Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/869840
www.postmagazine.com 34 POST SEPTEMBER 2017 SPECIAL REPORT: VR/AR Canon has already released a mixed-reality device that retails for $125,000, which makes it more for business use than consumer consump- tion. Also, Microsoft's HoloLens is launching a developer kit for $3,000. The consumer version of this device is still pending but cannot be far off. Magic Leap is not yet revealing a schedule or price for its MR device, but rumor is that it will astound us all over again with its unique approach to the problems of convincing MR im- agery. Meanwhile, prices for the various MR and VR devices that have shipped are already falling as the market expands. The new Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, developed in collaboration with Valve, have added haptic hand controls that allow for interaction. At present, the available apps are fairly simple and basic, but when this goes on to include fully interactive gaming or experiences of more detailed and engaging worlds, then it will have a wider appeal, offering ever more believable virtual experiences. THE FUTURE We humans seem able to adapt to all sorts of tech- nological advances. After all, we have been doing so ever since we gave up living in caves and figured out how to build houses, which are, one could say, virtual caves. Professor Ken Perlin is one of the early mas- ters of CGI, first making his mark on the industry back in the 1980s as the original inventor of the procedural networks for creating and applying textures known as shaders. Nowadays he is a pro- fessor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, the founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, and director of the NYU Games for Learning Institute. Perlin and his team at NYU are currently work- ing on a fully tetherless VR system, one that allows a person to live in a perceived virtual world while moving freely and safely through the physical world. This is done by providing "equivalence in the virtual world of the obstacles, the walls, furniture, the 'curves,' of the physical world." Imagine, for instance, walking down a crowd- ed city street wearing a tetherless device. The people, traffic, and buildings would appear in the virtual world, but they might be aliens, with the buildings as cliff faces or the walls as some vast castle structure, while the traffic could be a river of floating vessels. It can be any type of virtual environment; the point is that the user is aware of the objects. "We're not going to have people walk into physical walls and not see them," says Perlin. Perlin imagines a world where children will learn to live in this kind of adaptive virtual/physical reality. After all, children are already at ease with devices like mobile phones and iPads. Adventurous as this sounds, it is only the be- ginning. There is a lot more to come, and that is only what we know of now. An implant that allows blind people to perceive the world as a virtual image transmitted directly to the visual cortex has already been developed and successfully tested. The concept of an implant that will create all the sensations of a believable virtual world – touch, smell, sight, and sound – delivered directly to the brain is already under discussion. This may seem far-fetched, and it is probably some decades away, but it is no longer impossible. One day it will be part of our normal experience. As Perlin says, "We got used to the telephone." Until such time, there is an adjustment period. The brain is vulnerable to deceit, as our visual and audio senses rule our awareness of the world, as does touch and taste, all of which can trick our brain. So, it is not a big leap to get our brains to believe in virtual worlds. Plumer recalls an expe- rience of wearing a VR headset that placed him on the roof of a skyscraper. "I walked to the edge of the roof and looked down at the street below. I thought about stepping off the edge. I knew I was in a room inside the building. I knew I was wearing the HMD, but I couldn't take the step." And that is with the current resolution of 360-degree CGI, which is still a long way from the kind of convincing realities we expect from cinema HD VFX and high-end game consoles, let alone the resolutions of future devices. Everything you can imagine is possible. It's only a matter of time. Imagine that you are sitting in your dingy flat in a smoggy, overcrowded city somewhere, or you're slogging your way to work through dense crowds. But with a VR device, you can experience a garden filled with flowers, trees, and grass gently blowing in the salted sea air. How long would you stay in that virtual paradise? How often would you escape into your VR device? Pearl shows the Pearl shows the Pearl life of a young girl as she grows up, and the car in which she travels the country. mDreams is offering users an escape to VR environments (left) while Microsoft's Hololens is geared to the AR and MR worlds (far left).