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The door to mass-market virtual reality is about to burst open. Engineers have solved most of the hardware challenges, driven down the price to just a few hundred dollars, done extensive testing, and gotten software tools into the hands of creative developers. Store shelves will soon be teeming with head-mounted displays and hand controllers that can paint dazzling virtual worlds. And then the first wave of VR immigrants will colonize them.
You might think the first adopters will be gamers, but you'd be wrong. The killer app for virtual reality will more likely be something to enhance ordinary social experiences—conversations with your loved ones, a business meeting, a college class—but carried out with a far richer connection than you could establish by texting or talking or Skyping.
Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his coauthors predicted in these pages in 2011 that such "social VR" was on the horizon. "Current social networking and other online sites," they wrote, "are just precursors of what we'll see when social networking encompasses immersive virtual-reality technology. When people interact with others for substantial periods of time, much as they do now on Facebook but with fully tracked and rendered avatars, entirely new forms of social interaction will emerge." With the variety of head-mounted displays—including the Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR, and the HTC Vive—going on sale later this year, that future is now here.
Prediction: hacking avatars to get through long meetings will become a "thing."
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday December 26 2015, @09:01AM
Imagine donning your goggles, and being able to bring up as many different 'monitors' as you need or want.
Sounds awful. For a little while, I used a pair of 30" monitors. It was very easy to lose windows on them and have to hunt around to find them. I want a monitor just big enough to completely fill my field of view without turning my head and keyboard shortcuts for quickly jumping between windows. For development work, a load of different tabs for the different files / debugger instances and shortcuts for switching between them that don't require moving more than my fingers a little bit are far more productive (and less conducive to neck strain) than having to move my head around.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday December 26 2015, @12:21PM
having to move my head around
You wouldn't have to move your head around (but you could).
Just imagine that you could arrange an infinite virtual office in the way that you want. You could have copies (references) of all the documents (and windows/views/logs/inputs/controls) you need in a specific context without them ever loosing sync if you make a note on one and then move to a different area of your environment containing the same document.
You would also not have to look for anything, as you'd have a CTRL+F for your environment.
You could get a (n original) Kinect and run some of the demo apps from the OpenNI suite and get your mind blown by what was already possible a few years ago, or just look at some of the leap motion and other NUI (natural user interface) gadget videos to break free of your keyboard/mouse constraint (and I definitely don't mean waving your hands around ).