Visionary Position : The Inside... | Buy

America leads the world in the creation of new industries. From personal computing to Internet start-ups to biotechnology, hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value have been created from what were nothing more than figments of imagination in the minds of entrepreneurs. But moving from a dreamy vision to the hard realities of companies operating in the marketplace is a messy business at best. Finding start-up capital, dealing with the clash of egos and personalities, getting the technical specifications right, building the product, and marketing it to the right audience are all stressful, expensive, time-consuming, high-risk endeavors. A writer's worm's-eye view of an industry coming into being provides the reader a unique perspective on just why America is the world's capital of progress and innovation. Fred Moody spent a year tracking developments at the center for virtual reality research, a cluster of Seattle companies formed around the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, and in The Visionary Position he chronicles the birth of the VR industry. Virtual reality products hold out immense promise, not only to those hoping to make money from new companies and products, but to those in need as well. Some VR products have the potential to help people with severe sight problems or Parkinson's disease overcome their handicaps; others can help people with severe psychological problems treat their phobia and depression. VR entrepreneurs are looking in these and other areas for the spectacular, high-payoff, commercial breakthrough that will bring widely used applications to military and consumer markets. It's not surprising, then, that an unholy combination of profit motive and idealism brought together an odd group of people at the HIT lab and the companies it spawned: Virtual i/O, F5 Labs, Microvision, and Zombie Virtual Reality Entertainment. Fred Moody's year at HITL resulted in incredible fly-on-the-wall reporting. He gets inside the lives of an almost unbelievable cast of characters who are trying to make high-tech history: the buttoned-down academic who spent twenty years doing military research before becoming director of HITL; the male software developer who thought nothing of wearing his best dress to corporate presentations; the venture capitalists interested in only one thing--a high return on the investment they would make; the oddball hardware and software engineers more interested in invention than convention; and the company executives at VR start-up firms working desperately to commercialize products and bring them to market. Today there are approximately 400 companies in the United States at work on virtual-reality products. The Visionary Position is an up-close and very personal look at where it all began. It tells the tale of an industry ready to break out into many markets: business, medicine, exercise, gaming, the Internet, communications, and mass entertainment. It is also an important study of the American way of creating and doing business, and of the American technopreneurial character. A Man "Tom Furness--more formally known as Dr. Thomas A. Furness III--is an exotic commodity in the Pacific Northwest. . . . His enthusiasms are highly contagious, bewitching investors, entrepreneurs, students, fellow faculty, and journalists alike. When he talks about his hopes and dreams for virtual reality, you find yourself reflexively reaching for your wallet--whether to hand over its contents to Furness or to hide it them from him, you're never quite sure. . . ." A Vision "Now the speech was building to a crescendo . . . Furness was offering the museum an opportunity to change the world, to shift the paradigm of education, to "open the portal between information and the mind." With the system he envisioned, "if you want to, you can crank it up to a hundred Gs and juggle on Jupiter." Even after

This book has distant origins in two conversations I had years ago--one with Intel's Andrew Grove, the other with Microsoft's Bill Gates. I had asked each of them why he and his company had succeeded so spectacularly, and discovered that neither man seemed to feel particularly successful. Grove said, "Well, there was a certain amount of historical inevitability to it," and Gates said, "We tend to focus more on our failures here than on our successes."

I went on to discover at Microsoft--arguably the most successful company in history--a culture thoroughly steeped in feelings of anxiety and failure. And the histories of both companies eventually made it clear to me that if they had not parlayed a combination of skill, determination, luck, and timing into their positions of dominance, someone else would have. It was as if technology itself were marching forward, and the people fated to develop and profit from it were simply soft machines exploited by progress to help move things along.

Gates's disgruntlement and Grove's humility eventually led to more questions: What is success? Does real success ever feel like success to the successful person? And in industry, where does the individual leave off and the zeitgeist begin?

I had scarcely begun work on this book when I encountered a visiting Japanese engineer, the Fujitsu Research Institute's Dr. Masahiro Kawahata, here to study and meet with some of the researchers and entrepreneurs whose work I was chronicling. Kawahata is an unabashed lover of the United States, which he regards as a vibrant, turbulent, and productive dream factory. "Every day a new company is born, but every day some other company is dying, right?" he said to me. "So it is activating the U.S. economy!"

Kawahata described the essential difference between the United States and Japan as one of aptitude and level of imagination. Japanese primacy in manufacturing, he said, arose because "the U.S. engineer didn't recognize the importance of product engineering. Or quality engineering. The idea is fine, but product engineering is poor. In Japan, the idea is poor, but product engineering is very nice." Although the Japanese industrial complex built a massive economic machine out of its ability to turn American inventions into products, this disparity has caused more crises than complacency in Japan. "We in Japan now are saying that we are very poor in generating ideas. And the idea is very important now. So we have a lot of talk about why the U.S. is better at generating new ideas, and why Japan is poor. That's a kind of big issue in Japan in recent years. We are very well trained, but lack creativity."

