**1. Introduction**

For many 1990s-era computer science students, the science fiction book *Snow Crash* [1] by N. Stephenson suggested a powerful use case for 3-D computer graphics to advance an alternative online cyberspace whereby large groups of human beings could meet each other online in an audiovisual context that reduced the geographical and temporal limitations of the physical world.

Around the time I read the book, I sent 66 electronic mail messages to academic researchers at US-based universities who publicly announced they did virtual reality research formally. Thirty-seven of those recipients replied enthusiastically with details on their research agendas, hardware and software infrastructures, and thematic aspects of VR they intended to explore. Two suggested they had immediate funding available if I could get accepted to their campus' PhD program. Six responders suggested I should pursue working with Fred Brooks at the University of North Carolina. Six responders suggested I pursue working with Tom Furness [5] at the University of Washington. Soon thereafter I realigned my life to take the latter recommendation seriously. I wasn't the first to imagine the potential of VR to improve quality of life for those who would be willing to immerse themselves in 3-D cyberspace.

#### *Computer Game Development*

At the time I landed on the University of Washington campus in Seattle, the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, affectionately known as the HIT Lab, contained a remarkable amount and variety of VR-enabling software and hardware [2]. The HIT lab also employed a highly-effective cybrarian, Toni Emerson, who performed the lead editor role of the USENET group sci.virtual.worlds, which grew to have an avid international readership. Researchers around the world could be read posting VR-related ideas and news at any moment during any 24 h day. As a result, an endless stream of VR-based conversation and news flowed through the HIT Lab. The simple text correspondence built a collegial sense of community.

The HIT Lab worked on research grants with industrial, governmental, and academic sources of funding. The work those grants funded varied from building VR-related hardware, to building software, to performing design and development work in virtual world creation, to testing the effects of VR on human beings immersed in a wide variety of virtual experiences for extended periods of time. Funders seemed motivated to visit the lab often. I understood why. The experiences provided within immersed computer graphics were thought provoking. The human energy level in our 10,000 square foot lab space was high 24/7.

A significant change in career path occurred for some of us when we veered away from PhD work in computer graphics hardware and algorithms, to focus more on the coupling of computing platforms with human perception and cognition. Dr. Furness convinced us that the lab benefitted from being firmly located within an Industrial Engineering department, as not enough people were working on the coupling of the fruits of computer science research with the full capabilities of the human being.

Many of us in the lab decided to focus on VR as a tightly-coupled system between man and machine. By the time we defended our doctoral theses, our department had been renamed as Industrial and Systems Engineering. I had spent so much time applying VR to social spaces and investigating data streams coming from natural systems that the addition of systems to the name alleviated concerns about feeling like a fraud or imposter in the industrial world.

Whenever I walked into the lab to start a long work shift, I could not help but have a nagging thought that the HIT Lab experience deserved to be expanded to avail the experience to more people. The vision of what we were working on seemed to suggest we ourselves should be working and playing in immersed 3-D cyberspace as we worked on VR. An undercurrent of ethical arguments emerged as thoughts from time to time, as well as a burning desire to make greater access possible because it seemed technically possible—and because even more books, movies, and radio broadcasts were telling stories within that context.

Work for my masters thesis in computer science, entitled "3D Collaborative Multiuser Worlds for the Internet" [3], provided me ample opportunity to spend time in the various online VR platforms—a subset referred to as *desktop VR*—where I virtually walked about in curious visual spaces with likeminded researchers who felt VR should enable widespread visual 3-D human communications, unlimited by geographical location or temporal time zone.

Because the various platforms we met in existed in the labs of research organizations, the quality of communications was high. Those of us meeting in there, from all over the world, were building a 3-D cyberspace and imagining all it could become. Twenty-five years later, what we imagined is far from being mainstream, but the technology to build it has continued to improve and evolve.
