Virtual Reality

Gray skies, the daily grind, family problems, international crises - the real world has always had its drawbacks. But an easy escape might soon be at hand. Put on a headset and a data-glove and you could jump into a completely different world - a "virtual reality" where the sun always shines and you can live out your fantasies. Known as VR, virtual reality has been on the drawing board for years. Now, thanks to increased computer power and a surge of interest, VR applications are finally making their debut.

Set in a futuristic Tokyo with a burning chrome skyline, Ghost in the Shell is an eye-popping, mind-bending Japanimation adventure in cyberspace. The plot revolves around a female uber-cyborg, whose circuitry is augmented with voluptuous human flesh. Her mission is to locate a cyber-terrorist known as the Puppet Master, who, like her, eludes detection by the use of therm-optic camouflage. Our heroine refers to her cyber-spirit as her "ghost" and her human casing as her "shell," hence the film's title.

A creepy-crawly excursion into the realms of virtual reality, David Cronenberg's Existenz is sort of The Matrix of the art house - sans the kinetic kung fu, dazzling digital effects, and 22d-century whizbangs. But there is still plenty of icky bug imagery to go around, along with computer cables that hook up to human bodies like umbilical cords. The metaphor of machines as an extension of man (and woman) isn't hard to miss. Set in a bleak, rural world of boxy churches, barns, mutant-trout farms, and hidden laboratories (it would be no surprise to see Dr. Frankenstein's cadaverous creation come lumbering down the road)

"Strange Days" represents a new generation of Hollywood movies designed not to entertain but to pulverize. Like this summer's "Batman Returns" and last year's "Natural Born Killers," "Strange Days" combines thumping, synthesized music with a torrent of images, leaving viewers not with a message or a moral, but a migraine. To this list of sins, "Strange Days" adds another - the already hackneyed subject of virtual reality. It's used here as a mechanism to draw the viewer into simulated murder, rape and assault.

Sister Jean Anthony, a professor of music therapy at Immaculata College, believes the field's future is intimately connected not to musical instruments but to computers. Make that computer-generated musical instruments. Sister Jean Anthony and Rebecca T. Mercuri, director of the computer consulting firm Notable Software, have been working for the last year on ways to use cyberspace, the phenomenon of a simulated environment also known as virtual reality, with traditional music therapy techniques.

Army Col. Bill Mathers had heard the promises before: vendors swearing that their product was going to revolutionize the way the military operated. Mathers was deputy commander of the Fort Dix battle lab, where he was in charge of finding ways to train through simulation, producing well-prepared soldiers while keeping costs down. So when Peter Rogina marched into his office in 1996 and delivered the goods - a souped-up, dead-on, photo-realistic version of virtual reality and the best imaging he'd ever seen - Mathers was incredulous.

A marriage of television and compact discs has produced a potent new offspring at this year's Summer Consumer Electronics Show. Resembling a plain- Jane CD player but hiding computer-strength smarts and a strong sense of adventure, this new breed of "multimedia" CD player (about $1,000) will run rich new hybrids of "electronic literature" that combine text, graphics, animated cartoons, partial screen video and digital stereo sound. Yes, it sings! It dances! It tells you stories and takes you places you've never been before!

It'll be big (at least according to early plans). And it'll be bright. But will it be Disney? Just about everyone, it seems, has started calling the lot at the corner of 8th and Market streets "the Disney site," in hopes that the Mouse himself will grace Philadelphia with his one of his new, virtual reality, Mousified game arcades called DisneyQuest. And yesterday, the city zoning board gave the nod to a Blue Bell developer with plans for the former Gimbel's site that include: along with a 20-screen multiplex, a 30-story hotel, a parking garage, and a gaggle of street-level shops - a five-story "arcade" space that just happens to meet the rodent's very needs.

The usual onslaught of spiffy new audio and video products was severly tempered at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show. Many of the big guns of the electronics business - including Sony, Sharp, JVC, Toshiba, Pioneer and Hitachi - skipped the trade show for reasons of timing or cost-saving. As a result, there were only a handful of those "golly gee, never saw that before" gizmos: Most prominent in computer/game land were Sega's wrap-around VR (virtual reality) video glasses that pull you into a 360-degree color game environment (priced under $200)

Chip Roach's first contact with the "virtual reality house tour" came more than two decades ago, when a salesman arrived at his office armed with an early version of the home video camera. "It was interesting," recalled Roach, cochairman of Prudential Fox & Roach. "The fellow had filmed the interiors and exteriors of almost 80 houses," Roach said. "But that was the problem. There were 80 houses to look at, and you had to fast-forward and rewind just to try to find the one that may have caught your eye. " Roach's comments, made as he returned from the mid-November annual convention of the National Association of Realtors in Orlando, Fla., were inspired by the four-day event's overwhelming emphasis on technology.

