Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/869840
www.postmagazine.com 29 POST SEPTEMBER 2017 SPECIAL REPORT: VR/AR perception, agency and intelligence." He is di- rector of the Mixed-Reality Laboratory at USC's Institute for Creative Technology. He is also associate professor of interactive media at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, and cofounder of Fakespace, which builds tools used by VR centers. Bolas's VR breakthrough came in 1988, when, as a student working on his Stanford design thesis, he received a place in NASA's VIEW program, where the earliest efforts to design the related hardware and software were under development. According to Bolas, it was here, with the VIEW program, when the story of VR really began to take hold. One could be forgiven for thinking that Oculus Rift was a major breakthrough in the develop- ment of VR. After all, Facebook paid upward of $2 billion for the company, but in fact much of the relevant hardware and software had been in development for some time at USC, in Bolas's department. It was, and still is, open source, free for anyone who wants to make use of it. "From my perspective, the real breakthroughs in reducing motion sickness and making VR accessi- ble to a wide audience were about finding a way to do a wide field of view, with phone displays and with inertial tracking," says Bolas. The wide field of view was the key to giving the viewer a convincing "immersive" experience. The seminal moment for the USC research- ers, in Bolas's estimation, was their discovery in 2012 of the UltraOptix 7x aspheric lenses, which provided a 90-degree field of view (FOV), the minimum needed for VR immersion. Alongside this was the Fakespace Labs' Wide5 HMD, which actually provided a 120-degree FOV — more than has since been achieved by any of the consumer HMDs so far. Experimentation established that a 90-degree FOV was sufficient to create a con- vincing VR experience. The ambition was to disrupt the industry by making VR affordable so everyone could enjoy it. For this reason, USC's R&D work in the field is available for free, as open source. The concept was catching the imagination of many, not least Palmer Luckey, who, in 2011, following publication of the lab's work on the smartphone HMD, went to work at Bolas's lab at USC. He was part of the team that came up with the FOV2GO Models A and D cardboard proto- type, and Bolas suggested that Palmer utilize a Kickstarter campaign to further the concept. The rest, as they say, is history. This is only a brief overview of a long and arduous process taking place over the last 30 years. Bolas and his many collaborators at his Mixed-Reality Lab (including USC professor Perry Hoberman, an expert in the field of stereosco- py, and Thai Phan, MxR's resident development engineer) were caught up in the excitement of re- search. But the rest of us might ask, what good is it? We can see the marvel of it, the fun, but in this world, the problem is always how to make it work for the consumer. How VR will become a consum- er must-have (and it is surely destined to achieve that status) is for the entrepreneurs of the market to test and the consumers to decide. Building Conversation's AR App is geared for the construction industry. Low-cost HMDS (far right) have sparked AR, VR and MR development. nDreams' VR Gunner game Gunner game Gunner (right).