#3 What Peak VR Will Look Like with Ken Perlin
Why technology is neither good nor bad
Kenneth H. “Ken” Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. His invention of Perlin Noise in 1985 has become a standard that is used in both computer graphics and movement.
We discuss what peak VR might look like, Which industry he thinks will benefit most from VR. And how VR is simply another step in the evolution of mediums serving us information. Is there anything about the way the industries emerging that he doesn’t like. And whether or not VR will substitute human to human communication.
Click on any of the links on the left to listen to my talk with Ken on your favorite podcasting platform or scroll down for our interview text!
Ken, can you just give us a quick rundown how you how you became so involved with VR.
KP: Oh it was a gradual process probably it began when I was 5 and my brother and I would play with little plastic dinosaurs in my parents basement in the Bronx, and them I said I want to keep doing this I think I kind of wandered off for a bit for a while I I got I was interested in art and math then when I was 16 then I saw a Fantasia - the one from 1940, thought okay, definitely want to do that, and then ended up going into computer graphics the computer graphics industry and we always wanted to do VR and we as you probably know people have been trying it since 1960s you know some of them were doing early version 1968 was too expensive Jaren Meniere tried to have a company in 1986 and it was always just been out of reach and I think that it was really the IPhone that changed everything I mean the IPhone showed up since 2007 and you take the IPhone and then you take the 1850, one so David Rooster stereo scope and you put them together and hey you got VR, and the rest is all detailed, so I think the modern portable phone where the the battery the communication the high resolution bitmap graphics with the the GPU the Gyroscope built in that’s kind of what you need and we all have just been building on that.
Do you think do you think Perlin Noise is going to help the current processors handle the graphics demand on processor
KP: One thing I think the thing that I really did back then was create this idea of procedural shaders. The whole programming line is that it runs at every pixel, and that is you might know is turned into this multi-billion dollar industry companies like in Nvidia and ATI now have graphics accelerated chips which allow people to write entire shaders like kind of like the way I was doing decades ago and those are now running on phones.
So I do think that there is a kind of a virtual cycle going on here, where because the game industry wants to be able to get more interesting stuff on the phones and VR is the way to immerse people in these things even these small graphics chips on phones are going to start having some of the power more and more and more, that we now think of today as being on the PCs that run the Vive, and that’s going to be happening and as that gets better more people will go into that and then they will be more money in it
I mean there’s Vive is doing great with the Vive and there is only few hundred thousand units out there, but there’s 2.1 billion smartphones in the world right now so really we have to make VR on the phones if it is going to be reaching everybody and if especially across the digital divide to the rest of the world.
What do you think peak VR will look like?
KP: Well, ultimately phones are a transition technology. You got this big giant brick that is in your face that is blocking you from the rest of the world.
What a number of companies are looking into is kind of the end goal for VR is the Hololens from Microsoft, and Magic Leap is working on their own version.
What is going to show up in 5 years is going to be just glasses and it’s funny because there is you already this sort of Snap glasses. People are starting to feel like form factor you put on a pair of glasses and the graphics is somewhere in here and the world around you is transformed and the reason that is important is that once it is just glasses it becomes invisible, people stop thinking about the technology nobody is going to be staring at their phone instead just as you and I could be looking right now over a screen and there could be graphics between us we are doing a kind of a hangouts we will be able to that in real life face to face conversation.
To me that is really going to be the dawn of the age of computer graphics, finally we are going to be living in a world where ever we look we are going to able to see computer graphics for better or worse and at that point VR AR is all the same thing, it is just reality.
Which industry do you think will benefit most from VR?
KP: I just had a talk just a few days ago at a panel I was running. The response [00:05:42.23 inaudible] enterprise forum and John Golfinos who is the chair of department of neurosurgery at NYU was pointing out that they are already using VR in their surgical planning and they are moving toward using VR in actual brain surgery.
Because there is a lot at stake, and what is going to happen is as the quality get higher and the cost gets lower it like the web. It is going to go into everything I mean we don’t we don’t ask of mature technologies like a book “Oh you have a book, what is book about”.
