The Oculus Crescent Bay prototype showing the Samsung Gear-type head harness with motion tracking sensors on the back and the integrated headphones
As is to be expected, Oculus VR are attending the International Consumer Electronics Show 2015, which is once again being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, through until January 9th, 2015, where the latest headset prototype – Crescent Bay – is undergoing its “public debut”, and the company’s CEO, Brendan Iribe took time out to discuss the prototype and more with Techcrunch’s Darrell Etherington.
“Crescent Bay is a huge leap from Oculus Rift DK2,” Iribe informs Etherington at the start of their 6-minute discussion. “And it increases all the different parts, whether it’s resolution, precision, the positional tracking, the latency, the optics themselves, everything really takes a big jump, and it really finally delivers what we’ve been talking about for a long time, this pursuit of presence. It finally delivers on that presence that we feel is good enough for consumers.”
So, does that mean he’s revising his comment at November’s Web summit conference about the consumer version of the headset being “many months” away?
Oculus is again a major presence at the International CES in Las Vegas
Well, probably not. While no outright statement on time frames is given, it’s fair to say the the company is still putting a consumer release as some way down the road.
For one thing, the next immediate target is getting an audio SDK to developers to allow them to get to grips with the capabilities of Crescent Bay’s 3D immersive audio system. However, it’s liable to be another “few months” before that happens. For another, while the company feel they are now “close” to having a headset that is, technology-wise, to being consumer-ready, Iribe also notes the audio is at a “minimum” the company requires of a consumer product, and also that no decision on what they’ll actually be shipping as a consumer product as yet been made: it might be “just” the headset, or it might be the headset and an input system / device.
When speaking to Peter Rubin at the Web Summit in Dublin in November (linked to above), Iribe made it clear that input had become a “big focus” for the company, which they were “R&Ding”. He restates part of this to Etherington, which suggests they may still be leaning towards headset + input system / device, although he also noted that the company is not yet ready to discuss matters of input in public.
In terms of a suitable software library being available in time for any launch so – another consideration in determining when to launch the consumer product – Iribe indicates the company is “very happy” with the progress that is being made, suggesting this is less of a concern as they gradually move towards a consumer release.
Samsung’s Gear VR: now available in the US & pre-orders being taken in the UK
Can’t wait for the Oculus Rift consumer edition to arrive? Got a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 phablet (or thinking of upgrading your existing contract to a Note 4?) Then you can get into the VR revolution wirelessly, if still pretty much on a “beta” basis.
The Gear VR headset, featuring Oculus technology, is now available in the US for around $200.00. The headset can be ordered from the likes of AT&T and direct from Samsung US, which both price the headset at $199.00 – although a game controller is a purchasable extra (Samsung offer 30% off the price of their gamepad if purchased with the headset)
Offering a wireless, portable VR experience, the Gear VR headset requires the Samsung Galaxy note 4 phablet
Within the UK, advance order of the Gear VR headset are currently being offered by the likes of Expansys for £159.99 sans controller but inclusive of VAT. Handtec are offering the headset at £185.99 inclusive of VAT, or £239.99 (inc VAT) for the headgear and a controller. Handtec are also supplying a 16Gb micro SD card for the Note 4 along with both versions of the headset. This contains a collection of immersive trailers and film tie-ins, and a Cirque du Soleil 360-degree immersive experience, all of which are separately available through the Oculus Share store.
Samsung are offering 30% off the price of their game controller (which works with most of their smartphones) t US purchasers of the Gear VR headset – although the company also admits, a game controller isn’t the best way to partake of an interactive VR experience…
The Samsung Gear VR Innovator’s Edition headset combines the Note 4’s Super AMOLED 2560×1440 and software (remembering that the Note 4 is not included in the Gear VR’s retail price) with the Oculus Rift’s optics, head tracking and dedicated controls – you can see the full specs on the Samsung global site.
According to The Verge, the tracking controller is from the Oculus DK1. Also, note that although the finish product is more polished than the Oculus DK offerings, “innovator” in the name should be taken as indicative that it is still a “beta” unit.
