{"id":4996,"date":"2015-05-28T19:57:19","date_gmt":"2015-05-28T18:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=4996"},"modified":"2015-05-28T19:57:19","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T18:57:19","slug":"the-return-of-virtual-reality-or-the-return-of-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=4996","title":{"rendered":"The Return Of Virtual Reality Or The Return Of Hype?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur has posted a very interesting article reagarding Virtual Reality :\u00a0The return of virtual reality: ‘this is as big an opportunity as the internet’<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Predictions about the boom in Virtual Reality go back a lot further and the article points this out. Charles talks to\u00a0Dr 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 :<\/p>\n

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\u2019s so compelling \u2026 this is as big an opportunity as the internet.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think we’ve heard claims such as that before too. However\u00a0Dr Jonathan Waldern isn’t new to the VR scene, he was involved with a company called Virtuality<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 :<\/p>\n

\u201cOur system used some of the very first Sony LCDs, with 300 by 200 pixels,\u201d Waldern recalls. \u201cToday you get 1,080p [1,080 horizontal lines] minimum, and by the launch next year you\u2019ll probably have 4K by 4K. And the computational power is transformational \u2013 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\u2019re talking about a teraflop.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However even today, there are those who are enthusiastic but don’t feel we’re quite there yet.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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 :<\/p>\n

“it\u2019s not much different from the headsets of the late 1990s”. He cited \u201cpixel bleed\u201d (where the pixels don\u2019t appear sharp) and limits on the field of view. \u201cWe\u2019re using Oculus Rift development kit 2 [the latest version] in defence projects, because it\u2019s the best of a bad bunch,\u201d he said. Why bad? Stone feels that if you have to wear something, \u201cyou aren\u2019t really experiencing total immersion\u201d; he thinks ideally VR should simply feel like life. \u201cMore than 20 years on, shouldn\u2019t we be further ahead than this?\u201d he asks.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 :<\/p>\n

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.\u201d Games drove costs down: \u201cThings that in the late 1990s cost six-figure sums you can now do on an \u00a3800 laptop.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n