There does seem to be something uniquely American in the niche we have in this country for what might be called the shamans of engineering--visionaries who struggle to realize a more distant and less immediately profitable future than the rest of us have the time or imagination to contemplate. As I went on in the course of this project to watch visionaries spin fantasies for money, and to watch young industrialists flare up and burn out in the course of trying to get their outlandish ideas off the ground, I grew thoroughly amazed at the American worship of the American dreamer. I was to learn that there is an unacknowledged and in large part accidental appreciation in this country for the restless soul who is determined to find a different, or better, or more exciting way to do things. These people are never of practical mind and often seem not to be of particularly sound mind, yet their fellow citizens indulge them again and again in their fantasies. I came to see the group in this book as exemplars of the American spirit that has engendered so many industries (automobile, aerospace, oil, cola, personal computer, entertainment . . . ) that have gone on to dominate the world. I was to come away from my research convinced that I had watched an archetypal exercise: the messy, troublesome birth process of a new American industry, a process identical in its dynamic to the origins of countless previous passages from dreamy vision to multibillion-dollar enterprise.

For as long as engineers have dreamed of building faster and more powerful computers, some among them have dreamed of displaying computer-stored and -generated information in three dimensions, with users walking through information landscapes the way they walk down grocery-store aisles and city streets. Among the earliest and most persistent of these dreamers was Dr. Thomas A. Furness III, an electrical engineer who began working on such display technology in 1966 (twenty-three years before the term "virtual reality" was coined by Jaron Lanier), in a secret laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio. After more than twenty years of largely classified research into what he called the "visually coupled system," or the "virtual world interface," Furness left the air force and set out on an avowed mission to turn his new interface into a powerful weapon of moral and social change for the better.

Furness's wanderings led him to Seattle, Washington, in 1989, where he set up shop on the campus of the University of Washington under the auspices of the Washington Technology Center (WTC). Established in 1983, the WTC was charged with licensing technology developed at the University of Washington to businesses headquartered and incorporated in the state as a way of hastening the transition of academic lab discoveries into the marketplace. Furness's new lab, which he dubbed the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Laboratory, commenced innumerable research projects into the development and use of VR hardware and software, with particular emphasis on "human factors"--the ways in which people assimilate and disseminate information through computer interfaces.

Although most of the work he had done for the air force was classified, Furness was well known in the worldwide VR community as one of a handful of pioneers. To the VR literate, his move to Seattle was big news, and before long a somewhat disorganized orbit of allies, enemies, followers, collaborators, competitors, exploiters, and exploited had moved to the Northwest and taken form around him and his lab.

Furness arrived in a Seattle that was going through the second gold rush in its history. Like the Alaska gold rush that preceded it by some one hundred years, the digital gold rush of the present age sent visionaries and hallucinaries flooding into the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By 1996--the year the technology sector officially passed the natural-resources-based sector of Washington industry as the leading employer of the state's citizens--what once had been a land of dropouts, drifters, lumberjacks, fishermen, and the occasional Boeing engineer now was almost entirely the territory of a new breed of prospector: the computer-industry entrepreneur.

There loomed in the imaginations of these prospectors a single overpowering model: the Microsoft Corporation. Ever since two local boys, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had made good in the process of taking their tiny start-up to the pinnacle of power in the software industry, digital dreamers in Seattle and its surrounding communities have been launching new companies, large and small, that seek to emulate Microsoft in one way or another. This start-up culture spread with shocking speed: It was reliably estimated in 1996 that the number of high-tech start-ups in the Seattle area had jumped from 85 to more than 1,100 in four short years, with 200 of the new enterprises launched by young Microsoft retirees.

From little refurbished Alaska-gold-rush-era hotels in downtown Seattle's Pioneer Square, to spiffy new office suites across Lake Washington in Redmond, to tattered second-floor walk-ups in northwest Seattle's sprawling Ballard district, computer-technology ventures of every imaginable genre were sprouting up daily. There were companies producing office software, games, multimedia software, digital animation, interactive movies, Internet software and hardware, switching technologies and other services, voice-recognition software, one-handed keyboards, and goggles that were said to be on the verge of replacing computer screens. Invariably, these businesses were founded by young people who dreamed not only of mining the miniature infinitudes of silicon for fabulous wealth, but also of "making a difference," "pushing the envelope," "having an impact," or "advancing the state of the art." For many of these adventurers, the glamour of the cutting edge was as alluring as the stock options their companies constantly proffered in lieu of legal tender.

