Visions of Profits : Virtual-Reality Firm to Test Illusions in O.C.
The financial success of Visions of Reality Inc. depends on how well it can sell its version of reality.
The 20-employee South San Francisco company, which has offices in Irvine, is trying to create the ultimate arcade-like game using three-dimensional computer graphics technology known as virtual reality.
The test will come soon. Visions of Reality hopes its pod-like simulators, which are designed to look and feel like a real spacecraft, will be landing in Orange County by year’s end.
Visions of Reality plans to rent space in a local shopping center and charge $8 to $10 for a 10-minute ride. At that price, analysts say, its illusions will have to be very close to those used in the Pentagon’s military warfare simulations and as thrilling as an amusement-park ride.
“It’s got to be real-time and more sophisticated than something that would appeal only to adolescent boys,” said Kay Keppler, editor of trade journal AI Expert’s VR Special Reports in San Francisco. It will have to be “bigger, faster, noisier and more colorful than what you get in the arcade.”
Anything less than realistic timing on the game, or real-time, could mean motion sickness for players and financial disaster for the company, which was started by San Francisco entrepreneur Dan Rice in 1991.
“It’s a very ambitious project,” said Ken Stone, project administrator for Visions of Reality. “It takes your fantasies and imagination and turns them into a reality, sort of like a dream in which you don’t wake up.
“You watch a flat display screen inside the goggles of the helmet, and it’s like you’re inside it, not looking at it. If it doesn’t work in real-time, you’ll get sick and wind up with vertigo.”
Virtual reality in its purest form is a set of technologies producing an illusion that so immerses a person in an artificial, computer-generated world that he or she cannot distinguish it from reality.
In a virtual-reality simulation, a person can turn in any direction and see part of a 3-D picture. The military has long used such computer simulation to train combat pilots and tank drivers, and the public has seen slices of virtual reality’s promise in futuristic rides such as Disneyland’s Star Tours and Universal Studios Hollywood’s “Back to the Future” ride.
Stone, who describes himself as a reality expert, knows the risks involved in creating an expensive high-tech toy that must capture the imagination of fussy consumers. But he thinks a combination of technological developments has moved virtual reality into the realm of commercial success.
Editor Keppler describes virtual reality as “a technology that is here, though it is fledgling, and it will revolutionize all aspects of our life.”
With the computer technology that Visions of Reality is using, she said, the company “is a pretty serious effort.”
The company is trying to meet a tight deadline. Its first demonstration is scheduled Oct. 21 at a trade show in Anaheim.
So far, the company has a prototype pod and helmet, computer workstations and an unfinished software program that will ultimately be its first game. The graphics are far more sophisticated than those for typical video games, Stone said.
The company hopes by year’s end to open a “family entertainment center” built around the virtual-reality machines at an Orange County mall, Stone said, though he would not confirm which one. The goal is eventually to open hundreds of such centers across the nation.
Visions of Reality is not the only company betting on virtual reality as a successful business venture.
Rivals include Virtual World Entertainment, which has virtual-reality entertainment centers in malls in Chicago, Walnut Creek, Calif., and Japan. A group of companies including Paramount Pictures plans to open Star Trek centers using virtual-reality technology next year. And video-game company Sega of America is planning virtual-reality amusement parks.
“I think there is real promise for these centers, now that the technology problems are solved,” said Ben Delaney, editor of CyberEdge Journal, a Sausalito-based trade journal that follows trends in virtual reality. “They’re like places where people can go on dates, not at all like arcades and more like theme parks.”
Each of the Visions of Reality centers will have 36 game pods with spaceship-like controls and helmets that completely cover the players’ eyes.
A $158,000 Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine2 graphics supercomputer will control the game graphics with split-second timing. As many as six players will be able to interact with each other in each game.
No one is making predictions about whether the venture will generate the riches that Visions of Reality envisions. Other companies, such as VPL Research, have faltered by miscalculating the market’s readiness.
“We’re trying to avoid the pitfalls that everyone else made,” Stone said.
Rice, the 32-year-old San Francisco resident who founded Visions of Reality, formerly worked in the concrete construction business, but his interest in games and virtual reality led him to invest everything he owned in his new venture.
“As long as I can remember, I dreamed of astronauts and outer space,” he said. “As a kid in school I would drift into daydreams with Buck Rogers and imagine what it would be like to be in his world.”
Rice would not give financial details of the company, which is funded by several limited partnerships.
Stone, however, say the company has lined up an impressive alliance of partners.
Said CyberEdge Journal’s Delaney: “It seems VOR is putting together a good team.”
The suppliers include Silicon Graphics Computer Systems in Mountain View, whose high-powered graphics workstations helped create 3-D animations in the films “Jurassic Park,” “Terminator II” and “The Abyss.”
Another ally is Sense8, a Sausalito company that developed a set of tools that make it easier for software developers to design virtual-reality graphics.
And the defense industry, desperate for new markets, has been happy to sell its virtual-reality technology to the entertainment market. Visions of Reality will use a helmet-like display that Kaiser Electro-Optics Inc. in Carlsbad has adapted from its combat flight simulators for military pilots.
The headset weighs only 13 ounces, but the technology can deliver eye-popping graphics that can fool pilots, Kaiser spokeswoman Nancy Casey said.
Gemini Technology Corp., an Irvine simulation software maker, is developing the first game for Visions of Reality. Gemini’s space adventure will use 3-D animation techniques that it developed over the past 12 years for the military-simulations market.
The company is actually engineering spacecraft and other objects that will appear in the Visions of Reality simulation. Shadows and lighting on the objects under design are realistic, giving the objects an illusory 3-D effect.
“We’ve been training pilots for years how to fly in combat,” said Chris Morrow, vice president of sales. “Now, as part of our strategy to become less dependent on the Department of Defense, the market is entertainment.”
