Editorial Reviews:
America leads the world in the creation of new industries. From personal computing to Internet start-ups to biotechnology, hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value have been created from what were nothing more than figments of imagination in the minds of entrepreneurs. But moving from a dreamy vision to the hard realities of companies operating in the marketplace is a messy business at best. Finding start-up capital, dealing with the clash of egos and personalities, getting the technical specifications right, building the product, and marketing it to the right audience are all stressful, expensive, time-consuming, high-risk endeavors. A writer's worm's-eye view of an industry coming into being provides the reader a unique perspective on just why America is the world's capital of progress and innovation. Fred Moody spent a year tracking developments at the center for virtual reality research, a cluster of Seattle companies formed around the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, and in The Visionary Position he chronicles the birth of the VR industry. Virtual reality products hold out immense promise, not only to those hoping to make money from new companies and products, but to those in need as well. Some VR products have the potential to help people with severe sight problems or Parkinson's disease overcome their handicaps; others can help people with severe psychological problems treat their phobia and depression. VR entrepreneurs are looking in these and other areas for the spectacular, high-payoff, commercial breakthrough that will bring widely used applications to military and consumer markets. It's not surprising, then, that an unholy combination of profit motive and idealism brought together an odd group of people at the HIT lab and the companies it spawned: Virtual i/O, F5 Labs, Microvision, and Zombie Virtual Reality Entertainment.
Fred Moody's year at HITL resulted in incredible fly-on-the-wall reporting. He gets inside the lives of an almost unbelievable cast of characters who are trying to make high-tech history: the buttoned-down academic who spent twenty years doing military research before becoming director of HITL; the male software developer who thought nothing of wearing his best dress to corporate presentations; the venture capitalists interested in only one thing--a high return on the investment they would make; the oddball hardware and software engineers more interested in invention than convention; and the company executives at VR start-up firms working desperately to commercialize products and bring them to market.
Today there are approximately 400 companies in the United States at work on virtual-reality products. The Visionary Position is an up-close and very personal look at where it all began. It tells the tale of an industry ready to break out into many markets: business, medicine, exercise, gaming, the Internet, communications, and mass entertainment. It is also an important study of the American way of creating and doing business, and of the American technopreneurial character. A Man
"Tom Furness--more formally known as Dr. Thomas A.
Furness III--is an exotic commodity in the Pacific Northwest. . . . His enthusiasms are highly contagious, bewitching investors, entrepreneurs, students, fellow faculty, and journalists alike. When he talks about his hopes and dreams for virtual reality, you find yourself reflexively reaching for your wallet--whether to hand over its contents to Furness or to hide it them from him, you're never quite sure. . . ." A Vision
"Now the speech was building to a crescendo . . . Furness was offering the museum an opportunity to change the world, to shift the paradigm of education, to "open the portal between information and the mind." With the system he envisioned, "if you want to, you can crank it up to a hundred Gs and juggle on Jupiter." Even after more than thirty years of work on this interface, he was still reduced to an awestruck kid when he thought about its potential. . . ." A Business?
"One message that crossed my screen included an attempt at explaining [the
employees'] obsession with the misfortunes of their [bosses] . . . 'Everyone needs some source of drama in their life. And VIO has it all, sex, . . . office politics, backstabbing, power struggles, good and evil, money, set in a hi-tech world. Dallas with circuit boards.'". . . to conceive a new industry.
"For as long as engineers have dreamed of building faster and more powerful computers," writes Fred Moody in his opening to The Visionary Position, "some among them have dreamed of displaying computer-stored and -generated information in three dimensions, with users walking through information landscapes the way they walk down grocery-store aisles and city streets." Chief among these farsighted engineers--and the primary focus of this well-written history of the still-nascent VR industry--is Dr. Thomas A. Furness III, an electrical engineer who began researching such technology in a secret Air Force-base laboratory nearly a quarter-century before the term virtual reality was ever uttered. Intending to "turn his new interface into a powerful weapon of moral and social change," Furness left the military in 1989 and took his work to the University of Washington, where he ultimately created the Human Interface Laboratory to further its goals. Moody provides us with a fascinating window on all of the ensuing action as various academics, programmers, and financiers come together and fall apart over the ongoing development and potential commercialization of virtual-reality products. --Howard Rothman
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 21 total reviews (Page 1 of 5):
 Worse than "I Sing" by same author
I got both books as a gift when a relative met the author and he suggested that they would make a good birthday present for me (some objective referral).Both books are horrible, but this one is by far the worst. I might just cut the spine and cover off this book and glue it to a different one. This way if my relative stops over she sees the title on my bookshelf and think it's not in the dumpster where it belongs.  Disjoint and superficial
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.  Pinpointed the Problem
Moody accurately captures the confusion, competition and corruption of the VRD circle -- as a VRD inventor myself I found the comments about Rutkowski as corrupt accurate -- was a bit surprised that he missed a few characters -- the MIT circle in particular. It provides an excellent lesson in Shakespearean intrigue and corporate politics. Moody must be "truth" challenged
If the publisher had used softer paper, there would be a real use for this book Digital Greedbags
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. More Customer Reviews:
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(21 reviews)