Terry Beaubois is the director of Montana State University’s Creative Research Lab, and he talks about how he used Second Life to teach architecture classes and the different limitations he faced from having an imprecise physics model in the virtual world.
He talks about the other potential for using architecture within virtual reality as well as starting to think about how a physical space can interact with you through the Internet of Things, and the implications of living in a smart home that is aware of who you are, where you’re at, and you behavioral patterns.
Terry also talks about his different VR projects that he’s been working on since the early 80s with doing telepresence applications for NASA so that astronauts could control robots through a virtual reality interface.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Teaching at Stanford and talking about lessons on VR. Been doing VR since the 80s with NASA doing robotic telepresence. Motorcycle helmet with CRT monitors and wires. Data glove. Involved with VRML and early days of Second Life. Going to be experimenting with Terf VR program, which is a follow-up to Croquet & Qwaq.
- 3:09 – Seems like a natural fit for architecture. Different between building a house in VR vs. designing a house for how it’ll actually be built. Second Life and VR programs need to have accurate physics models in order to have a 1:1 mapping of reality and to do actual architectural design. Currently have to do workarounds, which isn’t teaching real architecture.
- 5:55 – Would love to see accurate physics models within a VR engine for architectural purposes.
- 7:05 – Importance of spaces and design principles for architecture. Creates a context that blends in with reality. Architecture needs to have sensory awareness and be plugged into the Internet of Things. Entering an age of enormous amount of information being shared. Architecture could be a participant in peoples lives through sensors and detecting your identity and patterns of living. Not a lot of imagination for what a smart building would mean
- 10:00 – Entering a golden age where everything will communicate with everything. Track medical biometrics and share to relevant parties. Singularity will be a non-event because we still people to help interpret the meaning CERN is generating an enormous amount of data, and it still requires humans to look at it
- 12:04 – History of VR since the 1980s. Human’s connection to a virtual avatar could be relevant and cognizant of your physical avatar because we’re not connected to what our human life form is in charge of maintaining. VR can help us with deal with who we are. VR will enable helping people deal with phobias. He meets the most creative and fun people in virtual worlds. VR will be a tool that will develop and evolve over time. Lots of uses for training. They physics engine will get there eventually to be more relevant for architecture.
- 16:08 – VR and Architecture business engagements, and be used to build something and preview it beforehand. Perhaps VR to 3D printing and have lots of iterations.
- 17:25 – Being able to experience a architecturally design space in VR before it’s created
- 18:14 – Dealing with the Wild West with no rules in Second Life and adult content.
- 18:47 – Future of VR. Thought we’d be where we are with VR back in 1985. Good thing we don’t know how long it’ll take otherwise we may not start things. Humans are hopeful and generally optimistic for how long things take.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.941] Terry Beaubois: My name is Terry Beaubois. I'm an architect and a researcher and an educator. and I'll be teaching at Stanford University this fall, a course in the architecture school. And I'm here today to talk about my experience and momentum in virtual reality and where I think it's headed, to share that information with people. And I'm pretty excited about it because I've been involved with virtual reality since the early 1980s at NASA Ames Research Center, when they were studying what they called telepresence, which was how you set up a system using computers and video cameras and a robot. Because the idea was it costs about $100,000 to $200,000 to send a human astronaut EVA, extra vehicle activity, like outside the space station. So they were looking at how could the astronauts stay on board and operate a robot using telepresence, meaning they could see what the robot saw, their arms would manipulate the robot arms and hands, so it would be less expensive and less dangerous for a human to send the robot out to fix something. So that's what they were experimenting with. and it was a really exciting time and it was really quite a long time ago. Some of this stuff I think started long before many people are aware of virtual reality being around and we had things like motorcycle helmets with CRTs glued to the windscreen and all sorts of cables coming out of the top like an umbilical cord. A data glove, which is some of the newer viewing hardware is realizing you can't cut people's view off from their keyboard and still expect the kind of interaction that people are used to having with a computer. So the data glove looks like it might be coming back into play. But as Aaron said this morning, It was expensive, it was bulky, it was heavy, and so it didn't really catch on. And then the space program went in a direction where the space station as they envisioned it in the late 70s, which was sort of the toroid spinning with one g of centripetal force, sort of like the Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick space station, was replaced by sort of the spam in a can version of the space station that was approved. But it's interesting. I think it may be a precursor to where all this is headed. It's really good background and I've enjoyed it. And then I was involved with VRML and then early Second Life and I'll be experimenting with some new virtual reality programs. like TERF, T-E-R-F, next week, which is a further development of what started out to be Croquet and Quack. I don't know whether you're familiar with those two terms, but they're virtual reality programs as well. It's a very interesting area. It's very interesting.
