become a
universally accepted method of communication, maybe become dominant, even replacing linear television ...
[Overlapping voices] ...make sense of itself, it brings out whatever is special within the individual, and allows them to put part of themself into the story, yes I hope ...
[Overlapping voices] ... while that's one part of the equation, I think we are slowly realizing there's a second, and that is, what are we trying to say with all of this ...
... links and quotations stretching forever to the horizon is a great literature, that will expand...
... I think I know how Descartes felt with X and Y, stretching forever, as it's defining all mathematics, and realizing
that he was the first person to stand at the center, but he wasn't the center, the center itself could be you...
Those then, are the prospects for tomorrow. And the outlook for the rest of the week is something we simply don't know at the moment.
But for now, I'll say good night. Linear television is closing down.
Subtitles by Nancy Webb and Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) Copyright 2017