Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 13, 1995 TAG: 9504190001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK DE LA VINA KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Four decades later, the creative minds of television and film are turning to a new area of science to allow characters to battle monsters as well as visit dreamscapes and fulfill assorted fantasies.
Cyberspace is becoming the hip new TV plot device. Whether used to give a character an opportunity to sample virtual sex or plug into the alternate day-glo of ``VR.5,'' cyberspace has found a place on television.
``We have an incredibly hot topic, something on the front of every newspaper,'' said Michael Wolff, the head of a company that bears his name and publishes books about the Internet. ``And television is obsessed with wanting to seem cool or hip. But one of the ways it projects that is by taking these stories and popularizing them to the point that they're no longer true, no longer real and no longer hip.''
The most obvious example of TV's vision of cyberspace is Fox's ``VR.5.'' Each week, wallflower/telephone line woman Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer) dives into a cyber realm where she has a range of surreal adventures. While the show takes liberties with the realities of computers and cyberspace - one episode showed Bloom using a now-antiquated modem - executive producer John Sacret Young explained the subjects of the Internet and virtual reality presented the writers with a deep well for potential storylines.
``The so-called information superhighway is coming at us with greater and greater speed and we have a fear and ignorance of it,'' Young said. ``We also have a sort of desire for it and a need to rewrite it into stories.''
Although ``VR.5'' is the most extreme example of TV's take on cyberspace, other programs have had a turn at depicting the technological frontier:
An episode of ``Mad About You'' featured the characters played by Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt living out their fantasies with a virtual reality device that hooks them up with Andre Agassi and Christie Brinkley.
In the TV movie remake of ``The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,'' Kirk Cameron logs onto his computer and the word ``Internet'' flashes on his screen - a ridiculously simplified version of what happens when a user connects with the Internet.
A music video for the rock band Aerosmith features a teen-ager living out his amorous dreams with video Lolita Alicia Silverstone through an interactive computer program.
An upcoming episode of Showtime's ``Outer Limits'' has a scientist using a virtual reality machine to look into the future.
While everyone in Tinseltown seems eager to blast into cyberspace, few are presenting it accurately. Virtual reality, the most popular aspect of cyberspace presented on television, in reality is nothing more than a glorified video game. At the moment, the most complex forms of virtual reality technology is used in flight simulators or in computerized architectural plans.
``TV oversimplifies it and makes it appear more outrageous than it is,'' said Chip Bayers, managing editor at HotWired, a commercial Internet service. ``It is as extreme and outrageous as real life, but the range of subjects you tend to see associated with cyberspace stories are very narrowly focused, like the teen-age hacker story or virtual sex. They seem to be enamored with virtual reality above and beyond its common use or practical applications.''
``It's funny,'' Wolff said, ``I see these things on TV, and I just kind of block them out because they're so far from the truth.''
by CNB