Spokesman Review, Spokane, September 24, 2004

Rob McDonald
Staff writer
September 24, 2004

When personal computers first hit stores, people wondered why they should own one.

When the Internet first offered online surfing, families wondered if they should bother.

Today, most households own multiple computers that aid in shopping, reading and downloading music from the Internet. Campbell Soup has a Web site, for goodness sake.

Now there's another latest-greatest digital tool in our midst called VPnet. It wants to do for the Spokane economy what eBay did for shopping.

VPnet is a super high-speed digital network connecting brains, bucks and business sense. In short, the region's colleges, medical innovators and entrepreneurs just got their own private playground where they can all interact with perfect live video and sound. They can even crawl into the same virtual reality environment to work together.

The idea is to get smart people mingling with financers to translate research into products. What will emerge exactly, no one knows.

Eventually, as innovations start popping, the next great thing could percolate out to the general public from this VPnet tool. At least that's the promise.

"It's a hard thing to explain," said Jaron Lanier, a visiting researcher and futurist famous for coining the phrase "virtual reality."

Digital tools can be just about anything and that makes it hard to explain just what a tool can do, Lanier said. No one predicted we'd buy books on our computers at Amazon.com, he said.

Lanier was invited to speak at the launch ceremony and he also spoke at the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce annual luncheon Thursday.

Lanier said no one is smart enough to see into the future to predict the next hot product.

"It can only be discovered through experimentation," he said.

Officially launching VPnet was Avista Utilities President Scott Morris, who spoke like a strapped-in astronaut when he said, "Let's light it."

VPnet originated when Avista, at the request of college presidents from Eastern Washington University and Whitworth, donated a heap of fiber optics to link the area schools. As the network developed, the idea grew into forming a nonprofit corporation with a business model.

Fifteen groups are members, paying $1,250 a month.

After Thursday's official launch, Morris said, "Have at it. Let's make some applications happen."

Some of the ideas discussed among the hundreds of people who attended the launch ceremony were:

• Spokane high school students could attend classes only offered in Seattle by interacting through a large video screen that sends and receives instant video and sound. Or – unlike Running Start students, who visit a college campus to attend classes – students could take college courses while staying at high school. EWU is working on a virtual classroom.

• Washington State University engineers could design complex machines with scientists in other towns as if they were side-by-side in a virtual reality world.

• With hand-held computers, hearing-impaired students could watch instant transcriptions of lectures and speeches through a developing system of voice recognition that could be more readily available than what current methods allow.

• Researchers at WSU Pullman are hoping to use VPnet to provide high-speed data collection for Gridstat, software for monitoring the power grid.

Lanier said he was surprised by what he found in Spokane since he arrived Wednesday. It's incredibly rare to find a town that offers a networked community of entrepreneurs, academic researchers and medical innovators, he said.

"Right now I can think of one city in the United States that has all these qualities," Lanier said during the chamber's lunch event.

That'd be Spokane.

Innovation is often started in smaller communities, he said.

Lanier cited The Beatles, arguably the best pop band in history, as an example. They started in the dirty town of Liverpool, not an urban center like London. The Fab Four were allowed to develop without being bothered in their small town. They competed rigorously with rival bands before taking their shot at the big time.

"I think you have a Liverpool thing for civic digitalness," Lanier said.

Civic digitalness, may not be as catchy as virtual reality, but it is intriguing. The crowd murmured at hearing the phrase.

Lanier, also a musician and artist, trolled Spokane's pawn shops for instruments. He's a self-described visual "curiosity" with his red dreadlocks, but he found everyone in town to be very pleasant, not the makings for a hard-charging competitive environment.

"Given how sweet everyone is here that may be a little hard," Lanier said.

For more information, see www.vpnet.org.