Virtual Reality

What is virtual Reality ?

Today the Virtual reality (VR) technology is applied to advance fields of medicine, engineering, education, design, training, and entertainment. VR is a computer interfaces which tries to mimic real world beyond the flat monitor to give an immersive 3D (Three Dimension) visual experiences. Often it is hard to reconstruct the scales and distances between objects in static 2D images. Thus the third dimension helps bringing depth to objects.

Virtual Reality (VR) vs Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented Reality (AR) that places computer generated objects on top of real world to make it more meaningful and interacting with it. The good example of AR would be PokemonGo game and IKEA app. The IKEA app uses camera so users can visualize the products being placed at their home.

VR and AR, they don’t have winners or losers as they are being better in their respective way of use. VR, for example, is terrific for gaming and watching video. Being able to fully immerse yourself is incredible, and nearly all the experiences wouldn't feel the same in AR. At the same time, the ability to interact with the physical world while seeing elements of the virtual world is fantastic for productivity and some forms of entertainment, and long term could be a default for how we interact with all kinds of computer interfaces.

History of VR

Following are brief history of Virtual Reality:

Year	Developments
19th century	Panoramic paintings : VR technology started with the introduction of 360 panoramic paintings from 19th century. These paintings filled the viewer’s entire field of vision making it an immersive scene.
1838	Stereoscopic photos and viewers: Charles Wheatstone demonstrated that viewing different two-dimensional (2D) images side by side through a stereoscope gave the user a depth and immersion. The brain processes these two images from each eye into a single object of 3D. Later it was used for virtual tourism.
1930s	Pymalion’s Spectables, a short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum presented an idea of google-based virtual reality world through holographics, smell, taste and touch making hi a true visionary of the field.
1960s	Ivann Sutherland created the first VR Head Mounted Display with specialized software and motion control platforms which became standard for training.
1987	The name “Virtual Reality” was coined by Jaron Lanier, founder of Visual Programming Lab (VPL).
1993	Sega VR headset was announced for Sega Genesis console at Consumer Electronics show. However, it was a huge flop for Sega because it did not go further from prototype phase despite having four games developed for it. The prototype headgear had head tracking, stereo sound and LCD screens.
1995	The Nintendo Virtual boy (VR-32) marked the walkthrough of VR in public realm. It was first ever portable console displaying true 3D graphics for gaming console but it lacked software support and was uncomfortable.
1999	The Matrix, the Wachowski siblings’ film featured characters living in simulated world depicting VR. It was major cultural impact and introduced VR into the mainstream
21st century	The boom of smartphones with high density displays and 3D graphics capabilities has made a new generation of lightweight and practical VR devices possible. The video game industry developed consumer VR unabated. Depth sensing cameras suites, motion controllers and natural human interfaces are already in market for daily human-computer interaction.
2014	Facebook bought Oculus VR and developing a VR chat rooms for future.
2017	Burst of different VR devices in the commercial market.

COMPONENTS

This section shows an overview of VR systems from hardware to software to human perception to understand the working of entire VR systems.

Hardware

The hardware produces stimuli that override the senses of the user [22] based on human motions. The VR hardware accomplishes this by using sensors for tracking motions of user such as button presses, controller movements, eye and other body part movements. It also considers the physical surrounding world because only engineered hardware and software does not constitute the complete VR system. The organism (users) and its interaction with the hardware is equally important.~

VR hardware constitute of sensors which act as transducer to convert the energy it receives into a signal from an electrical circuit. This sensor has receptor to collect the energy for conversion and organism has sense organs such as eyes and ears for the same purpose. As the user moves through the physical world, it has its own configuration space which are transformed or configured correspondingly.

VR Devices

VR devices are the hardware products used for VR technology to happen. The different key components of VR system are discussed below. The figure (number) shows the high-level view of Virtual World Generator (VWG). The inputs are received from the user and his surroundings and appropriate view of the world are rendered to displays for VR experiences.

Personal Computer (PC)/Console/Smartphone

Computers are used to process inputs and outputs sequentially. To power the content creation and production significant computing power is required, thereby making PC/consoles/smartphones important part of VR systems. The VR content is what users view inside and perceive so it is equally important as other hardwares.

Input devices

Input devices provides users the sense of immersion and determines the way a user communicates with the computer. It helps users to navigate and interact within a VR environment to make it intuitive and natural as possible. Unfortunately, the current state of technology is not advanced enough to support this yet. Most commonly used input devices are joysticks, force Balls/Tracking balls, controller wands, data gloves, trackpads, On-device control buttons, motion trackers, bodysuits, treadmills and motion platforms (virtual omni).

