Unreal Engine, Epic Games, Vicon. She’s not real but she’s rendered in real-time.
How close are we to being able to participate in movies, rather than just watch? When Netflix and Steam aren’t something you turn on but something you step into, shows and games will be immersive; environments and characters will be interactive. An amazing confluence of AI, graphics, and hardware is on the brink of transforming entertainment as we know it. A great deal of such technology was on display at the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Here are some takaway conceptions that might just make you super stoked about the future of immersive visualization.
The science fiction sensation Ready Player One will soon become a Steven Spielberg picture. That means the idea of the Oasis, a virtual reality universe central to the future and more vast than the physical Earth, is about to become a household concept. Just imagine the possibilities of a digital cosmos with infinite clubhouses and vistas, its own economy, and untold expansions in the possibilities of interaction. What would be necessary for such a place to take form IRL?
First, who even has a VR headset? Not enough people. The current models are amazing in experience but less than convenient to setup. The industry is moving toward wireless headsets with batteries built in, as evidenced by Oculus’s only public demonstration: the unreleased Go headset. It’s a $200 unit with a battery that lasts half a day. Enough to watch several episodes of Rick and Morty on a virtual space cruiser or play a game with friends.
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Amy Sterling. Settlers of Catan in Virtual Reality
VR with friends is the VR that will stay. Suddenly, geography doesn’t dictate who hangs out. Watch as interactions blossom beyond a 2D news feed. For example, take Catan in VR. A popular board game becomes a completely natural social experience that unfolds in a stunningly beautiful lodge over a 3D animated Catan gameboard. If you look closely, tiny sheep wander and sulking thieves prowl.
It’s amazingly intuitive to grab and move pieces; to give a thumbs up and roll dice; to shift your UI around and lock it in place. And it’s really fun. Still, the social VR experience of Oculus, the headset owned by Facebook, a company worth $450 billion, leaves much to the imagination. You exist as a floating head with disconnected hands. No microexpressions are translated into VR, which means movement and voice are your only means of communication.
It’s surprising how much you can infer just by head movements and finger-level hand tracking. And haptics is a whole other story. A vibration across a vest or gloves becomes an explosion, a portal, an enhancement of the experience. Haptics are coming and they’ll let you feel the virtual world.
Thankfully, that drive of humanity to ever-expand beyond the present yields impressive advancements of everything, including simulated characters in VR. A landmark collaboration between Unreal, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Tencent, Vicon, and several researchers resulted in a photorealistic digital human that can be “driven” aka rendered in real-time by a real human. I’ll have to write a separate blog on this. Until that happens, please enjoy a demo video below and watch the State of Unreal ’18 to learn more about how this was accomplished.
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Source: Forbes