This is something the company itself is emphasising, with Samsung virtual reality VP Nick DiCarlo carefully defining the marketing approach to this release of the Gear VR, “We’re very carefully trying to avoid overhyping this, but we think it’s going to be amazing.” DiCarlo also notes that while company’s game controller is being offered at a discount when ordered with the headset, game controllers are perhaps not the ideal companion for immersive VR experiences.
That Handtec are also offering offerings from the Oculus store helps to underline the fact that the Gear will work with content that is already available. In this regard as well, Titans of Space, already hugely popular with DK1 and DK2 users, is pointedly listed as being available for the Gear VR, as is cyberpunk hacking game Darknet. Oculus Mobile themselves are keen to point-out that they are working on both sides of the net with products suitable for both mobile options and for desktop / laptop options.
Titans of Space: an Oculus / Gear VR experience which allows users to experience the majesty of the solar system
Samsung is also promoting a new VR service alongside the headset – although this still, at the time of writing, has yet to be rolled-out. It’s called Milk VR, which the company defines as:
The company’s first virtual reality content service. Milk VR will deliver new and immersive 360° videos five days a week, with channels in music, sports, action and storytelling. The service also tracks what is trending across the VR landscape, to help viewers find the best VR content.
Samsung’s belief is that by making VR a mobile experience, they stand to help it gain more widespread acceptance as an entertainment medium – hence the Milk VR offering. “If VR is only ever for gaming, it’s going to be a great and successful business,” DiCarlo told The Verge in another interview. “But part of what we’re hoping to do is really have VR evolve over time towards a mainstream thing that people do in a lot of different cases.”
This is perhaps also reflected in the company’s recent launch of Project Beyond, a 3D, 360-degree camera rig designed to capture videos and stream them on the Gear VR.
However, not everyone is convinced that releasing the Gear VR now is necessarily a good move. At the end of November, having tried a pre-release version of the headset, TechRadar noted:
Where the Oculus Rift is tethered and feels like a “grown up” version of virtual reality, the Gear VR feels more accessible as a mainstream product. But this December may be too soon for Gear VR to hit the market. Sure, it’s targeted at early adopters and developers but making it widely available doesn’t seem to be the right move. Given more time to improve latency and allow more content to flow in, it could very well be a hit.
It might also be argued that while both Project Beyond and Milk VR are interesting concepts, they perhaps also demonstrate a lack of imagination, regulating VR to what James Cameron recently critiqued as little more than “stand and watch” (although it has to be said Milk VR could easily offer more in the way of involvement and interaction, depending upon the content curated through it). Nevertheless, by making VR more accessible and less reliant on slaving yourself to a computer, Samsung is more on the right track in making VR a more accessible medium with full freedom of use.
Nor are they entirely alone – Carl Zeiss recently launched their $99 (£79 / 99 Euro) Zeiss VR One, which is intended to work with a range of mobile ‘phones, starting with the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 (in a novel move, users are being asked to vote on which other ‘phone should be supported by the headset in the future). The headset is tied to an app supplied by the company, which may limit initial offerings, but Zeiss are also offering developers wanting to work with the Zeiss VR One access to their open source Unity3D SDK so that games and other offerings can be more easily developed.
Zeiss VR One – yours for $99.00 (£78.00 / 99 Euros)
While mobile headsets may well be the means by which VR could achieve deeper market penetration than being constantly slaved to a computer, they will require fair amount of maturing. The Gear VR Innovator Edition, for example, despite having a higher image resolution capability, thanks to the Galaxy Note’s screen, actually delivers pretty much the same per-eye experience as the Oculus DK2, so on-screen text can still appear blurred and hard to read.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see where this all leads, and what else might pop-up in the mobile sector of the new VR market ahead of the Oculus Rift eventually making its appearance. And on that point, please don’t see the arrival of the Gear VR as indicative that the Oculus Rift is now “just around the corner”; Brendan Iribe seems to have been pretty clear on that subject recently, and the emphasis at Oculus VR is still on getting it “right”, rather than getting it “out”.
All images of the Gear VR and the Milk VR logo courtesy of Samsung; image of the Zeiss VR One, courtesy of Carl Zeiss AG; image from Titans of Space courtesy of Drash VR LLC.