Output Devices

Devices that each stimulate a sense organ. Output devices are used for presenting the VR content or environment to the users and it is utmost devices to generate an immersive feeling. These include visual, auditory or haptic displays. Like input devices, the output devices are also underdeveloped currently because the current state-of-art VR system does not allow to stimulate human senses perfect ideal manners. Most systems support visual feedback, and only some of them are enhanced it by audio or haptic information.

Software

Apart from input, output hardware and its coordination, the underlying software is also equally important . It is responsible for the managing of I/O devices, analyzing incoming data and generating proper feedback . The whole application is time-critical and software must manage it: input data must be handled timely and the system response that is sent to the output displays must be prompt in order not to destroy the feeling of immersion. The developer can start with basic software development kit (SDK) from a VR headset vendor and build their own VWG from scratch. SDK usually provide the basic drivers, an interface to access tracking data and call graphical rendering libraries. There are some ready-made VWG for particular VR experiences and has options to add high-level scripts.

Audio

Virtual reality audio may not be as technically-complex as the visual components, however, it is an equally important component to stimulate a user’s senses and achieve immersion. Most virtual reality headsets provide users with the option to use their own headphones in conjunction with a headset. Other headsets may include their own integrated headphones. Virtual reality audio works via positional, multi-speaker audio (often called Positional Audio) that gives the illusion of a 3-dimensional world. Positional audio is a way of seeing with your ears and is used in virtual reality because it can provide cues to gain a user’s attention, or give them information that may not be presented visually. This technology is already quite common and often found in home theater surround sound systems.

Human Perception

Understanding a physiology of the human body and the optical illusions are important to achieve maximum human perceptual without side effects. The human senses using different stimulus, receptor and sense organ.
As virtual reality are supposed to simulate the real world, it is important to know how to “fool the user’s senses” to know what are the most important stimuli and what is the accepted quality for subjective viewing? Human vision provides the most of information that are passed to our brain followed by hearing, touch and other senses. System synchronization of all stimuli with user’s actions are also responsible for proper functioning of VR system.

After understanding how the different senses, stimulus and sense organ works together to provide virtual reality to the user it is also vital to know how it works technically.

Content Creation

The recent take-off of virtual reality and its vast application has enabled many companies to emerge for different ideas to create contents. There are two ways of creating content for your virtual reality app:

Taking a 360-degree immersive videos

Taking 360-degree video is the easiest means of creating VR content. In case of 360 videos you will not be able to interact with the environment except for looking around. We also can see lots of 360 videos and it is now supported in Facebook and Youtube. Which has enabled people to upload lots of content online.

To create 360 degree video you will require a special 360 camera and with better resolution. Next step is filming where you need to maintain camera in still position or with even motion, else it would cause motion sickness for the viewer. You can also edit your video using softwares to reduce any issues while filming.

Making a 3D animation or construction

Taking 360-degree video will enable us to create content of real world but if we want to create more advanced and interactive application. Compared to 360-degree video which will let user view world from one point, 3D creation can allow us to create content where users can move in virtual world.

Easy way is to capture 3D model of real world and develop the experience. The other way is use game engine like Unity and Unreal Engine. There are lot of engine available now which would allow developers not only to create game but also for other 3D construction.

Field of View

Field of View (FOV)refers to how wide the picture is [Chinese girl ref] and is measured based on the degree of display. It also provides a realistic perception of the environment landscape. Today the most high-end headsets has 100 or 110 degree which is sufficient for most of the VR content available.

Frame rate

“Frame rate refers to the frequency (rate) at which the display screen shows consecutive images, which are also called frames”. In VR, minimum frame rate required is approximately 60 frames per second to avoid content stuttering or other side effects to users and to have a lifelike experience. Frame rates for VR headsets will increases inevitalbly in future providing more realistic experience.

Latency

The immersive applications also depends on naturalness of the simulation. Latency refers to the amount of time it takes for an image displayed in a user’s headset to catch up to their changing head position. Latency can also the thought of as a delay, and is measured in milliseconds (ms). In order for an experience to feel real, latency usually needs to be in the range of 20 milliseconds (ms) or less. Low latency is needed to make the human brain accept the virtual environment as real.

APPLICATION

With the advancement in display, sensing and computer technology, it gives the user a new VR experiences which are more realistic and immersive for different VR applications. VR can lead to new and exciting discoveries in different fields. There are wide range of applications for VR which includes:

Entertainment

The potential of VR in entertainment is clear and huge as the entertainment industry is a multi-billion dollars and consumers are always interested on its novelty.
The VR video game world was popularized already by the Disney Movie Tron in 1982. Today the video games are explored in large and realism world through an avatar. In VR games, gamers can look in any direction or walk through the scene.

Hollywood movies offers increasing degrees of realism to make user feel like they are part of the scene. They let the user totally immerse in computer generated world with the help of HMD that supports a stereoscopic view of the scene accordingly to the user’s position and orientation enhanced by audio, haptic and sensory interfaces.

