What do we know about virtual reality?
The history, downsides, upsides and future of Virtual Reality
The history of virtual reality
As the presence of VR increases in our day-to-day lives, it can be quite difficult to define what it means. According to Dictionary.com, virtual reality is an immersive 3D environment which one can experience or even control through interactive technology.
Although that definition was not elaborated until the late 80’s, the history of VR might actually be traced back to 19th century panoramic paintings. Back then, the intention of placing the viewer at some other point of space and time was achieved by filling out one’s field of vision.
Not long after, scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone presented a stereoscopic approach to creating a sense of depth and immersion. He demonstrated that two slightly different images — that of the left and right eyes — put together, causes the brain to interpret tridimensionality. This principle is still used nowadays in 3D movies and VR gadgets like Google Cardboard.
Almost a century later, in 1929, a significant advance was made. Edward Link created the first flight simulator controlled by motors that would not only change the flight’s pitch and roll, but also emulate turbulence. The electromechanical device was responsible for training over 500,000 US pilots during World War II.
Thirty years later came Sensorama, an arcade-style theatre cabinet that would immerse the viewer through all five senses in the inventor’s movies. It generated specific smells, had a vibrating chair, and blew air to simulate wind and speed. Its inventor, Morton Heilig, would later also invent the first head mounted display (HMD), which bore resemblance to our modern VR devices, but without interaction or motion tracking.
Headsight, the first motion tracking device (from 1961), used a person’s head movements to naturally look around. Shortly after, Ivan Sutherland’s Ultimate Display (another HMD) allowed realistic interactions between the users and the virtual world, leading to the term “artificial reality”. 18 years later, however, the term “virtual reality” came to be through Jaron Lanier, founder of the Visual Programming Lab (VPL).
The 1990’s were a key decade to VR’s evolution. In 1991, a range of arcade games and machines were launched, allowing the public to access this technology for the first time. People would also see VR in the movies just the next year, when Pierce Brosnan starred in a film called The Lawnmower Man. Also, in 1999, The Matrix was released, bringing the subject to the mainstream.
Still in the 90’s, SEGA announced a new VR headset that turned out to be a huge flop, as technical obstacles wouldn’t allow them to pass the prototype phase — even though 4 games had already been designed. Two years later, Nintendo launched the first portable console with 3D graphics, but that also became a failure, reportedly because of the lack of colors, software support and comfort in use.
Since then, virtual reality development has sped up and the costs have dropped as small and powerful devices emerge everywhere with amazing 3D graphics. Enhanced by camera sensors, motion controllers, and ever-more natural interfaces, the video game and porn industries launch products more frequently, while companies such as Google and Samsung take VR further in our day-to-day lives.
Downsides
However, as interesting and exciting as virtual reality might be, it comes with its downsides and potential consequences. From a technical point of view, the technology necessary to provide the ideal experience to VR users is still out of reach, and what we have today is too expensive. But there are topics even more critical than that, such as potential health threats and ethical issues.
The computers we use today in our daily lives do not have the graphic capabilities needed for VR. Not that there is no computer capable of that, but those are extremely expensive and they are approximately one percent of all the 1.43 billion computers in the world according to a research done by Gartner.
It is not only ultra-high-end machines that are a problem, but also the bandwidth necessary for creating immersive 3D environments. Netflix has already shown us that the average bandwidth we have today will have to increase to satisfy our needs for ever increasing gigabytes of download — but VR will take this issue to a whole new level. The amount of internet needed to render interactive 3D scenarios is unprecedented, and we’ll need to have better internet providers in order to make it work.
However, the problems of VR are not only technical and economical. As with any new technology, there comes new ethical issues yet unknown to us. With past technological advancements, like in videogames, we had the problem of “desensitization”, wherein a person loses sensitivity to extreme acts of behavior, such as violence, and fails to show empathy or compassion as a result.
Concerns have already been raised about VR and desensitization, as illustrated by Virtual Reality Society. And that’s not the only ethical issue that comes with the advancements of VR. The same article from Virtual Reality Society cites cyber-addiction and virtual criminality as major problems we might have in the near future.
There are also health risks. Several people have experienced headaches, queasiness, blurred vision, or many other side effects. And although those are thought to be only temporary, there is little research on this topic. As this article from the Guardian points out, there can be very serious side effects of using VR that we don’t know about yet.
That’s not to say we should forget about VR. It is natural that new technologies bring new challenges, but that doesn’t mean the technology itself is a problem. We ought to think of the best way to apply VR to our lives so it becomes a solution to us, not another problem to deal with; and these solutions are already being developed by some people.
Positive applications
For most people, VR calls to mind fun and games, but it’s being used in several areas to improve the human experience. The intersection of the real and virtual has brought with it good results in areas like the military, medicine/healthcare, tourism, and many others.
Medicine and healthcare benefit a lot from it. Paraplegic patients who would never walk again are close to taking real steps, thanks to initiatives like the Walk Again Project (WAP), a combination of motorized exoskeletons and VR that helps people regain some control of their paralyzed limbs.
VR also allows us to explores different worlds inside our own homes, remotely touring museums and monuments or relaxing at some distant park. This use of VR can help us learn things we otherwise wouldn’t have access to and expand our worldview, creating empathy and bringing people together.
It has also been specially useful for military training, for example to simulate combat situations and other hazardous contexts in which soldiers need to learn what to do and how to react without taking major risks.
So what’s next?
While nowadays the most common VR headsets, like Google Cardboard or the Samsung Gear VR, offer a pretty decent and immersive experience for the users, these devices only track and respond according to the user’s head movement. HTC Vive goes a bit further by providing two manual controllers and room tracking technology that enables the user to move around within the virtual environment.
Although today VR headsets can do an excellent job at serving and delighting our visual senses, and to some degree our auditive senses, all those technologies only focus on two of our senses. VR will get much more physical.
Avatars will become more convincing than today and be able to interact with other users, such as teammates, in the VR environment. PrimeSense, a company recently acquired by Apple, is developing technology to track the movement of the whole user’s body. Faceshift is working on the capture of the user’s facial expressions so that the user’s avatar will be capable of doing the exact same movement, like smiling, frowning, or even rolling the eyes.
Once the technologies start to consider experiences for our whole body — touch, taste, smell — the perception of reality will get stronger. We will have the possibility of refining some of the concepts first introduced with the Sensorama, with the experience of elements like wind and smells.
The combination between the technologies of Thrive Audio, specialized in spatial audio, and Feelreal, which has developed a mask that releases scents, could for instance provide a very significant perception of reality in virtual scenarios like forests, restaurants and conventions, or even wars. The capability of offering taste sensations is also being researched and developed by a group in Singapore.
Creating technology that simulates touch, like being able to actually feel wet when we dip our fingers in virtual water, will likely take a few hundred years of development. Anyway, the next steps of VR are all about the user participating physically in the virtual world. Experiencing things will be more interesting and powerful than just sitting down while looking around and touching a mobile screen.
VR is still in it’s early days, but it’s easy to notice that there’s a lot of possibilities to be explored, and consequences to consider. As its future uses are yet to be defined, the opportunities to change our lives in a positive way are certainly there.
This text was written by Caê, Vinicius, Marcela and Maria Thaís, with the helping hands of Mark Bowen.
