Archief - >>> FAQ <<< PC Virtual Reality (Oculus, Vive, Gear VR, etc.)

I saw human-sized robots walk through the actual walls of the room. I could shoot them with power blasts from a prop gun I really held in my hands. I watched miniature humans wrestle each other on a real tabletop, almost like a Star Wars holographic chess game. These tiny people were obviously not real, despite their photographic realism, but they were really present.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating mixed-reality technology, but right now the quality of its virtual visions exceeds all others. Because of this lead, money is pouring into this Florida office park. Google was one of the first to invest. Alibaba, Legendary & Warner Bros, Qualcom, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and many other huge names followed.

Few people have been allowed to see the gear in action, and the combination of funding and mystery has fueled rampant curiosity. But to really understand what’s happening at Magic Leap, you need to also understand the tidal wave surging through the entire tech industry. All the major players—Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung—have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, and they’re hiring more engineers daily. Facebook alone has over 400 people working on VR. Then there are some 230 other companies, such as Meta, the Void, Atheer, Lytro, and 8i, working furiously on hardware and content for this new platform. To fully appreciate Magic Leap’s gravitational pull, you really must see this emerging industry—every virtual-reality and mixed-reality headset, every VR camera technique, all the novel VR applications, beta-version VR games, every prototype VR social world.

Then you will understand just how fundamental virtual reality technology will be, and why businesses like Magic Leap have an opportunity to become some of the largest companies ever created.

One of the first things I learned from my recent tour of the synthetic-reality waterfront is that virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them. What we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences.

We haven’t yet fully absorbed the enormous benefit that the internet of information has brought to the world. And yet we are about to recapitulate this accomplishment with the advent of synthetic realities. With a VR platform we will create a Wikipedia of experiences, potentially available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Travel experiences—terror at the edge of an erupting volcano, wonder at a walking tour of the pyramids—once the luxury of the rich (like books in the old days), will be accessible to anyone with a VR rig. Or experiences to be shared: marching with protesters in Iran; dancing with revelers in Malawi; how about switching genders? Experiences that no humans have had: exploring Mars; living as a lobster; experiencing a close-up of your own beating heart, live.

All three major MR headsets rely on images that are projected edgeways onto a semitransparent material—usually glass with a coating of beam splitting nanoscale ridges. Magic Leap claims that its device is unique in the way it beams light into the eye, though the company declines to explain it further at this time. However Magic Leap works, its advantage is that pixels disappear.

If a near-eye screen offers sufficient resolution, brightness, breadth, and color richness, it can display any number of virtual screens, of any size, inside it. While I was wearing the photonic spectacles of Magic Leap, I watched an HD movie on a virtual movie screen. It looked as bright and crisp as my 55-inch TV at home. I watched a live football game on a virtual screen hovering next to a web browser window, alongside a few other virtual screens. I could fill my office with as many screens as I wanted, as big (or small) as I desired.

One of Microsoft’s ambitions for the HoloLens is to replace all the various screens in a typical office with wearable devices. The company’s demos envision workers moving virtual screens around or clicking to be teleported to a 3-D conference room with a dozen coworkers who live in different cities. At Magic Leap, the development team will soon abandon desktop screens altogether in favor of virtual displays. It’s no great leap to imagine such glasses also replacing the small screens we all keep in our pockets. In other words, this is a technology that can simultaneously upend desktop PCs, laptops, televisions and phones. No wonder Apple, Samsung, and everyone else is paying attention. This is what disruption on a vast scale looks like.

Peter Jackson (LOTR) serves on an advisory panel for Magic Leap, and his company will produce content for the new gear. “This mixed reality is not an extension of 3-D movies. It’s something completely different,” he says. “Once you can create the illusion of solid objects anywhere you want, you create new entertainment opportunities.

You can add as little as you want—a single tiny figure on this tabletop talking to us—or you can replace the walls of this room with a skyscape so we’re sitting here watching clouds float by. If you have your Magic Leap glasses on, you can look up at the Empire State Building and watch it being built in the early 1930s, floor by floor, but sped up. Maybe while you are walking around the modern streets of Chicago you see gangsters driving past with tommy guns. It could be a form of education, entertainment, and tourism. In 10 years I expect that mixed-reality technology like Magic Leap will be used as much as, if not more than, smartphones.

All that said, it was not the reality of artificial reality that surprised me most. It was how social it is. The best experiences I had in VR or MR involved at least one other person. “Our goal is to make virtual communication even better than real-world communication,” Luckey said. “VR is the only thing that will get us there.” The time is coming when, if someone says “let’s meet,” everyone will know that means let’s meet in VR. The default mode of VR is “together.” Magic Leap is working on protocols that save a mapped place in the cloud so it doesn’t have to be remapped for each encounter. Your unit (or perhaps another unit in the same location) merely needs to register and update any changes in the space. This in turn will let you share virtual objects across different surroundings, even if participants are in distant places. Someone in Barcelona can drop a virtual flower into your virtual vase in Chicago. Because artificial reality is inherently social, its environments will be inherently social and networked.

Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. When you’re wearing the visor of an augmented- or mixed-reality system such as Magic Leap, HoloLens, or Meta, it maps the local environment. To make, say, a virtual teacup appear on your real table, it needs to know where your table is. The visor uses outward-facing cameras and sensors to scan your environment to create this map.

That’s not to say this will be easy. Don’t let the relatively portable size of VR and MR wearables fool you. As they get smaller and lighter (and they will), the infrastructure behind them must grow larger and larger. The scale of the servers, bandwidth, processing, storage, and cleverness required to run networked virtual places at the scale of the planet for billions of people is beyond Big Data. It is Ginormous Data.

The creation of global artificial reality is an enormous project, and its adoption will start slowly. Horowitz, who led his company’s early investment in Magic Leap, thinks VR will follow the flywheel effect: sluggish to start, its momentum slowly compounding until it’s nearly unstoppable. “What gives me hope is how good VR is right now,” he says. “Once people experience high-end VR, they’re going to want it. We’ll look back on 2020 as the VR era, but in the next five years I’m bracing for the inevitable trough of disillusionment in the hype cycle.

The evolution of technology can take curious turns. Cell phones started out so bulky they needed their own luggage. It was easy to imagine them getting smaller and smaller. Which they did. But they did not merely shrink into miniature versions of themselves. As it got smaller, the mobile telephone lost its keypad, gained a hi-res color screen, started to grow in size again, and eventually stopped being used as a phone. It evolved into something different and unexpected. VR will surprise us too.

Not immediately, but within 15 years, the bulk of our work and play time will touch the virtual to some degree. Systems for delivering these shared virtual experiences will become the largest enterprises we have ever made. Fully immersive VR worlds already generate and consume gigabytes of data per experience. In the next 10 years the scale will increase from gigabytes per minute to terabytes per minute. The global technology industry—chip designers, consumer device makers, communication conglomerates, component manufacturers, content studios, software creators—will all struggle to handle the demands of this vast system as it blossoms. And only a few companies will dominate the VR networks because, as is so common in networks, success is self-reinforcing. The bigger the virtual society becomes, the more attractive it is. And the more attractive, the bigger yet it becomes. These artificial-reality winners will become the largest companies in history, dwarfing the largest companies today by any measure.

A threshold has been crossed. After a long gestation, VR is good enough to improve quickly. It’s real.