[00:03:08.926] Kent Bye: And so, it seems like architecture and designing spaces is a natural fit for virtual reality, and have you been doing anything with VR and architecture then?
[00:03:18.575] Terry Beaubois: Yeah, that was the original intent. That's what attracted me to it, is the idea of designing the space station in addition to using it for telepresence. And then when I got involved in it in the 90s, VRML was sort of a dysfunctional version of the virtual reality markup language. And then when Second Life came out, it got exciting. It looked like it was going to be it. But there's a big difference between teaching people how to build a house in a virtual reality program and teaching them how to really design a house and build it. So if you're trying to teach them how to do it in real life, but what you're spending all your time doing and what they're spending all their time doing is learning how to do it in the virtual reality program. It's different than actually learning how a house is designed and built. What they learn is how that software program works. So it's a challenge. I think they're sort of on a parallel track. Hopefully they'll converge somewhere down the road. Like the physics of Second Life was such that it doesn't have true physics the way Earth does. It has its own physics, so it has physics. You can turn it on and off, so things can just float in the air. But if you turn it on, it's not like Earth physics because of the objects in the VR program, when you like make a keystone that's sort of beveled in shape, it's really rectilinear still, but visibly it looks like it's tapered. And so you have these corners that create pressure in the physics, because they're really there as far as the physics is concerned. They're just not there visually. So you get things happening like the keystone shooting up in the air for no apparent reason because of the vector forces that go into an arch are the exact opposite of what you would get in real life, where the weight of the stone and the shape of the stone cause it to fit together. So if I have to teach them how to do the workaround rather than how you would do it in real life, that's a different class. We struggled with that. You know, because we didn't find out and no one had tried to do it in 2005 when we went in there. I was trying to show students just how to do this, one of the simplest forms in architecture. And we were getting this reaction that we didn't understand. So I met with the guy that was in charge of physics for Second Life and he explained how. what I just said as far as the actual object did have corners on it and it wasn't tapered, it just looked like it was. So they did their work around so we would have to do our work around but pretty soon you get two clicks away from reality and then I'm not teaching and they're not learning real architecture.
[00:05:54.259] Kent Bye: And so what is your intention now with using virtual reality in architecture? What would you like to see happen?
[00:05:59.721] Terry Beaubois: I've always been willing and interested and able to participate with a company that wanted to get their product to there, where it was real physics and was corresponding to teaching architecture in real life. But it isn't necessarily everyone's priority. Like in movie making, They don't care if there's no real drawer inside the drawer, if they're not going to open the drawer in a scene. So they do all this back face removal of things, where an architect would panic if they knew that every little pixel and every little polygon wasn't there, because they want to be able to open the drawer if they need to. And so it puts a load on the scene, because even some of the Hollywood software actually has the ability to go through and see what's going to be on the camera and then gets rid of everything else. So it lightens up the object or the model, where if you just try to have every polygon on there, it just becomes really burdensome as far as trying to use it as a set or a scene.
[00:07:04.981] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things that I've really been noticing since getting into virtual reality is the importance of spaces and architecture and how that can set a scene, but also what kind of emotional reactions that gives people. And so I'm curious about, from the architectural perspective, what are some of those fundamental design principles that you are working with every day?
[00:07:24.866] Terry Beaubois: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a military family. We grew up all over the world. I was born in Japan. My mother's Scottish. My dad was stationed in Turkey for a while. I've been in all the states. So a lot of my influences come from real-life architecture and a lot of different influences, but it creates a contextualism that we're starting to run into with the technology that is associated with virtual reality. By that, I mean the following. If you have smart shoes on in real life, and a smart watch, and a smart t-shirt, and smart glasses, you shouldn't be walking into a stupid building. So the architecture not only could be done in virtual reality, but it could have the electronic equivalent of beacons and the ability to recognize people if they opt into that kind of sharing of information. just the way your phone can recognize you, or you can give permission for a map to recognize where you are, you know. So we're entering this age of information, incredible amounts of information being exchanged, and I think buildings should be one of the things that is collecting and receiving and respecting privacy, of course. But like, let's say you and I had an appointment in a building. If we walked into the lobby And we had our beacons on, and it recognized who we were. And we were there for a three o'clock appointment, and they had moved the room from the fifth floor to the second floor. I mean, the building could tell us things and show us where to go and things like that. So it's a participant, where in the past, if someone drove their car into the driveway, they'd have a box up on their visor, and they'd push the button, and the garage door would open. Well, the garage door doesn't know who you are, the button didn't know who you were, and the box doesn't know who you were. It's very mechanical. It's almost 18th century. Where now, when you drive in your driveway, your house can recognize your car. The house can recognize if you're in the car. And it could recognize patterns that you have. Well, on Thursday, for some reason, he parks out in the driveway. But every other night of the week, he brings it into the garage. I mean, it can be more supportive and more reflective of what your life is like, I think. And buildings have such capability and potential capacity. for doing that. Right now I think we think a building is a smart building if it controls the elevators and the HVAC system, the heating, ventilating and air conditioning, where I think in the future it'll be able to manage all of these different elements that are in and out of things.
