A national research agenda for virtual reality (panel): report by the National Research Council Committee on VR R&D

In 1992, at the request of a consortium of federal agencies, the National Research Council established a committee to "recommend a national research and development agenda in the area of virtual reality" to set U.S. government R&D funding priorities for virtual reality (VR) for the next decade. The committee spent two years studying the current state of VR, speculating on where likely breakthroughs might happen, and deciding where funding could have the greatest impact. The result is a 500-page report that will have tremendous effect on what does and does not get funded in Virtual Reality research by agencies such as ARPA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Laboratory, Armstrong Laboratory, the Army Natrick RD&E Center, NASA, NSF, NSA, and Sandia National Lab. The committee's report tries to "describe the current state of research and technology that is relevant to the development of synthetic environment systems, provide a summary of the application domains in which such systems are likely to make major contributions, and outline a series of recommendations that we believe are crucial to rational and systematic development of the synthetic environment field." The purpose of this panel is to report the (often surprising) recommendations in the committee's report. Few researchers will have time to read this very influential document, but this forum will disseminate the basic highlights, and attempt to explain some of the more fractious points that the committee dealt with. For example, the report recommends "no aggressive federal involvement in computer hardware development in the [virtual reality] area at this time." Based on last year's SIGGRAPH, Virtual Reality is one of the hottest areas for the computer graphics community, and funding is clearly needed from the federal government. Industrial sources are not viewed as having sufficiently long-term strategies to advance the field in many necessary areas. Therefore, the funding priorities and strategies discussed in this report may have a direct impact on the future directions of the SIGGRAPH community. The report itself is Virtual Reality, Scientific and Technological Challenges, copyright 1995 National Academy of Sciences; ISBN 0-309-05135-5, Nathaniel I. Durlach and Anne S. Mavor, editors. The purpose of the panel is to disseminate the report, the various panelists will be covering the following areas of the report and its recommendations: