Japan Inc. Cooks Up A `Virtual' Kitchen -- Once Again, It's Bringing Consumers Hot Technology Developed In U.S.

TOKYO - Are you ready to don a wired golf glove and a pair of goggles attached to a computer and enter your new kitchen?

It won't be the actual kitchen, but a "virtual reality" simulation of the kitchen you've chosen, where you can test the height of the counters and cabinets, sample the window light, rearrange the layout if you're dissatisfied and even throw a dish against the wall.

With a little financial help from the Japanese government, Matsushita Electric Works last fall opened a, well, virtual showroom here to show off its home-construction division's custom-designed kitchens. The company says the showroom is the world's first consumer application of virtual-reality technology developed in, you guessed it, the U.S.

The key word here is "consumer." The U.S. may lead in military and scientific uses of virtual reality, but apart from a few games that approach it, the evolving technology is still far from U.S. homes.

More than just a kitchen showroom, Matsushita's work suggests the Japanese are serious about "VR" and may even take the lead away from the U.S.

MATSUSHITA THINKING BIG

Matsushita's showroom can be found amid the high-rises of Tokyo's Post-Modern Shinjuku section. One reaches the showroom after passing through three floors of home furnishing displays that would make even the most gadget-obsessed consumer in this gadget-obsessed society reel from mental exhaustion.

There are more than 200,000 products in all, provided by the minds at Matsushita, best known in the U.S. under the Panasonic, Technics and Quasar brand names.

The virtual-reality showroom eschews such ostentatious display - just three computer work stations, a half-dozen chairs and a TV set and speakers so observers can monitor what is going on in the virtual world. In the middle of the small room is a coat rack holding the goggles, headset and data glove that will take travelers into virtual space.

Can't reach the top shelf of that kitchen cabinet? Let's lower it a couple of inches and see how that works. Want a wider-angle view from this window? Let's move the sink over and see if that's better.

"Our target is to develop an amenity-testing system in virtual space for a total housing system," said Junji Nomura, senior researcher at Matsushita's Artificial Intelligence Laboratories in Osaka. "In Japan, we are thinking about many applications for consumers."

DEFINITION, EVOLUTION OF VR

Scientists in the U.S. have been tinkering with the concept of virtual reality since the late 1960s when Ivan Sutherland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled the first head-mounted, three-dimensional computer display capable of tricking its wearers into believing they were somewhere other than where they were.

The basic idea entailed projecting a 3-D movie inside goggles that excluded all other light. The user's imagination projected him or her into the imaginary space. By having the movie change in response to the movements of the user, presto, virtual reality.

The computer power behind Sutherland's first contraption was low, and the graphics capability of the tiny screens inside the goggles was poor. But it was enough to whet the appetite of science-fiction buffs who until then could only dream of traveling to imaginary worlds.

Advances in computer and display technology made VR possible. Researchers in the U.S. began putting elements of VR to work in nuclear and chemical plants, space, medicine, education and games.

Companies in the U.S. and England developed the sensitive sensor equipment needed to provide near-instantaneous feedback between person and computer. VPL Research Inc., a Silicon Valley company, invented a golf-glove-like data glove that has wired sensors on each fingertip and above each finger and allows the user to see his "hand" when extended in front of his body.

NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., tapped the latest advances in miniature flat screens to develop the goggles needed for projecting the user into virtual reality. Sensors on top of the headset kept track of the wearer as he or she moved through virtual space.

Another California firm, Crystal River Engineering, developed a three-dimensional sound system for virtual space. One of the small pleasures of walking through Matsushita's virtual kitchen came from grabbing a dish off the counter, throwing it against the wall, hearing it shatter and not having to sweep up the glass.

KITCHEN STILL HAS BUGS

Nomura and 10 computer programmers at Matsushita began writing the software for its kitchen in 1990, shortly after reading about the NASA hardware advances in a paper published by the U.S. government. "We bought the hardware," he said. "Our contribution was the software."

A major difficulty, he said, was combining the data bases for 3-D sound and pictures so they would change rapidly and logically in response to changes in the environment. "Each object has its own characteristics," Nomura said. "A door, a dish, a drawer."

It's obvious that the programmers still have a lot of work to do. After the dish flew against the wall with a horrible crash, it fell to the floor unbroken. After walking through the door to leave the kitchen, one could walk through the wall to get back in.

The images in the VR kitchen also looked cartoonish, because the computers still can't handle the huge amount of information in motion-picture-quality images. And the image changed just two to three times per second, making for a jerky reality.

"The speed of data processing is a big problem," said Hiroyasu Horio, deputy director of the housing industry division of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which is spending $24 million over five years to help develop the virtual-reality system. "But we are preparing a high-speed computer for virtual reality, one capable of 10 pictures a second."

ENGLAND LENDS A GLOVE

Matsushita also is experimenting with touch-sensitive systems that use a body suit with sensors and different data gloves. The new devices use air pressure to signal when a person is bumping up against VR.

Again, though, they are looking abroad for the key technological breakthroughs. The Advanced Research Robotics Laboratory in Manchester, England, is developing the new glove.

The software programmers at Matsushita are hard at work in anticipation of the glove. "We're developing a texture mapping system," Nomura said. "It won't be a touch feeling, but a feedback system using air pressure in the data glove."

The Japanese government's interest in virtual reality goes far beyond kitchens. The Matsushita experiment, for example, is part of a program called Wish 21, the "housing development project for the 21st century." It includes 35 major building-supply manufacturers and construction firms.

"At the end of this project, we plan to use virtual reality to design houses," said Horio of the international trade ministry. "It will handle both multifamily and single-family homes and allow people to design their own spaces."

---------------------------- SUNDAY IN THE TIMES ----------------------------

Pacific magazine looks at University of Washington researchers hot on the trail of virtual reality. So hot, in fact, they've attracted Japanese businessmen among their visitors.

--------------------------------- JAPAN'S VR NETWORK ----------------------------------

In "Virtual Reality," author Howard Rheingold chronicles the technology's evolution. He looks at Japan's research efforts not as a threat but as a model to learn from.

Arguing against centralized planning, Rheingold stresses the idea of cooperation between government and industry in finding practical uses for "VR."

"The key distinction between VR in Japan and the United States," he writes, "is that VR is integrated into Japanese industrial policy, and the United States does not have an industrial policy."

"The technological big boys of Japan Inc.," Rheingold adds, "are heavily backing VR. Even if every research funder in America was enthusiastically committed to a televirtual development effort, it would take a good chunk of the 1990s to ramp up to the level of research planning in Japan."

A glance at how Japan cooperates on VR:

MITI

The Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Rheingold writes, has the respect and resources to bring Japanese government and business together to work on a shared goal. MITI is sponsoring VR research under the larger umbrella of robotic technology.

In 1990, MITI created a VR commission, made up of MITI, NTT, ATR and Japanese university researchers.

NTT

Nippon Telephone and Telegraph is Japan's phone company and builder of its "information highway" using fiber-optic voice and data lines. It spends heavily on VR, foreseeing the day people can exchange and simultaneously experience VR worlds on this highway.

ATR

Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, a consortium of 140 companies, has a budget of $50 million a year to study VR applications. The centerpiece of a "science city" outside Kyoto, it has attracted researchers from around the world. Its major patron is NTT, followed by NEC, Toshiba and Hitachi.

Source: "Virtual Reality," Howard Rheingold