[00:09:58.559] Kent Bye: In your presentation you're talking about the golden age of immersion and what do you mean by that and what do you see happening?
[00:10:04.634] Terry Beaubois: Sort of what I was talking about, where I think we're entering a period of time where everything will communicate with everything, if we want it to. And it will allow us to think differently about the objects, about our watches, about our shoes, about our health. If there's some medical monitoring that's going on because you have a medical condition, And an external device, even a fitness watch or something like that, could recognize that before you realize it. So whether that could put you in touch with some telemedicine that's operated through the house. It may not be operated through the fitness band, but the fitness band may communicate your diabetes, blood sugar level is up, or your heart rate's down, or there's something wrong. That's the golden age of data. Now, the interesting thing is that everybody's sort of waiting for the singularity to happen, or not waiting for it, but looking forward to it. I think it's going to be like a Y2K event. I think it's going to be a non-event, because you're going to be sitting there going, OK, that computer is smarter than I am. So what? It doesn't necessarily mean the computer knows what to do. So we should all continue to think about what people's role in all of this technology and managing all this data is. Because, for example, one of the most significant producers of data in the world right now is the Large Hadron Collider. at CERN. Well, when they were testing to see if they could identify or determine whether the Higgs boson existed or not, they ran all these tests, they got so much information they couldn't look at all of it. They broke it into segments, they gave it out to different groups, they read it, and then they voted on whether the collider had found a Higgs boson or not. It wasn't like it knew. You know, so these machines can do wonderful things. There can be lots of data involved in it. But if you see the role that people played in coming to a conclusion or making sense out of the data, I think that's going to keep people busy for a long time.
[00:12:04.683] Kent Bye: So getting back to virtual reality, coming from it in the early 80s, and then there was a big renaissance in the 90s, and then now we're in this sort of next wave of virtual reality. So maybe you could go back and, from your perspective, how you saw that unfold.
[00:12:19.473] Terry Beaubois: The whole relationship between a human and their avatar is a major part of virtual reality. And people have a misconception about their relationship with their biological avatar. Like, for example, how's your bone marrow doing in producing blood cells right now? You have no idea. Well, how's your lymph node system doing? You're not in control of it, right? You're not sitting around thinking about it. How's your digestive system? Have you got the right balance of chemicals? We could go through a hundred things that any of us pay no attention to every day, and then all of a sudden you get an avatar and you're like, wow, I don't do this, I don't do that. You can almost create a situation where you realize that you're doing more with your avatar, you control what's going on there, and there are no organs, there's no brain, there's no, you know, it is more you, where there's a lot of things that your biological life form does that you're really not that connected with. I think it frees people up from this Humans can develop a lot of hubris about, well, we could blow up the Earth. I don't think we could blow up the Earth if we tried. I'm not saying we should try. Hopefully we'll get better about managing our role of taking care of the Earth. But I think, you know, people think that they're much more important than they are. I think we should enjoy and contribute to the positive nature of other human beings' experience on Earth. And I think virtual reality can sort of help us deal with who we are in a very positive way, as opposed to being confused about... I mean, I had people that used to kid me about, are you going to go play with your imaginary friends now? Yeah, you know. But it's not everybody's cup of tea. So that's another thing. Not everybody plays golf, you know. So I think some of the things that people will think of doing in virtual reality are enabling kind of events that have to do with helping people with phobias. I know people that have been improved if not cured from agoraphobia because they can practice going out and second life or another virtual reality thing. easier than they could in real life, but after a while maybe it makes them more confident and they can go out in real life where people have fear of spiders or there's been lots of different things that have been experimented with in regard to health and benefits and things like that. It's a lot of fun too. I think some of the most fun, intelligent, creative people I know are in virtual worlds. And I meet a lot of the people that I know in virtual worlds in real life as well. Because I don't try to pretend to be anyone else. I'm not trying to be some... I don't do role play. I'm a teacher. They know who I am. I'm there. I look like my avatar and vice versa. It's like architecture. Architecture, a field that's so broad, you can practice it in a number of different ways. There's no right or wrong way to do it. Same thing with virtual reality. I think it'll become a tool, an opportunity for people to develop further. I think it will be more successful in the future. It sort of went through this, you know, roller coaster ride of extreme popularity and then less popular and now it's just, I don't know. Everybody's got different opinions on it. I'm still as favorable as ever about it because I think the potential, because I see it from the, you know, it could be training people for the space station or training people for medicine. I'd love to use it for training people for architecture. And I think it'll get there as far as technically being able to mimic the physics and be more like building with real materials as opposed to all these prim workarounds, you know, to get something to look like it looks. But you've really just tortured a little geometric object to make it look like it would in real life.
