Sharks in the virtual reality Cube at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hank Kaczmarski/Beckman Institute
Wonders, being wonders, are best experienced first hand. And the story of the future—the actual, here-it-comes, hold-it-in-your-hands future, as opposed to the far-off, hazy, wouldn’t-it-be-great-to-have-hoverboards future—is often a story molded from first-hand experience. I am by no means an Early Adopter (I’m somewhere between Late Majority and Laggard), so every technological leap of faith I’ve made has come as a result of trying something out. Why do I need a tiny box that carries every single album I own? I once thought, until I listened to someone else’s iPod. Why do I care if my phone can also direct me with GPS? seemed like a perfectly logical line of reasoning until someone else’s phone did just that. Right now, I feel no visceral need to, say, enjoy a ride in a driverless car, but I can also imagine that might change dramatically once I ride in a driverless car. And even as someone who’s since written a pair of novels about a future jam-packed with virtual reality, I never truly believed that virtual reality was coming until I stepped inside the Cube.
The Cube, or The ISL CUBE, as it’s more accurately called, is “an immersive, stereo-capable (true 3-D) visualization chamber manufactured by TAN Projektionstechnologie of Dusseldorf, Germany.” This according to the website for the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where one such Cube laboratory is in operation—one of just five in use in universities across America. In 2009, I traveled to the Beckman Institute on assignment for New York magazine, researching a story about brain cognition. The story had nothing to do with virtual reality and, really, nothing to do with the Cube—I was more interested in an experiment they’d run using a different 3-D simulator (called the Cave) in which they’d studied how distracted people are while using cellphones and trying to cross the street. (Short version: Very.) But my host, a professor at the Beckman, pulled me aside at one point and asked, “Want to see something cool?” In my experience as a writer, that’s a question you never say “no” to.
In Adam Sternbergh’s new book, the Limnosphere—a VR evolution of the Internet—becomes the site of a terrorist conspiracy. courtesy Crown
So he took me inside the Cube—an enclosed room (here’s a schematic) consisting of projection screens on all sides, and which, once you enter wearing a goggle-like contraption (specifically, “a Stereographics LCD shutter-glasses system”), can create an immersive 3-D environment. The first such environment he showed me was—no joke—the flight deck of the starship Enterprise. The Cube, he explained, was mostly used for studies on cognition and spatial awareness, but also had a few cool bells and whistles, like the Enterprise simulation.
I should say here: The flight deck was not at all convincing as a simulation, but that made it no less mind-blowing as an experience. Everything was rendered in blocky, obviously computer-generated shapes, like a very crude cartoon or early AutoCAD rendering. Still—it felt real, like this was a space we could actually move through. Then, with the flick of an unseen switch, my host was able to transport us to a different environ—this time, we were underwater. A blocky computer-generated shark swam by. Again, the shark was very obviously not an actual shark, yet even now, years later, it’s hard to convey how crazy and exhilarating this all felt. Something I’d seen depicted in movies and TV as far-off fantasy was happening all around me. The objects seemed like objects. The shark seemed like a shark. I reached my hand out to touch it. It wasn’t there—yet it was. Which is when I knew: This is coming. This is no longer if, but when.
I was familiar, of course, with the concept of virtual reality, mostly from pop-culture: the Holodeck from Star Trek, the world of The Matrix, the novels of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. I remembered, too, the late ’90s VR-boom, exemplified by magazines like Future Sex, that never seemed to actually go boom. Yet here, in front of my very eyes (or, in front of my shutter-glasses), the future was made manifest. Sure, it looked like the Pong version of VR (or maybe Donkey Kong) but it was clear, even to my laggard’s mind, that with enough time, money, and computing power, Pong inevitably gives rise to Avatar.
So when, years later, I sat down to write a novel, Shovel Ready, that takes place in a near-future New York that’s been devastated by a terrorist attack, and asked myself, “OK, but what about technology?” I naturally recalled the Cube. That primitive, herky-jerky, animated shark swam through my mind once again. The result, in the novel, is the Limnosphere, an entirely immersive VR evolution of the Internet, which serves as an escapist playground for the rich in Shovel Ready and, in the sequel Near Enemy, becomes the site of a terrorist conspiracy.
At first glance, this notion of a virtual world seemed, in some ways, familiar; as I said, I’d also seen the Holodeck and read Neuromancer and heard about Second Life. But familiarity is partly the point: In my experience, the future seems outlandish until it suddenly seems inevitable. I was both reassured and unnerved to learn, months after my book came out, that Facebook had bought Oculus, thus promising to one day turn every living room into a version of the Cube. And that’s exactly the experience I had that day on the plains of Illinois. The Cube, in hindsight, feels less like a simulator than a miraculous time machine—vaulting me forward to a not-so-distant place, where we’re all inevitably headed.
Adam Sternbergh is the author of the Spademan novels. The second installment—Near Enemy—comes out tomorrow.
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