Paul Mealy - Virtual & Augmented Reality for Dummies

Virtual & Augmented Reality For Dummies

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Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942938

ISBN 978-1-119-48134-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-48152-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-48142-3 (ebk)

Around 25 years ago, I visited the Forest Fair Mall in Cincinnati, a large, sprawling mall that has since closed down. One of the greatest features of this particular mall (to an 11-year-old kid) was the basement arcade. Running the full length of the mall, it had everything you could want: a Ferris wheel, bumper cars, mini golf, laser tag.

But the pice de rsistance was a pair of Virtuality pods, a virtual reality (VR) experience created by the Virtuality Group. The Virtuality 1000 featured a stereoscopic head-mounted display helmet (HMD), an exoskeleton touch glove and gun, and a waist-high ring used to track a players movement within the enclosure. This specific VR experience was a local user multiplayer experience: Take on all comers in a high-energy laser battle!

My father patiently waited in line with me and handed over the $10 for me to play. By the time I reached the front of the line, I was bouncing off the walls with excitement. As the helmet was lowered onto my head, I closed my eyes, mentally preparing myself for the wonders of the virtual world I would be entering. Where would I be transported to? A lush, Amazonian jungle? A gleaming futuristic metropolis? Surely my imagination could not prepare me for the wonders I was about to behold.

Thus prepared, opening my eyes, I found a mostly empty, boxy world populated by pixelated characters. Confused and disoriented, I glanced around the crudely rendered environment, the tracking barely keeping up with my movements. I was being assailed with lasers (really, blocky lines), but the resolution of the headset was so limited, I couldnt even determine where I was being shot from. I was quickly eliminated from the game, and the headset came off. My less than two-minute experience in VR had left me (and my fathers wallet) deflated.

Fast forward to 2013, and I found myself working in the emerging technology field. The industry was abuzz with the next big thing: the Oculus Rift Development Kit (DK1), a VR headset originally launched via Kickstarter. Still sporting the scars of my previous VR experience but determined to see what the buzz was about, I sorted through the mess of cables in the development kit, hooked it up to my computer, and put the headset on with trepidation, preparing myself to be let down once again by the promise of VR versus the reality of VR.

Instead, all the things I hoped to experience in that Forest Fair mall years ago were delivered. The Rift tracked my head movements accurately! The visuals were convincing! Instead of floating in a vaguely 3D-ish landscape populated by blocks, I could wander about a Tuscan villa, watch butterflies flutter by, stand by a roaring fire, gaze out the windows 3D audio tying it all together. It all felt so real. With little to actually accomplish in the demo scene (no monsters to fight or riddles to solve), I (and everyone I showed the scene to) could spend hours just wandering about the villa, for the first time truly immersed within VR.

What was little more than a simple demo scene for a Kickstarter startup became the headset that launched a thousand companies. In one fell swoop, consumer-grade VR was re-introduced to the world, and upon seeing just how far this transformative technology has come, hundreds of thousands have jumped into this burgeoning industry to help shape its future.

VR, which was once only a plaything in tech laboratories or a research-and-development (R&D) experiment in large technology companies, has entered the mainstream consciousness. VR, and its technological cousin augmented reality (AR), are quickly proving to be the next pieces of transformational technology. Estimates vary wildly on just how big these markets might become, but many estimates place business revenue of VR and AR at over $100 billion by 2021, if not sooner.

Despite these eye-popping numbers, the VR and AR wave is still in its early stages. There is still ample time for consumers, content creators, even those with just a passing interest in learning how these technologies will affect their lives, to brush up on these technologies before the wave of mass consumer adoption hits.

In this book, I arm you with broad knowledge of the VR and AR fields, their histories, and where they appear to be headed in the future. VR and AR are vast areas of study, and many Fortune 500 companies are currently waging war to try to ensure that