The stereo image being presented inside Falker’s goggles showed a nonexistent, computer-generated Ping-Pong table, with Therese Loel transposed so as to be facing him from the far end of it. To everyone watching, Falker simply extended an empty hand palm-up and looked at it. A program analyzing the output from a pair of cameras mounted on the walls tracked the movement, and another program added a Ping-Pong ball to the image that he could see of his hand. Therese Loel saw it appear too, but the view in her goggles showed Falker at the far end of the table.
“Go ahead,” Tyron invited, speaking into a mike.
The onlookers watched as Falker tossed the invisible ball up and hit at it with the metal paddle. Sensors around the room tracked the paddle’s motion from laser reflections, and the ball in the optical representation followed the computed path.
“Hey!” Therese cried involuntarily, and jumped sideways to play a return stroke.
“I can hear it hitting the bats and the table,” Falker said, playing a backhand. “The synchronization is perfect. This is good!” Therese returned, but the ball went high.
As state of the art, simulating a Ping-Pong game wasn’t especially a revolutionary, or even a new, concept. What was different about this demonstration was the quality. There was nothing crude or cartoonlike about the images that the two players were seeing. The table in front of them and the room around it (actually a stored representation, encoded from videotape, of the games room in the OTSC Recreational Gym in another part of the establishment) were real. The figures at far ends were Therese Loel and Don Falker, superposed into the scene without the helmets—the missing facial details were added from TV images captured beforehand. Even with a fast forehand smash shot, the images of ball and paddle stayed clean and true: no flicker, no blurring. This hardware was fast.
The others couldn’t keep from laughing at the two goggled figures lunging and swiping over a table that nobody else could see. Even Ken Endelmyer was smiling between two of his cohorts. What made the spectacle even stranger was that the two players were facing roughly the same way. The images that the computer was creating in the two sets of goggles were correct for the perspectives that each was perceiving.
“It’s okay, Don,” Tyron called as Falker turned automatically to retrieve the ball from the floor. “You don’t have to chase after it. Just serve another.”
“Oh, really? Okay.” Falker faced the virtual table, raised his left hand again, and—to him—a ball appeared in it. “Say, I’ve got another one.” He played it. “What happens to the first?”
“It evaporates.”
Falker and Loel continued their game for a few minutes more, then stopped to allow a couple of the other visitors to try. While the helmets were being taken off and donned, Tyron took a spare unit from a rack by the wall. He turned to address himself particularly to Endelmyer and Pinder.
“We can give you Pinocchio with voice and vision now.” He made a dismissive gesture, conveying that there really oughtn’t to be anything to think about. “The way you’re planning to go at present, it will take years at least. Even if you do shift the interface boundary from the medulla to the pons, you’re still as far away as ever because visual data enters farther still above that.” He patted the helmet resting in his hand and said again, “We can give you it now, using technology that already exists, right here. No banking on uncertain future developments. No speculating with unnecessary risks. It doesn’t mean that you have to abandon your plans for extending to the pons. But going this way could relieve the time pressure for getting results.”
Endelmyer looked inquiringly at Pinder. His expression said that it sounded good to him and he was looking for endorsement. Pinder obliged. “I think it would be worth looking into, Ken. It would give us a mainstream hybrid thrust toward full-sensory now: tactile from Pinocchio, visual and speech/auditory via the regular sensory apparatus, using VIV. The pons research gets relegated to lower-priority status as a secondary approach. It may produce results sooner or later. Either way, we can afford to wait.”