| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : APRIL 12, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Virtual Alchemy THE VISIONARY POSITION The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Are Making Virtual Reality a Reality By Fred Moody Times Business 353pp $27.50 Of all the current technological marvels, few have inspired such flights of fancy as ''virtual reality''--the generation by computer of interactive, simulated worlds ranging from the inside of a minivan to the surface of Mars. Hundreds of startups have formed around the commercial promise of VR. And such major players as Sun Microsystems Inc., Boeing Co., and most of the Japanese electronics giants have from time to time invested millions in exploring industrial applications. The trouble is that VR has become high tech's alchemy: Lots of people pursue it and spin wondrous tales about its possibilities, but such potential is never quite realized. VR's backers have suggested that it might do everything from cure blindness to reinvent sex. Elements of the technology, such as the physical sensors designed to track body movement, certainly have practical uses. These can be employed to help generate highly accurate animated graphics for everything from medical diagnostics displays to cartoons. But for the most part, the industry has delivered unsatisfying product demos that tend to crash. Fred Moody's The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Are Making Virtual Reality a Reality shares some of the shortcomings of its subject. Its title--and the book-jacket photo of a cyberbabe in the throes of electronically enhanced ecstasy--promises an exciting and comprehensive journey. But the book's actual scope is painfully narrow, focusing on just one VR laboratory at the University of Washington and four mostly unsuccessful VR startups in or near Seattle that Moody hung around for more than a year, hoping to be on hand as one of them struck gold. None did. By book's end, one company has gone bankrupt, and the outlook is uncertain at best for the others. What Moody really mined was a motherlode of sociopathic-personality clashes, bizarre habits, and business naivete. Moody illuminates several high-tech archetypes, from eccentric, highly insulated computer programmers to swaggering-but-clueless business types. And several of his fly-on-the-wall stories are great--such as the outfit that tested its technology for handling large volumes of Internet-server traffic by clandestinely setting up and promoting a hardcore-porn Web site. Unfortunately, the company's founders couldn't explain their technology's good performance, even to their own board, ''for fear of creating a reputation--and business-killing scandal,'' he writes. Don't read Visionary Position to get an overview of VR or find out where it's going. Moody writes that he wanted to ''climb into a microcosm.'' But after a while, the air gets pretty stale in there. And the author pays short shrift to a long list of other VR pioneers: major companies outside Seattle and such figures as the dreadlocked Jaron Lanier, who coined the term ''virtual reality'' and founded one of the first VR companies. It's sort of fun to visit places where programmers pace the hallways while screeching incomprehensibly about goats' blood--but this topic deserves a more comprehensive treatment to live up to its title. BY JOAN O'C. HAMILTON _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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