Author: Arvind Padmanabhan
An opinion on an exciting new technology
Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the hot topics of 2016. We’ve been getting an almost constant stream of articles on VR in tech blogs and news sites. Quite a lot of it is hype as one would expect of any new technology. At the same time, some of this hype is being translated into commercial products as innovators reach out to grasp and realize the full potential of VR.
Gaming is the first application of VR. This is expected because games have already come a long way from the real world to the cyber world. Today we play Scrabble with strangers across the globe rather than play it with friends across the coffee table. We play Fantasy Cricket rather than go out to the ground next door. Indeed, one of the promises of VR is to fulfil fantasies, to take us away from the mundane routines of the real world, and to show us exotic places and experiences that we can normally only dream of.
Beyond games, VR is being considered for education, curing medical conditions, training surgeons, selling real estate, guided virtual tours of tourist places, adventure sports and many more. You can use VR to train yourself to become better at public speaking. You can use VR to conquer your fear of heights by going up a tall building, walking on a ledge or on a tight rope. If you are a real estate agent, you can differentiate from your competitors by using VR rather than just plain videos. If you are a tour operator, you can give your potential clients a VR sampler of what they will see when they arrive at the Taj Mahal.
Despite this wide application of VR, and the promise of a bold new world far more exciting than our own, VR has its problems. We may call them teething problems since the technology is so new. For starters, VR hardware is expensive and most people have computing/graphics power far worse than what VR demands. For example, Oculus Rift requires a demanding PC configuration, although earlier this year new technical developments have managed to relax the requirements.
The fact that one has to wear a headgear is something alien to us at the moment but I’m sure this will become a habit because humans are so good at adapting to new things. While many headsets have come on the scene lately, opinions vary as to ergonomics and design. It’s only a display device and other wearables may be needed to allow users to give inputs within a VR environment. Currently, the only input possible with headsets such as Google Cardboard is by using head movements. These movements are captured by sensors on the smartphone strapped to the Cardboard. The real problem with headsets is that they necessarily isolate users from the real world but we continue to inhabit the real world. Why is this such a big problem?
IEDF recently had a chance to introduce VR to a group of children in a government school near Nandi Hills, thanks to IEDF member Manoj D, a VR enthusiast, who took care of all the technical details. The students took turns visiting the Taj Mahal within a VR environment, as the class teacher led them through the experience. We used Google Expeditions as the platform to do this. The children had a lot of fun. It was also an opportunity for us to understand the challenges. Some children did not realize that they could turn around to experience their surroundings 360 degrees. The fact is that we normally focus on what’s ahead of us on our television screens and PC monitors. While VR is more an environment than a display, our mind still thinks of it as a display. Yes, VR is supposed to be immersive but it’s not immersive enough to compete with reality.
In fact, our body has gone through millions of years of evolution. Everything in us is “perfected” for survival in the real world. Thumbs evolved to grasp objects, not to tap icons on touchscreens. We stood upright so that we could see farther and hunt better on open landscapes. Such upright backs are not ideal for sitting in front of a PC for long hours. Our ancestors developed peripheral human vision to avoid dangers. It’s not really clear how effectively this would work within VR. It’s for this reason that a VR session of even thirty minutes can lead to many health problems: headaches, blurred vision, loss of awareness, disorientation, fatigue, motion sickness, and so on. Perhaps, we need to take frequent breaks when experiencing VR, but if VR is going to be truly immersive, will we want those breaks? Humans have the habit of pushing themselves too hard beyond sensible limits.
While with the school experience all students had to do was to turn around, other VR environments require users to move around. Because users are still “tethered” in the real world, they end up bumping into walls and worse still against furniture if the room is not empty. The current solution to this, such as in the game Minecraft, is to “teleport” users within VR, which is really a stopgap measure until we figure out a better way to do this. In one experience, a user walking on a tight rope fell and actually injured himself. Recently, a gamer was sexually abused within VR and it left her with emotional scars in the real world. At the moment, it’s not really clear if the abuser can be punished by law and if crimes in VR are as serious as those in the real world.
While gaming will surely go mainstream VR, the success of VR in other domains is not so clear cut. Real estate agents may not want to adopt VR because buyers will anyway want to visit the property before deciding. While VR is certainly good for education, teachers may fear their importance is being undermined. Teachers will have to constantly innovate so that they are ahead of technology in terms of teaching methods and interactions. In any case, technology (VR or non-VR) is already helping mediocre teachers and enabling students to learn on their own.
The last important bottleneck with VR is the availability of quality content. Like Wikipedia, VR content must adopt the crowdsourcing model but there will probably be some design houses and commercial content creators specifically for VR. Professional equipment, accessories and software are already available for creating 360 degree content. Some of this will spillover into the hands of amateurs as costs drop. Creators will need to be trained though. Even for seasoned filmmakers, such as Winslow Porter, VR can be a new territory, “Forget everything you know about film and learn VR from scratch.”
When writing about a new and evolving field as VR, I’m sure more articles on the topic will appear on this blog. For now, let’s just say that VR has its problems. Lots of people are working on it. Solutions will evolve. There will be hot debates. There will be choices made. And we are looking at new possibilities.
Author: Arvind Padmanabhan
Arvind Padmanabhan graduated from the National University of Singapore with a master’s degree in electrical engineering. With more than fifteen years of experience, he has worked extensively on various wireless technologies including DECT, WCDMA, HSPA, WiMAX and LTE. He is passionate about tech blogging, training and supporting early stage Indian start-ups. He is a founder member of two non-profit community platforms: IEDF and Devopedia. In 2013, he published a book on the history of digital technology: http://theinfinitebit.wordpress.com.
The IEDF Blog 