From: Ben Delaney
<ben@cyberedge.com>
Date:
To: Marc Bernatchez <marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca>,
3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Is there any standard in VR?
Reply-To: ben@cyberedge.com
Hello Marc,
While I agree with much of what you say, I have one substantial
disagreement. you said, "Granted, there is no
real VE/VE market
yet."
In fact, there is a huge VR market, valued worldwide by my
company at $36 billion. this includes all aspects of
VizSim/VR --
hardware, software, consulting, salaries, maintenance, site prep,
training, etc. This figure is derived from our annual study of the
VizSim/VR market, The Market for Visual Simulation/Virtual Reality
Systems, currently in its fifth edition. More
information is found on
our web site, http://www.cyberedge.com.
In fact, each individual industry using VizSim, such as oil and gas
exploration, medical training, architectural visualization, military
training, and so on, creates its own standards which are applicable
to the field. this is usual and appropriate.
We need to keep in mind that VizSim/VR is not an
stand-alone
technology. Rather, it is an enabling technology that is used in many
diverse fileds. Each of these fileds has particular, and
often
exclusive requirements, and therefore, develops standards and
conventions to meet the needs of its practitioners.
So, perhaps the question is not a universal VR standard, but rather,
translators to enable people to move between standards. We see
many examples for this, such as converting analog video to digital,
feet to meters, USB to RS232 ports, and many others.
Thanks for starting a stimulating dialogue. I hope this adds a bit to it.
Ben Delaney
---
On
Thank you all who took the time
to share their views about my question
regarding standards applied to VR/VE.
I guess we can summarize by saying there is basically nothing yet.
VRML (soon X3D) is a standard 3D format useful to communicate various
3D scenes and package it in a file. Still, it does not apply to the
kind of standard that was mainly referred to, that is, standard user
interface interaction techniques in general.
Worldtoolkit and such commercial toolkits are in between OpenGL and
the kind of standards we are referring to. They make it easier to code
a 3D environment simulation in terms of 3D objects and scene graph
management. Still, they are too low level to provide a standard UI
framework that VR application developers can use to create consistent
user interface, that share a common look and feel for the end-users.
Chad Wingrave bring very interesting remarks and I
feel the same
regarding his initial remark. "everyone builds
their own". As long as
this situation persists, we will not see major improvements.
Jerry Isdale added the HLA / DIS standards to the list. These are
network standards for VisSim applications which were initially put up
by military needs. I have worked with these a bit while I was at CAE
Inc. (flight simulation) but I'm not sure they adapt well to more
general VR/VE simulations. These standards use a pretty
military-oriented (I.e. battle-field simulation oriented) vocabulary.
Still, it may represents a good starting point to
address the network
portion of the VE/VR systems.
Mark Young and Ivan Poupyrev pointed out that it may be too early to
try to standardize VE/VR user interfaces. I am more with the line of
thinking of Sandy Ressler. I understand (and greatly respect) Mark and
Ivan point of view. Granted, there is no real VE/VE market yet.
Granted, a standard is usually put up front to unify the way many
commercial instances of a technology can interface together. That been
said, sometimes an early standard effort can help the emergence of
commercial use of a technology. We are currently the best placed to
have a clear vision of what is available and what can be done to put
some order in the VR UI arena.
There is currently "fog" in this field impeding a real commercial
interest in developing professional user interface for the 3D market.
There is not enough knowledge about the current interaction techniques
and 3D UI paradigms. A "filter selection" will probably have to be
performed on the many interaction techniques so that only the few best
remains and develops into standards (See "Immersive VR for Scientific
Visualisation, A progress report",
discussion on that topic). The problem is that this filtering action
has to be performed by the end-users. We are stuck in a vicious
circle.
I like to make a parallel with natural selection. If you look at
evolution of various life forms on earth, it indeed follow the
accepted view that standards (i.e. successful life forms in this case)
are selected by a lengthy process of trial and error, only keeping the
most adapted to their environment. Human, by their actions are
changing these rules quite drastically. In a very narrow period, we
are changing the environment so much that valid life forms are
vanishing from the planet. Are we imposing new standards too early?
Maybe. One thing comes out of this thought,
we can change things much
faster than what it normally takes natural selection to operate. It is
in that respect that I believe we are not forced to wait for that
market to appear before trying to standardize things in our field.
In the paper "Pioneers and Settlers - Methods Used in Succesful User
Interface Design" by S. K. Card at Xerox Palo Alto Research center at
the time, he refers to two kinds of inventions:
- Demand-pull (waiting for a market to show interest in
something) - Technology-push (trying to offer something new to
the market and create a demand for it)
I.e. we can either adopt a passive or proactive attitude regarding
VE/VR UI standardization.
Your views are always welcome.
Regards,
==============================
Marc Bernatchez
Ph.D. candidate
Ecole Polytechnique de
marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca
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SF: +1 510 419-0800, NY: +1 212 358-7800
info@cyberedge.com, ben@cyberedge.com
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