After being successfully crowd-funded, the consumer version of the much anticipated Oculus Rift is still a mystery. This concept by Carlos Pendas gives a glimpse as to what we might expect the virtual reality head-mounted display to look like. It’s designed around 3 main features: a curved screen, integrated headphones and a gesture recognition system. Simple and friendly, it’s a far cry from the gargantuan headsets of yesteryear!
A group of students from the Royal College of Art have invented a virtual reality tool that allows designers to sketch in three dimensions (+ movie).
Gravity consists of a stylus and a tablet, familiar tools used for digital drawing, that have been adapted specifically for sketching in 3D. The tools can link to almost any augmented reality headset and the team have also connected it to an Oculcus Rift virtual reality device using a Unity 3D engine.
Developed by RCA students Guillaume Couche, Daniela Paredes Fuentes, Pierre Paslier and Oluwaseyi Sosanya, the product allows any user to draw in 3D without a screen or computer.
“Gravity was developed specifically for creatives,” the designers told Dezeen. “We designed it to be simple enough so it could be used by everybody without prior explanation. It makes creating shapes as easy as doodling on a piece of paper.”
As the user draws above the clear acrylic sketchpad, radio signals are used to track the movements of the stylus from coordinates on the pad. These are sent to an Arduino board – an open source prototyping device containing a micro controller – which is contained in a black panel that forms one edge of the pad.
This communicates with virtual reality or augmented reality devices to generate a 3D drawing. Controls on the pad can change the planes on which pen is sketching, meaning the drawing can be given volume.
The drawings can be rotated and approached from any angle and other people can view the drawing using their own headset, and even add to it.
“The project started with a strong belief; the tools that are commonly used for drawing, designing and making things in 3D limit people’s ability to bring their ideas to reality,” said the team.
The designers believe the technology could be applied to a multitude of fields, from animation to medical science. “Gravity was designed to be a tool for creation and collaboration.”
“We think that new technologies, and in this case, augmented reality, should be used only when it makes sense for the user,” they continued. “Designers are always looking for the best tools to effectively bring their ideas to life. We believe this new way of creation will revolutionise the way we, as designers, create.”
Feature: as Facebook buys virtual reality headset maker Oculus and Sony reveals its own VR device, Dezeen explores what the resurgence of this old school technology means for designers.
Oculus VR was already bigbefore Facebook bought the virtual reality headset maker for $2 billion. A resurrection of dead technology from the 1990s, Oculus Rift had previously been branded as a gaming device, but with Facebook’s acquisition VR’s progression into the digital world in general has been accelerated.
“Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a call to Facebook’s investors, while his announcement post painted a picture of the world donning headsets to watch tennis, study in classrooms and consult with doctors.
Facebook sees Oculus Rift as a chance to profoundly transform communication, and to the gaming industry it’s a generational leap in electronic entertainment. But there’s more to virtual reality. It’s as much a creative tool for designers and architects, as it is a new medium for designers to explore, and a close and personal way of experiencing the creations of others.
And good god it’s difficult to explain why to anyone who hasn’t tried modern virtual reality devices. Rewinding to the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco just last week, Sony neatly illustrated this fact in its reveal of its own prototype virtual reality gaming headset, Project Morpheus.
Sony’s president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, called the peculiarly powerful effect of being sensorily immersed in virtual reality “presence”, acknowledging just how hard it is to relate its effect of “being there”. Seeing it formatted in double vision on YouTube doesn’t cut it at all.
Outwardly you look dorky, with a bulky headset strapped to your head, swinging it around to see things that aren’t really there. But inwardly the experience is remarkable, your virtual gaze mapped exactly and immediately to your real one. The ability to crane around obstacles, lean close to study objects or track an enemy starfighter as it loops over your cockpit is enveloping. And it clearly has further application than games.
At its Morpheus announcement, Sony saw it complementing Google’s ongoing 3D interiors mapping project Indoor Maps, which allows you to sample hotels and shops before you visit. Indeed, Oculus Rift has already been used for a sort of viral tourism from its earliest demos, taking users on a visit to Tuscany, Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, and the EUseum, a virtual gallery that presents high resolution paintings to study.
It therefore isn’t much of a leap to seeing it being used as an architectural visualisation tool, something that both architects and technologists have actually been exploring since virtual reality’s advent. Importing from CAD into 3D game engines like Unity is relatively easy, allowing companies like Arch Virtual to spring up to offer walkthroughs of prospective projects along with environments for military training, medical simulations and advertising.
Instead of the all too familiar glossy render, with virtual reality you get to examine the details: the weight of a wall, the expanse of a void, the shifting sightline as you freely move across an aperture. Clients can experience their commission before they sign instead of just pore over abstract plans.
There are applications in product design, too. Ford uses virtual reality to sample new car designs, allowing the chance to inspect an interior from the perspective of the driver or passengers. Ford argues that it allows the company to assess designs far earlier in the process than before, from material finishes to colour schemes, in different light conditions and environments.
As well as sampling designed objects and spaces, virtual reality also has an application in creating them, whether in CAD or ZBrush, breaking beyond the perceptive confines of 2D displays. As an idea of how easy the new generation of virtual reality software and hardware makes manipulation of objects in 3D space, there’s MakeVR. It uses wireless motion controllers similar to those popularised by Nintendo for its Wii console to make interaction seamless. Shorn of the complex menus found in a lot of design software, virtual reality helps to democratise 3D design – in terms of skills and knowledge if not financially. Spool the 3D models out to a 3D printer and production is further pressed into the hands of the many.
On the other hand, it’s possible to use 3D sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect to map fully textured environments or objects for use in virtual reality. Through a confluence of breaking technologies, 3D as a medium for creatives to work in has become a reality.
