Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 30, 1990                   TAG: 9007310343
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A/6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RE-CREATION

The idea is that a person can put on special clothing wired to a computer. The suit and gloves have sensors; the eyewear includes two tiny video screens. The computer generates images that appear to the viewer in three dimensions. Thus, the viewer becomes part of a separate reality.

In its simplest existing form, virtual reality is an extension of video-game technology. Instead of manipulating a joystick to cause a figure to leap over an obstacle, the player actually jumps. Theoretically, two people in different cities could play virtual tennis against each other, or a virtual golfer could play the world's great courses without leaving the living room.

Even the most enthusiastic boosters of virtual reality admit that it's still in the Kitty Hawk stage. The important uses of the technology may well be unimaginable now. Several serious applications have been mentioned. Surgeons might be taught to use a scalpel without cutting flesh. More realistic flight simulators could be used to train and test commercial pilots. Specialized military equipment might be designed and evaluated without the construction of expensive prototypes.

Those uses and others have attracted the attention of AT&T, IBM and DARPA, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. (DARPA is a small, powerful organization that stimulates and manages the vanguard of military technologies.) If those corporate and governmental heavy hitters are interested in virtual reality, it's not merely a toy; it's an idea with substance.

It's also intriguing. What, after all, is real? At what point does an escape from reality become a new reality? For some people, a golf course or video screen is as real a place as any other, maybe more so. Ten years from now, virtual reality may be an arcane branch of computer science that's still used and understood by only a few initiates. Or it could be a multiuse technology that's an unremarkable part of everyday life: something that people wonder how they ever got along without.

Whatever the future holds for this concept, one thing is certain. Before scientists can recreate the perception of reality, they have to understand perception. They have to know how human senses work, how individuals experience any reality, virtual or otherwise. Such knowledge will be invaluable whether its application.