Veejay Kumar Podaturanajureenhaminadi introduced his "GPS Virtual Presence Reality Location Simulator" to a packed house at Siggraph's main auditorium this morning, immediately becoming the hit of the week-long forward-looking computer graphics expo.

Podaturanajureenhaminadi kept the technology and his start-up, Virtual Presence, in stealth mode until his demonstration.

"It has been dificult, until now, to accurately represent a location with virtual reality technology. The difficulty, we believe, comes from having to recreate, from scratch, a place the user may be unfamiliar with."

To illustrate Virtual Presence's quantum leap over the competition, Podaturanajureenhaminadi handed a pair of Virtual Presence Optical Locality Regeneration Goggles to everyone in the room. At the highpoint of his presentation he turned on the Virtual Presence Regional Proximity Server. A wave of gasps swept the room.

Nearby someone whispered, "It's as if I am in this place, seeing it, looking at it with my eyes, right now!"

Podaturanajureenhaminadi's enthusiasm increased as the demonstration continued.

"I knew we were onto something when I put the goggles onto an infant and he immediately knew how to interact with his environment."

Journalists, after seeing only a glimpse of Podaturanajureenhaminadi's work, quickly dialed cell phones to urge their editors to move other assignments below the fold or to back pages. This was THE technology they had been promised for years.

"What you are seeing right now is an exact reproduction of the environment you are currently in, delivered and rendered in Real-time, complete with textures, sound, lighting and smell. GPS sensors in the strap holding the goggles on your face are feeding quadruple redundant positioning data to our specifically engineered 500 Teraflop Virtual Presence Regional Proximity Server, which, in turn, constructs a three demensional facsimilie in stereo on 4000 dpi miniature plasma screen lenses."

More gasps. Someone a few rows away fainted.

Podaturanajureenhaminadi later told us that he had encountered more extreme responses to his goggles during beta testing. "Her first words after coming out of a coma were 'tell my broker to buy when Virtual Presence goes public'."

"Go ahead, look around. Turn your head as quickly as you like. The computations are that fast. It is as if you are here, at this very moment, sitting in this theater seeing things in front of you which, in fact actually are in front of you. Now, slowly, with your right hand, reach over to your left forearm. Placing your thumb on the top and your fingers below, grab your skin and squeeze. Do it until you feel discomfort. Feel that? Can you get any more real?"