ABSTRACT
Virtual reality (VR) has been with us a lot longer than you may think. The actual concept of what virtual reality could be is described by Plato (428 to 348 bce) in his parable called the Allegory of the Cave [1]. In movies like Tron (Walt Disney Productions, 1982), The Lawnmower Man (New Line Cinema, 1992), and The Matrix (Warner Brothers, 1999), virtual world metaphors have been created to provide fantasy entertainment. These movies, which often pushed the cinematic technologies to their limits, portrayed artistic interpretations of virtual spaces and what it would be like for us to visit them. They showed us the grandeur, the geometrical enchantment that a virtual environment could cast over us. It has been more than thirty years since Tron, and now companies such as Oculus, Valve, and Samsung are developing stereoscopic virtual reality devices that may become as ubiquitous as smartphones. Stereoscopic technology also has a long history. The rst device was created by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, and variations of it have been used throughout the last two centuries [2]. In 1861 another version was developed by Sir Oliver Wendell Holmes, the View-Master was introduced to the American audience at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and the Google Cardboard viewer that utilized images from a smartphone display was launched in 2014 [3]. Many of us already use devices on a daily basis that enhance or replace part of our real environments. Sometimes we are partially in the virtual world, using augmented reality (AR) to play a game like Ingress (2012 from Niantic Labs at Google) on our smartphones, and sometimes we are completely immersed within a virtual world using a head-mounted display (HMD). In this chapter we will consider various aspects of the stereoscopic virtual environment in an HMD and how these aspects inuence the design choices that this completely immersive environment presents to us. Here are some of the key concepts we will cover in this chapter:
• The fundamentals of how a VR HMD works • Five dimensions of design for virtual environments • Design challenges: latency, drift, and judder
“It seems truly short sighted for the industry to focus on HMDs as the primary viewing platform for the future of VR. The fact that VR headsets basically put their users into a cocoon of limited movement and isolation from real life also does not offer us a hopeful future for social interactions or experiencing real life,” wrote Scott Highton in “The Future of VR – Is This All There Is?” [4]. Highton’s observation, while valid, may become less signicant if the new social networks dedicated to VR, such as ConVRge (https://www .convrge.co/) and AltspaceVR (https://altvr.com/), gain wide acceptance. Much of this technology is still untried in the general consumer arena, and the level of acceptance for this kind of display may be less than expected, in spite of the hype and nancial backing enjoyed by the larger players like Oculus, htcVIVE, SONY, and FOVE. A nimble virtual environment designer would be wise to prepare for designing content that plays well in both VR and AR environments, creating modular content with elements that can stand alone or collectively. Elements that work in a mixed reality environment as well as an immersive virtual world would be a good achievable goal for the design team and pay dividends down the road as the content can be repurposed across the new platforms that will undoubtedly emerge. At the end of this chapter you will nd a project that concerns itself with creating an optical illusion device, the Ames Window. With the 3D content provided, you will assemble, and script a “fairy compass” based on this optical illusion for your growing game-based sim.
