organ that rode atop the hearts of single parents: guilt.
She made a quick guess and padded her answer. “By eleven.”
“See ya.”
He hung up, not waiting for her response. She figured he didn’t want to give her too much time to think about the homework versus RPG situation.
PJ swiveled around and faced the high-end Silicon Graphics workstation that was the magnet that brought her to St. Louis. The department had obtained the equipment under a federal grant and quickly realized it was necessary to hire someone who knew what to do with its visualization capability. When PJ arrived, the boxes were literally gathering dust in a corner. She’d quickly set it up and installed the software developed in her marketing research job.
As a marketing analyst, she produced simulations of grocery stores, car dealerships, whatever the client wanted. People participating in the study entered the scene virtually and shopped, picked cereal from the shelves, or test-drove cars. It could be a product’s shelf appeal that was being tested or whether a dealer’s showroom enticed buyers to come inside. The big difference between her past and current work was in motivation: make a profit or put a killer behind bars.
She began by scanning in crime photos of the levee and the access road. Her program took the setting and rendered it in simple 3D wireframe mode. Then she did the same with photos of the victim. Her software filled in any missing areas by extrapolation, combined setting and person, and set the whole thing in motion. In fifteen minutes she had a wireframe version of a male lying at the base of the cobblestone levee, river water slapping at his feet. His wounds were crudely shown at this point, but she had routines to make the blood and guts realistic.
PJ had a large library of standard elements she could add, so she plunked a car, a late model sedan, on the access road. She also added a driver, choosing from among the set of avatars she’d developed. Genman, for generic man. Average height, build, appearance—the face in the crowd. She also had Genfem, Genteen, Genkid, and Genbaby programmed and ready to use. She’d never had to use Genbaby, and hoped she never would.
She ran through a basic scenario on her monitor. The car traveled along the access road and stopped. The driver emerged by walking through the door rather than opening it. The trunk lid popped open. Genman pulled the victim out and tossed him toward the river. Instead of rolling, the victim floated smoothly down as if he were cushioned on air and stopped several feet short of the river. Water surged up the levee from the Mississippi, rose three feet into the air, and enveloped his feet.
The playback was rough even by PJ’s lenient standards for a first run-through. It was going to be a long afternoon.
There were three apples and a stale Danish lined up on PJ’s desk, and that would have to do for dinner.
She worked with the wireframe scenario of the dump site until there were no scenes of walking through solid objects, and then added the subtle shading of 3D rendering. The victim’s face was now Arlan’s, and his injuries were chillingly accurate. The computer used its database of information about St. Louis to fill in the downtown backdrop. After reviewing the playback several times, PJ felt there was nothing more to be learned by exploratory VR. That was the term for interacting with a virtual world only by viewing it on a monitor. The next step was immersion, in which she would enter the world she’d created as a participant, and everything would appear life-sized to her.
It took more than a powerful computer to provide an immersion experience. It took a Head Mounted Display, or HMD, and a device to control motion in the virtual world, usually data gloves. When PJ first got started, she’d had to borrow those items from a researcher at Washington University. The hardware she borrowed wasn’t the slick commercial type, but she was in no
She made a quick guess and padded her answer. “By eleven.”
“See ya.”
He hung up, not waiting for her response. She figured he didn’t want to give her too much time to think about the homework versus RPG situation.
PJ swiveled around and faced the high-end Silicon Graphics workstation that was the magnet that brought her to St. Louis. The department had obtained the equipment under a federal grant and quickly realized it was necessary to hire someone who knew what to do with its visualization capability. When PJ arrived, the boxes were literally gathering dust in a corner. She’d quickly set it up and installed the software developed in her marketing research job.
As a marketing analyst, she produced simulations of grocery stores, car dealerships, whatever the client wanted. People participating in the study entered the scene virtually and shopped, picked cereal from the shelves, or test-drove cars. It could be a product’s shelf appeal that was being tested or whether a dealer’s showroom enticed buyers to come inside. The big difference between her past and current work was in motivation: make a profit or put a killer behind bars.
She began by scanning in crime photos of the levee and the access road. Her program took the setting and rendered it in simple 3D wireframe mode. Then she did the same with photos of the victim. Her software filled in any missing areas by extrapolation, combined setting and person, and set the whole thing in motion. In fifteen minutes she had a wireframe version of a male lying at the base of the cobblestone levee, river water slapping at his feet. His wounds were crudely shown at this point, but she had routines to make the blood and guts realistic.
PJ had a large library of standard elements she could add, so she plunked a car, a late model sedan, on the access road. She also added a driver, choosing from among the set of avatars she’d developed. Genman, for generic man. Average height, build, appearance—the face in the crowd. She also had Genfem, Genteen, Genkid, and Genbaby programmed and ready to use. She’d never had to use Genbaby, and hoped she never would.
She ran through a basic scenario on her monitor. The car traveled along the access road and stopped. The driver emerged by walking through the door rather than opening it. The trunk lid popped open. Genman pulled the victim out and tossed him toward the river. Instead of rolling, the victim floated smoothly down as if he were cushioned on air and stopped several feet short of the river. Water surged up the levee from the Mississippi, rose three feet into the air, and enveloped his feet.
The playback was rough even by PJ’s lenient standards for a first run-through. It was going to be a long afternoon.
There were three apples and a stale Danish lined up on PJ’s desk, and that would have to do for dinner.
She worked with the wireframe scenario of the dump site until there were no scenes of walking through solid objects, and then added the subtle shading of 3D rendering. The victim’s face was now Arlan’s, and his injuries were chillingly accurate. The computer used its database of information about St. Louis to fill in the downtown backdrop. After reviewing the playback several times, PJ felt there was nothing more to be learned by exploratory VR. That was the term for interacting with a virtual world only by viewing it on a monitor. The next step was immersion, in which she would enter the world she’d created as a participant, and everything would appear life-sized to her.
It took more than a powerful computer to provide an immersion experience. It took a Head Mounted Display, or HMD, and a device to control motion in the virtual world, usually data gloves. When PJ first got started, she’d had to borrow those items from a researcher at Washington University. The hardware she borrowed wasn’t the slick commercial type, but she was in no
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