[00:16:07.144] Kent Bye: And here at the Immersion 2014 conference, you're in the track of the business track and how virtuality could potentially change business. And from your perspective, how do you see virtuality changing business?
[00:16:20.455] Terry Beaubois: Well, the one-to-one relationship is my relationship with architecture. Architecture is a service business. It's a matter of designing a building for a use. It's either someone's house or a factory or a university building or something like that. So it's a business engagement of some kind. And I think that it can be used to build something and look at it before you build it in real life. It could be better, but it is a great prototyping environment. That's what I see. And then if you could do something in a virtual world, send it to a 3D printer. And then maybe that's another form of prototyping it, or maybe that's the final product. I mean, we need to get it so it's more iterative, so it can flow from one program to another to another and back again. Because design is iterative, it's not linear. And right now, there's still a lot of walled garden feeling to some of the virtual reality technology and programs. And it really limits what one can do successfully in them.
[00:17:21.732] Kent Bye: Yeah, it really sounds like architecture is a field that's really built for virtual reality in the sense of allowing the customer to actually experience the space before it's actually built. Absolutely.
[00:17:32.139] Terry Beaubois: Absolutely. I was so excited in 2005 when I read an article in Wired magazine. I was in Second Life that afternoon. I called Linden Labs up on the phone. I went up and met with them. And I just thought, wow, this is really going to change the industry. And it did for a while. But I think it got into a social tailspin that put a lot of people off of it and made it less desirable or comfortable for them. I know education has had its varying relationships with the technology. And I understand it. I mean, I understand why people don't like it, but I just wish it was really good and everybody liked it.
[00:18:07.628] Kent Bye: What was the social tailspin of Second Life that you're talking about?
[00:18:10.749] Terry Beaubois: Oh, I think a lot of the, you know, triple X rated activities and things that, they're really corresponding things in real life. We just ignore them physically and socially more successfully than if they're in your area or next door or something like that and you can't do it. I think it really was like the wild, wild west, you know, as far as there was no rule of law type of thing. You know, it was like people could pretty much do what they wanted to. There was some guidance, but for the most part, it was pretty wild west.
[00:18:46.381] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see virtual reality going from here forward as the Oculus Rift is coming out? And, you know, there seems to be a huge groundswell of interest and momentum now.
[00:18:57.945] Terry Beaubois: Yeah. Viewing goggles, like Oculus Rift, isn't virtual reality. They're viewing goggles. So it's an aspect of virtual reality. I think if Oculus Rift gets a data glove, because right now you put Rift on, you can't see your keyboard. So there's some evolution to do with the software programs, with the viewing programs, with the data gloves, and things like that. I think it'll improve. You know, for someone who started in 1980 into VR, it seems like it's taking a long time. And I'm impatient anyway, so it would seem that way if it... But in some ways, I felt like where we are now with VR is where I thought we'd be by 1985 when it was 1980. I mean, it just looked like such a wonderful technology that would just develop quickly and get all sorts of support. Things take longer than you think sometimes.
[00:19:50.330] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just to follow on with that, what do you think happened? What was not there yet?
[00:19:54.234] Terry Beaubois: Things are harder than we think. I mean, I went up to Montana for three years and I was up there eight years. So, you know, I think part of it is it's a good thing we don't know how long things are going to take or we wouldn't start some of these things. So I think it's the general optimism of humans that We're hopeful. We're optimistic. We think things are going to not take as long as they actually do. And this is a tough technology. This is not easy. It's very complex. Very complex, but fun.
[00:20:21.726] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thanks so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.
