Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This book is so full of outright lies and grotesque exageration that one hardly knows where to begin in critiquing it. The author was apparently satisfied to take Furness' word for how things were in the "early days" of VR at Wright-Patt. Too bad. Even a cursory check of the record would have revealed some significant problems with what is instead reported as fact:

(1) VCASS was never classified - there was nothing "top secret" about the work Furness was doing.

(2) The author reports R&D budgets for Furness' project (and Air Force R&D in general) that are so wildly erroneous that one has to wonder where he managed to come up with such incredible figures. As someone who was there - I only WISH that the USAF was throwing that kind of money around then.

There is more BS in this book than you can shake a stick at.

The utter lack of truth is so disturbing that I will be very surprised if some sort of backlash doesn't occur as a result. And a reader with any sort of knowledge of the situation at all would have to wonder what motivated this exercise in self-aggrandizing fantasy. It is truly astonishing that something this devoid of fact could make it into print. This book is an extreme disservice to the history of an exciting technical area.

Was there in the early years of HITL. Worked with those involved both named and unnamed in this book.

Key people and details conspicuously omitted. Credit misplaced. Some slandered in effort to make dramatic stories.

Sources and/or accounts obviously not verified before publishing. Some facts are skewed.

Read it for what it is:

Part entertaining fiction, part meaningless gossip.

I recently finished reading this book and have been following the reviews posted on amazon.com with a lot of interest. Like others who have posted their thoughts, I am also familiar with many of the key people discussed in the book, and I have also been engaged in this area of R&D for quite some time.

There are many, many points one could make about this book, none of them good I'm afraid. I'll just try to make a few, limited to what I'm familiar with:

(1) While I'm not sure that VCASS was NEVER involved in any classified research (it would have been unusual for any lab at AAMRL to not be involved in any classified work back in those days), certainly it was not "Top Secret." Most classified work had to do with the fact that fighter cockpit symbology was being used - and that was of course classified. However, the technology itself (ie., VCASS) was not classified.

(2) The funding and staffing figures that are cited for VCASS (100 people working there at an annual budget of $150M) are off by at least a factor of 10.

In general, most of the information regarding the start of VR at Wright-Patt is quite wildly misstated, which makes me question how the author got his information and if he bothered to check on its veracity at all.

Given that the beginning of the book was devoted to material I am familiar with and which was reported erroneously, I really don't know how to take the rest of the book. I'm inclined to dismiss it is as fiction too, but I can't comment with any sort of knowledge on things that went on in Seattle.

In general, the whole tenor of the book is disturbing to me. There is a great deal of excellent work going on in the world of VR by (get this) people who are NOT primarily motivated by the urge to become millionaires! What a concept! But Moody never really goes into the world of VR, he's more into the world of the get-rich-now Seattleite. Therefore people who are are "cynical and sarcastic" and say "well...Duh!" a lot are help up as being somehow exceptional human beings. Please!

(Also, readers who attended North Caolina State University and the University of Delaware will be sad to note that their schools aren't really very good. There's a lot of very gratuitous and off-the-cuff nonsense like that in this book).

Given the lack of factual material in the discussions of things I'm familiar with, I don't know whether or not the people working in various VR shops (not the HIT Lab)are actually quite as unsavory as the author makes them out to be. They tend to come across as ultra-materialistic trendoids who are solely motivated by money. It's hard to believe that could be strictly true.

Generally speaking, I think this book is about one step away from being farce. The VR world has suffered tremendously from overhype, overpromise, and lack of delivery. It's too bad - because there is good work going on. Perhaps someone, someday will write a legit review of it.

I worked at one of the companies mentioned in the book and worked with or knew several of the characters personally. A co-worker actually turned me onto the book after she recognized my old company's name mentioned. I borrowed it and proceeded to catch up with what happened to these folks for the few years after Worldesign shut down.

While the few facts I can personally relate to are accurate, they do focus a great deal on emotion and bitterness and seem to take one person's accounts as gospel without balance from others. It does state many of the hidden trials of startups.