Dan Hope over at High Fidelity has provided a light-hearted blog post on using the Leap Motion gesture device with the High Fidelity Alpha.
The blog post includes a video showing Chris Collins and Ozam Serim in-world in High Fidelity playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. The intention is to provide something of an update on integrating Leap Motion with High Fidelity.
Both Chris and Ozan’s avatars have intentionally-oversized hands, which although they look silly / awkward, help emphasise the dexterity available in the High Fidelity avatar. Not only can avatars mimic user’s gestures, they can mimic individual finger movements as well (something Dan has shown previously in still images).
Dan also points out the work to integrate Leap Motion hasn’t been done internally, but has been a contribution from CtrlAltDavid – better known in Second Life as Strachan Ofarrel (aka Dave Rowe), the man behind the CtrlAltStudio viewer. As such, Dan points to it being an example of the High Fidelity Worklist being put to good use – although I say it’s more a demonstration of Dave’s work in getting new technology into virtual environments :).
A lot of people have been fiddling with Leap Motion – including fixing it to the front of an Oculus Rift headset (as noted in the HiFi blog post) in order to make better use of it in immersive environments.Having it fixed to an Oculus, makes it easier for the Leap Motion to capture gestures – all you need to do is hold your hands up in your approximate field-of-view, rather than having to worry about where the Leap is on your desk.
Mounting the Leap motion to the front of Oculus Rift headsets is seen as one way to more accurately translate hand movements and gestures into a virtual environment. Perhaps so – but a lot of people remain unconvinced about using gesture devices as we have them today
Away from the ubiquitous Oculus Rift, Simon Linden did some initial experiments with Leap Motion with Second Life in early 2013, and Drax also tried it out with some basic gesture integration using GameWAVE software, however the lack of accuracy with the earlier Leap Motion devices didn’t easily lend their use to the platform, which is why more recent attempts at integration didn’t really get off the ground. However, Leap Motion have been working to improve things.
That said, not everyone is convinced as to the suitability of such gesture devices when compared to more tactile input systems such as haptic gloves, which have the benefit of providing levels of feedback on things (so when you pick a cube up in-world, you can “feel” it between your fingers, for example). Leap certainly appears to suffer from some lack of accuracy – but it is apparently getting better.
Given a choice, I’d probably go the haptic glove + gesture route, just because it does seem more practical and assured when it comes to direct interactions. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see how experiments like this are progressing, particularly given the Lab’s own attempts to make the abstraction layer for input devices as open as possible on their next generation platform, in order to embrace devices such as the Leap Motion.
As noted by Ciaran Laval, Philip Rosedale appeared at the Gigaom Roadmap event held in San Francisco on November 18th and 19th. He was taking part in a (roughly) 30-minute discussion with Gigaom’s staff writer, Signe Brewster, entitled Designing Virtual Worlds, in which he explores the potential of virtual worlds when coupled with virtual reality, both in terms of High Fidelity and in general. In doing so, he touches on a number of topics and areas – including Second Life – providing some interesting insights into the technologies we see emerging today, aspects of on-line life that have been mentioned previously in reference to High Fidelity, such as the matter of identity, and what might influence or shape where VR is going.
This is very much a crystal ball type conversation such as the Engadget Expand NY panel discussion Linden Lab’s CEO Ebbe Altberg participated in at the start of November, inasmuch as it is something of an exploration of potential. However, given this is a more focused one-to-one conversation than the Engadget discussion, there is much more meat to be found in the roughly 31-minute long video.
Philip Rosedale in conversation with Gigaom’s Signe Brewster
Unsurprisingly, the initial part of the conversation focuses very much on the Oculus Rift, with Rosedale (also unsurprisingly, as they’re all potentially right) agreeing with the likes of the Engadget panel, Tony Parisi, Brendan Iribe, Mark Zurkerberg et al, that the Oculus Rift / games relationship is just the tip of the iceberg, and there there is so much more to be had that lies well beyond games. Indeed, he goes so far to define the Oculus / games experience as “ephemeral” compared to what might be coming in the future. Given the very nature of games, this is not an unreasonable summation, although his prediction that there will only be “one or two” big game titles for the Rift might upset a few people.
