Virtual Reality Check: 10 Things You Should Know Before You Plug Into the Matrix
(AltspaceVR)
I’d like to apologize for being hard to reach lately. I’ve been quite busy — conversing with robots, exploring shipwrecks, communing with blue whales, tossing around toddler-sized chess pieces, creating psychedelic neon paintings in the air and then stepping inside them, and shooting laser beams with my eyes.
In other words, I have been trying out prototypes of virtual reality systems. I traded my real world for a virtual one, and I will never be the same again.
Related: I Survived a Week in the Virtual Reality Worlds of E3
For the uninitiated, a virtual reality headset is essentially a computer display you wear on your face. It looks like a scuba mask on steroids, and features two small HD screens whose images are slightly offset, creating the illusion of three dimensions. The headset has a powerful computer in it — or connects to one — that creates the 3D world you’re visiting, and it contains cameras and accelerometers that respond to your movements in the real world and bring them into the virtual one.
Crescent Bay, a prototype of the latest Oculus Rift VR headset. (Facebook).
In my sojourn into the matrix, I learned a few things you might want to know. Actually, ten of them.
1. It’s easy to confuse VR with AR. Don’t.
Though they are often talked about interchangeably, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are distinctly different beasts. With VR, everything you see and hear is generated by a computer — making you essentially blind and deaf to the physical world. Augmented Reality devices are more like traditional glasses with a computer display superimposed over the lenses; you can interact with the world around you as well as with virtual objects.
Related: Microsoft HoloLens Is Awesome, but if You Try to Photograph It, We’ll Have to Kill You
While VR will be used primarily for gaming and other immersive experiences, AR can have more practical applications in the fields of education, engineering, and design.
2. But it doesn’t really matter because you can’t buy one yet.
None of the top VR headsets announced so far — the Oculus Rift, Sony Morpheus, and the Vive from HTC and Valve — are commercially available. Oculus and Morpheus are slated to go on sale next spring.
HTC has vowed it will deliver the Vive (rhymes with hive) before the end of 2015. But the prototype I used last week, wicked cool though it was, is still rough around the edges. No doubt HTC and Valve have their elves working overtime on a new model that’s more polished; for now, though, I am officially registering my skepticism.
Related: I Used HTC and Valve’s Virtual Reality Headset and Basically Had a Religious Experience
Samsung Gear VR, which is a Samsung Galaxy phone running Oculus software inserted into a pair of $200 magnifying glasses, is available now. Still, buying the Gear is kind of like going to Denny’s at 3 a.m. — if you’re hungry enough, it will be good enough.
In the AR world, the leading examples are Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. Google pulled Glass from the market after getting a lot of negative feedback, but is allegedly planning to bring it back “soon.” Microsoft has announced that HoloLens will ship “within the Windows 10 time frame,” but what that actually means is anyone’s guess.
3. You’ll want to start saving your pennies.
While no pricing has been announced for the major VR headsets, they’re likely to cost at least as much as an Xbox or PlayStation — $400 or more. But you may also need to upgrade your PC.
Generating a virtual world requires some serious graphics processing oomph. The Sony Morpheus, which connects to the graphically sophisticated PlayStation 4, has that covered; the others not so much.
Related: Hands-on: Sony’s Morpheus Headset Is a Virtual Delight
The HTC Vive delivers 360-degree images at 90 frames per second, which is one reason why it requires a wired connection to a PC (the cable also serves as a power supply). HTC has not revealed the Vive’s hardware requirements, but the prototype I tested was connected to a beast of a machine.
Facebook, which purchased Oculus last March, just released its PC hardware requirements for the headset. Bottom line is you’ll need a machine with a fast processor, lots of memory, and a cutting-edge graphics card if you want the full VR experience. Your laptop probably won’t do the trick.
4. You might want to bring a vomit bag, just in case.
The biggest problem with VR headsets is that some people find living inside a virtual 3D world highly disorienting after more than a few minutes. Similar to motion sickness, VR sickness can cause some people to get dizzy or nauseous. (Though some researchers claim that adding a nose to the 3D environment – a visual substitute for your schnozz — can reduce the disorientation.)
