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Conference heron::euro_swas_ai

Title:	Europe-Swas-Artificial-Intelligence

Moderator:	HERON::BUCHANAN

Created:	Fri Jun 03 1988
Last Modified:	Thu Aug 04 1994
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	442
Total number of notes:	1429

239.0. "Is AR anything like AI?" by HERON::ROACH (TANSTAAFL !) Fri Oct 19 1990 15:12

Printed by: Pat Roach                                    Document Number: 013535
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                  I N T E R O F F I C E   M E M O R A N D U M

                                        Date:     19-Oct-1990 02:19pm CET
                                        From:     Bob Heinz
                                                  HEINZ AT A1 at OFFPLS at MKO
                                        Dept:     Corporate Sales
                                        Tel No:   264-5641

TO:  PAT ROACH @VBO


Subject: Is AR anything like AI?





                  I N T E R O F F I C E   M E M O R A N D U M

                                        Date:     15-Oct-1990 03:14pm CET
                                        From:     TOM WERST
                                                  WERST.TOM AT A1 at OFFPLS at MKO
                                        Dept:     INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS CONSULTING
                                        Tel No:   603-884-8163

TO: See Below

Subject: Artificial Reality

VNS COMPUTER NEWS:                            [Tracy Talcott, VNS Computer Desk]
==================                            [Nashua, NH, USA                 ]

 ARTIFICIAL REALITY - GETS TAKEN SERIOUSLY IN TOKYO
	{The Wall Street Journal, 11-Oct-90, p. B1}
   Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, renowned for nursing
 frontier technologies into mature businesses, is showing interest in a group
 of technologies that enable users to immerse themselves in three-dimensional
 images, molding this "artificial reality" with their hands. Today, artificial
 reality is mainly a research curiosity. Some big U.S. firms are studying the
 field, but so far commercial applications are few. The best-known one is a toy
 glove from Mattel Inc. that enables players of Nintendo games to control video
 screens with the wave of a hand. MITI's interest could change that. The
 ministry has called on some of Japan's biggest electronics concerns to discuss
 the future of artificial-reality techniques this week. Experts say a MITI
 initiative - targeting entertainment and consumer-electronics products - may
 follow.


Distribution:

TO:  CONNIE WHARFF @OGO
TO:  RICH COLARUSSO @MRO
TO:  CARROLL WRIGHT @MKO
TO:  DAVE YOUNG @MKO
TO:  CATHY STOCKWELL @MRO
TO:  BRIAN T. MAHER @MRO
TO:  CARROLL WRIGHT @MKO
TO:  BFULLER @CHECK @VMSMAIL
TO:  DALE GUNN @MRO
TO:  DAN SULLIVAN @MRO
TO:  ESTHER HOLDERBY @MRO
TO:  SHERRY GRONOWSKI @MRO
TO:  KAREN CALZONE @MRO
TO:  JULIE BEAUDET @MRO
TO:  HRATCH ASTARJIAN @MRO
TO:  TRAVERS @FRICK @VAXMAIL
TO:  Sherry Lawler                        ( LAWLER AT A1 at OFFPLS at MKO )
TO:  Bob Heinz                            ( HEINZ AT A1 at OFFPLS at MKO )
TO:  CHARLIE MOEDER @MRO
TO:  MARY ANN HODGES                      ( HODGES.MARY ANN AT A1 at OFFPLS at MKO )
TO:  BRUCE GOLDBERG @MRO
TO:  NICK AFENTAKIS @MRO
TO:  JOHN STINEBAUGH @MRO
TO:  BEVERLY MANSFIELD @MRO

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
239.1	VR	ISTG::SELECT::KELLY		`Thu Oct 25 1990 21:10`	72
	Greetings, Classic Wall Street Journal article! Several years behind the real world, and loaded with incorrect terminology. Always dangerous to get any kind of techie information from the greed-mongers. Remarkable that there was none of the usual Journal off-the-wall "Projected revenues for the year 2000 in this field". But American business people love to read that kind of silly Japan-is-way-ahead-of-us propaganda. Kind of sad, actually. Everyone reading this file, I'm sure, already knows the name of the field is VIRTUAL reality. But what you may not know is that even though Jaron Lanier and his VPL company is way out in front in the design of VR hardware (magic helmet, data suit, linked treadmill, eyephones), DEC is actually doing some of the work for making virtual reality useful. One of the projects at the Univ of Washington is the design of the new Seattle shipping terminal using VR. You put on the eyephones, don the data glove and suit, and mount the treadmill. Then you're inside the virtual building (constructed CAD-fashion by the architects). You walk through, notice that the walls are too close together in one corridor, and ask the designer/programmers to pop the walls out two feet. They do, and you continue walking through the building (actually on the treadmill), looking left and right through the eyephones, suggesting revisions to the building's construction. And some of this work was funded by a ~2$miilion hardware grant from DEC to the human interface lab at UW. The interesting part of this project is that the treadmill walker can poke his head INSIDE the walls to look at the placement of studs and insulation, or poke his head THROUGH the wall to examine the landscaping outside. What's even cooler than walking through the virtual world is touching it, and the latest work from Lanier involves an implant into the data glove that acts as a tactile simulation system. This has created a new branch of computer science research called Dildonics. (No, I'm not kidding. DILDOnics, because of the phalic shape of the tiny steel pins in the glove implant.) The implant allows you to see a virtual vase on a virtual table, reach out, and actually FEEL the vase as the steel dildonic pins in the glove press against your palm when your hand reaches the coordinates of the vase. Every adolescent male who has heard of this system has suggested the programming of rather obvious sexual fantasies into the system, and in time, that will come (yikes, a pun). And the first people to walk around in these virtual worlds have sometimes not wanted to ever leave. Real Reality is so abrasive and nasty (for example, you write a harmless note in a notesfile somewhere and get blasted from all kinds of angry dudes with foreign accents!). So, the people who go into the virtual worlds sometimes use them as the ultimate escapist drug. The groups at DEC working in virtual reality are at Spitbrook (Michael Good), and Southwest R&D in Albuquerque. Wicked cool stuff, but no link to AI yet. However, Artificial Life, another field still on the groundfloor has real links to AI, and the people in my group doing Artificial Life work are all KEs who also build expert systems. An A-Life system is essentially a bag of little expert systems all of which cooperate and compete for resources and space with each other, and can change their own programming (genetic algorithm style) or have their programming randomly changed by "mutation". The fun applications are in ecosystem heuristic modelling, but the real world applications are in industrial design (We're working on both kinds of apps.) Tons of fun to come in in the morning and see your screen full of electronic bacteria that you left growing overnight in your microVAX. Cool stuff. Gangs of fun. The VR/AL video arcades in 20 years are going to be an absolute blast. Dikk Kelly (am I forgiven yet for past notes?)
239.2	All forgotten by me! (But I got in hot water too!)	64802::ROACH	TANSTAAFL !	`Tue Nov 13 1990 17:05`	0
239.3	Keep it "coming", Dikk	OSITEL::BRITTAIN	Peter, ACT-IT Munich @UFC *773-3102	`Fri Jan 04 1991 11:11`	12
	Dikk, I'm only now catching up on my notes (breaching during an extended period submerged in project work). As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to forgive for "past notes". I'm enjoying your very informative and entertaining contributions to EURO_SWAS_AI - keep it up, and the Dave Barry notesfile could have serious competition! best regards, pete.