Everyone knows, in theory, that sugary soft drinks will make us fat.
But imagine watching a virtual-reality avatar of yourself sipping a soda. In the simulation, time flies by at super speed. With each sip, you see your hips and waist expanding. In the space of two minutes, you can see the effects of two years of accumulated globs of fat on your body.
This is just one example of how recent collaborations between health-care researchers and makers of virtual-reality simulations may promise a breakthrough in preventive care.
In a submersible. In Time Machine, a dinosaur exploration mystery from Minority Media.
On a physical bicycle that was a virtual horse. In VirZoom’s demo.
On a flying carpet. In Bazaar, a prototype for the Gear VR. (It was on rails, but you had to move your head to turn.)
In a wheelchair pushed by a computer-controlled character. In Starbreeze’s Walking Dead demo, which used the company’s proprietary headset to give players a wider field of view than is possible with the Rift or Morpheus.
On a rope line. In Back to Dinosaur Island 2, a prototype for Crytek’s Robinson: The Journey, I used the triggers on a gamepad to simulate the clenching of my virtual hands, and the left stick to control the speed of a rope as it ascended the face of a cliff.
On wings. In Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight demo, I controlled a fast-moving raptor — in first person — by moving my head to look in the direction I wanted to fly, and tilting it to one side or the other to make sharp turns.
On a gurney. The Assembly, an adventure game for virtual reality by the British developer nDreams, begins on rails. The player is given the first-person perspective of Madeline Stone, a behavioural psychologist, who is strapped to a gurney and carted into a mysterious compound beneath the Nevada desert. I found the experience entirely comfortable.
On foot. The next two levels of The Assembly, however, allowed me to move either Stone or Hal Pierson, an Assembly scientist in a laboratory, with the left thumbstick. I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up, but moving too fast or turning too quickly made me sweaty and a little queasy. (On one or two occasions I have felt the same way when playing a first-person game on a television or computer screen, most recently during Alien: Isolation.)
One way to mitigate this unpleasant sensation is to slow the player’s movement with a spacesuit (Adr1ft) or an underwater suit (Narcosis), making the avatar’s motion feel more like that of a vehicle than a body.
Another surprisingly effective option is to abandon the first-person viewpoint. At least two Oculus games — Lucky’s Tale and Edge of Nowhere — use a third-person perspective. The player can still look around to see the scale and depth of the world, but disconnecting your avatar from your eyes somehow makes movement less unsettling. The most comfortable methods I have used to find my own way through VR spaces are in vehicles (whether cars, planes, or mechs), in bodysuits that made my avatars float and drift like vehicles, and in third person.
Removing navigation from VR — as the Walking Dead and London Heist: The Getaway demos did — can make the experience extremely comfortable. Using your gaze to create movement in an otherwise on-rails experience is also very effective, and at its best (in Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight demo), you forget that your forward movement is on autopilot. Eye-tracking technology, of the kind used in Fove’s prototype headset, is almost certain to improve gaze-directed navigation, which already works very well.
Players want to interact with virtual spaces, and they want to explore them — not just look at them or hurtle through them. It’s hard to imagine that players will be satisfied in the long run with VR games that always put them on rails, or in a cockpit (like the fantastic EVE: Valkyrie), or motionless in a chair (like Epic’s Couch Knights demo).
The slow-moving rope lines that the player uses to ascend a cliff in Crytek’s Back to Dinosaur Island 2 may have been the most inventive solution for this dilemma, giving the player a first-person viewpoint and limited control of movement within the space. Still, at the end of the demo, I stood atop a cliff, looking at dinosaurs on a plain in front of me and wondered: What now?
The headsets will be used in two modes: Remote Expert Mode and Procedure Mode. Remote Expert Mode uses Skype to let ground operators see through the eyes of an astronaut, letting them give instructions and even draw on the augmented reality world that the crew member is seeing. Procedure Mode puts special illustrations on top of objects in the space station, potentially reducing the amount of training needed and helping out astronauts on long missions deep into space where they might not be able to talk to ground control.
[Philip Lelyveld Comment: while the story title is accurate, another way to think of it is that the study gives guidance to heads-up display UI design.]
When the number of spots increased, the rate climbed to one in 10 instances, suggesting that if attention is increasingly occupied by the primary task, participants will have more difficulty attending to the secondary task stimulus. The accuracy of the number of spots reported also diminished as the number of spots increased, suggesting that as a primary task becomes more demanding both tasks compete with and interfere with each other.
