VIVED
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| VIVED (Virtual Visual Environment Display) | |
|---|---|
| |
| Basic Info | |
| VR/AR | Virtual reality |
| Type | Head-mounted display |
| Creator | Michael McGreevy, with contractors Jim Humphries, Saim Eriskin and Joe Deardon |
| Developer | NASA Ames Research Center (Aerospace Human Factors Research Division) |
| Announcement Date | January 1986 (CES, Las Vegas) |
| Price | About US$2,000 build cost (research prototype) |
| Display | |
| Display | Two LCD panels taken from commercial pocket televisions |
| Resolution | About 100 x 100 in the 1985 demonstrations; 320 x 240 monochrome screens in the 1988 configuration |
| Image | |
| Field of View | 120 degrees effective per eye (as reported by Engadget) |
| Optics | |
| Optics | LEEP wide-angle optics |
| Tracking | |
| Tracking | Polhemus head and hand tracker |
The VIVED (Virtual Visual Environment Display, pronounced "vivid") was an early VR system created by/for NASA. It was a head-mounted display built at NASA's Ames Research Center in California in the mid-1980s, and it gave the wearer a wide-angle, stereoscopic view of computer graphics that changed as the head moved.[1][2] Other devices like it include the VIEW, the Virtual Interface Environment Workstation, which NASA Ames later derived from the VIVED and within which the VIVED was used.[3][4]
The VIVED used LCD panels taken from commercial pocket televisions,[2] and lecture notes from the University of Illinois Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory give the Sony Watchman as an example of the off-the-shelf parts used,[5] and a Polhemus electromagnetic tracker.[1] The NASA Ames History Office describes it as "a minimal system, considered to be the first low-cost, head-mounted display virtual environment system to demonstrate that cheap immersive systems were possible."[3]
History
Origins
Michael McGreevy, a manned systems engineer at Ames, developed the concept of a "Virtual Workstation" in 1984 while looking for ways to use simulation to improve how people relate spatially to computers.[2] In 1988 he told NASA Tech Briefs that his team "wanted to create a personal simulator for such applications as high fidelity telepresence, the projection of human capability to remote locations like Mars or a moon base."[2] A 2010 NASA paper on spatial audio research traces the VIVED to earlier work by McGreevy and Stephen Ellis on interactive perspective displays, and calls it "McGreevy's relatively inexpensive VIVED system".[6]
According to computer graphics historian Wayne Carlson, McGreevy designed and built the VIVED beginning in 1984 with contractors Jim Humphries, Saim Eriskin and Joe Deardon.[1] Humphries designed the video processors and the helmet packaging. He told NASA Tech Briefs in 1988 that the team "used mostly off-the-shelf components", that the LCDs "were pulled from commercial pocket televisions and modified to present video imagery to the optics", and that this kept the device low in cost while extending the state of wide field-of-view displays.[2] The same article says the group, working on a small budget, produced the helmet-mounted prototype within a year.[2]
Scott Fisher, who joined Ames at the beginning of 1985 after working at Atari, later recalled that he had shown Ellis and McGreevy the wide-angle LEEP lens system invented by Eric Howlett (see LEEP Systems) during a presentation he gave at Ames before joining. When he arrived, he found that McGreevy had been working with Humphries on an HMD prototype built around the LEEP optics, using displays from a pocket TV.[4]
First demonstrations and CES 1986
McGreevy configured the first workstation around the VIVED: a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/40 computer, an Evans and Sutherland Picture System 2 with two 19-inch monitors, a Polhemus head and hand tracker, video cameras and custom video circuitry. He wrote the software for this first NASA virtual environment workstation with Amy Wu, and gave the first demonstrations in early 1985 to local researchers and managers and to visitors from universities, industry and the military.[1]
Around mid-1985 McGreevy left for NASA Headquarters in Washington as the Ames representative. Fisher wrote that over the rest of that year the team got "a couple of real-time head-tracked wireframe demos running in the helmet with only 100 x 100 resolution".[4] At the end of 1985 the team prepared a press release, which Humphries and Fisher went to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 1986 to release; McGreevy joined them there, and they showed the project's first demo tape.[4] Engadget, in a 2013 retrospective, described the CES showing as the launch of NASA's VIVED prototype.[7]
The system was described in the paper "Virtual Environment Display System" by Fisher, McGreevy, Humphries and Warren Robinett, presented at the 1986 Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.[3] Its abstract describes "a head-mounted, wide-angle, stereoscopic display system controlled by operator position, voice and gesture" that let a user "virtually explore a 360-degree synthesized or remotely sensed environment", with telerobotics, management of large information systems and human factors research as its main applications.[8]
Evolution into VIEW
Fisher set out to grow the prototype HMD into an interactive, multisensory system, the Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW), intended as a general user interface for space station applications. For it he specified a glove input device that VPL Research built under contract (the DataGlove), ordered a Polhemus head tracker, and began work with Elizabeth Wenzel on 3D sound and speech input and output.[4] Over the next four years the team made two more revisions of the HMD. Humphries also built the first BOOM, an alternative head-coupled display that was later sold commercially by Mark Bolas's company Fakespace.[4] The NASA Ames History Office describes VIEW as derived from the VIVED and as "the principal integrated system within which VIVED was used", with the same goal of studying how an operator interacts with a multisensory synthetic environment.[3]
In its July-August 1988 issue, NASA Tech Briefs reported that the "Virtual Workstation" used the VIVED as its key hardware component, together with a fiber optic DataGlove, and that a second-generation viewer without the helmet and with higher-resolution LCDs had been built.[2] The article also said that the current monochrome screens of 320 x 240 pixels were to be replaced by 512 x 512 color screens by the end of 1988, and that Ames was developing voice interaction, improved 3D sound and a wireless display system to be tested on the Space Shuttle.[2] According to Carlson, Scientific American featured the VIVED in October 1987.[1]
