Tag Archives: Virtual Reality

Ready Player One and the Future of Education

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Somehow, I missed out on reading Ready Player One when it came out. Someone at my son’s school gave me a copy one day and I was hooked. Even though it was written at the height of Second Life in 2010, the technology ideas still hold up with Virtual Reality making a comeback. Also of interest are the ways the author describes education in a VR-dominated world. Of course, there are still issues of access that create have’s and have not’s. But still, an interesting way of looking at how VR could be used in education make their way into the story from time to time. If you are not familiar with it, the basic premise is that at some point a Second Life world takes off in VR and over half the world begins working, playing, living in it. The creator becomes insanely rich and a bit odd. He is obsessed with 80s geek culture and then finds out he is dying. So he creates a super complicated game in his VR world that gives the winner control of the VR and his vast riches. An entire culture and economy develops around finding this treasure, with the hunt dragging on for years and years. Oh, and did I mention they are currently creating a movie about it with Steve Spielberg directing? Can’t wait to see that. The video above in a fan trailer, but it captures a lot of the 80s/90s SciFi/Fantasy references in the book.

Google Takes Virtual Reality in an Interesting Direction

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While focused in some meetings yesterday, I got a Slack message from our ex. director George Siemens asking what I knew about Google Daydream. I got online and saw various news sources exploding with references to Daydream. It’s an interesting approach to VR – Daydream is more about making sure hardware (especially phones) and software are ready for Virtual Reality. Or maybe think of it as a VR ecosystem with Google as the center of many devices. Sounds familiar, or course. Connecting to Google could mean interesting things for tools like Google Maps, Google Earth, and YouTube. This article looks at the general idea, as well as how YouTube already has a VR mode that other apps could copy. I think the basic idea is that you start experiencing your phone as VR (hopefully not while walking). The cool thing is that Google can sometimes do cool things and this has promise, but then again Google has a bad track record of letting things die… and the fact that they are everywhere is creepy at times (what will Daydream mean for data, privacy, etc).

Painting in 3D in Virtual Reality

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Another “cool” application of Virtual Reality. Also, another fairly limited one – but still really cool. Draw in virtual reality with a variety of colors and paint brushes of light. The video above doesn’t show it, but someone used this tool to make a sweet dragon… sculpture? VR 3-D painting? Wonder what people will call these creations. Of course, this is a Google tool limited to one specific phone. So not very available for, well, most people. The videos show that you can walk around your creations from all sides. But can you share them with others to view? Can you work collaboratively on the same piece? One interesting use I could see for this beyond art: build 3D models more intuitively than existing 3D modeling programs, and then export those designs to games, 3D printers, etc.

Virtual Reality Evolves Into The Holodeck

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Last week, my colleague Justin shared a link for a video game that uses heartrate monitors and other bio sensors to detect a players mood to adjust what is happening in the game itself according to the player’s emotions. Interestingly enough, I had also read about Virtual Reality glasses that were connecting to bio sensors to detect heart rates as well as Virtual Reality glasses that had built in eye motion sensors. So we are seeing VR connect with other tools like wearables and drones. Other senses are probably not far behind – olfactory devices that recreate smells? Atmospheric devices that help us feel wind and rain? Haptic gloves that help us feel virtual objects? The question becomes – will we keep connecting devices to VR headsets, or expand VR into a immersive environment like a Holodeck? Only time will tell, but I could image a spherical room that has a 3-D high-res screens wrapped around as a bubble. The user climbs in from the bottom and is sealed in with an omni-directional treadmill. They put on a an inexpensive set of 3-D glasses that covers their entire field of view. The screen creates the 3-D environment all around. Olfactory devices create smells, while atmospheric devices embedded in the screens recreate humidity, wind, etc. Sensors in the screen also detect movement. Lasers create sensations of touch when interacting with 3D virtual objects. Could all be down the road and expensive, but you never know. Someday, they will figure out how to convert light into matter and holodecks will be born, but I guess we are seeing the early phases now? You never know.

Holoportation – More Practical Application of Virtual Reality

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One of barriers to wide-spread adoption of Virtual Reality (well, beyond cost and computing power and complexity and…) is finding useful applications beyond gaming. Of course, anyone that has looked at a VR headset has probably thought how nice it would be to connect Skype to those somehow. Seems like Microsoft had the same idea, kind of. Fill a room with 3D cameras, connect to Hololens, and connect with 3-D virtual holograms of people that are far away. Microsoft’s Hololens is a different type of VR device that is also part augmented reality – it can combine virtual components with the real world around you as an augmented layer. It also currently costs thousands of dollars. So, yeah – this set up is not cheap. But someday we could see the eye tracking Fove combined with Microsoft Hololens and holoportation to take educational concepts like social presence, teacher presence, and immediacy to new levels. Of course, if most people are still ignoring those affective components in the future as they are now, newer cooler technology won’t change that.

Eye Tracking in Virtual Reality

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https://www.youtube.com/plTTqH-YMT4

Another sticking point in Virtual Reality is control. Many Virtual Reality “games” are really guided tours through cool 3-D graphics. Others require a game controller that can somewhat take you out of the “reality.” Others are trying to add more natural controls like eye tracking, unidirectional treadmills, etc. Fove is billed as the first VR headset with eye tracking built in. They say you can move with your eyes, make eye contact (with virtual things, that is – but important when considering new ideas like holoportation), and reduce simulation sickness. All of that in a device that doesn’t require a powerful computer to run for $349-399? Well, that is what they charged Kickstarter backers for one of their headsets. Wonder what the commercial version will cost. But it seems that many of the barriers to VR becoming a “thing” are melting away.