Of all the “sci-fi-come-true” ideas to emerge from computer research, one of the most intriguing is virtual reality (VR). Here’s a look at the progress to date of this high-tech grail quest. Virtual reality is the term (coined in 1989) for a computer-generated “world” with which the user can interact as if he were actually part of it, ideally with no awareness that the experiences are all created by the machine. Entertainment and education (to mention only the most obvious areas) would be utterly transformed by its full implementation. Perhaps not surprisingly, the original impetus for developing such a system came from the military, with flight simulators for high-performance jets. Moody (I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier, 1995) focuses primarily on the University of Washington’s HIT lab, which he describes as “the world’s leading VR research center,” and its director Thomas A. Furness III. Furness got his start designing fighter plane cockpits during the Vietnam War. He left the air force and moved to Seattle in 1988, where he began assembling a team of young computer hotshots to find civilian applications for his ideas. Some of the wild-eyed hackers of those early days were eccentric even by Seattle standards, and their primary loyalties were often not to HIT but to their own visions. Furness’s management style did little to keep them in line: “Tom loved to burn out competent people,” said one of his former protÇgÇs years later. Despite this, there was continual progress toward the dream. Much of the early research was aimed at developing the VRD—a device to project computer images directly onto the retina, rather than force the user to wear an unwieldy helmet or goggles. Moody gives the reader a detailed, often highly amusing account of how far VR has come, and a hint of where it is likely to go. An eminently readable account of life on the cutting edge of cyberspace.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-2852-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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