Design and hardware
The VIVED placed an LCD panel in front of each eye. Wide field-of-view optics enlarged each eye's image to approach the breadth of normal human vision, and each screen received slightly different imagery so that the two views fused into a stereoscopic scene.[2] Sensors tracked the position and orientation of the head, and the system redrew the scene to match, which produced motion parallax and let the wearer look around a synthetic panorama.[2]
| Component | Description | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Displays | Two LCD panels removed from commercial pocket televisions and modified for the optics | [2] |
| Screen size | Two 2.7-inch, medium-resolution, monochrome LCD screens | [7] |
| Resolution | About 100 x 100 in the 1985 wireframe demonstrations; 320 x 240 monochrome screens in the mid-1988 system, with 512 x 512 color screens planned | [4][2] |
| Optics | LEEP wide-angle optics (see LEEP Systems) | [4][7] |
| Field of view | 120 degrees effective per eye (as reported by Engadget) | [7] |
| Head tracking | Polhemus head and hand tracker | [1] |
| Host computer | Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/40 | [1] |
| Graphics system | Evans and Sutherland Picture System 2 with two 19-inch monitors | [1] |
| Cost | About US$2,000 | [7] |
Engadget also wrote that the system included surround sound for spatial audio cues, speech recognition for spoken commands, and gesture input through a glove.[7] The VIVED screens could also show television programs and stereo videotapes, but without head tracking.[2]
Applications
Engadget describes space telerobotics as one of NASA's primary applications for the VIVED.[7] The 1986 paper lists telerobotics, management of large-scale integrated information systems and human factors research as the primary applications.[8] One 1988 demonstration placed the wearer in space, with a space station in the distance ahead, a satellite drifting past over the shoulder and the Earth below.[2] The article also described plans to pair VIVED displays with NASA's PLAID computer-aided design software so that engineers could walk through Space Station module designs before building mock-ups, to build "virtual wind tunnels" for computational fluid dynamics research in the Ames Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation program, and, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to recreate planetary surfaces from spacecraft imagery for virtual exploration.[2] Carlson notes that later virtual reality work at Ames covered planetary terrain exploration, computational fluid dynamics and space station telerobotics, with more than two dozen technical contributors.[1]
Preservation
The NASA Ames History Office holds a collection (AFS8078) of Human Systems Integration Division virtual environment materials that Stephen R. Ellis transferred in February 2008. It includes a VIVED head-mounted display, a VIVED system chassis with its image display and display interface circuit cards, electronics box and cords, and two volumes of 1987 VIVED system documentation: one on the display electronics and one with fabrication drawings for the headgear.[3]
Significance
Carlson calls the VIVED "the first low-cost, wide field-of-view, stereo, head-tracked, head-mounted display" and writes that clones and extensions of its design became common in the later VR market.[1] He also notes that in the nearly twenty years after Ivan Sutherland's work, head-mounted displays had been used mainly in multi-million dollar military systems, while the idea of a personal virtual environment system as a general-purpose computer interface had been largely neglected.[1] Engadget's retrospective credits NASA's research with part of the groundwork for later devices such as the Oculus Rift.[7]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Wayne E. Carlson (2017). "17.2 Virtual Projection". Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: A Retrospective Overview. The Ohio State University (Pressbooks). https://web.archive.org/web/20260118134043/https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/17-2-virtual-projection/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 "NASA's Virtual Workstation: Using Computers To Alter Reality". NASA Tech Briefs, vol. 12, no. 7. Associated Business Publications for NASA. July-August 1988. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110004238/downloads/20110004238.pdf. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Stephanie Pierce (July 2010). "Guide to the Human Systems Integration Division Virtual Environment Documentation and Equipment, 1986-1993 (Collection Number AFS8078)". NASA Ames History Office. NASA Ames Research Center. https://history.arc.nasa.gov/hist_pdfs/guides/afs8078_virtualenviron.pdf. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Scott S. Fisher (2016). "The NASA Ames VIEWlab Project - A Brief History". Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 25, no. 4. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1162/PRES_a_00277. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ "CS 528 Lecture 1". Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois Chicago. https://web.archive.org/web/20240411130544/https://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/528/lecture01.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Durand R. Begault, Elizabeth M. Wenzel, Martine Godfroy, Joel D. Miller, Mark R. Anderson (October 2010). "Applying Spatial Audio to Human Interfaces: 25 Years of NASA Experience". AES 40th International Conference: Spatial Audio, Tokyo. NASA Ames Research Center. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110008295/downloads/20110008295.pdf. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 Jon Turi (2013-12-15). "Time Machines: NASA goes virtual at CES". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-15-time-machines.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 S. S. Fisher, M. McGreevy, J. Humphries, W. Robinett (1987). "Virtual Environment Display System". Proceedings of the 1986 Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics (SI3D '86), pp. 77-87. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/319120.319127. Retrieved 2026-09-27.