The Sensory Deception (9 page)

Gloria pulled three legal-size files out of her briefcase and handed one to each man. Ringo flopped onto a worn chair and started reading. Chopper tossed his on the desk and stood next to Farley. Farley opened the file and saw the forms with all the numbers filled in for the first time. He said, “You did it.”

As Gloria leaned closer so she could show Farley the budget page, he put his arm around her. It was the sort of congratulatory, appreciative gesture that parents use to impart self-esteem in children, and coaches use to build loyalty in teams. She knew this from business school, but that didn’t make it any less effective.

He pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket, unfolded it, and compared the numbers with those on the budget page. Then he stood up straight and spoke with resonance: “We have ten million dollars—enough to build a VR system and maybe enough for a prototype, but not enough to pay ourselves minimum wage.” He smiled.

Ringo said, “Okay, what was I going to do with all that money Intel has been paying me, anyway? Besides, I don’t really like to sleep.”

Gloria reached into her briefcase and handed each of them a small box: business cards. She also took out a bottle of champagne and handed it to Farley.

“Chopper,” Farley said.

It seemed like he was going to continue speaking, but Chopper interrupted him. “I’ll put it on a shelf over the door to the lab. We’ll know when to celebrate.”

Farley said, “And away we go.”

T
he garage became Ringo’s kingdom. His lab included a hardware-design bench with cables, oscilloscopes, network and spectrum analyzers, and transducers and sensors; a data acquisition, or DAQ, area with wireless routers and satellite transmitters and receivers; and a software development space based on a car-length rack of blade-computing servers capable of mixing and rendering five-sense virtual reality in real time. To the side of the server rack sat five used stainless steel, hourglass-shaped sensory deprivation chambers. All this gear represented an outlay of more than eight million dollars, which had already put them over budget.

The garage door was locked down and reinforced. A month in, Farley built a cooling and ventilation system based on ocean breezes, fans, and a dehumidifier. They’d considered air conditioning but were already tired of resetting circuit breakers.

The family room became a conference area, complete with full-size whiteboard and overhead projector. The living room and adjacent bathroom became Chopper’s chemistry lab with the addition of a makeshift hooded vent. Discussion of the legality of the configuration was avoided. The dining room table became a bench for Farley and Chopper to test and debug Ringo’s transducer, sensor, and DAQ inventions. Gloria used the Captain’s office for accounting and operations. The only areas unscathed
were the kitchen and upstairs bedrooms, which became a dormitory for three men who worked hundred-hour weeks.

The lines of responsibility blurred in the way of start-ups. When someone needed help, everyone helped. The centerpiece of the VR system was the central transducer processing chip and associated electronics and software—Ringo’s baby, so he needed the most support.

Farley submitted proposals for zoological studies of bull sperm whale behavior to the Pacific Whale Foundation and Greenpeace. The proposals included recording behavioral data and data sharing with the conservation societies, plus payment of a royalty on sales of the Moby-Dick app. He would have liked to submit to research organizations, but they required co-patent and copyright agreements that would have violated Sand Hill Venture’s policy. Since the conservation groups stood to gain financially and politically, it felt like a lock.

Gloria’s role as business consultant evolved into that of business manager, though she preferred “chief operating officer.” She commuted to Santa Cruz from her Cupertino apartment seven days a week and usually arrived as the sun rose. When she was early, she would join Chopper on the bluff. She would try to sneak up behind him, and he always let loose an annoyed but tolerant and smoky sigh and then scooted over to make room for her. Sometimes at the end of a long day, she’d fall asleep at the desk or on the couch, so they put a futon in the office for her. When she woke up, she’d tread into the living room and Ringo would pour her a cup of “caffeinate,” which is how he referred to his collection of high-octane coffees, and hassle her for being the soundest sleeper on earth.

The different layers of intimacy with each of these men—the immediate presence of Farley in everything they did, Ringo’s laughter from the garage, and smoking barches with Chopper on
the bluff—gave her a sense of family. She did a lot for them in the way of care and maintenance but drew the line at tidying up after them. After she sat on a damp wet suit, she posted household rules on the whiteboard. Farley obeyed them without comment, Ringo pretended to be afraid of the dishwasher, and Chopper ignored them completely.

The typical day started with a meeting in the family room over Ringo’s caffeinate and oatmeal. Farley ran the meetings by looking at each person in turn and asking, “What have you got?” The gazed-upon would give a short status report, Farley would put the report in perspective by commenting on how it fit in the overall project schedule, and then he would move on to the next person. His summaries were always positive, but never so positive that each person couldn’t hear the clock ticking down on the deadline. When a milestone was completed he’d tug his beard in a slow nodding motion that conveyed satisfaction and affection. When someone was still stuck on the same problem they’d had the day before, he’d brush it off with a confident reference to some other problem that the person had conquered in the past, but an hour later he’d be seated at that person’s side determining what was needed to move forward.

Two months into development, software lagged hardware.

“We need a programmer,” Ringo said.

Farley turned to Gloria, who said, “A full-time hire? No way.”

“How about an intern or a grad student?” Farley asked.

