Virtuality Updated 2017

Since our last look at the worlds of Virtual Reality (“VR”, see AiaVW-2011 and VH-2012, note the comments from back then…) and since our visit by Second Life, the various worlds have ‘sort of’ moved on… Time now (jumping forward to ABVoVW-2017!) for some of what is happening now…

The list below is something of a mix of “impressive”, “good”, “not-so-good”, “excellent” and “bad”… This tech is not quite up to the direct connection as seen in the Sci-Fi series Star Trek for Geordi, however, immersive stereo vision and stereo (“binaural“) sound provide a very powerful and convincing conduit into your mind to shape your world of experiences.

Here is a brief view of what is presently being ‘experienced’:

• The “Impressive” – New Consumer Hardware and New Worlds:
  • Will 2017 be the year virtual reality gets real? – “The last year has seen the launch of every major VR platform, from high-quality tethered systems like HTC’s Vive and Facebook’s Oculus Rift, through to cheap-and-cheerful smartphone-based platforms like Google’s Daydream and Samsung’s Gear VR. … how will the platforms evolve? What will you actually be able to do with them? And is VR just a stepping stone anyway, to the even more science-fiction future of augmented reality (“AR”) tech?…”
  • Virtual Reality 101 – “So what is Virtual Reality?” (Good rundown given of the consumer VR headsets presently available and brief details listed for what you can do with them.)
  • The complete guide to virtual reality – everything you need to get started – A detailed rundown of consumer VR headsets and VR games
  • VR Explore – What Google sees for a search of new VR Worlds!
• The Good:
  • Why is virtual reality taking so long to take off? – “LOS ANGELES — At the Electronic Entertainment Expo… More than 125 VR exhibitors… [VR] is costly. It’s also been hard getting people to try it… What virtual reality needs… is a killer app…”
  • Magritte VR Experience Opens in Belgium Inside a Giant Bowler Hat – “… the Magritte VR Experience is a shared immersive experience for a large audience in which 50 headsets featuring 3D binaural sound are triggered at the same time.” (The VR experience is open until 03/09/2017.)
  • Beyond Anime and Manga, Tokyo Content Showcases Augmented and Virtual Reality – “In a keynote address … the ultimate goal for VR development was the “merging of the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ as the technology advances.”…”
  • Vive Tracker Used to Create Pressure Sensitive Photoshop Stylus for VR – “the latest version of a DIY motion-tracked VR stylus prototype…”
  • ‘Lone Echo’s’ Virtual Hands Are an Unexpected VR Innovation – “our hands are our primary means of interacting with the world around us, and getting them ‘right’ in VR can make it that much easier to feel immersed and present inside of your virtual body…”
  • How Mozilla is Driving WebVR Content & Tooling with the A-Frame Framework – “Mozilla’s mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they’ve been helping to bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework for creating WebVR content…”
  • ‘Noda’ is a Mind Mapping Tool for Spatial Thinking in VR – “Gaming in VR is great, but there’s huge potential for the tech to be used for productivity too… [To explore] a Mind Map…”
  • Dungeons & Dragons ‘Dungeon Chess’ Comes to Oculus Rift and Gear VR – “The [VR] title combines classic chess gameplay with iconic D&D creature designs and suitably richly atmospheric environments…”
  • Mario Kart makes the leap to virtual reality at new Tokyo VR entertainment center – “… the head-mounted display and first-person-perspective graphics aren’t the only things that make the new game special. Before the race starts, players strap motion sensors to their wrists, which allow them to make throwing motions to fling weapons, such as Mario Kart’s iconic Koopa shells, at their rivals…
  • Second Life creators look to revamp reality once again, this time in VR – “… the SF-based team that has maintained a very odd, somewhat dysfunctional digital society called Second Life for what’s coming up on thirteen years… Traversing the [new] worlds of Sansar and chatting with my guide, Linden Lab VP of Product Bjorn Laurin, was a mostly seamless experience but still an oddly unsettling one. … I was viewing through an Oculus Rift headset. Sansar is visually placid and often beautiful, but it’s also startlingly scalable and boundless…” (See also: Wikipedia: Second Life)
  • New Virtual World Sansar Is Ready to Pick Up Where Second Life Left Off – “On its 14th birthday, a reflection on Linden Lab’s groundbreaking Second Life, and how their next project Sansar hopes to go even further… While Second Life never reached a level of mainstream adoption in the way a platform like Facebook has, it’s worth noting how groundbreaking it was — and still is today… The in-world economy of Second Life, the one that supposedly ‘failed’ to take off, still outranks some small countries in gross domestic product…”
• The (spookily?) not-so-good?:
  • ‘Strange Beasts’ is a Sci-fi Short About Augmented Reality… – “[where] augmented reality is capable of delivering a realistic Tamagotchi game superimposed onto the physical world…” Note the ‘Tamagotchi effect‘…
  • … [Too Many] Dropping Out of Real Life to Live in Virtual Worlds[?]… – “If you don’t want people to live in a virtual world, make the real world better. Virtual worlds were invented precisely because the real world sucks…”
  • Moscow artist ‘arrested for wearing a virtual reality headset’ – “Journalist Mikhail Levin, who reported the arrest on Facebook, said the arrest was the first of its kind in Russia…”
  • … HoloLens apps to be piloted with ‘Hogwarts for the MoD’ chapesses, chaps – Augmented reality apps for future Army, RAF, RN kids…
• The Excellent:
  • Putting all this together to bring the virtual world into reality with the aid of 3D-printing: Elon Musk, SpaceX: The Future of Design
• And just one (random, recent,) example of The Bad:
  • It’s July 2017 – and your expensive HoloLens can be pwned over Wi-Fi – “Augmented Reality bites…” Would you want your view of the world to be controlled by Malware? Where would the Malware wish you to go?…
• Meanwhile there are always a few provisos:
  • Virtual reality audiences stare straight ahead [most] of the time – YouTube’s advice to turn heads is ‘make better videos’. Literally. That’s all they’ve got…
  • AR and VR in data visualisation – can it ever be useful to our puny human minds? – ‘The biggest challenge is to not misrepresent the data’
• And to summarize the ‘present state of the art and development’ here is a very brief fly-through of the hard real-world reality as compared to a glimpse of what direction consumers may well be pushed into?:
  • Get a Pilot’s Eye View of the F-35 Head-Up Display – Yes… The pilot really does have an uninterrupted infra-red/night-vision view through his entire aircraft! An array of cameras around the aircraft body are combined to present a very real all-round view. (They are also used to optically detect incoming missiles…)
  • Infinity Augmented Reality (Infinity AR) – An easy-going sales pitch for what sort of thing can be done with present tech…
  • The Best Augmented Reality Campaigns – Examples of what is already being done in the name of Advertising
  • HYPER-REALITY – And an all-too-real example of where this is leading to…
  • The future of augmented reality – (Scarily?) That last example is from 2014. Note the new hardware developments mentioned even back then… How soon for our New Reality?

All this is all an old idea from long ago, for both good and bad, as envisioned by: Matrix (Doctor Who)…

All coming into your reality soon!

Is all that we see or seem, naught but someone else’s dream?…