Virtual Interface Environment Workstation
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| VIEW (Virtual Interface Environment Workstation) | |
|---|---|
| Basic Info | |
| VR/AR | Virtual reality |
| Type | Head-mounted display |
| Creator | Scott Fisher (project director), with Jim Humphries, Michael McGreevy, Warren Robinett, Elizabeth Wenzel and others |
| Developer | NASA Ames Research Center (Aerospace Human Factors Research Division) |
| Predecessor | VIVED |
| Display | |
| Display | Monochrome LCD screens, one per eye (1985 configuration) |
| Image | |
| Field of View | 120 degrees horizontal and vertical per eye (effective, 1985 configuration) |
| Optics | |
| Optics | Wide-angle optics |
| Ocularity | Binocular (stereoscopic) |
| Tracking | |
| Tracking | Magnetic head and limb tracking (Polhemus; later a high-powered Ascension Technology tracker) |
| Audio | |
| Audio | Headphone 3D audio (Convolvotron), speech synthesis |
| Device | |
| Input | VPL DataGlove, speech recognition, gesture tracking |
The Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW) was an experimental virtual reality system developed in the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, beginning in 1985. It combined a wide-angle, stereoscopic head-mounted display with magnetic head and limb tracking, instrumented gloves, connected speech recognition, speech synthesis and a three-dimensional auditory display, so that an operator could explore a 360-degree computer-generated or remotely sensed environment and interact with it by voice and gesture.[1][2]
The project grew out of the VIVED (Virtual Visual Environment Display), a low-cost head-mounted display prototype built at Ames by Michael McGreevy and contractor Jim Humphries. Scott Fisher, who joined Ames at the beginning of 1985 and became project director, expanded that display into a multisensory system intended as a general user interface for space station work, with telerobotics and information management as its main applications.[1][3] The project commissioned the first DataGlove, which VPL Research built for NASA under its first contract, and produced the Convolvotron 3D sound processor, later marketed by Crystal River Engineering.[1][4] A 2010 NASA paper on spatial audio calls VIEW "seminal" and writes that it set the interactivity hardware elements now well recognized as the basis of such systems: a stereo display of a computer-generated scene, tracking of the user's head and body to update the graphics, and glove-based interaction with virtual objects.[5]
Name
Fisher's papers and NASA Spinoff use the name Virtual Interface Environment Workstation.[2][4] Some project papers from 1990 and 1991 call it the Virtual Environment Workstation, and the NASA Ames History Office finding aid and a 1990 paper on system lag use Virtual Interactive Environment Workstation; all of these refer to the same VIEW system.[6][3][7] Fisher's 2016 retrospective refers to the laboratory as the VIEWlab.[1]
History
Origins in the VIVED prototype
Fisher first visited Ames in early 1984 for a workshop on human factors for the planned U.S. space station, where he met Dave Nagel, then assistant chief of the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division. He had been working with Alan Kay at Atari Corporate Research on head-mounted displays and first-person media. In a later presentation at Ames he showed the wide-angle LEEP lens system invented by Eric Howlett (see LEEP Systems), and researchers Stephen Ellis and Michael McGreevy asked about it. When Fisher started at Ames at the beginning of 1985, he found that McGreevy had worked with Jim Humphries, an onsite contractor from Sterling Software, on a head-mounted display prototype built around the LEEP optics and displays taken from a pocket television.[1]
Fisher then set out to grow the prototype display (VIVED) into an interactive, multisensory system (VIEW) that could serve as a generic user interface for a range of space station applications. He specified a glove input device based on a sensor invented by Thomas G. Zimmerman and negotiated VPL's first contract to build it, ordered a head tracker from Polhemus, and began working with Elizabeth Wenzel on 3D sound and speech input and output. Mark Bolas, Scott Foster, Steve Bryson and Warren Robinett were among the people who later joined the effort.[1] The NASA Ames History Office describes VIEW as derived from VIVED and as "the principal integrated system within which VIVED was used".[3]
An early written description of the system is Fisher's presentation given at the Space Station Human Factors Research Review at Ames, 3 to 6 December 1985, and published by NASA in 1988. It describes a helmet-mounted unit with monochrome liquid crystal display screens seen through wide-angle optics, an effective field of view of 120 degrees horizontally and vertically for each eye, a helmet sensor whose position and orientation data updated the stereo images, and lightweight glove-like devices that sent arm, hand and finger data to a host computer.[8]
Project status and the CES 1986 demonstration
According to Fisher, McGreevy left for NASA Headquarters around mid-1985, and over the rest of that year the team had real-time, head-tracked wireframe demonstrations running in the helmet at 100 by 100 resolution. At the end of 1985 the group prepared a press release, and Fisher and Humphries took it to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 1986, where McGreevy joined them and they showed the project's first demonstration tape. Nagel, by then division chief, made the work a formal project with goals and milestones and appointed Fisher project director. Fisher writes that the plan was to make the refined display publicly available, together with the system and software documentation, at the end of the project.[1]