A virtual nose inside a virtual environment. (Photo: David Whittinghill/Purdue University).
Some models are better than others. Crescent Bay, the code name for the latest Oculus Rift prototype, is a vast improvement on the original. Using the Vive and the prototype of the FOVE, another virtual headset whose crowdfunding campaign launches soon, I didn’t experience any VR sickness. Your hurlage may vary.
5. No, porn will not be the killer VR app.
When you talk about virtual reality, someone will inevitably declare that pornography is going to be “the killer app.” Not surprisingly, there’s already a nascent VR porn industry, even without the hardware needed to view it. I suspect, however, that — unlike with DVDs or broadband Internet — porn will not be the driving force behind the success of VR. At least, not until the feedback mechanisms get a lot more sophisticated and personal, if you know what I mean.
The real killer app: The ability to shoot laser beams with your eyes. I was able to do that inside a demo game from FOVE, the only VR headset that does eye tracking, so it always knows where your pupils are. That was awesome.
6. It’s not all about shooting lasers from your eyes.
VR might actually prove useful for meetings with far-flung family members and business colleagues. Last week, I tried out AltspaceVR, a software platform that lets you interact with other people in a virtual environment. The system relies on standard VR gear and an external camera that captures your voice and body movements. Your avatar interacts with other avatars, and you use a mouse to “walk around” the virtual environment.
An avatar inside one of the virtual worlds created using AltspaceVR.(AltspaceVR).
Inside AltspaceVR, I had a conversation with company CEO Eric Romo — or rather, a robotic version of Romo, who was in his office 20 miles away. (More photo-realistic avatars are in the works, Romo says.) It felt surprisingly natural, and vastly superior to any audio or video conferencing systems I’ve ever used. Romo says AltspaceVR has held virtual meetings with up to 60 avatars in the room at a time.
7. You may need to sell some furniture.
If you end up with the HTC Vive, you may want to dedicate space in your house to it. The Vive uses two laser lightboxes you set up at either end of the room; sensors on the headset use them to determine your position. Wearing the Vive, you can walk around in up to roughly 10 feet in any direction; as you walk in the real world, you also walk in the virtual one.
So before you turn your studio apartment into a holodeck, you probably want to sell that Ikea furniture and break out the sleeping bag.
8. You may feel like Captain Awesome, but to everyone else you’re King Dork.
You’re busy exploring asteroids or battling an enormous dragon in its underground lair. But to everyone else in the room, you’re wearing a scuba mask on your face and flailing your arms like a lunatic.
Yahoo Tech’s Dan Howley wearing the HTC Vive prototype at Mobile World Congress last February.
Watching someone else don a VR headset and plunge into a virtual world is surreal in its own way, and not always a good one. Planning to set aside dedicated VR space in your living abode is also a good way of saying, “I’m single and aim to stay that way.”
9. It’s time to cool your jets, killjoy.
Right about here is where I’m supposed to bemoan the loss of interpersonal contact brought on by technology, and declare that VR will quickly turn us all into mindless drones enslaved to a pixelated experience devoid of meaningful human interaction.
Consider it bemoaned.
Have you ridden in a subway car or visited a cafe lately? The difference between people staring at their phones and peering into an imaginary three-dimensional plane is not that vast. That ship really left the harbor when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone; virtual reality just sends it little further out to sea.
As with all technologies, there will be positives and negatives. You might well spend more time inside a virtual world and less time in the real one; at the same time, you may encounter people there you’d never otherwise meet, because they live on the other side of the planet.
10. Virtual reality could be addicting.
My experience over the last week ranged from sublime to annoying, depending on the gear and the environment. But when I put on that Vive headgear and it inserted me into a scene from the game Portal, I didn’t want to leave. If they hadn’t kicked me out of the demo after 30 minutes, I’d probably still be there. It’s a little worrisome. But it’s also cool.
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