In this chapter, I will explain what virtual reality (VR) is and why it is worth your time to become a VR pioneer as well as some of the areas within which it is being used. You will also learn about three essential concepts in VR: the place illusion, the plausibility illusion, and the embodiment illusion, which are essential for creating genuine immersion in VR. Additionally, you will find out about the popular headsets currently on the market that you will need to follow along with this book and be introduced to the term degrees of freedom .
What Is Virtual Reality?
There is much excitement around the topic of virtual reality, also known as VR. The definition of virtual reality can be extensive, encompassing everything that happens in the digital world, like social networking, online marketing, and so forth. However, more often, the term is used to refer to a medium that immerses users in a computer-generated, simulated representation of a natural or fantasy world, allowing them to see, feel, hear, and interact with the simulated environment and the objects within it. As users are completely immersed in and engaged with this interactive experience, they can look around, move about, and interact with objects without ever having to break the illusion of being in a virtual world. VR is made possible by using a headset, input controllers, gloves, or even full bodysuits.
Become a VR pioneer now, and create the future!
Since the VR market is still very young, a lot of room remains for breakthroughs. Creating something completely new is a unique opportunity that VR provides you.
It took approximately 27 years for PCs to grow from representing 2% to representing 70% of the type of computer most used in the United States, approximately 13 years for the Internet to reach that level, and approximately eight years for smartphones to get there. Many analysts have predicted that VR will reach this point within the next five to seven years. This leaves you two to three years to get trained in VR development and three to four years to create something that will significantly impact the VR ecosystem.
Creating features for a new product is complex, involving testing, failing, and then testing again. Given that the whole VR industry is currently in the test-and-fail mode, rapid prototyping in VR is what will gain you maximum leverage, and that is what this book is all about.
What Can You Do with VR?
You may believe that VR is only suitable for entertainment or gaming, but the fact is, other industries have started to take note of its potential and popularity as well. VR is still in infancy, and we are currently only in the first generation of consumer VR hardware. Having not even come close to discovering everything we could do with VR, you could be the one to discover something new and become a VR pioneer.
Medical and Mental Health
The use of 3D visualization is not new to the medical industry. X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs have helped doctors immensely in diagnosis and treatment for years. Likewise, VR has the potential to have profound effects in medicine, neuroscience, psychology, and pain management. VR has already been extremely effective with helping treat fears, phobias, stress-related disorders, bipolar disorders, cognitive rehabilitation, and other psychological conditions. It has benefitted health care professionals and patients across a multitude of disciplines.
Automotive Engineering and Design
VR has also been an effective tool for engineering and design applications. VR design eliminates the need for building physical prototypes. The automotive industry uses VR to help visualize products within virtual environments before physical prototypes are made, allowing designers to see how parts fit together. VR is also being used in this industry to help customers get a sense of how their car would look and feel before ordering it.
Training and Education
Training and education is another field in which VR has been a potent tool. While many other types of media communicate verbally via ideas, VR communicates via direct, hands-on experience. This is possible due to VR’s combination of interaction and true immersion. Aircraft pilots, firefighters, oil field workers, and others are some professions where training is done by VR. It is also used in education, helping students to learn new languages by using VR environments with applications like Linguisticator.
Architecture, Construction, and Real Estate
VR provides an immersive experience that allows a user to explore space on a real-world scale in a way that is not possible via other mediums. In the world of construction, traditional designs have made use of flat technical drawings and 3D models. However, VR has changed what is possible by creating a realistic representation of spaces. Architects and engineers can now explore every inch of a construction project and identify any issues before construction begins, potentially avoiding delays and unnecessary costs. VR has also been tremendously helpful in real estate, wherein the environment can either be fully modeled in 3D or photographed as a 360-degree panorama, which provides an immersive sense of the space and its surroundings that the user would not be able to experience without visiting the actual physical location.
Entertainment and Journalism
The ability of VR to create the simulated experience of being present through immersion makes it a compelling medium with which to narrate a story with a deep sense of empathy, something that is harder to achieve on a flat screen. The entertainment industry, gaming in particular, is where VR is making the most waves. However, there are other areas of entertainment, such as music and cinema, where VR is making an impact as well. Music concerts put on by famous artists have been released as VR events that allow viewers to recreate the experience of front-row seating. Oculus and Netflix have also released their version of a cinematic experience, allowing viewers to watch films in a different way. Virtual tourism and documentaries are other exciting aspects of VR cinema.
VR is also being used in what is known as immersive journalism, where news is produced in a form where people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situations described in news stories. By having viewers wear a VR headset, they enter virtual worlds and scenarios where they can experience the news events firsthand.
Advertising and Retail
VR offers a range of ways for customers to experience products. A person wanting to purchase a car can experience the car in virtual reality, make color choices, select the car’s interior features, and more, all from within the comforts of their home. It enables retailers to reach customers who cannot visit their showrooms, increasing the likelihood of making a sale. It also allows the customer the opportunity to try out the product before buying it. VR is also used in advertising to build an emotional connection with a brand by immersing a customer in a virtual experience that creates a deep sense of connection with the product.