In April 1986 VPL Research won the contract for its first product, the NASA DataGlove, and delivered the first glove to NASA in May 1986, according to NASA's Spinoff 1990. The same account says VPL scientists worked closely with Fisher's telepresence and telerobotics researchers, and that VPL learned from extensive use of the technology in the VIEW system.[4] The project published its early design at the 1986 Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in "Virtual environment display system" by Fisher, McGreevy, Humphries and Robinett.[9][10]
Development, 1986 to 1990
Over the next four years the lab built two further revisions of the head-mounted display, had a real-time graphics system custom made to render filled polygons, built the Convolvotron 3D sound processor, and contracted Ascension for a high-powered tracker so that users could move around larger virtual environments in the lab while both hands were tracked.[1] Fisher's retrospective dates three system prototypes to 1985, 1986 and 1988. It also shows a counterbalanced CRT-based stereoscopic viewer from 1988, and notes that Humphries built the first BOOM, an alternative head-coupled display later commercialized by Mark Bolas's company Fakespace.[1] The 1987 software team pictured in the same paper was Fisher, Steve Bryson, Rick Jacoby, Ian McDowall, Mark Bolas and Phil Stone.[1]
Britannica's history of virtual reality, by Henry E. Lowood, describes Fisher as founding director of the project and writes that his group focused on low-cost personal simulation environments. It adds that NASA's objective was to develop telerobotics for automated space stations in future planetary exploration, while the group also considered entertainment, scientific and educational uses.[11] Fisher writes that the finished VIEW system was widely published in professional journals and covered in the popular media, including a Scientific American cover story in October 1987.[1] Fisher left Ames at the beginning of 1990 and co-founded Telepresence Research with Brenda Laurel.[1]
A June 1991 Ames paper by Fisher and nine co-authors described the system as it then stood. It presented VIEW as an aid to the design, simulation and evaluation of operator interfaces, and its stated aim was to derive guidelines and requirements that could define hardware and software architectures for future virtual environment systems.[6]
Design and hardware
Fisher's 1991 description lists the components as a wide-angle stereoscopic display unit, glove-like devices for multiple degree-of-freedom input, connected speech recognition, gesture tracking devices, a 3D auditory display, speech synthesis, and computer graphic and video image generation equipment. Combined with magnetic head and limb tracking, the head-coupled display presented visual and auditory imagery that appeared to surround the user. Graphics were generated at up to 30 frames per second over two independent, synchronized channels, one per eye, to give stereoscopic depth cues.[10]
| Subsystem | Description | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Display | Helmet-mounted monochrome LCD screens seen through wide-angle optics; effective field of view of 120 degrees horizontally and vertically per eye (1985 description) | [8] |
| Display (1990 account) | NASA Spinoff 1990 describes a display box with two small (3.9-inch) television screens, one per eye, in a headset that blocks the view of anything but the imagery | [4] |
| Tracking | Polhemus sensors for the head tracker and the DataGlove; later a high-powered tracker contracted from Ascension for larger spaces and two-handed tracking | [4][1] |
| Hand input | VPL DataGlove: fiber optic sensors detect finger movement, with a magnetic tracker for hand position, used for gestures such as flying, operating virtual menus and scaling objects | [4][1] |
| Audio | Headphone audio; development of MIDI-based binaural cues began in 1987, followed by spatial cues from the Convolvotron; two Ensoniq ESQ-M synthesizer modules and a DECtalk speech synthesizer | [12] |
| Host computer | Most of the system, including the auditory subsystem, ran on a Hewlett-Packard HP 9000/835 in 1990 | [12] |
| Graphics | Dual-channel graphics; the 1991 paper discusses synchronizing SGI IRIS, HP SRX/TurboSRX and ISG systems for stereo | [6] |
| Remote video | Two miniature CCD video cameras on a head-coupled, computer-controlled pan, tilt and roll platform | [10][13] |
The 1991 implementation paper set a performance objective of 640 x 480 pixel imagery at 30 frames per second over dual, synchronized display channels, with viewpoints updated in step with head and limb motion. The hardware was integrated with a real-time Unix workstation that drove an external 3D graphics system and handled input from up to 12 real-time peripherals such as trackers and gloves. A software library called the "simulation framework" gave access to the peripherals and services. The paper lists cumulative transport delay, "realtime" Unix and communication timing among the problems in reaching the 30 Hz target.[6] Bryson and Fisher developed a video-based method for measuring transmission lag and position lag on the workstation.[7]
Convolvotron and the auditory display
The VIEW auditory display could produce localized sound cues over headphones in real time. Development of a binaural display based on MIDI sound synthesis began in 1987, and true spatial cueing was added later by integrating the Convolvotron, a processor designed by Scott Foster of Crystal River Engineering. The Convolvotron filtered up to four moving or static sources with head-related transfer functions, interpolating between the four nearest measured transforms, and scaled amplitude as a simple distance cue. An Auditory Cue Editor (ACE) linked sound parameters to events and data in VIEW scenarios.[12]
Begault and colleagues write that Wenzel and Foster developed the prototype between 1986 and 1988 as a two-card set for an IBM PC-XT or PC-AT that could spatialize up to four sources at a 50 kHz sample rate.[5] NASA's Spinoff 1992 reported that Crystal River Engineering, based in Groveland, California, marketed the Convolvotron, with customers among universities, virtual reality developers and aircraft makers.[14] For background on the technique, see 3D audio.