In a real-life situation -- such as driving a vehicle -- even more is demanded of a driver. It is not enough to simply see something unexpected, one must identify what is seen and respond appropriately.
"It would be necessary to distinguish, for example, between warnings of a collision and a recommendation to make a turn," said Spence. "Otherwise competing warnings may be more dangerous than no warning at all."
Matterport has raised $30 million in growth funding from Qualcomm and Singapore’s GIC to expand its virtual reality and augmented reality content creation platform.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Matterport makes a $4,500 Pro Camera that can capture an environment in 360 degrees. It also makes the cloud software to stitch the content into a virtual reality or augmented reality experience. The target market has been realtors looking to show off homes for sale in 3D.
Matterport began selling the application platform for realtors in July 2014. So far, Brown said that the company has sold thousands of VR cameras to real estate agents, and those videos are getting about 1.2 million unique views per month. Most of the major brokerage companies are customers.
Over time, Brown hopes to reduce the cost of content creation and eventually enable consumers with 3D-sensor-enabled smartphones to record and publish their own virtual reality visual experiences. A consumer could, for instance, create a virtual tour of their own home.
Matterport has raised $56 million to date, and it now has more than 80 employees.
Like many great technological advances, virtual reality was envisaged in science fiction long before it became fact. In Pygmalion's Spectacles, a 1935 short story by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum, a strange man in Central Park, New York, invites the protagonist to use a pair of VR glasses to travel to the utopian world of Paracosma.
1962
Mort Heilig, a US film-maker, unveiled Sensorama, an arcade system with a vibrating seat, 3D display and even a scent nozzle. Viewers sitting in a giant cupboard could “ride” a motorbike through New York, sensing wind, bumps and smells. But high costs meant that the first true VR experience remained a novelty and died.
1968
Ivan Sutherland created a head-mounted computer using early elements of virtual reality and augmented reality (the overlaying of virtual elements over a real-world view). But the graphics were still rudimentary, and the device was so heavy that it had to be suspended from a ceiling while the user wore it. Meanwhile, at an air base in Ohio, military engineer Thomas Furness was starting work on new flight simulators that would later use VR.
1977
Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology drove around Aspen, Colorado, with cameras on a car roof, photographing every inch of the city. Decades before Google Street View, they stitched the images together to create a digital recreation of every street, which the viewer could navigate by computer. Financed with Pentagon money, it was supposed to give armies a way to remotely familiarise themselves with new terrain.
1985
Jaron Lanier set about popularising VR devices with his company, VPL Research. His “Data Glove” paired with a set of “Eye Phones” allowed users to explore and manipulate crudely-drawn worlds. Toy company Mattel bought into it, but VPL was never more than a novelty.
1990
Devices including “Virtuality” launched a VR boom as developers made immersive games to be played on heavy headsets. Sega introduced VR arcade games to its consoles, but the graphics did not match the hardware and VR retreated to industrial uses and functional applications.– Independent
Searching for Hell, directed by Pawel Nazaruk &Tomasz Adamski, Darek Barecki, Yuki Nakamura, Gloria Kurnik and James Kenney has become the first long documentary film screened and distributed in Virtual Reality Cinema.
The project is penned by Pawel Nazaruk who elaborated the original concept and is the executive producer. Searching for Hell is a production of Poland’s Filmmakers Pond / Dogfilm Studio. The film tries to understand what Hell is today in different parts of the world (Russia, USA, Japan, Indonesia and Congo) through five different stories made by five different teams.
The film is now available worldwide exclusively in Virtual Reality Cinema CINEVEO until 1 October 2015.
The Mathson students are just completing their first year learning with the zSpace STEM lab, which includes a set of student virtual reality stations and a teacher station, each outfitted with an interactive stylus as well as a wide variety of educational software ranging from science and physics to engineering. Virtual-holographic images can be “lifted” from the screen and manipulated with the stylus.
The impact of zSpace for students and teachers is exciting, particularly because many students using the system have special needs, and have experienced frustration learning in the traditional way.
With two or three students at each virtual reality desktop, students collaborate in teams and use critical thinking skills to solve complex challenges.
They can perform highly engaging tasks that are often impossible in the real world, like exploring a volcano or experimenting with zero gravity.
