Christopher Mims
Picture this: You walk into a coffee shop or an office, and half
the people around you have their eyes hidden behind opaque goggles.
Their heads pivot from one made-up thing to the next as they peer
into a world invisible to you. They're in virtual reality.
This might sound like the far future, but I'm here to tell you
that it could be our world within five years.
The reasons are simple: Many of us already have a VR-ready
device in our pockets. All that's left is a compelling reason to
slip it into the appropriate holder, something that puts it inches
from our face, like Google Cardboard or Samsung's Gear VR.
Granted, VR on your smartphone isn't as compelling as what you
can achieve with dedicated, consumer-ready headsets from HTC,
Facebook and Sony, which arrive late this year and early next. But
the engineers I spoke to--the ones actually building this
future--assured me it is only a matter of time before phones catch
up.
Meanwhile, all the coverage of the birth of VR is about its
applications for games and entertainment. This makes sense, because
almost all the early demos are games. But VR is going to be much
bigger, much more compelling, and much less trivial than what its
earliest adopters have so far envisioned.
"I think what's going to sneak up on people is all of the
nongaming, very conventional uses for VR," says Adam Levin, head of
the nonprofit group Virtual Reality Los Angeles.
I believe Mr. Levin because I've tried a number of those
"mundane" applications for VR, on some of the most advanced
consumer hardware available, and the experience was anything but
mundane.
I'll spare you the rapturous account of the time I sculpted in
three dimensions with light, fire, leaves and rainbows inside what
felt like a real-life version of a holodeck from "Star Trek."
Writing about VR is like fiction about sex--seldom believable and
never up to the task.
If you really want to understand how compelling VR is, you just
have to try it. And I guarantee you will. At some point in the next
couple of years, one of your already-converted friends will insist
you experience it, the same way someone gave you your first turn at
a keyboard or with a touch screen. And it will be no less a
transformative experience.
We could soon be using VR in place of videoconferencing, not
because it's an adequate replacement for meeting someone face to
face, but because it's actually better. "At some point, VR will get
good enough that you'll feel like you're there," says Jeremy
Bailenson, head of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford
University. "The goal is ending unnecessary travel that you feel
like you had to do for some implicit cultural reason," he adds.
Dr. Bailenson's work on "transformed social interaction"
promises a future in which our avatars always show up to (virtual)
work perfectly attired, even when we're stuck at home in our
jammies. To increase engagement, everyone in our meetings will feel
like the speaker is making direct eye contact with him or her. Our
avatars will also automatically mimic one another, to increase
accord, and any accidental or inappropriate gestures will be
automatically filtered out.
The thing that's especially difficult to convey about
"room-scale" VR--the kind enabled by the HTC Vive, where you can
actually walk around with a headset on, exploring a virtual
environment in exactly the same way you would experience a real
one--is just how compelling it is. "Any VR experience is so much
more engrossing than any you'd have on a flat screen," says Patrick
Hackett, senior user interface designer at Google for the Google
Cardboard VR headset.
That has potentially huge implications for education.
Amir Rubin, head of VR software company Sixense, is working with
a client on a system to train thousands of technicians to
decommission nuclear-power plants. "Any application that has high
liability, where teaching students has a high cost of insurance,
and is high risk, we're seeing people ask for VR training," says
Mr. Rubin. At Stanford, Dr. Bailenson is taking students on virtual
tours of the world's great works of art--letting them clamber over
and deeply experience, for example, Michelangelo's "David."
Companies like Matterport are making it possible to rapidly and
cheaply digitize the interior of any building and then walk through
it in virtual reality. But the ultimate goal is much bigger than
that, says CEO Bill Brown. "Two-dimensional photography and video
is going to cease to exist," says Mr. Brown, adding that they will
be replaced by immersive captures of entire spaces and events,
gathered by conventional and 3-D cameras.
Imagine a version of Google Maps that doesn't end at the front
door of buildings, or an Instagram consisting of immersive
experiences rather than snapshots.
"Immersive 3-D content is the obvious next thing after video,"
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a recent earnings
call.
All of this is possible because, like the PC and the smartphone,
virtual reality isn't so much a single technology as the happy
coincidence of a bunch of related ones. Motion tracking, 3-D
capture, ultra-high-resolution displays, fast graphics chips and a
deep library of 3-D software developed for games and other
applications are coming together at just the right time. Google,
Facebook, Sony, HTC, Microsoft and countless smaller competitors
have already made public their plans for VR, and given its hiring
and patents in the area, it's likely Apple is working on it
too.
VR is a technology that is truly in its infancy, despite decades
of work in academia, industry and the military. Rapid progress in
frame rates, displays, interfaces and more realistic rendering are
already in everyone's development pipeline.
"Keep in mind, this is just the Atari 2600 of VR," says Cymatic
Bruce, head of developer relations at Altspace VR, as he helps me
take off a bulky headset I wore to experiment inside the company's
VR play space.
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