at home Virtual Reality?
February 2nd, 2010In his Singularity University talk, Philip Rosedale convinced me of the value of “presence.” The brain works better, he argues, if it can pinpoint speakers and if it is working in a novel environment.
Obviously people have been working on tele-presence and things like video phone for years. Skype does a decent job of video phone communication. What Skype lacks is dimensionality, both visual and audio.
So how far are we from an at-home “virtual reality” experience?
1) On the topic of sound, there was a great TED talk by Woody Norris on his creation of directional sound. A simple pictoral explanation here.
This tech seems like a reasonable, way to provide virtual locations for sounds.
2) We need to translate facial expression into the virtual world. This will allow us to communicate on more “channels.” I have a gut feeling that this will be a) easier technologically and b) personally preferable to actual true video interaction. True, it’s “less real” to map your expressions onto an avatar, but it retains the anonymity and virtuality of the online world, two valuable components. As long as the mouth and eyes could be captured and mapped, perhaps using the facial action coding system.
We already have facial recognition software– even if it is a bit racist.
3) Next we need projectnatal style motion capture to sense where your head is moving, and change the image on the screen accordingly. If I turn my head left, the on-screen image could scroll left. This adds to the feeling of presence, and frees up the hands.