Crash Course Games #21 Future of VR (2016)
- I have just begun to watch Sword Art Online.
- I had my first taste of the real thing recently.
Both these things are an indicator of a massive event in recent tech history - the coming of age of virtual reality. In the past few years VR has become a major subject in tech media, mostly thanks to the Oculus Rift. Starting off as a prototype duct-taped together by a teen in Long Beach, California, it became the subject of a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Two years later the company developing it was bought by Facebook for $2billion. Multiple development kits of it were made for developers to use over the years until this year when a consumer version was finally released ... a year after Oculus helped create the Samsung Gear VR headset.
While the Rift is a purpose-built computer interface device (like a head-mounted mouse or Wii controller), the Samsung Gear is basically a smartphone placed inside a pair of goggles. This means that you can make your own VR headset with just a touchscreen smartphone or tablet. All you need is to devise a way to attach it to your face, like a modified welder's mask or scuba/ski goggles. But if you think this "hacking" is too much work, Google has made a piece of cardboard origami that'll save you the hassle plus a few apps you can download on your Android (I presume) to make the most of it.
And that last one is a clear indicator that there is a high demand for VR in the mid-2010s. Why would Google go through the hassle to make a "cheap" cardboard VR headset if their was no demand for it?
You may have worked out (from seeing people wearing the headsets and thinking about them while you play your favourite video game) that the idea of been able to explore another world like you were actually there or becoming someone else in it is an attractive one. Who would want to explore Hogwarts for real and try to learn some magic? Who would want to live in a world where it is possible to have a pet Pikachu that you can cuddle? Who would kill to be the lucky guy with loads of money, in the back seat of an open-top limo with a few .... you get the idea.
It's an idea that is older than you think, and may be as old as fiction. But the technology to make it possible is much older than you think. The make it possible you'll need a way to enclose the senses of the user, like a pair of goggles, and something to replace what those senses usually pick up, like a video on a screen.
According to this criteria, the earliest form of VR was the stereoscope, a 19th century device designed to give a viewer the illusion of depth when viewing specially-made stereographs (a pair of photos taken of the same scene with two cameras placed side-by-side to mimic stereoscopic vision). It's like a steampunk version of the Nintendo Virtual Boy. The stereoscope in some form continued to exist well into the 20th century, mostly in the form of the View-Master. But by then the stereoscope became just a toy. A novelty gift for tourists visiting the Grand Canyon, where they can re-experience seeing it in 3D. And that was the limit of the stereoscope - it only works with still environments, like views of landscapes.
The next step was to make those images move. One attempt at this was the Sensorama, a coin-operated booth where you can view one of five wide-screen stereoscopic 3D films and hear and smell it like you were there, while riding a rig that tilted you. But this was a mechanical passive system system. For VR to be a reality things had to go electronic.
The true ancestor of the Oculus Rift was a device called "The Sword of Damocles." Created in 1968 by computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland, this contraption is considered by most as the world's first VR headset. Although Philco has a claim of this "first" years earlier, with a headset that controlled a video camera remotely, allowing remote viewing, Sutherland's device get's the credit because of one thing - it can allow you to view computer-generated objects - like a cube (as seen in the clip below).
demo of "The Sword of Damocles"
It may have been just a wire-frame cube, but it was a start.
The tech remained dormant in research labs and a curiosity in science-fiction until the late-1980s then the cost of headsets fell dramatically, when some realised that they could make cheaper headsets by cannibalising consumer pocket-sized LCD colour TVs. Soon afterword, VR became a hot topic in tech news, as seen in this 1992 episode of Computer Chronicles.
Computer Chronicles - Virtual Reality (1992)
It all seem promising (and familiar). But there was a fundamental problem with this tech that limited its application. Because of the limited processing power that was available at the time, the real-time rendering of realistic-looking scenes was impossible without causing nausea to the headset wearer.
The environment the user is in is stored and processed by the main computer as a series of co-ordinates in a three-dimension grid and instructions that join up the dots to form shapes and label what colour and texture they are (plus a few other things about the environment, such as its lighting arrangement). For the VR headset wearer to see this environment the computer has to convert all this data into a picture that is to be displayed in the headset. This conversion of data into pictures is known as "rendering" and the more objects and detail a scene has the more processing is needed to render it. Simple scenes, like 1980s TV idents, don't take that much time to render (the processor in the laptop I'm using to write this can do that in minutes, even seconds). But those HD quality graphics you enjoy on 7th gen and later consoles - they take a heck of a lot of processing to render. This is not much of a problem if we are only dealing with still images. But a VR system (and your console) has to render a new image every 50th of a second or so to generate the moving picture you'd expect to see on the screen. Your "modern" console can do this very easily, thanks to their ultra-fast multi-core processors. But computers in the 1990s can only barely manage to render primitive 3D graphics without causing the picture to "stall." This was just an annoying problem if we were just discussing playing games on a console that's plugged into a normal TV set. But in a VR headset this problem had serious consequences. If a picture stalled while the wearer was moving their head, the time lack between the head movement and the system's response to that movement can cause confusion in the wearer's brain, triggering motion sickness.