LOS ANGELES - Would you want your surgeon to party hearty the night before you went under his scalpel? Probably not. Yet there are no rules on the amount of alcohol a surgeon may (or may not) consume on the eve of a day in the operating room. This despite the fact that 42 percent of health-care workers acknowledged having a hangover at work, according to a 1993 study. And among doctors, surgeons are known to have a particular fondness for drinking, according to some other studies and the casual observations of many physicians.

Saturated mulch sank two inches when Rowan University graduate student George Lecakes stepped onto the playground at Von Nieda Park in Camden. The stench of sewage rose in the air. "It's one thing for a grassy area to be flooded, but this is a kids' playground," Lecakes, 26, of Haddonfield, said last week during his engineering team's weekly survey of the Cramer Hill neighborhood's failing storm-water system. The students poked clogged drains, photographed houses, and surveyed streets - gathering data to help the university's virtual-reality supercomputer seek remedies to the neighborhood's perpetual water problems.

They seem like a pretty motley crew, this Drexel University design team - Jared Weinstock in his flip-flops, quoting Zoolander and expounding on the virtues of the fourth dimension; Kyle McArdle, grass stains on his jeans, downing cheesesteaks at every group meeting; and Nick Deimler, taking potshots from the gang as his ring tone, "Land Down Under," fills the room. "It's my mom," he says sheepishly. But look and listen closer, and the accolades they are receiving start to make sense.

The small crew of Villanova students and professors entered the Sistine Chapel at 8 p.m. - after it was closed to the public and everyone but a few workers had left. And for the next three hours, they were allowed to film almost alone and uninterrupted the most well-known chapel in the Vatican, even moving inside the small area where ballots are counted in the election of a new pope - which is normally roped off to the public. "It was perfectly silent. It really was sort of outside of time," said Bryan Crable, chair of Villanova's Communication Department and one of the professors on the project.

Think back to when you slipped on the ice or in the shower: the ground rushing up, your feet shooting out, terror building even as your mind is working a mile a second to plot a soft landing. This is what Emily Keshner studies, in a lab designed to mimic all the above. Balance is something most people don't think about unless they're learning to snowboard or walking up the aisle when their plane hits turbulence. Or recovering from a stroke, as more people will be doing in an aging America.

"OK!" Ashawn Brewer powers his Formula One racer onto the track. He almost loses it on a fast curve but - yes! - he recovers with a hard swerve to left. Some wise guy throws a watermelon in his path and he outmaneuvers the mess, only to find a purple speedster blocking his lead. No problem; a butt to the fender, and Mr. Purple is out of there. Ashawn beams. "I like it when I run the other cars off the road," he says. Sharp driving for a 7-year-old - and his wheelchair has nary a scratch on it. Ashawn does his racing at the Voorhees Pediatric Facility for special needs children, one of a growing number of health, education and youth programs using virtual-reality games and programs to achieve a varied array of goals.

Electronic offers to extend my line of credit, my life span, even my sexual prowess flood my e-mail inbox. I cannot keep them from entering my electronic space, just as I am unable to stop electrons initiated by sellers from triggering the ringer on my telephone. But I can stop the salesperson at my door. The key difference is that the law cannot identify my "virtual" property line. Suppose I stop by your house next Monday at dinner to offer you a special price on vinyl siding.

Army Col. Bill Mathers had heard the promises before: vendors swearing that their product was going to revolutionize the way the military operated. Mathers was deputy commander of the Fort Dix battle lab, where he was in charge of finding ways to train through simulation, producing well-prepared soldiers while keeping costs down. So when Peter Rogina marched into his office in 1996 and delivered the goods - a souped-up, dead-on, photo-realistic version of virtual reality and the best imaging he'd ever seen - Mathers was incredulous.

IF VIDEO A is a pornographic movie featuring real child actors, and Video B is the exact same movie, recreated to include "virtual" actors, that is computer-generated images of children indistinguishable from the real thing, is there a difference? On Tueday, the Supreme Court said there's a big difference: Video A is illegal, but Video B is not. And while that ruling, overturning the Child Pornography Protection Act, may make constitituional and legal sense - the court said it struck down the original law for being too vaguely worded - it doesn't make much sense on any other level.

Just a few years ago, Michael Golden was living the Internet life - jetting from coast to coast to sell online expertise to big clients, including Barnes & Noble, for the company he had helped found, Organic Inc. Today, he is slapping salami and cheese on rolls behind the counter at Hoagie Experience at the Shops at Village Square in Blue Bell. On the two-year anniversary of the all-time high for the technology-stock-driven Nasdaq, several former dot-commers in this region are living decidedly not-com lives.