Virtual Reality Continues To Develop

 Virtual Reality  

Researcher Oliver Kreylos has been working with Virtual Reality for over a decade.  In his recent work, he has combined Oculs Rift headset, Razer Hydra joysticks and Kinect camera to create a virtual environment with a lot of promise.

Oliver Kreylos, a researcher at UC Davis has been working on immersive virtual environments for more than a decade. What you’ll see in the video above is a combination of three different technologies, all originally intended for gaming, but here set up to explore new interface paradigms: A set of Oculus Rift goggles to project a 3D environment directly into Kreylos’s eyes and track the orientation of his head, two Razer Hydra joysticks to track the movement of his hands and give him some buttons to press, and a Kinect motion tracking device.

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The use of the Kinect is especially interesting.  As Kreylos found, using the Oculus Rift headgear blocked the vision of his hands and his other devices, like the keyboard and mouse.  Overlaying 3D video from the Kinect into his VR environment, allows him to see his hands in space properly as well as other items on his desktop.

This video really demonstrates how augmented reality and virtual reality are merging and may dramatically impact how certain computer applications (as well as gaming) could evolve in the future.  As anyone working with 3D CAD systems will be aware, there is always a disconnect between the on-screen version of a 3D file and the real-world equivalent.  (This is, of course, a boon for the 3D printing industry...)

With research like that done by Kreylos, the design world may be about to make another leap, as dramatic as the one between 2D drawing and the advent of 3D CAD systems.

To demonstrate this, Kreylos also produced another video (above), which he states provides an effective benchmark for the effectiveness of the new Oculus Rift-enabled VR system.  In it, he creates a 3D dimensional Buckyball from individual digital carbon atoms. According to Kreylos this task can take as long as 45 minutes with a keyboard and a mouse, but a good 3D environment allows a person to do it in under two minutes.

The advent of a consumer-grade, affordable virtual reality system has led softare pioneer John Carmack to join Oculus as CTO.

For more about Kreylos’ work, it’s worth checking out his ongoing series of blog posts on the Oculus Rift and the challenges of virtual reality in general.

SOURCE  Quartz

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