This is why most VR experiences in the 1990s are of primitively-rendered environments with little detail. Any more detail, the computer could crash or there was a mess on the VR suite's floor.
But despite this, many saw VR then as the future. Cyberpunks saw VR as a means for social change. Former hippies saw it as a legal alternative to LSD. Some believed that with VR you can have your mind leave the physical world by jacking the system up to your brain, Matrix style. You can re-experience memories and share them with others in the same way you can share music on Napster. And if that's possible users would experience a form of enlightenment that was once the reserve of Buddhist monks. But all of that was just cultural hype. Hype that was immortalised in films of the period, like Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man.
The actually reality of virtual reality was that all those headsets and data gloves were just more expensive versions of the computer mouse. Although it did see some applications, such as the computer-aided design of complicated stuff like buildings and drugs. but to the average Joe VR was just an expensive version of the NES. By the time The Lawnmower Man's squeal was released in 1996 the buzz in the tech world had started to move to the thing that actually changed the world - the internet. A shift this squeal actually captured.
By 2000 VR had become like the Space Shuttle. It was an advanced piece of tech that promised a lot but didn't truly deliver those promises - let. So VR remained in the doldrums.... until something happened ... in the form of Google Street View. 360-degree photography and video revived VR in the 2010s. You no longer needed to render computer-generated scenes live. All you needed was to play a 360-degree video clip to create the illusion of a different world or perspective to the headset wearer. Playing a HD video clip requires less processing than rendering a realistic CGi scene over 50 times a second, as I explained earlier. And that development (and relatively cheaper consumer headsets) has opened the market for VR. So much so that even charities can use it to give shopping mall patrons the experience of having a disability.
Which brings us to my first experience with VR.
In March 2016 The National Autistic Society introduced a new campaign, which began with this video.
"Can you make it end?" National Autistic Society (2016)
In June NAS took advantage of recent developments in VR and made an immersive version of the video, where you become the boy with the toy dinosaur. The Autism TMI Virtual Reality Experience has been touring shopping malls across the UK. In September it was Braehead Shopping Centre, in Glasgow.
Work had begun on a new national newsletter publication I'm working on for NAS's Glasgow office and it was decided that this was a story worth covering for it. So for one afternoon I was their helping putting on the Samsung Gears and headphones and witnessing the various peoples reactions to the experience ... and trying it myself.
The device worked and was simple to operate. When I turned my head, the video moved to reflect this. And with the headphones (and the toy dinosaur in your hands) you are genuinely immersed in the content and you become the boy in the mall.
So how did the patrons react to this? The comments to this video pretty much summed it up. But one reaction on the day I was there stood out - one woman cried. And (according to the other volunteers at the stall that day) she was not the only one to do so. The number of people who have tried this experience include parents, guardians, teachers, doctors, and psychologists, plus some people who wanted to try the Samsung Gear. And everyone who tried it got a taste of what it was like to be autistic. A volunteer who was with me summed it up like this....
"What would have taken years of text book teaching to describe was understood by the wearer in just a few minutes."
But I know not everyone thinks it is accurate. But that is the nature of autism. It is not the same for everyone! The video is the result of surveying a number of autistic people and what this video shows is what can be considered the "average" autistic experience. Not every autistic person experiences blinding light and/or overwhelming noise in a shopping mall, but many do, especially the very young. That is why many parents tried it. They wanted to have a idea what it was like (no matter how rough or "average" it is). This was clearly an ideal application for VR. And its not limited to autism. It can give anyone the "walk in my shoes" treatment. (I remember that a few years ago VR was used to give users the experience of having a different skin colour to give them the taste of what it was like to be in the receiving end of racism.)
Just two years earlier this tech was muchly experimental. (In 2014, the BBC was experimenting with it to offer 360-degree coverage of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.) Today, in 2016, its on the verge of becoming everyday, like television was in the 1950s. (In August 2016 they launched the BBC Sport 360 phone app for VR devices for coverage of the Rio Olympics.) In that context, the VR devices of the 1980s and 90s were like the cumbersome TV sets and cameras of the 1930s. Broadcast television then was limited to the electronics available at the time. But thanks to the demand for radar systems during World War II TV improved massively after the conflict ended. (It is said that the main reason why broadcast TV was even allowed to exist then (despite the economic climate at the time) was the powers at be saw it as a means to help speed up the development of radar, but I won't get into that right now.) With surplus CRTs and smaller more reliable valves the costs of TV sets fell to the point that millions could buy one. VR technology in the 1990s was still highly expensive because the processing power needed for them to work was still quite costly. But thanks to Moore's Law and developments in video game console devices and smartphones, the cost of the VR technology has fallen. Like television in the 1950s, VR could became highly widespread in ten years.....
..... but all that depends on whether we want it and some of its current kinks (like the blind person walking problem) get sorted out. Whether the events of Sword Art Online become true in the real version of year 2022 is still out there.
