VFX Voice - Fall 2017

and engaging, but as I heard of VR, I knew that the context matters
and we could do it. I was naïve and had no idea about the long road
ahead. Had I known how far we were from realizing that vision,
I might have chickened out!
Q. You’ve described the early years in the field as the ‘nuclear
winter of VR.’ Tell us about your path during that era.
A. During the first challenging wave of VR, I got tossed a life buoy
to make me believe there was hope. Back in 1993, Dr. Dean Inman
at the Oregon Research Institute had developed a motorized
wheelchair training system for children. He built something where
you put the user’s own wheelchair on a set of rollers that would
induce the movement of the wheels and navigate them thought a
virtual obstacle course. But the key thing to motivate the kids was
that after they completed a certain amount of training they could
virtually fly off into the clouds in their wheelchairs wearing a headmounted
display. Their faces lit up and I was sold!
By the time I got into this academically in 1995, I had seen some
inspiring things and was excited about VR’s potential. But right
before I got my spot at USC I got to try a headset myself – and it
was really bad. I walked around a virtual city, the interface was
clunky, and I got stuck inside a very primitive building and realized
this isn’t ready for prime time after all.
When I got my position at USC’s Alzheimer’s Center, it was right
across the street from computer science. My strategy was to pester
people to get access to equipment and programming – and that’s
what happened. I saw the wreckage of the past and wanted to move
forward, and as we were working on this stuff, everyone else caught
on that VR wasn’t ready for the technology. Companies dissipated.
VR magazines fizzled. VR conferences crashed and burned. And all
of a sudden everyone was excited about the Internet and moved on
as VR was labeled a failed thing. And it didn’t really hit its second
life until last year.
“The lightbulb ultimately went off thanks to a
young man and his Game Boy. … I was struck by
kids who played video games for hours on end
and imagined, what if you could get a client
engaged in well-produced sophisticated content
to do their rehab for that period of time?”
—Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo, Director of Medical
Virtual Reality, USC Institute for Creative
Technologies (ICT)
TOP: “Virtual Patients” use virtual human technology to train future
clinicians in therapeutic interview skills.
BOTTOM: Afghan helicopter extraction. Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan.
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