Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [14]
“How many users?”
“At the moment, the system can handle five at one time.”
“And the Corridor looks like what?” Sanders said. “Wire-frame?” In the earlier versions, the Corridor was outlined in skeletal black-and-white outlines. Fewer lines made it faster for the computer to draw.
“Wire-frame?” Cherry sniffed. “Please. We dumped that two weeks ago. Now we are talking 3-D surfaces fully modeled in 24-bit color, with anti-alias texture maps. We’re rendering true curved surfaces—no polygons. Looks completely real.”
“And what’re the laser scanners for? I thought you did position by infrared.” The headsets had infrared sensors mounted above them, so that the system could detect where the user was looking and adjust the projected image inside the headset to match the direction of looking.
“We still do,” Cherry said. “The scanners are for body representation.”
“Body representation?”
“Yeah. Now, if you’re walking down the Corridor with somebody else, you can turn and look at them and you’ll see them. Because the scanners are capturing a three-dimensional texture map in real time: they read body and expression, and draw the virtual face of the virtual person standing beside you in the virtual room. You can’t see the person’s eyes, of course, because they’re hidden by the headset they’re wearing. But the system generates a face from the stored texture map. Pretty slick, huh?”
“You mean you can see other users?”
“That’s right. See their faces, see their expressions. And that’s not all. If other users in the system aren’t wearing a headset, you can still see them, too. The program identifies other users, pulls their photo out of the personnel file, and pastes it onto a virtual body image. A little kludgey, but not bad.” Cherry waved his hand in the air. “And that’s not all. We’ve also built in virtual help.”
“Virtual help?”
“Sure, users always need online help. So we’ve made an angel to help you. Floats alongside you, answers your questions.” Cherry was grinning. “We thought of making it a blue fairy, but we didn’t want to offend anybody.”
Sanders stared thoughtfully at the room. Cherry was telling him about his successes. But something else was happening here: it was impossible to miss the tension, the frantic energy of the people as they worked.
“Hey, Don,” one of the programmers shouted. “What’s the Z-count supposed to be?”
“Over five,” Cherry said.
“I got it to four-three.”
“Four-three sucks. Get it above five, or you’re fired.” He turned to Sanders. “You’ve got to encourage the troops.”
Sanders looked at Cherry. “All right,” he said finally. “Now what’s the real problem?”
Cherry shrugged. “Nothing. I told you: fine-tuning.”
“Don.”
Cherry sighed. “Well, when we jumped the refresh rate, we trashed the builder module. You see, the room is being built in real time by the box. With a faster refresh off the sensors, we have to build objects much faster. Otherwise the room seems to lag behind you. You feel like you’re drunk. You move your head, and the room swooshes behind you, catching up.”
“And?”
“And, it makes the users throw up.”
Sanders sighed. “Great.”
“We had to take the walker pads apart because Teddy barfed all over everything.”
“Great, Don.”
“What’s the matter? It’s no big deal. It cleans up.” He shook his head. “Although I do wish Teddy hadn’t eaten huevos rancheros for breakfast. That was unfortunate. Little bits of tortilla everywhere in the bearings.”
“You know we have a demo tomorrow for the C-W people.”
“No problem. We’ll be ready.”
“Don, I can’t have their top executives throwing up.”
“Trust me,” Cherry said. “We’ll be ready. They’re going to love it. Whatever problems this company has, the Corridor is not one of them.”
“That’s a promise?”
“That,” Cherry said, “is a guarantee.”
Sanders was back in his office by ten-twenty, and was seated at his desk when Gary Bosak came in. Bosak