There are many hurdles ahead. A major one is that virtual reality in its current iteration is insular, highjacking your senses and removing you from the real world. Whether you’re in a living room or a studio, you don’t get to share glances with those around you. Moreover, wearing a headset for extended periods is less than comfortable and has a tendency to make people fall over. Aside from its weight (which isn’t exactly heavy but it’s an unaccustomed bulk), nausea and dizziness can result from a lag between head movement and seeing the result, how quickly the screen refreshes and the speed at which things are moving in the virtual space.
But still, Facebook’s just bet $2 billion on virtual reality, a discarded tech from the mid 1990s, finally making a comeback. We’ve experienced enough Hollywood visualisations of a computer-vision based future, and increasingly the confines of the 2D – and even 3D – TV screen are becoming suffocating, failing to express the richness of the virtual things and places that creatives are making. Virtual reality might be yesterday’s future, but that isn’t making it feel any less fresh.
“This is really a new communication platform,” said Zuckerburg. “By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life.”
First launched on crowd-funding website Kickstarter in 2012, Oculus Rift creates an immersive computer-generated environment in front of the wearer.
The technology is already set to change the way video games are played and Facebook plans to see this realised. “Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate,” said Zuckerburg.
“Oculus Rift has been sort of the poster child for virtual reality,” Millns said. “What you’ve got essentially is a seven-inch mobile phone-type screen and two lenses. It’s that simple.”
“I think augmented reality and virtual reality will essentially converge into the same thing”, says Millns.
The co-founder of Inition explains that the next generation of appliances will blur the once-clear distinction between augmented technology devices like Google Glass and virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift headset.
“There’s two strains of headsets: the Google Glass-type which only gives you a small image in the corner of your field of view.” says Millns, referring to Google’s augmented reality spectacles which can overlay digital information like maps and internet searches into the user’s field of vision.
A view through Google Glass
“The other strain is the Oculus Rift type, which is designed to replace the entire world and give you a high resolution and the biggest picture possible.” says Millns, referring to the strap-on motion-responsive virtual reality googles from Oculus VR.
Oculus Rift headset: an example of a virtual reality device
“Eventually those two things will converge [into] some sort of contact lens which goes in your eye and does both of those things. It will give you a huge image at high resolution but also the ability to see through and mix images with the real world”, says Millns.
Artist’s impression of an everyday augmented reality view, for Google Glass
Millns also predicts that the integration between displays and humans will become tighter and tighter, leading to what he calls a “cyborg situation where you have something embedded inside your brain that has a direct interface to your visual cortex.”
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in our first movie looking at the interface between design and technology, Andy Millns of 3D production company Inition claims virtual reality will soon become almost indistinguishable from the real world.
Based in Shoreditch, east London, Inition specialises in using new technologies such as virtual reality to create a range of experiences and installations.
“Virtual reality was the technology that set me off on this career path in the first place,” says Millns. “I was absolutely obsessed with virtual reality in the early nineties; now it’s very exciting that the hardware has finally got to the point where the experience matches people’s expectations.”
The studio has been working with the developer version of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that was announced on crowd-funding website Kickstarter in 2012. The consumer version is currently in development and expected to launch this year.
“Oculus Rift has been sort of the poster child for virtual reality,” says Millns, before going on to explain how straightforward the device is. “What you’ve got essentially is a seven-inch mobile phone-type screen and two lenses. It’s that simple.”
The developer version of Oculus Rift has a very low-resolution screen, but with the pixel density of mobile phone screens rapidly increasing, Millns says it won’t be long before virtual reality becomes as life-like as the real world.
“We’re going to see this year a headset where it’s starting to get quite difficult to distinguish whether you’re actually wearing a headset or not,” he says. “When we start to get super-high-resolution headsets with the type of display technology that we’re seeing on the market now, it’s gong to blur the line between what is reality and what is virtual.”
It’s most recent project using the Oculus Rift device was a collaboration with the fashion designer Gareth Pugh called Monolith, which was installed last month at Selfridges for the London department store’s Festival of Imagination.
Visitors entered a soundproofed booth and put on a special helmet, which transported them on a virtual reality journey through monochromatic cityscapes populated by ghostly figures based on the sculptural costumes Pugh created for the Royal Ballet.
“You walk into the store, put the headset on and you’re immersed in a three-minute experience inside the world of Gareth Pugh,” Millns explains.
The problem with our fancy gadgets and social media is that it’s now easier than ever to get lost in documenting experiences rather than just experiencing them! While you’re clicking the record button, life is passing you by! This far-out video recording concept, the Nikon LIN, aims to capture life’s experiences without distraction, allowing the user to live freely and relive the experience later in 3D. How?! With a flying camera that floats above your head and wearable glasses cam that together see everything you see! DO WANT!
The system actually consists of two elements- the first is the flying cam that captures 360 degree views in 3D, and the other is a wearable pin-cam that records experiences from the user’s perspective.
Introducing… the future! The Eidos concept consists of two experimental products that let you fine-tune your sight and hearing to experience visuals and sound like never before. Essentially, the devices enhance what our bodies already do and the applications are endless – athletes can use it to hone in on their physical technique, musicians can perfect their sound, or spectators can view live performances like ballet with previously invisible/inaudible details. Incroyable!
Eidos Audio lets us hear speech more selectively. It neutralizes distracting background noise and then amplifies the speech you choose. Unlike conventional headphones that have two channels, Eidos Audio has three: left, right, and a central mouth piece that uses the principle of bone conduction. This creates the unique experience of hearing someone speak right inside your head.
Eidos Vision enhances the way we see motion, achieving a similar effect to long exposure photography for live experience. By detecting and overlaying movement, it allows us to see traces and patterns hidden to the naked eye.
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