Darwin’s Theory of….Virtual Reality

Have you ever found yourself wondering where technology will take us next? At Landmark we’ve been asking ourselves that very question about augmented multimedia, often referred to as Virtual Reality, and wanted to share a few things with you.

We’ve seen two main styles of technology which we think are relevant to our customers and we’ve classed them as “assistive” and “immersive”. The assistive style presents you with something in addition to your view of the world but does not necessary fully integrate with it. The immersive style will either replace or fully integrate with your experience of the world around you. Let’s take a quick look at some examples.

Our Google Glass device is a good example of assistive VR. The unit provides a small projected image directly in front of your eye which appears as the equivalent of a 25 inch screen about 8 feet away. It responds to movements of the head and has a touch sensitive panel to one side for more direct manual controls. There is nothing between your eyes and the world except a small panel of information so it feels a very natural experience. As it accepts voice commands and has voice recognition, this makes it particularly useful in situations when speaking will allow you to do more activities in parallel.

 

 

With immersive VR, we’ll look at two ends of the cost spectrum. For the more premium user, we have the Oculus Rift. This device is fully immersive (YouTube videos of user reactions will show you some of the down sides of this!). Slightly different projections of the same image are directed at each eye, giving the effect of 3D reality. Couple this with a good pair of headphones and it is incredibly effective for simulations in controlled conditions. Oculus VR started via Kickstarter, the crowd funding site, and Facebook purchased the company for $2 billion earlier this year so we eagerly await how the technology will be exploited.

On a lower budget, we have Google Cardboard. This is a fantastic, low tech, reuse of everyday hardware to create a virtual reality experience – and it started life as a hobby project at Google. It is a cardboard headset in which you place your mobile phone. The “Cardboard” phone app then replicates the experience of more expensive headsets by displaying the two slightly different images on each half of your phone screen. Using the phone’s camera and spatial awareness, this creates a very passable version of the technology. All for around £15.

 

 

Finally, something between the two. Layar is an app which has been around for some time and creates layers of information on top of reality. It uses the spatial awareness of your mobile device to plot useful information on the image seen by your mobile device’s camera. It’s not immersive, but does allow your view of the world to be augmented with useful information. This technology is frequently used with printed media (newspapers / magazines) to add augmented reality to two dimensional media.

 

 

In summary, and unsurprisingly, we think that each flavour of virtual reality technology has potential uses and pitfalls. We will track the progress of this technology as we continually look for new and innovative ways to empower our customers, and provide the most effective access to our products and data.

Darwin Lee

Head of Development
Landmark Information Group