“Maybe,” Ringo said. “I need someone to code up simple bits and pieces I’ve already designed. I need time to concentrate on algorithm development.”

“I can do it,” Gloria said.

Ringo rolled his eyes and Chopper snickered. Farley said, “You think?”

“They made me take a C programming class at Stanford. I was pretty good…”

Farley turned to Ringo and said, “If you define the pointers and do the memory allocation for her, it’s worth a try.”

“All right,” Ringo said. “I guess.” A week later, Gloria was cranking out some impressive C code.

They stayed on schedule, meeting every milestone for the first six months. The Soaring Eagle VR featured extensive interactive capabilities so that users could fly over a dozen possible terrains and hunt for small animals and snakes. You just had to catch them before the system crashed.

At the nine-month point, the transducer processing chip was debugged and ready for production at a Silicon Valley foundry. A month later, the helmet design was complete. Ringo switched his focus to building the prototype while Farley and Chopper went to work on the jumpsuit and converting the old sensory deprivation chambers into new VirtExReality chambers.

The schedule slipped by weeks, but not months. Gloria said that the VCs would tolerate it. Meanwhile, she knocked out the promotion milestones and determined the best zip codes in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco for VirtExReality Arcades. The demographics had to be high in first adopters of technology, and she wanted areas with plenty of tourism to keep the word spreading. She finally decided on the East Village in New York, Union Square in San Francisco, Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and smack between Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles. None of these sat on discount real estate.

In the morning meeting on their one-year anniversary, Chopper took his usual position on the couch where he could see the ocean
as well as the whiteboard. He stretched his legs out on the coffee table, nudging his yellow tackle box to the side. Farley stood next to the whiteboard, looking at a column of milestones. Most were checked off. Gloria sat at the edge of the couch to Chopper’s left, facing the whiteboard but looking at some inane corporate software she used to track progress.

Chopper closed his eyes and experienced one of the stranger symptoms of migraine headaches. The world looked brighter with his eyes closed than with them open. The pain had just started, a steady thumping behind his left eye.

Across the room, Ringo’s customary spot on a stool next to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room was empty. Gloria looked up from her coffee and set aside her laptop. She and Farley both watched the kitchen. Chopper heard the familiar rustle of Ringo emerging from the garage-lab. He set something on the counter and struggled with something else that sounded like a newspaper falling to the floor.

Farley asked, “Okay, Ringo, what have you got?”

Ringo stepped around the counter with the VR helmet prototype in one hand and a full-color poster of the finished product in the other. Wearing a wide grin, he said, “I give you the first complete VirtExReality Helmet.” He set the prototype on the coffee table and held up the poster.

Gloria got up and embraced Ringo. Farley gave him a high five. Chopper examined the helmet.

Built from the shell of a red metal-flake motorcycle helmet, this was the first prototype with every design feature: accelerometers to sense motion, binaural audio with subsonic and supersonic speakers, scent transducers with fans and baffles, and temperature control. The faceplate was split into two screens to provide genuine 3-D video that over-covered the user’s visual range, so that flashes of light outside the field of view could be
used to draw attention in a specific direction. When users turned their heads, the view changed appropriately. It looked like Iron Man’s head. Chopper smiled at the thought. No coincidence there. Ringo littered his work area with comic book superhero swag.

Ringo. Chopper had met him that first day of college at UC Berkeley. The same day he’d met Farley. At first, he had ignored the quirky, diminutive black man with the narrow face and easy smile. When he realized that Farley saw something in Ringo, Chopper had accepted him. It would be incorrect to say that Chopper liked Ringo.
Accepted
, that was the word; Chopper accepted Ringo’s talent, skill, and willingness to work hard in support of Farley’s noble goals. Whether or not Ringo shared those goals was still an open question in Chopper’s mind.

He leaned back on the sofa, staring at the helmet. Would it work?

The neurology of sensory saturation had seemed sound a year earlier, when the polar bear app had convinced Gloria. Technology-wise they’d come a long way, but no matter how refined the sights, sounds, scents, and tactile stimulation, the transducer-driven technology was still a one-sided, external approach. The ideal system would stimulate the senses by applying currents directly to the brain’s own DAQ wetware, directly to the nerves themselves without the intermediate step of producing images, sounds, and so on.

Would this one-way approach generate sensory saturation in a reasonable fraction of users? Every thought that went through Chopper’s mind landed at the same conclusion:
one-way is half-assed
. Ringo had done his part; the mix of hardware and software would excite every sense. But Chopper didn’t think it was enough. It was Chopper’s fault: he was the neurologist.

Farley asked, “What do you think, Chopper?”

Chopper looked back at him. They stared at each other for a few seconds, brown eyes meeting blue. Chopper understood how thoughts work, knew that telepathy was as absurd as clairvoyance, but he also knew without fail what Farley needed and when he needed it. Right now he needed Chopper to build up Ringo and keep his focus on the problem at hand.

“I think it’s amazing,” Chopper said. “Ringo, you’ve built world-changing technology in one year. You blow me away.”

Ringo responded to Chopper’s manipulation with an even broader smile.

He held the poster higher. The depiction of the finished product looked even more like superhero headgear than the prototype.