Applications
Project documents describe two main application areas, telepresence and "dataspace".[10][1]
| Application | Description | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Telepresence and telerobotics | The operator called up views from free-flying or robot-mounted cameras, with 3D sound cues for nearby objects, then switched to a mode in which the display was linked to the telerobot's stereo camera and the glove and speech commands controlled the robot arm and end effector | [10] |
| Dataspace | Information windows and reconfigurable virtual control panels arranged in 3D space around the operator, called up, moved or deleted by speech and gesture | [10] |
| Visualization | Planned for complex three-dimensional data in architecture, engineering and computational fluid dynamics; simple architectural models could be scaled to life size with a glove gesture so the user could walk through them | [6][10] |
| Surgical simulation | A VIEWlab virtual world database for surgical planning and education, developed with the MIT Media Lab and Stanford Medical School; Fisher names Joseph Rosen, Scott Delp and Steve Pieper as the main creators of the related virtual skeleton for surgical simulation | [1] |
| Spacesuit displays | The 1991 paper lists concepts for "portable" multimodal information systems such as an EVA spacesuit visor display | [6] |
Fisher's 1991 chapter also names a near-term goal of connecting at least two VIEW systems to a common virtual environment database so that remote users could collaborate in a shared space.[10]
Legacy and archives
VPL Research went on to sell the DataGlove commercially and created its own version of the NASA helmet display, the VPL EyePhone, according to NASA's Spinoff 1990.[4][1] Britannica writes that the VIEW workstation established a standard suite of VR technology: a stereoscopic head-coupled display, head tracker, speech recognition, computer-generated imagery, data glove and 3D audio.[11]
The NASA Ames History Office holds collection AFS8078, transferred by Stephen R. Ellis in February 2008. It contains VIVED hardware and documentation and a VIEW document index covering a system design review, system requirements, project goals, management and development plans, subsystem descriptions and a Unix programmer's manual.[3]
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 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 Scott S. Fisher (2016). "The NASA Ames VIEWlab Project - A Brief History". Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 339-348. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1162/PRES_a_00277. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 S. S. Fisher, E. M. Wenzel, C. Coler, M. W. McGreevy (October 1988). "Virtual Interface Environment Workstations". Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 32nd Annual Meeting, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 91-95. Human Factors Society. doi:10.1177/154193128803200219. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19890044246. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 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 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 "A New Continent of Ideas". NASA Spinoff 1990, pp. 88-91. NASA. 1990. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20020086961. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 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 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 S. Fisher, R. Jacoby, S. Bryson, P. Stone, I. McDowall, M. Bolas, D. Dasaro, E. Wenzel, C. Coler, D. Kerr (June 1991). "The Ames Virtual Environment Workstation: Implementation Issues and Requirements". Human Machine Interfaces for Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. NASA Technical Reports Server. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19950007621. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Steve Bryson, Scott S. Fisher (1990). "Defining, modeling, and measuring system lag in virtual environments". Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 1256, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications, p. 98. SPIE. doi:10.1117/12.19894. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19910056870. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Scott S. Fisher (1988). "Virtual interface environment". Space Station Human Factors Research Review, vol. 4, pp. 85-87 (presented 3-6 December 1985). NASA Ames Research Center. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19880014769/downloads/19880014769.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ S. S. Fisher, M. McGreevy, J. Humphries, W. Robinett (1987). "Virtual environment display system". Proceedings of the 1986 Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 77-87. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/319120.319127. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 Scott S. Fisher (1991). "Virtual Environments, Personal Simulation and Telepresence". Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice and Promise (S. Helsel and J. Roth, eds.), Meckler Publishing. http://www.itofisher.com/PEOPLE/sfisher/VirtualSimPresence-pdfrev.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Henry E. Lowood (2025-07-23). "Virtual reality - Entertainment, Immersion, Simulation". Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://web.archive.org/web/20250729204825/https://www.britannica.com/technology/virtual-reality/Entertainment. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Elizabeth M. Wenzel, Scott S. Fisher, Philip K. Stone, Scott H. Foster (March 1991). "Virtual acoustics displays". NASA Technology 2000, vol. 1 (reprinted from Proceedings of Visualization '90, San Francisco, 23-26 October 1990). NASA Technical Reports Server. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19910013710. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Mark T. Bolas, Scott S. Fisher (1990). "Head-coupled remote stereoscopic camera system for telepresence applications". Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 1256, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications, p. 113. SPIE. doi:10.1117/12.19896. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19910056871. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "3D Audio System". NASA Spinoff 1992. NASA. 1992. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20020083312. Retrieved 2026-10-21.