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sychology

Becoming a good scientist requires learning to balance apparent contradictions.  You must develop the courage to question the work of any individual, no matter how great that person's achievements.  You must temper this audacity with humility regarding your own work, recognizing your own lack of knowledge.  The good scientist is also the dreamer, someone more at home in tomorrow than today.  Yet science is quite rightly a conservative endeavor, which seeks to bind all dreams.  Science will be cruel to too fast steppers.  Remember cold fusion (Rosseau, 1992).

Virtual reality is the stuff of dreams.  It is too easy to let the dream part of science go, to lose the balance.  Only scientific training will save you, allowing caution to dominate.  You will remind yourself that unseen boundaries do not necessarily mean limitless horizons.  You will recall with disdain the long list of prematurely declared scientific "revolutions."  The ties bind you all too tightly to the present.  Then, the dream emerges again.  From these never ending conflicts, the best science arises.

Is VR something special?  Will VR be the training medium that forever takes us beyond the private tutor?  Can VR produce qualitative changes in training and education?

Predicting the development of VR requires a model of technological change.  This report will apply a model that the author devised and that he finds useful for describing the growth and maturity of technologies.

Technologies arise in the need and speculation phase.  A need, unmet by existing technologies, stimulates speculations about the general dimensions of the new technology.  During the nineteenth century, scientists debated the feasibility and potentials of air travel.  Churchillian conjectures (Manchester, 1983) about a weapon to break the trenches in World War I are another example of this phase.  VR has recently passed this developmental milestone.  Large scale force-on-force simulations will soon become routine.

Virtual reality has entered the second phase in which researchers rapidly extend the limits of the new technology.  Quick advancements thrill and delude consumers and some scientists.  Many people associated with the new technology convince themselves that the field will continually progress at this accelerated pace.  Intelligent people make unrealistic statements like, "the imagination is the only limitation," and other intelligent people take them seriously.  A few technologies in this phase, for example, the space program in the 1960s, become extremely popular with the public.

Inevitably, the rate of advancement slows and the technology enters a third phase of development.  Borders of the technology become better established and questions about what can and cannot be accomplished move to the forefront.  Researchers define specific selection or use criteria.  Efforts increase to  integrate the once new technology with other technologies.

Virtual reality is still rapidly growing and generating great expectations, but the beginnings of a mature phase are apparent.  For instance, a workshop report recently concluded that "the possible menu of virtual reality/synthetic environment applications for Army training could become unmanageable without the benefit of well-defined selection criteria" (United States Army Training and Doctrine Command & United States Army Research Office, 1992, p. 10).

As technological progress becomes more gradual, investigators focus their attention on unfulfilled hopes.  Instructional researchers are well aware of the harsh lessons of technological maturity.  Pundits once predicted that CBT and IVD would transform training and education.  Neither did, and many former proponents, switched to other untested technologies.  The period of disillusionment may be particularly difficult for VR, because current expectations are so high.  The current disenchantment of many Americans with their space program should be a lesson to us all.

Cool rationality eventually prevails, investigators weigh success and failures on the same scale, and accept the mature technology for what it is.  CBT is an excellent example of an instructional medium that has passed from the stage of disillusionment to maturity.  Instructional technologists now recognize that CBT is neither an educational panacea nor worthless.  It is a cost effective way to teach factual information.

Technological maturity can lead to a reflection of lessons learned.  Maturity in one technology is often the beginning of another.  Investigators identify gaps in the mature technology, speculation follows, and the process starts anew.

The model presented here is a reminder that technological change is a cortical and a limbic process.  I hope that this analysis will help researchers and consumers anticipate and understand their own responses as VR matures.
 
 

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