Virtual Reality

Kathy Choi touches a kiosk screen, then looks up at a larger wall screen to see digitally created yellowish-brown mounds snaking through bright green grassland dotted with brilliant blue rivers and lakes. The ancient earthworks in the Ohio River Valley now are grass- and tree-covered mounds and walls diminished by development, floods and agriculture. But she's seeing them as they might have looked 2,000 years ago by way of a computerized fly-over.

At a recent amusement park industry convention in Miami, Mitch Francis, chairman of a new company named Cinema Ride Inc. felt the heat of competition. There were up to 100 companies at the International Assn. of Amusement Parks and Attractions annual gathering claiming to be in Francis' field, marketing what's known as "motion simulator" rides for theme parks, shopping malls and movie theaters.

It was only a year ago that the evangelists of the software technology known as Virtual Reality Modeling Language were declaring that the age of "virtual worlds" had arrived. Soon, they said, we'd all be tooling about three-dimensional spaces and living alternate lives through our own virtual characters, known as avatars. It would be the famed science-fiction novel "Snow Crash" coming to life.

When psychologist Ralph Lamson first put on a virtual-reality helmet at an exhibition of new technology in San Jose two years ago, he unexpectedly collided with his worst fear: his terror of heights. He found himself in a tall building looking through floor-to-ceiling windows at a panorama far below.

When 5-year-old Christopher Cobbs straps himself into his electric wheelchair, his mother doesn't worry that he'll get dirty plowing through the mud or injured in an accident. With his small hand gripping the joystick and his eyes locked on tiny TV screens inside a headset, Christopher zooms through a computer-generated world of virtual reality, learning to pilot a wheelchair the same way an astronaut learns to land the space shuttle. "Put me on speed!"

As workers in Dresden, Germany, lay the first stones to rebuild a Baroque church destroyed in World War II, computer scientists here are creating a 3-D version of what the finished project will look like. Using a virtual reality headset, viewers can see the blue doors of the church open to a view of the ornate ivory and gold altar and the organ that Johann Sebastian Bach played in 1736.

Toward the end of "Virtual Reality," author Howard Rheingold peers into the world of tomorrow and offers the following report: "(T)here is no reason to believe you won't be able to map your genital effectors to your manual sensors and have direct genital contact by shaking hands." Then he asks: "What will happen to social touching when nobody knows where anybody else's erogenous zones are located?" I must admit that this question had never occurred to me.

Soon, MTA bus drivers might be careening down the wrong side of a street, running red lights, knocking out pedestrians and smashing into tall buildings. And Angelenos will be better off for it. The accidents are part of a video game-like world generated by a new virtual reality bus at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's training center.

Iwerks Entertainment believes it is on the verge of creating the movie theater of the future. In a major boost for the Burbank company, the huge Japanese trading concern Itochu Corp. apparently thinks so too. Since it was founded in 1986 by former Walt Disney Co. executives Don Iwerks and Stan Kinsey, Iwerks has become one of the top designers of special-format movie theaters for theme parks and world expos. The closely held company expects revenues of $35 million this year.

At a recent amusement park industry convention in Miami, Mitch Francis, chairman of a new company named Cinema Ride Inc., felt the heat of competition. There were up to 100 companies at the International Assn. of Amusement Parks and Attractions' annual gathering claiming to be in Francis' field, marketing what's known as "motion simulator" rides for theme parks, shopping malls and movie theaters.