0.15 Reincarnation  (Page 11/12)

This was 1997—years before the widespread deployment of broadband Internet access—so even that minor dimension of Furness’s project, to an informed and practical mind, sounded almost impossible to implement.

Furness’s presentation went on to cover a description of the project, its costs, how it would be built, and how it would work; an argument for using an immersive VR approach in education; an enumeration of the ways such a project would benefit the museum; and a presentation of some of the visuals the starship visitors might see through their headsets. His laptop was displaying an accompanying array of slides up on the screen: now some charts showing the components, time lines, and costs of building the starship; now a breathtaking, full-color picture of a star being born; now a view of Earth from outer space; now a schematic diagram of the school’s Internet connection, or “virtual schoolhouse,” the flight deck of the starship Enterprise, the debriefing room, and the post-flight, Internet-mediated revisitations to the starship; now the landscape of Mars, now a field of stars; now figures showing that television viewership among children had declined in the video-game age. “Studies show kids prefer interactive entertainment…. Kids are getting bored with traditional ways of education….”

Although Furness, who never raises his voice, eschews the shouts and dramatic exclamations of garden-variety techno-orators and evangelists, he nevertheless communicates powerful passion and conviction when he speaks. His language is rich, and the range of his intonations wide and deep. He has the odd ability to project his voice across a packed room in a way that makes it sound as if he is standing next to you, talking quietly and persuasively to you alone. His presentations always have woven into them an ardent argument for the virtual-world interface. “Computers are still outside in …. You can’t go to a place …. Building a virtual world leads to building a much more robust mental model…. We want to present a circumambience of visual information, we want to build a high-bandwidth interface with the mind.”

Now the presentation was building to something of a crescendo, with the understated rhetorical flourishes and images on the screen coming thicker and faster, richer and more colorful. Furness was offering the museum an opportunity to change the world , to shift the paradigm It was a measure of his rhetorical skill that he could use the term “paradigm shift”—by far the most overused phrase of the dotcom boom—without making his interlocutors roll their eyes. 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 30 years of work on this interface, he still was reduced to an awestruck kid whenever he thought about its potential: “Y’know, I was thinking to myself, ‘ Gosh ….’”

The museum not only had a chance to join him in unlocking the human mind and changing the face of education, it also could set humans free from the prison the PC age was slowly building around them. “Computers are basically symbol processors,” Furness said. “And to use them, we’ve had to act like computers. The only innovation in interface in the last 20 years is the mouse—that’s about it.”