Gaming in VR
It is no secret that VR has changed the overall gaming experience. VR does not just show you the game as you play it; it immerses you directly in the game, allowing you to become the protagonist and have experiences and interactions with actors and objects within the game world as if you were really in it. There are also input controllers with haptic feedback to simulate tactile sensations that allow for complex interactions, immersion, and presence, which wouldn’t be possible using traditional game controllers. The ability provided to the player to interact with actors and objects all around them, along with the ability to move about in the virtual world, is what makes gaming in VR truly incredible.
Immersion and Presence in VR
Now that we’ve gotten a good idea of what VR is and the many things you can do with it, it is time to delve further into what makes VR work.
Let us begin by talking about immersion in VR. Immersion is often used to describe the perceived experience of being physically present in a virtual world . For an experience to be genuinely immersive, certain illusions need to be created.
Place Illusion
The place illusion creates the feeling of being in a physical place even though you realize you’re not there. Your brain decides that you are in the virtual world rather than the real world. Place illusion can occur even if nothing is happening in the virtual world at the time. Because you are in a virtual world and you can look around, your brain decides that this is where you are. The place illusion is the first of the three illusions that lead to true immersion, where your brain believes that events occurring around you are genuinely taking place.
Plausibility Illusion
The plausibility illusion creates the feeling that the events you are engaged with are really happening. Your brain decides that these events feel genuine. It is different from the place illusion, as you can feel like you are in a place but at the same time not believe that anything is actually happening there. The plausibility illusion is the second of the three illusions that leads to true immersion.
Embodiment Illusion
The embodiment illusion is unique to virtual reality in that it has to do with your own body. Where in the real world you can look down and you see your own body, VR can be programmed to recreate that experience by allowing you to see a virtual body in place of your own body when you look down. The embodiment illusion gives rise to the third illusion, which is the illusion of body ownership or embodiment—that is, the belief that the virtual body is actually your body.
- 1.
Believing that you are in a place even though your physical self knows you are not actually there (the place illusion)
- 2.
Events occurring in a place and you responding to them even though your physical self knows they are not actually happening (the plausibility illusion)
- 3.
Looking down and seeing your virtual body and believing and acting like it is your own body even though your physical self knows it is not (the embodiment illusion)
VR Hardware and Technology
The most common way of immersing a user into a virtual world is by using a head-mounted display (HMD) . Even though there are other ways of creating VR, the method we will use in this book requires a HMD, also commonly known as a VR headset.
A VR headset can take you to levels of immersion where you believe you are walking on the moon or trying to survive on a battlefield even though you are just in your living room.
You may be wondering how this all works. The concepts for displaying VR content across different types of available HMD devices are similar. Two streams of content are sent to the headset, whether to one display or two. A set of lenses inside the headset focuses and reshapes the content each eye sees, creating a stereoscopic 3D image . This is done by adjusting the 2D images to mimic how your eyes view the world in real life.
VR headsets can be either tethered or untethered. A tethered device like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or Sony’s PSVR requires wires that attach the VR headset to a desktop, laptop, or console to deliver VR content. A headset such as the Oculus Quest or Vive Focus, on the other hand, is an untethered headset that does not need to be connected to a desktop or a laptop.
Some VR headsets only track the user’s direction, while others track changes to the user’s position. The term degrees of freedom (DoF) is used to distinguish between headsets that only track direction and those that track both direction and position.
Input Controllers
Although the VR headset is the main component of a VR system, most VR headsets also come with input controllers that allow users to interact within the VR world.
3DOF devices have input controllers that are essentially pointers, allowing users to take aim but not to reach out and grab something.
6DOF high-end devices have special controllers that function like virtual hands and are tracked by the same sensors that track the HMDs. These controllers allow you to use your hands in various ways within VR through a combination of buttons, triggers, and thumb sticks.
3DOF
A VR device that only tracks rotation but does not track position is referred to as a 3DOF device, as it only tracks three DOF in terms of rotation: the degree to which the device is rotating around its upward-pointing y-axis (yaw), or rotating sideways, the degree to which it is rotating around its forward-pointing z-axis (roll), and the degree to which it is tilting forward or backward on its horizontal x-axis (pitch).
3DOF devices track rotation only, so users can look around and point but cannot move from side to side.
The Oculus Go and Samsung Gear headsets are examples of 3DOF devices.
6DOF
A VR device that tracks both position and rotation is referred to as a 6DOF device. This device tracks all six degrees of freedom: yaw, roll, pitch, up-down movement, side-to-side movement, and forward-backward movement.
6DOF devices track both positions and rotation, so that users can look and move around.
Most first-generation 6DOF devices like the original HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift required base stations to provide positional tracking on desktop systems. However, untethered headsets like the Oculus Quest and the Vive Focus use camera arrays to track the headset’s position within the room, so they do not require base stations. This technology is referred to as inside-out tracking.
The HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Focus, and Oculus Quest headsets are 6DOF devices. You will need to have one of these to follow along with this book.
Summary
In this chapter, we went over virtual reality and why now is the best time to get into VR development. We also looked at the areas where VR is currently being used. You learned about the importance of immersion in VR and the three illusions of place, plausibility, and embodiment that create true immersion in VR. You also learned about the various types of VR headsets available, both tethered and untethered, and the degrees of freedom they support, as well as the benefits of input controller peripherals that accompany VR systems.