Well books are about everything because it is a mature technology and the same thing with the web, it’s not about anyone thing every body uses it for everything, architecture, health, find, weight finding, restaurants, games, music, pretty much anything you want to talk about, it’s just going to permeate.
How do you get excited about the medium of VR if it’s simply another step in the evolution of technology?
KP: Well every medium allows you to do things that other mediums don’t allow you to do. People don’t argue about should there be books or should there be movies, books can do things movies can’t and movies can do things that books cannot, and theatre can do things that neither of them can do and a well-designed game can do something that in the immersion and interaction of a game can create experiences that none of those other things can and I think there is a general understanding that we are kind of like movies before Eisentein,
We are we are before the real or tourist have come in and are mastering the medium so the equivalence of the jump cut and the medium shot and the monetize and all of this vocabulary that Thomas Edison and the Lumineer brothers didn’t know about them in the 1890s but then started showing up I think there is this general feeling that those acknowledge of how to create literature with this new medium is going to be emerging in the next 5 or 10 years and I think it’s not that people already know what that is it’s that they are very confident its coming.
Is there anything about the way the industries emerging that you don’t like?
KP: Well there are many industries, I think that in the short term people are trying to make money. Valve wants to get people to use high end PC games because they distribute using Steam, for them it is all about supporting their real business which is distribution of high end PC games.
Facebook is interested in people talking to each other over distances on line because Facebook wants people to communicate with each other using Facebook infrastructure because that is how they sell your ads and make money.
Google is probably more interested in the long term of people looking at the world around them because Google is a more generic kind of information provider so I think Google is more focused on this sort of if you will, Tango AR in the world around you and I find that interesting.
Because to me the real future is face to face conversation in person as it’s always been and has it probably will always be. People tend to like to do things together. We go to restaurants, we go to movies, we go to the theatre, we go to concerts, we go to art galleries and we do it in the presence of other physical people when we can.
I think that the real mainstream future of this is going to be in personal experience and when we stop even thinking that we wearing those glasses, the downsides are clear, there are downsides to privacy, to identity hacking to ads in my face when I don’t want them. To kind of in an effective digital divide, the rich get to opt out out of having to see ads in their face, and the poor don’t, a temporary digital divide where we get to have the cool glasses here but people in certain parts of India don’t get them yet, but I think that those things tend to take care of themselves because of those law, and there are a lot of upsides and a lot of downsides to any new technology and it is never about ultimately it’s not about the technology it is about what we decide we want to do with it.
Do you think eventually I mean let’s say 10 to 15 years that VR or AR based in your interaction in different parts of the world will be will be like a sub will be substitute because we still a video chat but we can still meet in person so that that seems to be a big part of like what what you are looking forward to just human to human interaction.
Do you think that in say 10 to 15 years AR/VR based communication via the internet will substitute human to human interaction in a more severe way that video chat has? It seems that a big part of what you’re looking forward to is human to human interaction.
KP: Sure, for example let me give you an analogy when I was a kid. If you and I were going to meet at a coffee shop and I said let’s meet at this coffee shop, I lived in a world that is incomprehensible to millennials. I had to go the coffee shop, I mean it was no possibility for me not to go to the coffee shop because there was no way for me to tell you if I changed my plans so we all went to the coffee shop.
And we didn’t feel as though we were missing cellphones I think because there was no other world where we could send someone a text and say “Hey I am not showing up to the coffee shop,” and similarly there are going to be future utilities there are going to be ways that people will get used to interacting, children will grow up and the information will be right here, conversations will be making use of information that we now think we need to go and stir over there to get but we will integrate to the flow of work of play of just talking in ways that we can’t imagine today because we are not aware yet that we are missing anything.
I can’t wait for that day.
KP: It is going to be cool. Technology is neither good nor bad nor valuable they are neutral.
“Technology is neither good nor bad nor valuable, it is neutral.”
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