A more interesting part of the discussion revolves around the issue of identity, when encompasses more than one might expect, dealing with both the matter of how we use our own identity as a means of social interaction – through introducing ourselves, defining ourselves, and so on, and also how others actually relate to us, particularly in non-verbal ways (thus overlapping the conversation with non-verbal communications.
Identity is something Rosedale has given opinion on ion the past, notably through his essay on Identity in the Metaverse from March 2014 – recommended reading to anyone with an interest in the subject. The points raised are much more tightly encapsulated here in terms of how we use our name as a means of greeting, although the idea of of trust as an emerging currency in virtual environments is touched upon: just as in the physical world, we need to have the means to apply checks and balances to how much we reveal about ourselves to others on meeting them.
Can the facial expressions we use, exaggerated or otherwise, when talking with others be as much a part of out identity as our looks?
The overlap between identity and communication is graphically demonstrated in Rosedale’s relating of an experiment carried out at High Fidelity. This saw several members of the HiFi team talking on a subject, a 3D camera being used to capture their facial expressions and gestures, recording them against the same “default” HiFi avatar. When a recording of the avatar was selected at random and played by to HiFi staff sans any audio, they were still very quickly able to identify who the avatar represented, purely by a subconscious recognition of the way facial expression and any visible gestures were used.
This is actually a very important aspect when it comes to the idea of trust as virtual “currency”, as well as demonstrating how much more we may rely on non-verbal communication cues than we might otherwise realise. If we are able to identify people we know – as friends, as work colleagues, business associates, etc. – through such non-verbal behavioural prompts and cues, then establishing trust with others within a virtual medium which allows such non-verbal prompts to be accurately transmitted, can only more rapidly establish that exchange of trust, allowing for much more rapid progression into other areas of interaction and exchange.
Interaction and exchange also feature more broadly in the conversation. There is, for example the difference in the forms of interaction which take place within a video game and those we’re likely to encounter in a virtual space. Those used in games tend to be limited to what is required in the game itself – such as shooting a gun or running.
If 3D spaces can be made to operate as naturally as we function in the real world – such as when handing some something, as Mr. Rosedale is miming, might they become a more natural extension of our lives?
Obviously, interactions and exchanges in the physical world go well beyond this, and finding a means by which natural actions, such as the simple act of shaking hands or passing a document or file to another person can be either replaced by a recognisable virtual response, or replicated through a more natural approach than opening windows, selecting files, etc., is, Rosedale believes, potentially going to be key to a wider acceptance of VR and simulated environments in everyday life.
There’s a certain amount of truth in this, hence the high degree of R&D going on with input devices from gesture-based tools such as Leap Motion or haptic gloves or some other device. But at the same time, the mouse / trackpad / mouse aren’t going to go away overnight. There are still and essential part of our interactions with the laptops in front of us for carrying out a ranges of tasks that also aren’t going to vanish with the arrival and growth of VR. So any new tool may well have to be as easy and convenient to use as opening up a laptop and then starting to type.
Drawing an interesting, on a number of levels, comparison between the rise of the CD ROM and the impact of the Internet’s arrival, Rosedale suggests that really, we have no idea where virtual worlds might lead us simply because, as he points out, even now “we don’t get it yet”. The reality is that the potential for virtual spaces is so vast, it is easy to focus on X and Y and predict what’s going to happen, only to have Z arrive around the same time and completely alter perceptions and opportunities.
There are some things within the conversation that go unchallenged. For example, talking about wandering into a coffee shop, opening your laptop and then conducting business in a virtual space is expressed as a natural given. But really, even with the projected convenience of use, is this something people will readily accept? Will they want to be sitting at a table, waving hands around, staring intently into camera and sharing their business with the rest of the coffee shop in a manner that potentially goes beyond wibbling loudly and obnoxiously over a mobile phone? Will people want to do business against the clatter and noise and distractions of an entire coffee shop coming over their speakers / headphones from “the other end”? Will we want to be seated next to someone on the train who is given to waving arms and hands, presenting corner-eye distraction that goes beyond that encountered were they to simply open a laptop and type quietly? Or will we all simply shrug and do our best to ignore it, as we do with the mobile ‘phone wibblers of today?
