By Alice Liu
Have you ever wanted to go to Mars, explore the ocean, or learn how to fly a plane without actually and physically doing it? Well, with virtual reality (VR), you can do so from the comfort of your own home! From gaming to exposure therapy, VR is breaking all kinds of borders in the world of technology. The unique 3D immersion into a simulated virtual world can allow users to interact with their surroundings through sight, sound, and soon: touch and smell. This innovative technological environment allows users to interact with and experience a visual simulation through multiple devices.
VR, AR: A Total Sensory Experience
Image credit: Pixabay
VR products totally immerse the user into a virtual digital environment by replacing the physical world with a simulation -- which is what users see and feel in VR. Similarly, another breakthrough form of technology on the rise is augmented reality (AR), which involves adding digital content to the real world environment in order to engage and interact with users. AR can be seen everywhere in technology, with one of the most common applications of it being on Snapchat, Pokemon Go, and many other popular apps. Given AR’s accessible features (usually only requiring a camera and smart device), users are able to access apps and tools that use AR from a variety of devices, including the typical smartphone.
VR, on the other hand, seeks to embody a 3D realistic computer-generated environment -- one that someone can interact with and perceive as real. For a user to feel truly immersed and involved in the digital environment, there needs to be an element of interaction and engagement via vision, sound, touch or other senses. VR can utilize a person’s senses and essentially “manipulate” them into getting comfortable with a totally digital world. To experience in this 3D virtual world, users completely immerse into the virtual world through the use of electronic tools such as a headset, a device, and sometimes a motion tracking gadget or handheld wearables. The abilities for head tracking, eye tracking and motion tracking are important to stimulate a user to see, feel, interact, move around and explore in a virtual world.
“AR inside VR”: Replacing the Controller with your Hands
Mark Zuckerberg talks about the future of VR for Facebook and sees that VR and AR are both interdependent and omnipresent. "If you think about how we use screens, phones are the ones we bring with us, but half of our time with screens is TVs. I think VR is TV and AR is phones," said Zuckerberg.
As we advance into the future, more and more technological innovations and discoveries come our way. An important development to enhance the VR/AR world is the hand-tracking technology. According to the Oculus Quest (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion) release, “From gesturing and communicating with others to picking up and manipulating objects, our hands play an important role in how we interact with the world—and they’re key to unlocking the feeling of true presence in a virtual space. We first brought your hands into VR with Oculus Touch controllers, so you could engage in VR in a more natural way. Now, we’re taking the next step with hand tracking on Oculus Quest—letting you interact in VR without controllers, using your real hands.”
Thanks to deep neural networks, the Oculus hand motion technology can predict the accuracy of hand tracking hence eliminating the need for controllers or gloves, while enhancing users' interaction in an intuitive and natural way in the virtual world. For example, in a VR training environment, students are able to interact and communicate with hand gestures without controllers or gloves. Zuckerberg sees its social VR platform as a way to expand into the augmented worlds to “help people come together.”
Today’s VR Applications
We all know VR as this immersive, intriguing, and relatively new technology commonly used in gaming, but what more potential does VR have? From envisioning architecture to helping with dementia, VR can be applied to a plethora of areas.
Architects and industrial designers commonly use VR to help visualize their designs and builds, which is a big step forward from building scaled models using paper. VR is much more efficient for designers to use and the digital platform makes it cheaper as well. Instead of buying materials to model their builds, they can just design it on a computer screen all while testing the build out for any flaws or safety issues in VR. On top of that, clients or architects can walk through the structure of their design through VR. Virtual reality can provide a much more accurate and complex model than just a scaled-down physical build.
Education and training is also a big way VR is used today. Training and teaching people through virtual reality can be very efficient in making sure they understand what they’re doing while actually experiencing it as if it were real life. In “Virtual Reality Goes To Work, Helping Train Employees”, an NPR article by Yuki Noguchi, she introduces the topic of VR in the workplace with an example about how Walmart is training over 1 million employees through VR. “The sensory immersion is key to its effectiveness,'' she writes, noting the fact that a brain can process the virtual sensory immersion as a real-life activity. This helps someone practice certain tasks through VR as if it were a real experience due to the realistic sensory details. Employers can use the data they gain from a VR experience and see how a person interacts with a certain situation in order to select the perfect candidate.
Over the past few years, VR has found a new purpose among all its others: improving the lives of those with dementia. A video by Dougal Shaw titled “How virtual reality is helping people with dementia” from the BBC opens at a residential care center in Oxford with a few elders suffering with dementia. They are using VR technology that shows specific, realistic scenes from their past to help them experience what was once theirs. The screens display a vivid scene from their past filmed specifically for people who remembered that event, which is called a “reminiscent experience”. The goal for this virtual reminiscence therapy is to provide stimulation for people. This stimulation can trigger memories which can help with the cognitive ability of the person.
Joint Power of AI + VR + AR
The confluence of AR and VR solutions can be further enhanced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), particularly computer vision and natural language processing. Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur futurist and investor from Silicon Valley, predicts that the future of fashion and shopping will be heavily influenced and shaped by these three technologies. He sees a new, virtually connected world where virtual shopping can be done anytime, anywhere, with AR glasses “always-on” shopping mode, powered by AI digital smart assistants loaded with personalized data who knows users’ taste, measurements, accessories better than the users themselves. AR and VR will allow shoppers to try on clothes virtually in 3D models wearing the clothes customized to their liking while machine learning algorithms train and help personalize the data and transform insights into decisions.
With the advent of 5G network connectivity, it is expected to be a complete game-changer that promises to empower AR/VR/AI applications and converge the physical and virtual world in education, work, gaming, vehicles, healthcare and beyond.
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