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Introduction: The Wonders of Virtual Reality
Posted by
thughes
,
05 February 2008
·
655 views
Recently I tried to keep a journal just to practice my writing skills, however a blog seems much more natural since I spend far more time with a keyboard than with a pen (pens are toys), plus someone else may find some entertainment value. Also, I can access it from anywhere in the house on my eee (they are so cute, I need to put little eye stickers on mine and name it).
My main problem is I'm not a "write the first thing that occurs to you" kind of person. I obsess. I read what I wrote 10 times to make sure it conveys what I want it to convey (and likely make it worse in the meantime). I write up something about my life and then decide its pretty boring and erase it. I'm hoping blogging will help me unlearn these habits. Either that or I'm going to be spending an awful lot of time here. Besides, forever is a long time to spend with social anxiety.
I just read the last line a few times, this is going to be a long trip...
I think this blog should aim for a technology slant on our future lives, as its what I have the most experience in. So to start, the wonders of virtual reality and a brief review of where I think it is going.
I was there before the online visual MMORPG thing started. On the old LPMUDS (text based gaming) we always used to talk about what a visual system would be like and how it would be implemented, but the technology wasn't there yet. Likewise, VR is not there yet. I suspect it will get there in stages.
The first stage will be gaming of course. Gaming drives the online world. The WII (love that name, how can you not love something with a control called the wii-mote) is a step in that direction. VR vision hasn't caught on yet, but thats the next step, combining VR goggles with a WIImote type device in a fantasy or FPS game. Note how good this could be for exercise. Well, upper body exercise. On that note, games like Dance Dance whatever are a cool thing for the next generation, get them moving!
We already have 3D sound, so tying that into a goggles/wii-mote game should be fairly easy.
Once this is popular I can see uses in business and education which I hope will catch on. Artifacts can be preserved, and viewed, in 3D, so that kids (or adult kids, whee mummies) in a Chicago school can view Egyptian artifacts from Cairo as if they were there. I don't know if our way of thinking will change once this type of thing becomes possible. I suspect we will continue to like real 3D environments, so what may happen is whole museums will be available for navigation online, at least organized by display, and possibly organized by remembered preference. The 3D environment will not be the same for everyone.
This may make desktop management easier, if you can have 3D VR goggles expand your desk space so you have a huge wraparound screen. Imagine all the operations you could perform on something like that. Once we move from a wii-mote to VR gloves, you could pick up and move windows, expand them with your hands, crumple them up and throw them out, shelve them in a visible library somewhere to your left (in any type of visual system you like, eg. leather bound books). A file window could be a shelf with objects, which when you select one can spin and reveal that shelf. You could write with a pencil on your windows, which believe me is much more precise than my old intuos tablet... We tend to think visually, all memory experts that I have heard about use visual cues, anything that moves us from organizing in text to organizing in vision has to be an improvement.
In business, face to face communications won't ever die, we read too much into expressions. Plus, its often hard to hear in a meeting environment, watching a person's lips, even subconsciously, gives you valuable interpretational clues. People could meet in a virtual meeting room, face to face. May have to use a camera to plug in your real face, as expressions are a bit further away... From there, we may find that more and more jobs are done from home, just in time for a revolution against horrid commute times. There's a trust factor with jobs, but if you can pop in on a virtual employee perhaps that will be ameliorated. So perhaps employees will work in a virtual office space.
Down the road we will add smell, expressions (net over your face?) and then touch (net over your whole body?). I imagine it will be a while before touch becomes well done. We'll probably start with feedback on the hands and face, and maybe the feet. Without a neural plug in (I bet this is a far future thing) its going to be hard to deal with competing sensations.
But once we are there, imagine. Whole parks online. Beautiful underground caverns you can now visit without destroying. You can explore every known part of the great pyramid, even touch everything. We can send scouts to other worlds and then reproduce the environment online for everyone to enjoy.
And, once we are there, everyone gets luxury. You can watch TV in your shabby apartment, or in your beautiful mansion with an ocean view...