That said, there is much that is covered with the discussion from what’s been learnt from the development of Second Life through to the influence of science-fiction on the entire VR/VW medium, with further focus on identity through the way people invest themselves in their avatar in between, until we arrive at the uncanny valley, and a potential means of crossing it: facial hair! As such, the video is a more than worthwhile listen, and I challenge anyone not to give Mr. Rosedale a sly smile of admiration as he slips-in a final mention of HiFi is such a way as to get the inquisitive twitching their whiskers and pulling-up the HiFi site in their browser to find out more.
The Oculus Crescent Bay prototype showing the Samsung Gear-type head harness with motion tracking sensors on the back and the integrated headphones (image via Oculus VR)
Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus VR was at the Web Summit event in Dublin Ireland at the start of November, where he sat down for a conversation with Wired’s Peter Rubin to discuss the latest state of play about the Oculus Rift, VR in general – and to deliver a small warning to others also involved in the headset market. He also indicated that the consumer version of Oculus Rift isn’t necessarily as close to reaching the market as some might think.
In terms of the Oculus Rift, he was upbeat about the latest prototype version, Crescent Bay, which appeared in September and which is said to be a “massive leap” forward in comparison to the Oculus DK2 hardware that shipped to developers in June and July.
Crescent Bay incorporates 360-degree positional head tracking through the inclusion of sensors on the back of the redesigned and improved head harness, higher resolution, wider field of view, a lighter body, and integrated audio (via Realspace 3D). Iribe said of the new prototype, “Crescent Bay is where it all begins: that quality level.”
Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe (left), in conversation with Peter Rubin from Wird Magazine at the 2014 Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland, November 4th (image via VentureBeat)
However, he also cautioned against people getting too excited over thought that the Rift is just around the corner. “What can I say on that?” he replied to Peter Rubin’s enquiry as to when a consumer version might appear. He went on:
We want to get it right. We really do. We’ve gone out there and we’ve set this bar and said, “we are going to get it right, and we’re not going to ship until we get it right” … We’re getting very close … We want it to be a beautiful product; there’s no reason it can’t be a beautiful product … so we still have a way to go, and we’re still working on a number of things, but we’re getting much closer. We like to say it’s months, not necessarily years, away [but] it’s many months, not a few months.
He then continued, “Crescent Bay, I’ll go on the record as saying that hardware-wise for the headset, it’s arguably almost there for the consumer product, and now there’s a few other parts. So we are finalising the specifications for that consumer version, and the headset is largely finalised.”
Michael Bormann of Engadget tires-out the Crescent Bay Oculus Rift prototype
One of the issues remaining in the way of a launch doesn’t lie with the headset – it is squarely down to the suitability of input devices. Iribe notes that keyboard, game pads and even gesture devices aren’t ideal; there needs to be some form of visual element (e.g. seeing your hands), and there needs to be a tactile element as well. People need to be able to touch, feel, and sense a button reacting to being pressed.He went on to say:
We’re trying to focus now on is, what is that VR input? Where does VR input begin? We don’t know the final Holy Grail of VR input; we have kind-of any idea of VR vision being a pair of sunglasses, which we’d like to get to [but] VR input, we’re still R&Ding, we’re still looking at. But that’s definitely a big focus for us.
The implication of his comments, and those that follow an observation made somewhat in jest by Rubin suggest that Oculus VR may be looking to develop their own input device, or perhaps work in close partnership with another company in the development of an “Oculus ready” (my term, not Iribe’s) device. Certianly, having grown from employing just 50 people prior to Facebook acquiring them, to almost 250 personnel today, it is not inconceivable that Oculus VR may be poking at ideas for its own inpute device.
What is the best VR imput tool… and are Oculus VR lloking to produce their own?
The subject of VR’s “killer application” also comes up in the conversation, and Iribe states he feels it is too early to really say, although he acknowledges it will initially have a big rooting in games and entertainment – hardly surprising, given the Rift’s pedigree. “There’ll be a market of a lot of really fun entertainment experiences in VR where you’ll feel like you’re in the game or in the movie, and it’s going to be awesome,” he said.
