Virtual Reality

A primary category of immersive technology, Virtual Reality (VR) was born out of early experiments and research in the 1960s. It grew in popularity up until the 1990s, then nearly disappeared from the public eye in what Jaron Lanier would refer to as VR’s “long winter.” With little obvious consumer potential, developments were largely confined to the military and university research labs.

The past decade brought a resurgence of consumer VR with a wave of innovations we are still riding today. Virtual Reality and related developments will profoundly impact the way we work, learn, and play, and raise unanticipated ethical challenges.

What is Virtual Reality?

Virtual Reality refers to a digitally simulated immersive environment where users can look, move around, or interact with a virtual space or objects. Wearing a VR headset blocks out your surrounding environment, creating an immersive virtual experience. As Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford put it when done well VR is a human experience, not a media experience.

Early VR headsets were bulky and difficult to wear until the consumer VR revolution which began with the Oculus Kickstarter project. Now, we are seeing the rapid development of standalone HMDs which helps keep the technology out of the way of the experience.

Since 2018, VR has often been subsumed under the umbrella concept of XR, Extended Reality. But the term Virtual Reality remains widely used and is often better understood by the general public.

Historical Overview and Developments

Every emerging technology has precursors and Virtual Reality is no exception. Predating any hardware development was the 1935 publication of ‘Pygmalion’s Spectacles,’ a sci-fi story of an unusual pair of goggles that gave people a 3D experience that included touch and olfactory elements. In 1957, Morton Helig invented the Sensorama which appeared in 1962. The massive device was a multimedia cabinet that offered a non-digital interactive experience that incorporated sight, smell, touch, sound, and vibrations. The nearly refrigerator-size device promised “the cinema of the future.”

In the late 1960s, Ivan Sutherland’s remarkable work gave us a true Virtual Reality headset – still so large that it had to be hung from the ceiling and was jokingly referred to as the “Sword of Damocles.” Around the same time, Tom Furness was developing immersive devices for the U.S. military.

The early work of these pioneers culminated in Virtual Reality projects for flight simulation, industrial use, and military applications. Early achievements included David Em’s navigable worlds for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (as NASA’s Artist in Residence), Eric Howlett’s LEEP optical system (which became the basis for early VR imaging), and Janon Lanier’s invention of several groundbreaking devices at VPL Research (he also popularized the term “virtual reality”). The VR boom expanded in the 1990s, as the gaming and entertainment industries embraced the technology, and pop culture took notice (especially with Brett Leonard’s 1992 film, Lawnmower Man). However, the cost and size of the devices doomed the early efforts to expand its use in education, the sciences, and entertainment. When Disney closed all but one of its massive DisneyQuest VR experiences in 2001, it seemed to mark the end of an era.

The Resurgence of Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality resurfaced at the beginning of the last decade with Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Kickstarter project in 2012 (which raised an astonishing $2.4 million from 10,000 contributors) and Google Cardboard (a DIY cardboard viewer that was initially distributed as conference swag) in 2014. Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR for US$2.3 billion would lead to the release of developer kits for the Oculus Rift (the DK1) in 2013 and commercial release in March 2016. Paralleling these developments, the HTC Vive and Sony Playstation HMDs were released in the same year and shortly after, the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go arrived.

The lighter-weight headsets provided creators and consumers with more affordable access to the technology even though devices like the Rift and the Vive remained costly due to the need for a gaming computer. The field continued to progress with headsets from HP (the Reverb), Lenovo, and Facebook’s Oculus Quest in 2019, which as a standalone head-mounted display (HMD), sharply lowered the barriers in terms of cost and ease of use.

With the Facebook Connect conference in 2020, we have seen new developments, including a significantly upgraded Oculus Quest 2, Project Aria to research and deliver AR glasses by next year, and Facebook’s “Infinite Office”, a project to merge virtual and real elements (including a physical keyboard) which could leverage the benefits of Virtual Reality for productivity in the Quest ecosystem.

The Convergence of VR and AI

With the rapid advance of the technology, we are beginning to see a convergence of Virtual Reality with artificial intelligence. AI will deeply influence how virtual environments are generated, the use of avatars in VR simulations, and data gathering and analysis of user experience in virtual environments. The latter is particularly important both for the development of adaptive and personalized learning experiences in education and workforce training – and for what it means in terms of individual privacy.

One area where AI and VR will intersect is in the use of displays used in HMDs in the future that incorporate foveated rendering. These displays will reconstruct the peripheral details of our vision in virtual experiences through machine learning algorithms to compress the display data streams. HMDs utilizing this technology will likely require eye-tracking capabilities (as in the Vive Pro Eye). The developments here fit into the broader emerging media landscape where AI is being used to resolve high-resolution rendering challenges (see the forthcoming version of Unreal 5). Overcoming the hardware limitations of current Virtual Reality devices opens exciting opportunities in creating new immersive environments and could raise ethical concerns about the authenticity of our virtual experiences.

Impact of Virtual Reality on Society

Virtual Reality is creating fascinating opportunities for Education, Media, Storytelling, Journalism, Work, and Retail environments. It is already beginning to transform entertainment and learning even though we are in the first steps of a long journey. In the end, it will impact society far more than the development of the graphical interface at the Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s for computing.

VR and Ethical Issues

We are only now beginning to identify the ethical issues that will be raised by Virtual Reality. AS VR continues to progress, it will eventually blur the boundaries between the real world and the virtual in our everyday lives. We now live in a world of deep fake videos and fake news. It won’t be too long in the future where we’ll have to deal with a far more complex category – fake experiences. It is precisely this intersection of the real and the virtual that both fascinates and concerns us. It is where our work at Digital Bodies resides.