greenlig
Well-Known Member
Thought I'd start a thread about this, as it's something I'm fairly heavily invested in.
A bit of background - in 2012, an 18yr old named Palmer Luckey posted some info on a forum regarding a virtual reality headset he'd been making in his parent's garage. HMDs (head mounted display) had been around for a long time, but the boom and bust of the early 90's VR craze had meant there was little innovation in the space. Luckey's headset attracted the interest of John Carmack, the father of realtime 3D rendering, and creator of Wolf3D, doom, quake, etc. Luckey sent him a hacked together unit, and Carmack displayed it in an interview at E3.
From there, VR leapt back into the public imagination. The key to this round of VR is that now the technology has caught up to the vision. Simulator sickness is a big problem, and killed off the 90's attempts at VR. The advances in tech over the following 15 years meant sim sickness could be overcome, and that's what Luckey's unit promised.
Oculus, Palmer's fledgling company, launched a kickstarter, raised millions, released two developer kits, and were bought out by Facebook. That's a very rough, Oculus-centric look at what has been going on.
So, where are we today?
In 2016, we'll the the commercial release of at least three major headsets, from Oculus, Sony, and HTC/Valve. We already have Samsung's GearVR, a mobile headset developed with Oculus that uses their flagship phones as the screen/hardware.
What's the experience like?
The key thing that VR provides is what people are calling "presence". When all the elements of your audio and visual systems are fully immersed, you can really feel like you are inside a virtual world. You get a sense of scale that you can't get on a normal screen, because it's true stereoscopic 3D. This is nothing like 3D TVs, it far outstrips that.
I have been using a social VR app a fair bit recently, Convrge, which allows a bunch of people to sit around a campfire, or in front of a big screen, and easily talk to each other. It's pretty incredible.
I'm really interested in where education can go with VR, and that's a big focus for me over the next few years. Research clearly shows that we learn better in groups and communities, and the presence VR affords means it can have a massive impact on distance education. Distance students find it harder to progress in their studies exactly because of that community deficit. One study showed that distance students with a simple web forum, like this one, progressed better than students without. VR will take that to the next level again, where you actually feel present with those people in a safe, designed-for-learning environment. Very exciting stuff.
2016 is going to be a big year for VR. It'll take 3 years to really be mainstream, but it's beginning now. Has anyone here used one of the headsets currently available? I'm pretty excited about the consumer release, but I've got most of the released headsets to date and use my GearVR regularly. Happy to answer any questions!
A bit of background - in 2012, an 18yr old named Palmer Luckey posted some info on a forum regarding a virtual reality headset he'd been making in his parent's garage. HMDs (head mounted display) had been around for a long time, but the boom and bust of the early 90's VR craze had meant there was little innovation in the space. Luckey's headset attracted the interest of John Carmack, the father of realtime 3D rendering, and creator of Wolf3D, doom, quake, etc. Luckey sent him a hacked together unit, and Carmack displayed it in an interview at E3.
From there, VR leapt back into the public imagination. The key to this round of VR is that now the technology has caught up to the vision. Simulator sickness is a big problem, and killed off the 90's attempts at VR. The advances in tech over the following 15 years meant sim sickness could be overcome, and that's what Luckey's unit promised.
Oculus, Palmer's fledgling company, launched a kickstarter, raised millions, released two developer kits, and were bought out by Facebook. That's a very rough, Oculus-centric look at what has been going on.
So, where are we today?
In 2016, we'll the the commercial release of at least three major headsets, from Oculus, Sony, and HTC/Valve. We already have Samsung's GearVR, a mobile headset developed with Oculus that uses their flagship phones as the screen/hardware.
What's the experience like?
The key thing that VR provides is what people are calling "presence". When all the elements of your audio and visual systems are fully immersed, you can really feel like you are inside a virtual world. You get a sense of scale that you can't get on a normal screen, because it's true stereoscopic 3D. This is nothing like 3D TVs, it far outstrips that.
I have been using a social VR app a fair bit recently, Convrge, which allows a bunch of people to sit around a campfire, or in front of a big screen, and easily talk to each other. It's pretty incredible.
I'm really interested in where education can go with VR, and that's a big focus for me over the next few years. Research clearly shows that we learn better in groups and communities, and the presence VR affords means it can have a massive impact on distance education. Distance students find it harder to progress in their studies exactly because of that community deficit. One study showed that distance students with a simple web forum, like this one, progressed better than students without. VR will take that to the next level again, where you actually feel present with those people in a safe, designed-for-learning environment. Very exciting stuff.
2016 is going to be a big year for VR. It'll take 3 years to really be mainstream, but it's beginning now. Has anyone here used one of the headsets currently available? I'm pretty excited about the consumer release, but I've got most of the released headsets to date and use my GearVR regularly. Happy to answer any questions!