The writing style is weak. I found the plot disjoint and with too much coverage in some areas, and mostly too little development/depth in others. If I were to have read the book without personal knowledge of the people mentioned, I would have screamed for more character development.

I agree with the other reviewer that this is something you borrow from the library. It was a quick read.

I worked at F5 Labs during its first 8 months of existence, and much of my experience there is contradicted by this fictional account. In the few cases where I was consulted, much of what I had to say was ignored or miscontrued; I have no doubt that many people interviewed for the sake of this book could say the same thing. Given this, the story seems to have been manufactured with only two things in mind: entertainment value and marketability.

If there's one thing the HIT Lab is REALLY good at, it's hyperbole and self-promotional BS (ok, two things!) There is excellent work going on in the world of VR, but you'll have to go elsewhere to read about it. Why was this book written??

This book is not badly written - I wouldn't say it's well written by any means but it's not bad. The thing that really galls one about the book are the characters - and unfortunately they're not fictitious. I hit rock bottom with the cast when I read about one "dreamer" who when presented with an opportunity to contribute a technological innovation to oceanographic research responded with the gushing realization that he could "make millions." Not that he might contribute something to humanity - but he might "make millions." It's a little hard to picture people primarily driven by a desire for money as "dreamers." Maybe the book should have been subtitled "The Digital Greedbags who are Hyping VR to Death."

If the point of the book is to lampoon the crass nature of the people in Seattle working on VR, it succeeds admirably. Somehow, however, I don't think that was intended to be the point. Read it only if you have a strong stomach for brainless greed, hype, and outright BS.

It would be great drama if it weren't for the fact that it's melodrama. Who could possibly believe such two dimensional characters rendered in vivid black and white? It's not even credible on the face of it let alone in the fact. In Moody's rush to lionize Furness and the HITL engineers and to enhance drama he leaves anything approaching objectivity completely aside. The immaturity of Furness and his mignons shows through in their "sour grapes" whining commentary which is full of expletives and extremes. Just another "visionary/engineer as victim" hack job, complete with poor fact finding and even a few completely fabricated events thrown in for good measure. A conspicuous lack of commentary from any of the business people who are so consistently slandered. Could have been an interesting story but...

I was one of the principals involved in the founding and initial operation of the HIT Lab. As the HIT Lab's first Associate Director, I organized the Virtual Worlds Consortium, the industry group that underwrote the Lab, and created the Lab-sponsored industry nexus, the sci.virtual-worlds newsgroup on USENET.

As I read Fred's book, I constantly found myself scratching my head and exclaiming, "I don't remember it that way!" In more than one case, Fred's recitation of "the facts" was contrary to the situation as I remembered it.

Moreover, Fred gives short shrift to the vibrant community of virtual-worlds developers, writers, and promoters, in the U.S. and abroad, who contributed to moving the field ahead. While I take great pride in the initial vision espoused by Tom Furness for the HIT Lab, in fact it was through interorganizational, often national and international collaboration that true progress was made.

Finally, contrary to Fred's account, (1) the HIT Lab did not engineer SIGGRAPH choosing me to chair the VR panel at SIGGRAPH 90, (2) I chose the panelists with great care to balance the concrete with the visionary, (3) the panel discussion was sensible and not ridiculous, (4) Myron Krueger and I did *not* get in a fight on stage, and (5) Myron did *not* shove me off the stage. He stepped down from the stage at Warren Robinett's urging. A small point? Perhaps, but this incredibly altered history makes me wonder how much of Fred's remaining reportage is credible.

Besides, weren't there more important things to say about the virtual-worlds movement other than that it was "populated by crazies" (who were a distinct minority)? Fred has missed a great opportunity to track an historical and cultural turning point in the computer industry.

fred's book is, simply put, a masterpiece. the depth, detail, and truth are simply unmatched. entertaining and educational, the visionary position is a must read for anyone living under the naive assumption that anything but pure greed, hype and lies drive the software industry. its funny too.