Intel recently hosted a 100-year-old man at its virtual reality lab in Hillsboro, Oregon. Lyle Becker was a big fan of the VR flight simulator, which reminded him of the planes that he flew in World War II. That kind of first-time experience evokes a sense of wonder at the immersiveness of VR, and that’s why Kim Pallister, director of VR excellence at Intel, believes so much that VR will be a transformative medium.
While VR is off to a slow start, Pallister believes that it will catch on in the long run. Intel recently pivoted away from a tech demo that it called Project Alloy, a stand-alone VR headset, to something entirely different. The first generation of VR headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, are connected to powerful personal computers via wires. Everybody wants those wires to go away, but how you tackle the issue matters.
Pallister said Intel tried at first to put the processing power in the headset itself so that you don’t have to connect a wire to a PC. But the company also worked on connecting the headset display to a PC via a wireless technology. Pallister thinks that will deliver a much better experience.
The WiGig wireless networking technology, which uses a short-range 60-gigahertz radio, can transfer data at fast enough rates to feed VR imagery from a PC to the display in a VR headset. With the WiGig connection, VR headset makers will be able to exploit the extra processing power available in a full desktop computer, rather than a more limited processor that has to run on battery power in a compact headset.
I recently joined a small group of journalists who jointly interviewed Pallister. We talked about Becker, the immersive nature of VR, Project Alloy, WiGig, and Intel’s partnership with Blueprint Reality on a VR presentation technology. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
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Above: Kim Pallister runs a VR lab at Intel.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: I saw that video of the 100-year-old man visiting [the VR lab].
Kim Pallister: That was in my lab up in Oregon. That was so much fun. We had a guy based in Oregon. His daughter is friends with the ops manager on my team. She said, “Hey, my dad is really into tech. He’s been hearing about VR, and I know you work on that.” We said, “Bring him by!” We have this open — the lab is behind locked doors, but there’s a “knock for VR demos” sign up, and we bring people in all the time. People bring their kids in. It’s a bit of a zoo sometimes.
We brought this guy in. He’s 100 years old. If I’m as spry as he is at 100 years — the guy came booking into the lab. He’s in great shape. We put together some demos for him to film it and make a thing out of it. He was a pilot, a commercial pilot, and a pilot in World War II. He flew these supply routes that went from Burma over the high mountains in southeast Asia. It was known to be a pretty dangerous route. If you took the wrong route in the dark, you’d hit a mountain you couldn’t get over. We thought, “Hey, we’ll put him in some flight sims and see what he thinks.”
The one question we asked him was — he was born in 1917. You’ve seen the advent of television, the advent of computers, the advent of the internet. You’ve seen the advent of commercial flight. So what’s the one technology you think was the biggest thing? You’d think maybe the internet, maybe computers. Maybe that’s my bias because I work at Intel. But he says, “Without a question, GPS.” As a pilot, seeing the world before and after, that’s the biggest delta.
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Source: Venture Beat