cover image The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Are Making Virtual Reality a Reality

The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Are Making Virtual Reality a Reality

Fred Moody. Crown Business, $28.05 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-2852-5

Seattle Weekly staff writer Moody (I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier) returns with a frontline report on VR technology, the progress of which has been hindered by the Webward flow of R&D dollars and persistent problems in making the technology commercially viable. Moody set up camp in the Seattle lab of Dr. Thomas H. Furness III, a former Air Force scientist who has been working on VR-related projects since 1966 and remains a lead dog in the field. Moody carefully describes Furness's difficulties in moving from governmental support to the more precarious world of the corporate/academic interface, where researchers must raise their own funds. While his depictions of the technology and its possibilities are sharp and enthralling (virtual spiders to acclimate the arachnophobic; images that can be registered directly on the retinas of those with certain forms of eye damage), Moody strives to make his book ""less a study of virtual reality in particular than of the origins of American industry in general."" As poisonous interpersonal relations and hyped expectations threaten to overwhelm Furness's lab and its (sometimes competitive) satellites, readers are given a riveting look at IPO-driven capitalism at its implosive worst. While providing a bracing reality check for Bill Gates wannabes, the players here, even at their lowest points, never quite give up their dreams, and Moody is empathic in communicating their enthusiasm and smarts. (Mar.)