But in terms of going mainstream, he very much sees VR’s future hinging on communications:
For me, the real media where this is going to really transform the world long-term, is when we can have face-to-face communications…. Most people travel, and we get on airplanes and cars to go have face-to-face communications… If you could, in the future throw on a pair of sunglasses, and we can have that same conversation with people around the world, all feeling like you’re in the same place, face-to-face, looking at each other, looking at each other’s eyes, looking in each other’s mouths; we may look like funny little avatars, we may look a little more human… that’s really transformative.
Could VR be as transformative in how we communicate and access information as the mobile ‘phone has been?
Were this to happen, and VR offer the same ease of use and access to communications and information as the smartphone, Iribe is convinced it could have as deep an impact on the way we communicate as the mobile ‘phone itself. “To have virtual reality where you can have these face-to-face communications, that’s going to appeal to billions of people,” he said.
However, he also had a warning for other companies also trying to bring VR headsets to the market – there have already been at least two Oculus clones making waves (the ANTVR being one), with Sony also working on its Morpheus headset for the PS4. And that warning is: don’t launch until you’ve solved the problem of motion sickness. In giving the warning, Iribe seemed to be particularly focused on Sony.
We’re really looking forward to this as an industry, and looking forward to it being an industry that takes off… We’re really looking forward to more people jumping into the VR space, and we’re doing our best to be very open, supporting others. At the same time we’re a little worried about some of the bigger companies putting out product that isn’t quite ready. That elephant in the room is disorientation and motion sickness. That’s something I view as, two or three years from now, will really be behind us… We feel pretty confident that our consumer product will have solved that; and we’re really encouraging other companies, especially big companies, “don’t put out a product until you have solved that!”
Iribe’s warning to Sony, “Don’t launch until you’ve solved the problems of motion sickness” (image via Sony)
To this end, Oculus VR’s openness on matter has been such that they’ve invited senior representatives from Sony to come and learn from the lessons the company gained from users’ experiences with the DK1 and the DK2 and to see the Crescent Bay prototype ahead of its launch, offering them the advice that they should “make sure your product is as good or close!”
Elsewhere in the interview, Iribe gives some fascinating insight into a number of topics, including his role as CEO of Oculus VR, the impact of being acquired by Facebook, the company’s relationship with the VR community, the worries those within the company had (rightly so as it turned out) over the potential backlash they’d face if they accepted Facebook’s offer, and more. All of which makes for a fascinating 19-and-a-half minutes viewing.
Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg was in New York recently, attending the Engadget Expand NY 2014 event, which took place on November 7th and 8th. While there, he participated in a panel discussion hosted by Engadget’s Ben Gilbert, exploring the subject of Back to Reality: VR Beyond Gaming. Also appearing on the panel were:
Marte Roel, co-founder, BeAnotherLab and the open-source project called The Machine To Be Another, which is designed to explore the relationship of identity and empathy through VR immersion. The approach is particularly seen as a means of helping in conflict resolution (by allowing a person to experience a situation from another’s perspective). The group is perhaps most widely known for the Gender Swap Experiment, in which participants experience the illusion of being in one another’s body
Matt Bell, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Matterport, a company providing a means to imaging interior spaces and reproducing them as 3D models which have the potential to be utilised in a number of ways.
At just over 34 minutes in length, the panel isn’t long, and the opportunity for discussion of questions and views is further reduced by the first ten minutes being devoted to each of the panelists giving an overview of their particular platform / interest. However, once past this, there are some interesting observations made on the status of virtual reality outside of the games environment, some of which tend to echo commentary from elsewhere.
For example, discussion is held around the idea that immersive VR is more than simply seeing and hearing; we rely on other senses as well – smell and touch in particular. The latter is perhaps particularly relevant as the ability to generate a natural sense of feedback through touch, say through a haptic glove – is in many ways essential to move one beyond being something of an observer of a digital 3D environment to being a participant within it.
