VR and AR - Becoming the newest IE's

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, virtual reality, augmented reality, surveys, history

I must have been twelve when my family and I went to a Cinerama theater to see Windjammer. It was quite a special event, partly because it cost a lot more than going to an ordinary movie. The theater's program discussed what made Cinerama extra-special; the ultra-wide screen (more than 140°) and the fully-surrounding sound system. Though the movie had some kind of plot and plenty of action (mostly sailors-in-training climbing rigging, at least as I remember), the sheer spectacle was the main attraction. It was my first Immersive Experience (IE).

The hype surrounding Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality) AR—and several other bits of jargon that boil down to these two terms—promises us better IE's. So it is about time for a historical and technological survey of the VR/AR field, ably supplied in a new book by David Ewalt: Defying Reality: The Inside Story of the Virtual Reality Revolution.

The author digs deep into history for the forebears of motion pictures and TV, and various efforts, with varying levels of success, to immerse the viewer in the experience. Considering how prone we are to see animals and scenery in clouds, pictures on half-melted butter on a piece of toast, and maps and other images on Holstein cattle, it doesn't take much to prepare us to be immersed in whatever is going on in front of us. If you look now at a video made for "standard" TV (called NTSC), it seems surprisingly blurry. Although vertical resolution was 535 lines, horizontal resolution seldom exceeded 200 dots per line. A TV screen larger than 25" (diagonal; 20"x15") looked blocky. Yet we could easily become immersed in the action on the screen and "zone out" everything else, particularly in a darkened room.

Fast-forward through the two HD formats, which look good on bigger screens, up to 50" or so, and 4k, which comes close to the resolution that most people can see when the screen's horizontal dimension fills about 70° of their visual field (that means being about 50" from the center of an 80" screen). But our actual visual field is more than 200° wide by 150° high, and the zone of overlap for binocular vision is 120° wide. Thus, for a fully immersive visual experience, it takes a heck of an optical system!

Every VR system or AR system so far produced cuts into this, sometimes greatly. As described in Defying Reality, the Oculus Rift, first prototyped by Palmer Luckey nearly ten years ago (on sale for about 3 years now), comes the closest. It is almost exactly matched by the HTC Vive. Both claim 110° horizontal field of view, which is close to our stereo-vision field of 120°.

The author, as a journalist, had good access to Luckey and other developers throughout this recent history. He is a good subject for testing the equipment, because he is extra-susceptible to motion sickness. He bought a purported VR system 20+ years ago, got sick, and remained a skeptic about VR's possibilities until the Rift came along. That and a few equally recently developed headsets are the first ones he's been able to use without nausea. As we say in the computing field, "The iron didn't match the application" until about 2008. It takes computing power equivalent to a 1990's Supercomputer such as the Cray-YMP to do all the "physics" needed to keep up with our visual senses. A decent gaming computer (in the $1,500 price range, at the moment) now has that level of compute power.

More recent developments include the Magic Leap, the first capable AR system, that lets you see the world around you (through tinted glass, not by re-displaying video from external cameras), with virtual elements superimposed. It uses some amazing optical tricks to make that work. So far, though, the field of view of the Magic Leap system is only about 40°x30°, so it has some specialty uses, but is less capable of producing a full IE.

How soon will VR or AR be found in the average middle-class home? A lot depends on application development. It's a little like the year 1981, when the IBM PC was introduced. There wasn't much you could do with it at first, but by the end of the year, WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3 became the killer apps that pushed sales of the machines, even at prices exceeding $2,000 (or $3,000 if you got a 10-Mbyte hard disk). The $2,400 I spent on my first PC clone would come to $6,500 today. No killer app for VR or AR has arisen. When one appears, the field will attain some momentum.

David Ewalt is young enough to keep his finger on the pulse of the field for another decade or so, and write the next book, about how incredibly changed life is with such machinery in most homes, and perhaps in public spaces, trending toward a much better successor to the Google Glass (a great idea ahead of its time and far ahead of the tech needed to make it worthwhile). I'll keep a search agent out there for upcoming books by this author.