By the time Furness arrived in Seattle, the PC revolution was in full swing. The VR discipline, however, was floundering. It suffered from an image problem that stemmed partly from an exaggerated media portrayal, partly from the eccentricities of its early advocates and developers, and partly from its own overhype. Thus in the popular imagination, the VR world quite reasonably consisted of a few mad scientists or game players wearing outlandish helmets and gloves from which extended a confusing, perilous tangle of wires. The late 1980s had brought no end of predictions that virtual reality was just around the corner; when by 1993 it had not yet arrived, public interest in it subsided almost to nothing. As far as most Americans were concerned, virtual reality was the lunatic fringe of the PC revolution.

Virtual-world interface designers, headset makers, architects, entrepreneurs, and other adepts, however, kept working away at their technological designs and business plans, and the mid-1990s saw the first tentative emergence of VR technology out of the laboratory and into the mainstream marketplace. It looked as if the steady increase in microprocessor computing power and the steady decrease in price of personal computers had finally conspired to bring virtual reality to the threshold of the mass market by the end of 1995. A growing group of Seattle prospectors was hard at work trying to do for virtual reality what Microsoft had done for personal computing: to come up not only with a set of standards that would bring uniformity and ease of use to the VR arena, but also with a "killer app"--a use for virtual reality so compelling that millions of people would feel forced to buy VR hardware. Their efforts began attracting the nervous attention--and sometimes the money--of investors from the financial markets, the PC industry, and the entertainment industry.

. . .

From May 1996 until September 1997, I set up shop in Furness's Human Interface Technology lab, researching its history and the lives of its scientists, and watching the lab's life unfold around me. I also spent countless hours in the offices and laboratories of other companies--some working in collaboration with the lab, others working effectively in competition with it, still others apparently doing both.

Much of this book is devoted to studying the uneasy alliances, misalliances, and battles between the research lab and companies in the industrial sector. My exploration took me around among the HIT lab and four Seattle start-up companies: Microvision, F5 Labs, Zombie Virtual Reality Entertainment, and Virtual i/O. Microvision was trying to bring to market an invention of Furness's called the Virtual Retinal Display (VRD), a means of seeing images without using a screen; F5 Labs was developing and trying to market an Internet switching system that would dramatically speed the flow of data in and out of web sites, allowing for the rendering of fully three-dimensional artificial environments; Zombie, cofounded by two VR pioneers, was developing CD-ROM VR games using discoveries and technologies developed in military research labs; and Virtual i/O developed and marketed the world's first lightweight head-mounted display (HMD), to be used both for viewing video and playing games in three-dimensional virtual environments.

In addition to fighting for their own survival, all of these companies maneuvered in concert and opposition at various times with one another and with the HIT lab, everyone caught up in a high-tech soap opera that was a complex welter of ego clashes, struggles for money, Shakespearean intrigues, nurture gone wrong, overlapping and conflicting visions, disillusionment, disgust, fury, revenge, and occasional respect and reverence. The tensions, of course, were a function both of the incredible difficulty in bringing an ambitious technological vision into the marketplace and the high emotional stakes involved in betting one's life on the endeavor.

I set off on this exploration because I wanted to find out what had happened to VR technology, which a few short years ago was being hailed as the Next Big Thing. I also wanted to climb into a microcosm--a tiny, illustrative slice in space and time--in order to study its inhabitants and their struggles from up close. I have long believed that the examination of a microcosm is far more instructive, and far more interesting, than the overview of a macrocosm, and I entered this one in the hopes that I could divine the way an American turns an idea into a commercial product, an industry, a fortune, or a disaster. In this respect, the resulting book is less a study of virtual reality in particular than of the origins of American industry in general. These VR pioneers, I believe, continue an illustrious American tradition--of the first adventurers into uncharted industrial territory, trying to develop new products and processes and consumer demand all at once, in the hopes that they will launch a world-changing new venture.

As often happens on such escapades as mine, I was soon faced with an intricate array of psychological avenues to explore, and I think now of the resulting book as a look--however uncomprehending--at the mysterious combination of ambitions, circumstances, obsessions, attainments, education, policies, personalities, and personal quests that go into the making of what we call progress. Every tangible enterprise, from the single small invention to the international conglomerate, begins with an intangible notion, a tug at the heart of a dreamer. What follows here is an examination of the people and events that gathered and grew, both wittingly and unwittingly, in the wake of just such a tug at the heart.

Excerpted from The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality by Fred Moody
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.