The Engadget Expand NY panel for Back to Reality: VR Beyond Gaming. For left to right: Ebbe Altberg, Matt Bell, Marte Roel and host Ben Gilbert
Marte Roel particularly notes this being the case with The Machine To Be Another, where users can use haptic capabilities to interact with the characters they meet by shaking hands and so on. Ebbe Altberg also observes a little later than haptics can help one enter more deeply into the illusion created by VR, noting that while it is possible to see the texture of a surface in a digital environment, the brain knows it is simply seeing an image, but if you can also feel the texture of that surface, the brain is further tricked into a deeper level of immersiveness and engagement – and move it beyond what James Cameron recently referred to as the “I can stand and look around” situation we currently have.
The flip side to this, as Ebbe Altberg also points out, is that the fidelity of the “real” experience – sight, sound, smell, touch, isn’t necessary in every potential use case for VR. There will be situations (indeed, there all ready are) where the full sense of immersiveness isn’t required; as such, over-emphasising things one way or another in terms of requirements or prerequisites would be a mistake, as there is liable to be a broad middle ground.
Even so, it cannot be denied that the technology is – for the time being, at least – one of the more obvious problems facing VR when it comes to mass adoption. There’s no denying ht Oculus Rift and its imitators and competition are still cumbersome, awkward and unappealing, lacking both convenience of use and portability. This is going to have to change – as the panel acknowledges. Indeed, we are already seeing attempts to improve the overall form factor – take the Zeiss cinemizer for example, or the Vuzix Wrap headsets. The problem here is that of price; even at $599, the Vuzix Wrap 1200DX VR is liable to be around $300 more than the Oculus, a pice point liable to keep people thinking VR more a “geeky” adjunct to activities than central part of them.
The Vuzix Wrap 1200DX VR “VR in a pair of sunglasses” – offering the kind of lightweight, non-nerdy approach that will help further acceptance of VR, but currently at a price.
Ebbe Altberg appears confident this could occur within a couple of years. He’s potentially a lot more optimistic than Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, who, when talking to Techcrunch in May 2014, suggested it could be another five years before people will be pulling compact (and presumably low-cost) VR glasses from their pocket and using them with the same ease they do with a part of sunglasses today.
Nor is it necessarily just the headsets; it’s the other accoutrements as well – haptic gloves, controllers, sensors systems, recognition systems. As the panel again acknowledge, these all need to mature and become more widely accepted. They also, frankly, need to become a lot cheaper. High Fidelity may well sign the praises of the STEM system, but it still dumps a minimum $300 extra on the cost of entry into some VR environments. Perhaps the answer lies in the improved integration and capabilities with existing hardware, as has been the case with mobile technologies: the more integrated things have become within the mobile ‘phone, the more central it has become to our everyday lives, something Matt Bell indirectly touches upon.
Matt Bell (holding the Galaxy Note 4), Marte Roel and Ben Gilbert (far right) during the Engadget Expand NY panel. Ebbe Altberg is slightly off-camera to the left (image via Bryan Bedder/Getty Images on Zimbio)
For a discussion on the future of VR outside of gaming, the conversation is surprisingly light; familiar verticals are pointed to as being very well suited to VR – education, health, virtual tourism, etc – but there’s no real probing of potentials. This is in some ways a shame; however, as Ebbe Altberg points out, predicting the overall future for VR isn’t that straightforward, given it could well cut through everything in its applicability:
It’s like an infinite number of potential use-cases for it… When people ask what’s the killer app, there’s going to be lots of killer apps, just like it is on the Internet in general or in the world in general. So I think of VR as a horizontal thing, something that you can able to apply to almost anything you’re trying to do.
Even so, it would have been interesting to hear thoughts on just how VR will be leveraged to a position of being not just an ancillary aspect of how we do certain things, but a piece of technology people see as vital to their every day lives as their mobile ‘phone. Will the catalyst simply because the hardware is available? Might it be come about as a result of multiple independent uses of VR which infiltrate our lives until it becomes an accepted part of everyday life – a quiet revolution, if you will, rather than the kind of sudden “whiz-bang, here it is!” that seems to be anticipated?
When limited to a 24 minute time frame, there’s obviously only so much that can be discussed in such a forum; as such, I couldn’t help be feel the topic might have been done more justice had it been given more time and a broader panel of participants. Nevertheless, what is there is worth listening to, and it has to be said the Ebbe Altberg does a respectable job to hoisting SL’s and the Lab’s flag and profile.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 