Rewind time, way back to the year 2016, and the technology industry was abuzz with the acronyms VR and AR. It felt like we had finally arrived in the future. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality were really real. For the former, the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR headsets had brought high-end, consumer-friendly virtual reality experiences into the living rooms of everyday folk. For the latter, it was Pokémon Go, turning quiet neighborhood parks into raging “catch ‘em all” parties.
The technology was great and the hype seemed justified. Then Facebook confirmed it all by dropping a cool two billion (yes, that’s “illion” with a “b”) to acquire one-time Kickstarter project Oculus Rift. It seemed like it would be only a matter of months before we ditched the messy state of present-day Earth and stepped into a pixel-perfect utopia. Ready Player One, here we came.
But that revolution hasn’t come – at least not fully. So why the lag? Was it all just a fad in the end? Is VR still on course to reach its potential and change the entertainment world forever?
Taking a cue from truTV’s truth-busting show Adam Ruins Everything, whose new season starts November 27, let’s look at what’s really going on with VR and AR.
The Difference between AR and VR
For those of you confused by the difference between VR and AR, a quick recap.
Augmented Reality is grounded in the real world. By placing a screen between your human eyes and the world in front of you, developers can overlay software that makes it appear like the real world is enhanced by a digital object. In Pokémon Go, that screen is your phone. Thanks to the forward-facing camera, the phone can display whatever is in front of it (i.e. the real world), but because it is a screen and not your weak human eyes, it can also show little Pokémon running around. Aren’t they cute?
For better or worse, your world has been augmented with Pokémon – you are experiencing an Augmented Reality.
Virtual Reality ditches the real world altogether. Your brain cannot see (or ideally hear) anything around you — only a world of software. It’s all-encompassing. If you were playing a Pokémon game in VR, the backdrop would not be the real world, it would be some cheesy variant of the Mushroom Kingdom.
Virtual Reality Will Get Over the Hump
Let’s start with VR. The good news is, the experience works really well. While low-end VR experiences found on smartphones – such as Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream – are a bit gimmicky, the high-end VR headsets are the real deal. The big three – HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR – already have hundreds (pushing thousands) of fantastic and immersive entertainment experiences that will blow your mind.
The headsets are comfortable to wear, the user interface is simple to understand, and while the first-generation of experiences on these platforms were hit and miss, there is now a constant stream of releases that are genuine quality.
However, it is very early days. You could think of VR only just coming out of its MS-DOS era, with plenty of iteration to go before it hits Windows 10. And it’s these growing pains that have caused the technology to hit a hump; not the possibilities the hyped “VR revolution” promised.
The four key factors holding back mass adoption of VR are controls, price, visual fidelity, and wires – so many wires.
The latter three are all hamstrung by VR’s need to run the software twice simultaneously. It runs once for the left eye, and again for the right eye. This requires a lot of power. Developers therefore downgrade the visuals to a certain extent to reduce the power load, but there is a bar that, if dipped below, causes eyestrain and nausea that most can’t stomach.
It means that the hardware running the VR needs to be beefed-up, which means dollars. In addition, the sheer bandwidth required to transfer 2x the information wirelessly to a headset means it’s hard to “cut the cord” and give users the freedom to move unencumbered.
Elsewhere, developers are trying to come to grips with controlling the virtual world. A combination of room-scale (full-body motion detection), wireless controllers, and voice activation are being constantly experimented with, and each step forward leads us towards greater usability.
Iteration is happening in all these spaces. Technology improves and gets cheaper with every passing day, and we’re already seeing a number of price drops and the emergence of wireless enhancements to headsets. But the buy-in is still way too high for that mass adoption tipping point. And it won’t be till the numbers of those with VR reaches a certain point that developers and creators can more securely make the financial investment required to produce the entertainment experiences we know are possible.
Perhaps then Facebook will begin seeing a return on its investment. Because the potential is huge. A future where tens of thousands of us can meet up together in virtual spaces to socialize and be entertained in worlds beyond imagination isn’t a possibility, it’s an inevitability.
AR Better Positioned for Mass Adoption
That leaves AR as the candidate most likely to live up to the hype in the near future. It passes its biggest hurdle with ease: price. In order to start with AR, all you need is a phone. And everyone has a phone. It’s also usable by just about everyone, whereas VR – in its current state at least – loses a sizeable chunk of its potential audience to motion-sickness.
The entertainment future of AR may not be quite as you may have imagined it, however. Rather than fully immersed experiences as we’ll see in VR, the future of AR takes a subtle approach, elegantly integrated into the experiences we already enjoy.
While Pokémon Go was AR at its most basic, the biggest movements are being made in wearables or even smart lenses that sit just over your eye. These place the screen required for AR into a hands-free, comfortable position. Controlled by eye movement and even voice control, these devices will allow key information (maps, messages, data) to overlay the real world.
Also benefitting the likelihood of AR reaching or even exceeding its hype before VR is its application outside of entertainment. For example, in education, children can see history books come to life on the page. Or you can pop your hood, look at the engine through your phone and see all the parts named alongside video tutorials on how to repair them. Doctors can use AR to have the location of veins laid over a patient’s arm to better know where to stab a needle.
You get the idea. Such immediate use-cases for AR will help see developers invest in it earlier than we’ll see with VR.
Could the Future be Mixed Reality?
But the real reality could be that neither VR nor AR is the true future. There is an alternative technology termed Mixed Reality (MR), or Hybrid Reality, which is looking very exciting.
Mixed Reality starts with the use of a wearable headset. However, the headset has a forward facing camera. This allows it to put the real world into a virtual construct whereby the software can interact with it. Cool, right?
Let’s return to Pokémon Go. In the standard AR experience, you point your phone at a tree and a Pokémon appears floating in mid-air in front of it. It may even run around or move a bit in the air to complete the ridiculous effect. But ultimately, the software has no idea a tree is actually standing there in front of you – it could be Mark Wahlberg for all the game cares.
In a Mixed Reality, the software recreates the real world in the virtual world. So, you can freely move around and interact with said tree without accidentally smacking your head into it, as the recreation is accurate. However, now, when the game places a Pokémon in this landscape, the software knows the tree is there. The creature can now run behind it, climb it, leap off it, breathe fire on it. The two realities have been mixed.
The biggest mover in this space is Magic Leap, who has now produced a run of experiences, from jaw-dropping shows to games, that detail how Mixed Reality could be the happy place between the mediums. Microsoft has also been experimenting with its HoloLens, which is creeping towards release with all the energy of a snail.
Is MR then the future for VR and AR in the end? Are they set to be out-hyped by the next big thing before they reach their potential? That would certainly be on-trend now, wouldn’t it?
To learn more hidden truths behind everything you know and love, tune into the new season of Adam Ruins Everything, starting November 27 at 10/9c on truTV.
