VR! Always!

As I'm majoring in entertainment technology, I was massively exposed to VR platforms last semester, so I know the magic that VR can perform, and I also know the limitation that current VR devices have. Even so, the topics we discussed in Tech Animation classes are still new for me.

The first topic was about the device itself. I have never considered carefully the working principle of VR devices. A research claimed that the sickness resulted from VR devices mainly comes from stereo system of the eyes, so researchers found a way to reduce disparity of left and right eyes. This results in smaller difference, reducing sickness while maintaining recognizable depth. However, as I mentioned in class, the sickness I experienced mainly came from the mismatch of velocity in the virtual world and the physical world. Nancy mentioned about the acceleration added to those 3D theme park rides to reduce motion sickness. Actually, I feel zero sickness in those rides. So I'm a bit curious: the mismatch of acceleration doesn't matter at all?

Another interesting research found a way to map paths in the virtual world to a much smaller physical space. It takes some tricks to guide the user to turn to certain directions, so the user feels like exploring a very large area, but actually the paths make use of the physical space repetitively.

I found this interesting, because indeed this is a practical problem. If look at the VR games in the market, there are very few of them dealing with physical movements of the player. Given the limited physical space, how to fit in the whole game world. To me, this still remains unsolved, given the limitations of this research: The ratio of step length in the game and in the real world is not resolved, so player cannot run or even walk naturally.

Another interesting research makes use of treadmill, so the player can actually walk and run in the game. And there is a belt tied around the waist of the player to pull backwards. This is to simulate the sub-force generated from gravity when a person is walking on a slope. They have also researched on a wind system that can redirect the air to go from the front of the player to simulate real natural environment.

The last research that I want to mention is the one uses sound wave to produce pressure on hands. Although there are a lot of limitations, like the space limit and the intensity limit, I think this is a brave and valuable direction to go. I feel that the bottle neck of VR development is at the hardware side, and the other types of physical sense feedback is as important as the visual feedback, which seems to be over focused on.

I think it was a fruitful discussion, and I personally am still very interested in the future of VR technology.