When I was interviewed by Justus Becker from AlphaAvenue, we somehow got stuck in the past, in the 1990s. The more I told about this decade that shaped me, the more I thought by myself: you should talk more about this, this was the time of your life. It also explains a lot of my attitudes on what’s happening today. So let me extend this section of the interview and tell you my personal review on this unbelievable time.
The 1990s were a whirlwind of change and innovation. After the end of the Cold War everything was possible. The internet took its first tentative steps into the mainstream, forever altering how we communicate, work, and play. It was a decade of optimism and opportunity, shaping my perspective on the endless potential of technology.
I studied computer science back then and I was extremely lucky to come into contact with VR early on, which was still truly avant-garde in the 90s. Funnily enough, it was less my status as computer scientist student that got me a job in that institute but my knowledge of MIDI. MIDI is a communication protocol for digital devices that record, create, and edit music, and they needed somebody who was familiar with it. Lucky me!
In 1992, I joined the ‘VisWiz’ institute of the then GMD (Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung) as a student assistant. Its director, Wolfgang Krüger, was actually a pioneer; he did research on computer graphics; he had tinkered with effects at Art+Com (which got him his nickname: rain maker); made contacts with artists there and was then poached by GMD. At the time, the GMD was considered a million-dollar grave for taxpayers’ money. One of the aims of VisWIz (besides research in computer graphics) was to produce convincing demos within a year by a certain deadline, an open day with great media attention, political and other celebrities, which were to show what was technically possible, i.e. to take the proverbial shoes off the audience.
For me, of course, this was absolute paradise: I worked with really interesting people in a lab with computer hardware worth several hundred thousand Deutschmarks (Silicon Graphics workstations, the non plus ultra at the time; the secretaries had just Macs). We didn’t just work with computers but also with very special hardware, including a so-called. Boom-Box, a box that hung on a boom and that had peepholes so you could walk around a 3D object that appeared in that box; data gloves were more of an accessory (until then I had only seen them in the German edition of American Scientist); the first touchscreen I had ever got a hold of; and home-made hardware: the team included a talented architect who built a table whose transparent surface was illuminated from below with a beamer. Objects were then projected onto the surface, which could be seen in three dimensions with shutter glasses – spectacular!
My job was to set a virtual room to music and play back the sounds you heard there in real time and realistically, and of course correctly located. I had no idea about any of this stuff (apart from MIDI, as I’ve said already 🙂). In six months, I had learned Unix, C, how to deal with my sample library and precious music hardware (an EMU EMAX II just for me!) , and 1000 other things.
Needless to say, this was the most intensive year of my life. The ‘Schloßtag’ was a complete success with lots of oohs and aahs, computer science celebs, artists, and people with power and money. Compared to our projects back then, many of today’s developments are just extensions of ideas from the past. VR goggles, smart devices: it’s all been done before. And our work in the 1990s was mainly based on papers by Russian scientists from the 1960s. In the 1990s, hardware was finally fast enough to give it a try. Today, most of that stuff has become commonplace and can be found in a lot of computer games.
