New Orbit Magazine Online: Issue 02, February 2018 - AR/VR Special

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_____________ My crash course into the world of virtual reality and all of its associated jargon came when I moved house, and found myself living with not one but two virtual reality developers, working in some of the key companies and projects within the New Zealand A/VR industry. While I knew very little about the field, I’d come into contact with the theory before; 1999 film The Matrix and it's associated philosophical readings – Rene Descarte’s Meditations (in which Descarte muses on how our senses are not to be trusted, and as the only way we understand our world is through our senses, perhaps some kind of virtual reality could be deceiving us) and Nozick’s Experience Machine (in which a thought experiment is posed regarding whether life – love, joy, achievement – experienced in a virtual reality can have as much value as a comparatively bleak “real world” life – more on page 26) – are the main reason my second major through university was in philosophy. There are some exceptional stories in this Virtual and Augmented Reality special of New Orbit Magazine, both in the philosophies and questions they create, and in the applications and uses for existing (or near-existing) technologies in the field across a huge range of areas. While the advancements may, as usual, seem far-fetched, we all know in this genre that science is close at fiction’s heels. It’s hard to believe some of the incredible applications that have come to the fore in the last decade or so for virtual and augmented reality, a field that to many exists somewhere in the realms of increasingly dated science fiction films; while The Matrix is surely a timeless classic, and Tron just received a 21 st Century update, The Lawnmower Man – while a favourite of mine – might be getting a little past it. The predictions of science fiction writers and filmmakers, though, often prove truer than one might expect. Like in The Lawnmower Man, A/VR is proliferating in the realm of education and knowledge sharing, from helping to teach children with autism in virtual environments where they won’t be disadvantaged by social concerns or distractions (more about this on page 91) to teaching adults and providing perspectives on learning unlike anything we’ve been able to conceive of until today. Like in The Lawnmower Man, too, VR has evolved from sitting among a room of screens as in early permutations, to a whole-body affair with more realism than one would expect, observing from outside the apparatus. Not only can players wear virtual gloves that provide “haptic feedback”, and use them to feel and identify
objects as if they were real, but developers have created an ultrasound system that creates the sensation of touch or feeling without the player wearing any equipment at all. You no longer have to sit in your chair or stand awkwardly on the spot; Vortrex is in the process of creating VR shoes with a motorised treadmill that move backwards as you walk, meaning the VR world in which you stand is now yours to explore without crashing into walls. If you’ve got a little more room to spare, the omnidirectional treadmill Infinideck allows you to walk, run and jump on a surface that moves beneath you based on your own movements. Monumental work has gone into making these virtual worlds more accessible, more interactive, and, most importantly, more real. That being said, augmented reality does the exact opposite, effectively creating the means by which our own “real” world becomes more virtual. An app for restauranteurs makes life easier for picky eaters by using AR to materialise virtual menu items on a diner’s plate, from a photogrammetric scan of the real dish, so they can consider it from all angles before committing to an order. Augmented reality game Night Terrors maps out the layout of your home and fills it with jump-scaring virtual beasties that “react to your terror”, custombuilding a horror movie of which you are both the audience and the star. Our conceptions of entertainment, education, training, and connection with others will be irrevocably altered, perhaps for better, perhaps for worse. I hope you’ll find something in the following stories and analyses that will assist you – or prepare you – for this revolution that has already begun. Augmented and virtual reality are fast becoming the frontrunners in the race for the next technology that is going to change the world. It has been compared to the internet, the home computer, the smartphone – it is possible, nay likely, that once A/VR becomes ubiquitous in our everyday lives, it will be hard to imagine a world in which we lived without it. Happy musing, Naomi Moore Editor and Founder of New Orbit Magazine
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Findlay’s pretentious messenger b
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That’s why I’m nervous. Swingin
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“ When asked these questions at t
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ounds of the universal laws of phys
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exist and would theoretically produ
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“Are you living in a computer sim
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twice he may have tried to get into
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Virtual reality has proved indespen
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too critically. I touched gently th
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unremarkable relationship history -
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internal command I disabled the rea
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“Of course. Present company exclu
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His head jerked - someone grabbed h
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interaction and intimacy. A further
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“No matter what day it is, I bet
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emotionally damaging other children
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“ Augmented Reality exploded into
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companion for children to create po
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experienced life without it. Handhe
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I started researching in 2011, but
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on an emergency management AR game
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