Education

In addition to creating social awareness, the first-person perspective could revolutionize education scenario we have today. Anything that is too dangerous, expensive, or impractical to do in reality, virtual reality is the solution. VR offers visualisation of geometric relationships in difficult concepts or data that are hard to interpret. If the real environment is costly or hazardous to health, VR is the best choice to understand and learn it. For example, flight simulation or firefighting, nuclear power plant safety, medical procedures etc are the training in VR which are useful for education. Not just these common uses, VR education includes history, anthropology and foreign language acquisition. Students can explore the streets in 17th-century, on different era rather than just reading a book.

Health

VR technology can also help improve today’s distributed health care system, in which doctors train to perform routine medical procedures in remote communities around the world. Doctors can immerse themselves in 3D organ models that were generated from medical scan data for better planning and preparation for a medical procedure. It can also be used to explaining the patient and his family so that they make more informed decisions. VR can also provide therapy to people suffering from mental illness.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry have used virtual realty to the models and design it before implementing it.

Tourism and Advertisment

Virtual Reality has been used to create histrorical sites, which then enables users to experience it with comfort from your house. For instance you can even create the war that happened at and location and feel being in war.

T The advertisment and shopping experience would be even better with VR. In case of shopping experiences even Agumented Reality are used to get information of products.

Military

The software needed to complete this work has been tested using the following technologies:

MARKETS AND FUTURE

VR in Market

Development of more powerful hardware and decreasing cos of devices have let many players to target VR as major next technology. A report from research firm SuperData shows that VR revenue will grow 20 times of what it was in 2016. Total earning was predicted to rise by 168% in 2017 compared to 2016 and reach $37.7B by 2020 as shown in figure below.

The low growth in 2016 was due to less availability of hardware and content but it is predicted to increase in coming years. 2020 the VR software revenue would reach $19.9B surpassing hardware earnings.

Main Players of VR

We could see development of VR but Facebook acquiring Oculus in 2014 made a big impact. Since then we have seen many major companies in this field.

Nearly 89million VR headset was sold worldwide and 98% accounted for mobile VR headset type. The Google Cardboard accounts majority of the market due to its cheap price and early release. It is not considered as the best platform to build complex games or interactive applications.

In figure above, we can see the sale of other headset excluding Google cardboard. The report shows 4.5 million VR sets have been sold so far.

1. Oculus (Facebook)

Probably the most talked about VR system in market is Oculus Rift. It was first launched as a Kickstarter project in 2012 and later acquired by Facebook in 2014. Around 355k of oculus rift was sold. The less sale could be because of motion sensor not being sold along with the device.

The headset focuses more on gaming as of now but they also are exploring the business use case. Oculus claims that the device is more advance and powerful and will require more setup for business use cases like in manufacturing and advertisements.

2. Google Daydream VR

Since its launch at Google I/O developers conference in 2014, Google Cardboard has the major share of market with 84 million devices as of 2016. As the name suggest its body was made using cardboard. It was initiated as an experiment to let people experience virtual reality but it did not have any kind of interactive mechanism.

Google introduce their new device called Daydream View in 2016. Since its launch around 261k headsets have been sold. All the smartphone in market are not compatible with the Daydream view except the smartphone labelled Daydream ready. The smartphone also must run the latest version of Android Nougat 7.1 as of now.

3. Samsung Gear VR

Samsung partnered with Oculus in September 2014 to build a Samsung Gear VR. Gear VR was built to be more consumer oriented due to its lightweight, wireless and is powered by Samsung mobile phones.

The Samsung Gear VR made highest sale of around 2.317 Million devices in 2016 compared to other newly developed VR devices as shown. Gear VR is compatible with Samsung smartphone and was initially shipped along with Samsung Galaxy S7 (Edge).

4. HTC VIVE

HTC has been developing smartphones but now have partnered with Valve, a major PC gaming platform company. HTC Vive can track you over 15 by 15 feet area which gives user plenty of area for movement.

HTC Vive as we can see is more oriented towards gaming and have sold 450K devices, which is more than Oculus Rift. HTC Vive is considered biggest competitor to Oculus Rift in market as of now because other major VR developer have devices more for specific platforms.

5. Sony PlayStation VR

Sony PlayStation VR, as name suggest Sony have combined their VR headset with their famous gaming hardware PlayStation.

PlayStation VR has sold 745K of devices and is leading to its competitor HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. This could be due to the strong users of Sony’s gaming platform PlayStation, which has around 20 million users.

Comparison of Main Players

We can see the comparison of major player in the market.

Future

We can already see that virtual reality will have tremendous impact in future. The major players entering the development means we will have growth faster.

We have seen Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate video chat in an virtual environment using Oculus headset. Also the announcement of Google to collaborate with HTC to develop standalone VR headset. The device is expected to be release later this year.