Virtual-Reality Check

Will the computer animation used in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within make actors obsolete? Will we all flock to holodecks to play virtual-reality games instead of playing in the real world? Are robots and computer-generated environments what we have to look forward to in the not-too-distant future?

As the chief scientist at Alias/Wavefront, the Silicon Graphics unit that helped bring the characters in the recent sci-fi movie Final Fantasy to life, Bill Buxton is accustomed to fielding questions like those. And, given his position, you'd think he would be a spirited promoter of the brave new virtual world.

But his perspective on the future of virtual reality is less sweeping than the vision -- often portrayed in movies -- in which we live in a world populated by computer avatars or robots.

"Virtual reality will change dramatically in the next seven years or so," says Buxton. "But it's likely to be a mixed reality, where computer imagery is mixed with the real world."

This year at Siggraph, the premier annual meeting for the computer-graphics industry, Buxton chose to team up with other exhibitors, such as Hewlett-Packard and Fakespace, to show off Alias's new technology: the Portfolio Wall, a 15-foot-by-6-foot Internet-enabled sketch pad.

"My message is this: The hot thing isn't any single technology, but relationships among companies," Buxton says. Buxton controlled the displays on the Portfolio Wall using a wirelessly enabled bar code-scanning PalmPilot. "The idea was to show how technology -- like wearable computers, wireless devices, bar-code scanners -- can have a huge impact on interaction," Buxton says.

Buxton also demonstrated a new design tool for automakers by asking a designer from the audience to sketch a car on the Portfolio Wall -- just as the designer would sketch a car on a piece of paper or on a laptop using design software. But in this case, the designer could sketch the car full-scale. Buxton's message? Design for specific uses, and make tools simple to learn. "Something like the Portfolio Wall should have a learning specification that says users must be comfortable using 80% of the wall's potential within five minutes of training and have a 90% retention of it a week later."

Buxton's pragmatic view of virtual reality stems more from his training as a musician than his training as a technologist. "Musicians have been taking code (notes on a page), putting it through technology (a guitar, for instance), and creating something new (music) for centuries," Buxton says. Indeed, Buxton didn't start out life with a plan to be a technologist or a futurist. He just wanted to play music.

In 1970, he was already using synthesizers to create music, but by around 1975, he was frustrated with what he could buy on the open market. So he discussed the problem with some professors at the University of Toronto and soon was recruited as an artist in residence at the university. Buxton ultimately went on to graduate school in computer science for what he claims were purely financial reasons.

"I'd never thought about being a scientist," he says. "But I had this obsession with music and with new instruments to play music on." In the 1980s, he became a consulting scientist at Xerox PARC. Then, in 1994, he joined Alias/Wavefront, a technology firm that develops graphics software for the film, video-game, automotive, and interactive-media markets. There, instead of creating instruments to make music, he helps create instruments to make art -- or, at least, very cool movies.

The company's rendering and animation program, Maya, was used not only in Final Fantasy, but for special effects in a variety of movies, including Men In Black, Titanic, A Bug's Life, Contact, The Truman Show, Mighty Joe Young, The Avengers, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Stuart Little.

In Final Fantasy, which was based on a popular Japanese video game, the characters are not actors, but computer-generated, photo-realistic human beings. While critics deemed the movie's plot clunky, most were dazzled by its special effects, with Roger Ebert rhapsodizing, "The look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies.... It exists in a category of its own, the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm."

Despite the accolades, Buxton's take on the movie is decidedly reality-based. "Final Fantasy is about digital makeup," Buxton says. "There are still actors doing all the movements. Actors will always be cheaper and faster than computers, but putting digital makeup on them is easier than having them sit in a chair for five hours."

But Buxton does believe the film -- with its very lifelike computer-enhanced cast -- will be considered a landmark film in a few years, although not because of the computer work it showcases. Buxton contends that its strength is its combination of storytelling and technology, which he considers a fundamental breakthrough in computer-enhanced films.