Gizmos & Gadgets: Full-Body Virtual Reality is Here

February 13, 2015

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February 13, 2015 – Today’s guest blogger is Bradley Green, a professional video game developer with more than 10 years of experience in interactive design and programming. When he’s not writing about what’s new in virtual and augmented reality technologies he enjoys collecting antique gaming consoles and devices. Currently living in Denver with his wife, Brad is a University of Idaho graduate with a BA in Interactive Technology. His topic is appropriately about what he knows and does best. Enjoy the read.

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Virtual reality made its first impact in the 1990s when engineer and filmmaker Jeffrey Travis stated that the RV graphics were so bad it was difficult to tell what you were looking at. Now Travis is scheduled to release his jetpack ride Rocket Ace in which the player wears an Oculus Rift headset and nylon harness to “fly” like Superman.

Unlike the VR experience of the 1990s, Oculus Rift, designed by founder of California-based Oculus LLC, Palmer Luckey, displays a more advanced simulation as if one were really immersed in an alternate universe. Said to begin with PCs and smartphones before consoles, the experience will be like looking through the eyes of the character, whether that character is battling through the corridors of a starship while being hunted by the extraterrestrial terror in Alien: Isolation or taking on cops and criminals in a shootout in the upcoming first-person shooter Battlefield Hardline.

Other participants in this VR revolution include Samsung. The company is teaming up with Oculus VR to develop a Galaxy Note 4 headset. While Sony has a prototype headset for its Playstation 4 called the Project Morpheus. And then there is Microsoft’s concept, RoomAlive, using projectors and the Kinect system to create augmented reality.

Where We’re Going

Back in 2008 at a Game Developers Conference, leading inventor Ray Kurzweil predicted a billion-fold increase in the price-performance of computers over the next 25 years. He made this prediction based on how the power of computing had grown in the preceding 50. That billion-fold increase when combined with the 100,000-fold shrinking of computer technology, is well past evolutionary. It represents a computer revolution spawning devices no bigger than the size of blood cells that can be inserted into the body to elicit artificial feelings and sensations, producing full immersion of virtual reality inside our nervous system.

With this growth fully immersive reality and real-world reality could merge by 2033. “In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality,” Kurzweil stated back in 2008. He continued, “Games are the cutting edge of what is happening—we are going to spend more of our time in virtual reality environments. Fully emergent games is where we really want to go. We will do most of our learning through these massively parallel interactions. Play is how we principally learn and principally create.”

This is the world of ubiquitous computing where virtual reality will make it possible for us to virtually travel anywhere and do anything. And when VR headgear gets augmented by a sensory-laden world, the augmented reality will take us further down the path to a synergistic combination of virtual and reality. For a glimpse of that world look at projects like DoppelLab coming out of MIT.

Are Their Risks to Virtual Reality?

Merging the real and virtual worlds, will players become disconnected? Will they lose touch with reality? Will they become addicts?

It is these concerns that have some arguing that VR should be restricted to simulators and training tools, helping those whose professions are most suitable. Think fire fighters, police, pilots, astronauts, and the military.