First-generation Interactive Headsets - Text 5
No doubt this is why the system showed two kinds of images, inviting two kinds of exploration, centrifugal and centripetal: an object around which the user could walk, such as a cube; and an environment in which the user could circulate, such as a room. Some forms were representational, in the form of everyday objects such as “a house with a chimney,” while others were more abstract and suggested a different scale, such as a “cyclohexane molecule”.
The question was thus not merely to synchronize the movements of the head with those of the camera. It was a matter of modifying the image – the appearance of the objects depicted – dynamically in real time (or almost: in a few microseconds), by connecting the coordinates of the head and the body with those of the geometric form (x, y, z and w, the latter coordinate measuring the scale, meaning the distance between the point of view and the form) in order to align the two points of view according to a shared reference system which Sutherland called “the room coordinate system”.[7]
It is interesting to note that this “earliest virtual reality headset” was in fact also an augmented reality system. In Sutherland’s system, as in Bradley’s, the image was relayed by a half-silvered mirror, enabling the user to see “both the images from the cathode ray tubes and objects in the room simultaneously”: “Thus displayed material can be made either to hang disembodied in space or to coincide with maps, desk tops, walls, or the keys of a typewriter.”[8]
The work of Sutherland and his team, begun in 1966-67 at the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT and continued at Harvard University, was funded “in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense under contract SD 265, in part by the Office of Naval Research under contract ONR 1866(16), and in part by a long-standing agreement between Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Harvard Computation Laboratory.”[9]
