(Photo: Eric Risberg, AP)
SAN FRANCISCO – Reality has a stalker. Its name is Virtual Reality.
Once a concept that lived solely in the domain of science fiction novels (1992's Snow Crash) and movies (2009's Avatar), VR now is poised not only to challenge reality's stranglehold on the way we engage with life, but possibly even eclipse it for sheer thrills.
Gaming. Concerts. Family reunions. Sporting events. Even sex – all of it will be experienced in a hyper-real fashion and with a commonness that technologists predict will rival our incessant smartphone use today.
The promise of VR was on display at Facebook's F8 developers' conference here last week, where attendees tested Oculus' latest iteration, Crescent Bay, and demoed Samsung's Oculus-powered Gear VR. But with Sony, HTC and others working on their own goggles, there's a good chance we will all soon be diving into an alternate pixelated reality.
“'VR has been around for decades, but it will stick this time.'”
"You can have Superman powers in the virtual environment, going where you want and accessing information at will," says Todd Richmond, director of advanced prototype at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, the lab where Oculus Rift goggle founder Palmer Luckey interned.
"VR has been around for decades, but it will stick this time because there's enough computational power and the price point will just keep going down," says Richmond, a VR group member with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers who is helping the Army and Navy design new equipment that can be demoed by human operators in VR before being built. "Gaming and the adult film industry will drive this tech first, and then by 2017 it will be massive."
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Video games and pornography are both $100 billion global industries, capable of establishing market trends ranging from heavy-duty graphic processing units to the now-defunct VCR player. It stands to reason that their embrace of VR is likely to catapult a specialized technology into instant ubiquity.
NextVR crewmembers set up their virtual reality cameras at an NBA game, allowing viewers of the live event to see the game from a variety of positions in the arena. (Photo: NextVR)
The popularity of sports also is likely to bring VR to the masses. That's the bet of NextVR, a Laguna Beach, Calif., company that has begun live-broadcasting hockey, basketball, soccer and NASCAR races in VR via Samsung's $200 headset.
With NextVR, when you attend an event, you can choose a variety of locations from which to view it, ranging from the stands to pit row, thanks to the company's proprietary broadcasting technology.
"The killer app for VR is live," says co-founder David Cole, who says watching NBA games in VR has increased his desire to attend a game in person but eliminated his interest in watching games on TV.
"The experience is so compelling that maybe in months or years, it'll be hard to choose from the real thing," he says. "At a game, I don't have zoom vision and can't pull up stats overlaid on the action."
Beyond the live component, VR's other big promise is simply its ability to bring us into worlds that we otherwise would need airplanes or even time machines to visit.
The demo of Oculus Rift Crescent Bay – which is in rapid development after Facebook purchased the company last spring for $2 billion – brought users vividly back to the dinosaur era and forward to an alien planet.
A technician uses virtual reality to test out new military hardware before it's ever put into production. (Photo: Todd Richmond, USC ICT)
All that's truly required for such trips is massive amounts of code-writing to create those worlds. While that will partly be the undertaking of companies such as Oculus, increasingly it will be contributed by citizens around the world in the same way that Wikipedia has mushroomed on the backs of global contributors.
"Everyone will be contributing these virtual world stories, and soon cyberspace as we know it will end simply because we'll be online all the time living in this blended reality," says Alessandro Voto, researcher at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit that helps companies or organizations plan for a world five to 100 years out.
Time Walk, a project by tech entrepreneur Ted Barnett, would allow a virtual reality visit back to the early days of Mill Valley, a San Francisco suburb. (Photo: Ted Barnett)
"What's promising about VR and its impact on the world is how using it can all increase our sense of compassion," he says. "VR is an empathy machine."
For example, he adds, programs could be written to allow a man to see the world from a woman's point of view, or a journalist could take a viewer into the story he's reporting.
Voto is one of many watching the VR field who senses that the ultimate iteration of the technology will be more augmented reality, or AR – overlaying a virtual world over the real one – than a VR goggle that keeps us blind to the outside world.
Internet entrepreneur Ted Barnett has been fascinated with building facsimiles of other worlds since he and his brothers built a small town out of cardboard in their basement. Today, he's teamed up with the historical society in the Bay Area suburb of Mill Valley to build a virtual representation of the village from 100 years ago.
Called TimeWalk, the project's ultimate aim would to allow a person to walk through the town today while wearing an AR headset that would simultaneously project a Model T rumbling by or the dances of the Native American tribe that once lived in Mill Valley.
"It's fun to think about (J.R.R. Tolkien's) Middle Earth or Star Trek, but what's really interesting is this sort of time travel that we can actually figure out thanks to VR," says Barnett, who envisions a near future where citizens everywhere are coding and scanning their worlds present and past through a platform called Unity. "We can honor the past, and in so doing learn things about ourselves."
While initially puzzling, Facebook's purchase of Oculus for a staggering sum may soon seem like a cheap ticket to the future.
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At present, the popular social networking site remains, in format, little more than a updatable bulletin board. But with an affordable Oculus Rift product, it could vault into being a VR-powered portal for experiencing the lives of family and friends in a compellingly real way. A birthday party? You're at the table. A wedding? You're seated in the front row.
When Oculus' chief scientist Michael Abrash addressed the F8 crowd for a keynote address titled "Why Virtual Reality Will Matter to You," he cited 1999's The Matrix as his inspiration.
Michael Abrash, chief scientist for Oculus, talks about virtual reality during a keynote address at the Facebook F8 Developers Conference Thursday, March 26, 2015, in San Francisco. (Photo: AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
"That movie made me believe in VR, it gave me a deep sense of what it might be like to bend and stretch our reality," he said.
Then a slide popped on screen that, for Abrash, distilled the essential appeal and fundamental inevitability of VR's imminent ubiquity. It was lines of dialogue spoken by Morpheus, the character played by Laurence Fishburne, in which reality is defined as simply being electrical signals interpreted by the brain.
The implication: Whether those signals are real or artificially created doesn't matter, if we react to the stimuli, then what we are experiencing is by definition real.
Abrash leveled a gaze at the audience and, in a voice that projected unwavering certainty, declared: "You are going to care about virtual reality, sooner or later."
发表于 2015-4-20 17:46:13
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Marco della Cava