Over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur has posted a very interesting article reagarding Virtual Reality : The return of virtual reality: ‘this is as big an opportunity as the internet’. What I find very interesting about this article is that it highlights hope, hype, caution and excitement. There’s also a really cool video from 1994 during an earlier round of Virtual Reality hype which I’ll embed later in this post.
Many of us know about the hype, we’ve seen it with virtual worlds and whereas virtual worlds have delivered in many ways, they haven’t delivered in that massive way that many were predicting they would a decade or so ago.
Predictions about the boom in Virtual Reality go back a lot further and the article points this out. Charles talks to Dr Jonathan Waldern, who has seen the hype and hope before but is absolutely revelling in the new found VR hope wave and is quoted as saying :
There will be people crying in this, people falling in love, people falling over. For all sorts of reasons, this strikes at the core of being a human being. It’s so compelling … this is as big an opportunity as the internet.
I think we’ve heard claims such as that before too. However Dr Jonathan Waldern isn’t new to the VR scene, he was involved with a company called Virtuality in the 1990’s who had been bringing VR to arcades. The company had been in talks with Atari about bringing their VR Headset, Jaguar, to the consumer market, and then, with very little warning, the hype and hope for VR died.
However one of the hurdles in the last wave of VR hype was cost. Dr Waldern’s company were using top of the range Silicon Graphics systems, which were not in the consumer end of the market at all, they cost six figure sums for a start. These days people have more power and better graphics at far lower costs. Dr Waldern points out some of the differences this time around :
“Our system used some of the very first Sony LCDs, with 300 by 200 pixels,” Waldern recalls. “Today you get 1,080p [1,080 horizontal lines] minimum, and by the launch next year you’ll probably have 4K by 4K. And the computational power is transformational – we were working on about a megaflop, and each machine cost about $70,000, which is a massive barrier to adoption. Now with an Nvidia GPU you’re talking about a teraflop.”
However even today, there are those who are enthusiastic but don’t feel we’re quite there yet.
Professor Bob Stone, chair of interactive multimedia systems at the University of Birmingham, who has also seen it all before, talks about Oculus Rift, Professor Stone is quoted in the article as saying :
“it’s not much different from the headsets of the late 1990s”. He cited “pixel bleed” (where the pixels don’t appear sharp) and limits on the field of view. “We’re using Oculus Rift development kit 2 [the latest version] in defence projects, because it’s the best of a bad bunch,” he said. Why bad? Stone feels that if you have to wear something, “you aren’t really experiencing total immersion”; he thinks ideally VR should simply feel like life. “More than 20 years on, shouldn’t we be further ahead than this?” he asks.
However he later contacted Charles Arthur by email to explain that he is very much a VR enthusiast and that he feels that VR can deliver. However I certainly share Professor Stone’s caution, especially when it comes to wearables and this is a subject I’ve touched upon before. I feel that Headsets will provide a short term solution because people simply won’t be comfortable wearing them for extended periods of time, or for that matter, calibrating them.
This isn’t to say that I think headsets will flop, I think they will be popular, but I don’t think they will be part of a long term explosion of VR, although they can certainly light the fuse.
However one area where both Professor Stone and Dr Waldern do seem to agree is that games and virtual worlds have helped to keep the dream of VR alive. Professor Stone is quoted as saying :
One thing that saved VR was that while we were running around talking about headsets and gloves, the gaming community was coming up underneath, and came up with software and hardware in the quest for the best quality games. That drove down the cost of computing with graphics, and also made available a number of toolkits for games-quality virtual worlds that people could sympathise with.” Games drove costs down: “Things that in the late 1990s cost six-figure sums you can now do on an £800 laptop.”
Costs, games, immersion, these are the driving forces behind VR but for VR to really prosper it has to go further and whereas I am very much a VR enthusiast, I think there’s still quite a long way to go.
As for that video, it’s from 1994 and it features Dr Waldern and his company, Virtuality. The video is fascinating because a lot of the discussion in the video, the hope, the hype and the caution sound as relevant today as they did back in 1994. That obviously leads to the question as to whether more than 20 years later, we’re really getting closer to VR really being here.
Charles Arthur’s article is well worth a read in full, I linked to it at the start of this post. I’m still optimistic and excited about the current round of VR hype, but I’m also wary about whether this time, we’ll get it right.