Virtual Reality Basics
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How many of you have seen the Matrix and been absolutely spellbound by the sci-fi effects and wondered if you would ever be able to grab your hands on such a product throughout your lifetime. Until recently, virtual reality had been something of a fantasy for storytellers and technologists. We could only imagine a virtual world through sci-fi movies like ‘The Matrix’, ‘Inception’ or ‘Ready Player One’ and through fiction novels. But all that changed in the year 2010 when an eighteen-year old American teenager Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of a VR headset that would later evolve into the hugely popular Oculus Rift. The announcement of the Oculus was followed closely by tech insiders, developers, and early adopters. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, liked the Oculus Rift so much he bought the company for $2billion in March 2014. And now we have reached a stage where there are several other VR players in the market such as HTC Vive, Samsung, Google Cardboard etc.
WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY?
So what exactly is Virtual Reality? How does VR work? How does a virtual reality headset make you think that you’re you are taking an evening walk across the busy streets of Paris or London whereas in reality you are simply confined within the four walls of your bedroom!!!! Imagine a front row seat to watch your favorite band play live, with the freedom to look in any direction in real time. These are just a few of the amazing applications that VR devices enable but how does it really make you immerse yourself into the world of make belief? Let’s find out!!!
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THE BASICS
Virtual reality (VR) means experiencing things through our computers that don’t really exist. It is a believable, interactive 3D computer-created world that you can explore so you feel you really are there, both mentally and physically. Virtual reality allows the user to be immersed into a virtual world, unlike regular screens in front of the user which do not allow for such an experience. Unlike traditional user interfaces, Virtual Reality places the user inside an experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are immersed and able to interact with 3D worlds. By simulating as many senses as possible, such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, VR can take people into a virtual world fairly easily.
The most universal VR product is undoubtedly the VR headset. We have seen many versions from top tech brands like HTC, Google and Sony, each with their own unique approach. VR headsets like Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR are often referred to as HMDs, which simply means they are head mounted displays. These headsets are easy to divide into categories based on the hardware they are designed to work with. To understand how these popular VR headsets function, we need to dive inside. Here are the components that make these devices work, and how it all fits together.
COMPONENTS OF A VIRTUAL REALITY EXPERIENCE
Feeds: Content feeds are supplied by hardware, typically the hardware in a computer, console, or phone. Video is sent from the console or computer to the headset via a HDMI cable in the case of headsets such as HTC’s Vive and the Oculus Rift.
Control: Very simple VR headsets allow basic exploration and interaction with a few buttons located on the headset. More advanced headsets offer handheld controllers which are just like any other gaming controllers having physical buttons.
Display: The display is where the VR image is pushed out to your eyeballs. VR headsets use either two feeds sent to one display or two LCD displays, one per eye. Many headsets include lenses that help focus your eyes on the screen so that it appears you are looking into a real environment. This is what allows VR to work on single screens like smartphones have. These lenses focus and reshape the picture for each eye and create a stereoscopic 3D image by angling the two 2D images to mimic how each of our two eyes views the world ever-so-slightly differently.
Field of View and Frame Rate: The immersive experience of a VR user depends on the field of view and the frame rate. The more the field of view and frame rate the better the immersive experience. The field of view is basically how wide a picture is. A wider picture would lead to a greater immersive experience. Most VR headsets have an optimal field of view of around 110 -120 degrees of display and a frame rate of around 60 FPS to 120 FPS to avoid users feeling sick and for the resulting picture to be convincing.
Tracking Sensors: Most VR headsets come with movement sensors on the headset — and sometimes also on additional hardware to track the user’s motion and physical position within a room. Head tracking means that when you wear a VR headset, the picture in front of you shifts as you look up, down and side to side or angle your head. All this is possible with the use of inbuilt components such as a gyroscope, accelerometer and a magnetometer. The big players like HTC and Oculus have also incorporated motion tracking into their recent products which has been a gamechanger for the VR industry. It involves two base stations around the room which sweep the area with lasers. These can detect the precise position of your head and both hands based on the timing of when they hit each photocell sensor on both the headset and around each handheld controller. The physical buttons on the controller can be used similar to a general gaming controller giving a feeling of using your own hands in Virtual Reality.
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