“Any predictions on what the future holds for virtual reality theatre?” Draxtor Despres asked MadameThespian Underhill in episode 24 of The Drax Files : World Makers. MadameThespian gave a very interesting answer :
In the future I want motion tracking technology, so that our bodies can be used to flesh out the acting, be free from a keyboard and a mouse. Eventually the way an avatar can be manipulated will be so detailed that it will be like being there in real life, totally immersed. Twenty years from now when everyone is doing this and going ‘Oh wow isn’t this cool’, hey I’ve been doing this in a virtual space since 1997, I’m still here, I love it.
The above quote demonstrates quite a few things. The first being that virtual spaces have been around in one form or another for quite a while now. Another being that the future has a long way to go and a further point is that those who are involved in virtual worlds have different ideas on what the future may hold.
However the most relevant part of the quote as far as this blog post is concerned is to do with body tracking. I’ve raised concerns as to whether people are going to be comfortable wearing headsets, setting up motion trackers and whether people will actually embrace having their movements captured. I’m not totally alone in this view, even enthusiasts of new technologies admit that there are concerns in this area.
Ebbe Altberg was asked by Ben Gilbert of Endgadget : What is the greatest challenge that the medium of virtual reality must overcome in the next five years? Ebbe’s answer touches upon these issues of comfort :
Ease of use remains the greatest challenge. In order to truly reach the mainstream, virtual reality experiences will have to be easy, natural and comfortable to create, interact with and consume.
Ebbe also touched upon this on the Endgadget Expand panel : The Future Of VRBeyond Gaming when he admitted that after about half an hour of using the Oculus Rift he feels tired. This isn’t so much about the comfort of wearing the device, it’s more to do with frame rates and resolution in virtual experiences that were not really built with the Oculus experience in mind.
However one could imagine that having to wear headsets or get in tune with a motion sensor may well suit those who have an acting and live performance background, they are familiar with the concepts of dressing up, making eye contact and being fully aware of what their expressions may convey.
Storytelling in virtual reality is a glaring use case that goes beyond gaming and if consumers can afford to get immersed from the comfort of their own home, it’s one that could really take off. We’re in the very early stages of this here but one company who have been happily playing to their peripherals are High Fidelity and they exemplify this yet again in their latest blog post : Rock-Paper-Scissors Showdown: Using Leap Motion at High Fidelity.
Chris Collins of High Fidelity, (not to be confused with Fleep Tuque, although I’ve never seen them both together) was the undisputed and undefeated king of Rock, Paper, Scissors in High Fidelity as he prepared to meet his latest challenge in shape and form of Ozan Serim, fellow High Fidelity work colleague of Chris and former Pixar employee.
A glaring observation, that I’m sure will be made, will be with regards to the size of their hands in the video posted in the High Fidelity blog post. Yes their hands are indeed very big! They’re not to scale for those avatars but this was a demonstration of using the Leap Motion Sensor in High Fidelity. This shows that it does indeed work inside High Fidelity. The dancing at the end is summed up well by Dan Hope in the blog post :
To answer any questions about the quality of the dancing at the end, the Leap Motion accurately represented their moves; Chris and Ozan just need dance lessons.
Quite! Another thing to note here is that even though the Leap Motion is designed to be positioned on a desk, the High Fidelity team have found that it works well when mounted on Oculus Rift goggles. This just goes to show that devices find their natural uses by being used and that those uses may not be quite what their developers envisaged.
This of course isn’t the first time the High Fidelity team have demonstrated using peripherals to track movements, we’ve seen Emily Donald singing away before now :
We’ve also seen the High Fidelity band, AKA, in action :
There are clearly imperfections in these examples, there are some strange movements, in eyes and eyebrows at times, but this sort of technology is in its early days. There has also been criticism of the avatars used in High Fidelity but avatars won’t hold back the technology because content creators will create all sorts of different style avatars if this takes off. The focus at this point should be on the moves made in terms of tracking facial, body and hand movements. They are getting there and the technology is, for want of a better phrase, coming on leaps and bounds.
The blog post explains that Rock, Paper, Scissors in High Fidelity is a recent development :
We’re still working on great things over here, and since the Interdimensional Teleportation Satchel isn’t quite ready for public demo, we thought we should show you something relatively new in our virtual worlds.
The Interdimensional Teleportating Satchel is something I think we’re going to have to wait a long time for, I think body tracking will be effective a long long time before the Interdimensional Teleporting Satchel is! However for where the future of VR may be going it’s worth going back to Ebbe Altberg in his recent interview with Dean Takahashi of Venture Beat :Linden Lab explores VR for its next-generation virtual world (interview) :
Think about all the machinery or architecture or things you want to be able to simulate in advance of building them, or to train people. There’s an incredible number of business use cases that have barely even started, where you can get a large number of people to successfully communicate and collaborate and create in virtual space. They can be trained and teach in virtual space. We’re scratching the surface of what will ultimately happen. Aside from just all the social and entertainment possibilities.
It’s the power of being able to take someone to a completely different place and have it feel natural. When you’re in a virtual space, if you have the right user experience and performance, your brain cannot distinguish between the virtual and the real, which shows you the incredible power you can have in those contexts. Now that VR is getting this whole new extra boost of excitement and a tremendous amount of investment, whether it’s Facebook buying Oculus or Magic Leap, where people barely know what they do and they get $500 million, this is all great for us. The whole space of virtual reality is getting so much investment and momentum behind it. We’re sitting here with 11 years of operating a successful virtual-world business. We’re excited to take it to a whole other level.
At the same time, the rest of the industry will take it to another level with better input devices, whether it’s Leap Motion or SixSense or the new cameras that you can do interesting things with to read people’s expressions and transmit that to avatars. The human-to-human interface through the computer or device is going to a whole other level, which is awesome for us. It’ll make the types of experiences people create and have a lot better.
The future of course may not include Second Life, that’s the fear some have. However, never underestimate the powers of habit and nostalgia. Many a technology has long outlived what many in the trade considered its sell by date. Those technologies did so because people still used them in large enough numbers. The future of Second Life remains in the hands of its users, whereas the hands of virtual reality are reaching into new and unchartered waters, as the High Fidelity team are more than happy to demonstrate.