I bet we don't add taste until we get a neural plug in though.
Isn't the future exciting? The Chinese were wrong, "may you live in interesting times" is not a curse.
- Mey
My main problem is I'm not a "write the first thing that occurs to you" kind of person. I obsess. I read what I wrote 10 times to make sure it conveys what I want it to convey (and likely make it worse in the meantime). I write up something about my life and then decide its pretty boring and erase it. I'm hoping blogging will help me unlearn these habits. Either that or I'm going to be spending an awful lot of time here. Besides, forever is a long time to spend with social anxiety.
I just read the last line a few times, this is going to be a long trip...
I think this blog should aim for a technology slant on our future lives, as its what I have the most experience in. So to start, the wonders of virtual reality and a brief review of where I think it is going.
I was there before the online visual MMORPG thing started. On the old LPMUDS (text based gaming) we always used to talk about what a visual system would be like and how it would be implemented, but the technology wasn't there yet. Likewise, VR is not there yet. I suspect it will get there in stages.
The first stage will be gaming of course. Gaming drives the online world. The WII (love that name, how can you not love something with a control called the wii-mote) is a step in that direction. VR vision hasn't caught on yet, but thats the next step, combining VR goggles with a WIImote type device in a fantasy or FPS game. Note how good this could be for exercise. Well, upper body exercise. On that note, games like Dance Dance whatever are a cool thing for the next generation, get them moving!
We already have 3D sound, so tying that into a goggles/wii-mote game should be fairly easy.
Once this is popular I can see uses in business and education which I hope will catch on. Artifacts can be preserved, and viewed, in 3D, so that kids (or adult kids, whee mummies) in a Chicago school can view Egyptian artifacts from Cairo as if they were there. I don't know if our way of thinking will change once this type of thing becomes possible. I suspect we will continue to like real 3D environments, so what may happen is whole museums will be available for navigation online, at least organized by display, and possibly organized by remembered preference. The 3D environment will not be the same for everyone.
This may make desktop management easier, if you can have 3D VR goggles expand your desk space so you have a huge wraparound screen. Imagine all the operations you could perform on something like that. Once we move from a wii-mote to VR gloves, you could pick up and move windows, expand them with your hands, crumple them up and throw them out, shelve them in a visible library somewhere to your left (in any type of visual system you like, eg. leather bound books). A file window could be a shelf with objects, which when you select one can spin and reveal that shelf. You could write with a pencil on your windows, which believe me is much more precise than my old intuos tablet... We tend to think visually, all memory experts that I have heard about use visual cues, anything that moves us from organizing in text to organizing in vision has to be an improvement.
In business, face to face communications won't ever die, we read too much into expressions. Plus, its often hard to hear in a meeting environment, watching a person's lips, even subconsciously, gives you valuable interpretational clues. People could meet in a virtual meeting room, face to face. May have to use a camera to plug in your real face, as expressions are a bit further away... From there, we may find that more and more jobs are done from home, just in time for a revolution against horrid commute times. There's a trust factor with jobs, but if you can pop in on a virtual employee perhaps that will be ameliorated. So perhaps employees will work in a virtual office space.
Down the road we will add smell, expressions (net over your face?) and then touch (net over your whole body?). I imagine it will be a while before touch becomes well done. We'll probably start with feedback on the hands and face, and maybe the feet. Without a neural plug in (I bet this is a far future thing) its going to be hard to deal with competing sensations.
But once we are there, imagine. Whole parks online. Beautiful underground caverns you can now visit without destroying. You can explore every known part of the great pyramid, even touch everything. We can send scouts to other worlds and then reproduce the environment online for everyone to enjoy.
And, once we are there, everyone gets luxury. You can watch TV in your shabby apartment, or in your beautiful mansion with an ocean view...
I bet we don't add taste until we get a neural plug in though.
Isn't the future exciting? The Chinese were wrong, "may you live in interesting times" is not a curse.
- Mey
