VIRTUAL REALISM. By Michael Heim. Oxford Univ. Press. 264 pp. $26

Technological disciplines have collective personalities. While the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that former prodigy who has been bumped around but is still game, virtual reality (VR) is AI’s sexier, younger, right-brain cousin, wilder, more sensuous, with a larger circle of admirers ranging from Pentagon warriors to neobohemians.

Heim is a philosopher determined to sort out what new technologies mean for enduring humanistic issues, beginning with Electric Language (1987), on the implications of word processing, and continuing with The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993). He presents Virtual Realism as an alternative

to debunking books by authors as varied as Clifford Stoll, Sven Birkerts, and Bill McKibben. Yet he also distances himself from those enthusiasts who foresee a posthuman cyborg destiny for our species. From Heim’s account, at least two main directions for virtual reality emerge. Operational telepresence is today’s successor to the flight simulation technology familiar in military and civil aviation, in which a human interacts with electronic (and sometimes physical) representations of physical objects. Artificial telepresence is more abstract, a synthetic social space rather than the representation of an existing physical one. Fabricated personalities called avatars, directed by programs or by human participants, can interact in a world with properties unknown in our universe. But artificial telepresence can also be used to design manufacturing systems that run in the physical world.

Heim gives some attention to helmetmounted displays, the gloves, and other simulation apparatus most commonly identified with VR. But he notes the practical difficulties that have frustrated early recreational versions of these combat-born techniques, including nausea and disorientation in a significant number of users. He notes an alternative form of VR, the CAVE Automatic Visual Environment, that does not isolate the senses like (to use his metaphor) a falcon’s hood. It is a 10foot cube of display screens in which participants can interact with virtual objects. Originally designed for scientific visualization, it is now used by Detroit automotive designers as well as media artists.

Heim points to a VR that is not a replacement for nature or the social world, but merely an enhancement. He takes issue both with "naive realists" who fear VR as an opiate amid the devastation of the living planet and with the "network idealists" and "data idealists" who are indifferent as to the source of a sensory input.

Virtual reality emerges from this book as a genuinely gifted youngster with distinguished ancestors in the arts and sciences. Heim could have added that VR also has a strong religious heritage. From the 13thcentury friar Roger Bacon to the architects of the Mormon Church, Western religious leaders have long sought rich sensory representations of invisible realities. Heim himself uses a theological metaphor when he writes that VR "does not imitate life but transubstantiates it."

AI has taken far longer than expected to live up to its promise. Is VR also destined to be an underachiever? Heim’s rich sampling of its techniques convinces me that VR is indeed for real. But, as with so many other innovations, its most important achievements may be far different from what we project. Virtual Realism is a refreshingly thoughtful overview of the possibilities, and a welcome invitation to humanist critics to understand and guide them.

—Edward Tenner