At 08:44 PM 11/24/96 -0500, you wrote:
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>I am doing a proposal that involves virtual reality worlds, interactive
>multimedia and would like to hear a science centre perspective?
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>I have used VR in a museum setting, I set up the UK's first permanent
Museum VR at Snibston Discovery Park in association with Leicester
University a couple of years back. From my experience I would approach this
with extreme caution for several reasons. The main thing to bear in mind is
that if you promise VR you must give people headsets - they are synonymous
with VR in the public eye, use desktop VR or motion simulators billed as VR
and they will be disappointed. The lessons I learnt were:
-it has a poor cost/benefit payoff, A decent VR unit will cost $25,000 and
can only be used by one person at a time.
- You are limited to about 4 minutes use time per person in a VR helmet or
you risk side effects (nausea disorientation, temporary loss of 3D vision,
flashbacks) in up to 61% of users - to avoid this you need megabuck military
simulators.
- Even given this limited use time,each unit can only get about 80 people
through in an 8 hour museum day maximum (allowing 1 min to put on and take
off the rig) - the same amount of cash spent on other forms of display would
give a good experience to far more people in the same time.
-The public also needed assistance in getting into the helmet and orienting
themselves in it which needs a member of staff for at least every 4 units
which is also costly.
-Most people are not used to functioning in a virtual space and take at
least their 4 minutes to get used to moving their head about, so miss much
of the experience you are trying to convey.
- It is very poor at conveying information, and far better at impressions,
people should not need to do anything specific while under, architectural
walk rounds are about the best things, with the virtual Lascaux and Cluny
abbey being good examples. If you try and make them show something which
contradicts the sensations their body is giving (eg simulating zero gravity)
you instantly generate motion sickness.
- Apart from the military jobs which are vastly expensive, as I said, even
the most modern VR still has pretty low resolution in most situations, so is
lousy at being convincing or showing detail, if things get too detailed the
simulation can't keep up with the speed of head movement and increases the
probability of nausea. Char Davies did an interesting art installation using
military VR, called Osmose, a person can stay in this for 15 or more
minutes, but the cost/benefit balance is even worse.
- The headsets, and we tried various kinds, very fragile and on days of
heavy use they would invariably go down, a situation which gets much worse
if visitors handle them. The only kit which has struck me as up to heavy
visitor use is the rig produced by Virtuality for arcade games, but they are
not really interested in the museums market and would not work with
Snibston, despite being the local technology museum. They would sell us an
off the shelf shoot 'em up, but nothing else.
Having said this, I would definitely think about using VR, or
perhaps some customised derivative of it in the future ( I was involved in
an unsuccessful millennium bid in which I was going to use a variant to put
people into a live archaeological dig from the diggers perspective using a
fibre optic camera/VR headset lash up). But I would not make it the
centrepiece of what I was doing and would not publicise the museum centre on
the basis of the hardware used, but on the content it conveyed. I would
definitely use it to put people into places they cannot normally go, to
evoke teleprescence or to meet a specific interpretive need should one
arise. As for other multimedia, although I have worked very satisfyingly
with CD-ROMs, I sense a move away from them, things like Brittanica are now
web sites, as CD-ROMs are pretty inflexible, I'd use an intranet instead and
would be enormously careful of live web access as page load times can be far
in excess of visitors patience, although you can use cache memory to make
things appear a lot faster.
Stuart Brand of the Well ond Whole Earth Catalogue once said very appositely
that installations relying on cutting edge technology are fine the first
year, OK the second and embarassing forever after that, which is very much
worth bearing in mind when considering VR and multimedia. It is an excellent
tool, but still a tool and will only ever be as good as the content it
communicates. The good old 3D diorama is not dead, a VR simulation would be
a very expensive and clumsy way of doing one at the moment, but it could be
a very good way of doing something else. The development of technology is
driven by demand, and we are in a position to make demands of VR and
multimedia that can push its capabilities in the way things like games
cannot, if we continue to experiment, think and be creative in our use of
technology, who knows where it will lead? If we become mesmerised by
technology for its own sake there is only one way it can lead - up a dead end.
IAN SIMMONS
- A mind stretched by new ideas never returns to the same shape
- RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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