Gadgetory

the way we are developing and treating VI it is a means to an end we are not developing we are for its own sake but in order to do better science now that you have this interface where you can work with your data in a much more natural fashion you're not just doing a science faster but you're doing in a completely different way I am Oliver Carlos I'm a researcher at the University of California Davis I am specifically in the caves project which is an interdisciplinary research project between computer scientists like myself and earth scientists on the other side with the overarching goal to develop virtual reality as a tool to enable scientific research at the time when VR really got noticed by the mainstream for the first time in the late 80s early 90s a head-mounted displays were the display modality of choice the problem was that had not the displays have two inherent issues that make them very difficult to deal with one of them is latency they require a very low response time between you moving and the system reacting to it the second part is they also are very sensitive to calibration you need to input the positions of your is relative to the very small screen very precisely in order to get a convincing image and so those were both things that couldn't really be done with the technology at the time which is one of the reasons why we are ultimately failed people ran out the video world instead of having two tiny little screens that amounted right in front of your eyes why not just use big screens that are far away from you and they are not attached to your face and hence the cave was born which is essentially a combination of three very big screens and a big floor which are projected by big projectors and then the user does not wear this pair on the face they just wear stereo glasses the same ones you would wear in a 3d movie theater that was really the first time that the VI environment was working to the point where you could really do things in it so the cave by design is a one-person environment due to the way it works it can only create a very convincing view of your virtual objects for the person who is wearing the head track glasses everybody else in the cave gets a secondary somewhat distorted view but in practice we found that our scientists are using the cave in smaller groups and that is when sort of the light bulb went off when we realize that science is collaborative not just because people work together in writing papers but really they they develop the knowledge of the extracted knowledge from their data in a collaborative fashion very naturally from that observation came then the question how can we support collaborative work that is not done in the same environment but across different environments we are trying to replicate precisely the way how people work together when they are in the same physical space but then we are trying to allow them to do it separately each one of these is a is a capturespace so to speak here in this space I'm capturing the user using 1 2 3 first generation Kinect cameras so that we get a full-body low resolution 3d scan of the person and then the same thing is true for the 3d TV only that we have only two connects one to the left one to the right because the TV is supposed to be used sitting down in front of it like this and so now I'm captured from here and from there anybody who is using this environment to a sitting here or standing here with the rift gets transported virtually into that shared space and the same for whoever sits in front of that it doesn't really make a difference if this is here or in another room on campus or somewhere across town or we've even tried it between here and Germany where latency was let's say does the problem but it still worked so this is a long-distance communication system what looks like very disparate elements is if you look at it from underlying level in mysticism a technical level is actually really one thing on the one hand we have all these different things and hardware that make VR app there's the cave and the 3d TV and the oculus rift and the project Morpheus and whatever you have in any of all these input devices from the game controller to keyboard and mouse to the kind of track one that we have in the cave and stems and Razer Hydra Zinj motion capture suit and all that so these very disparate elements those are the things that any good we our software has to unify what I am personally working on is to write that infrastructure that middleware that allows us to write software completely independently of any of those issues and while there is work in progress and I've been working for 16 years now it works really well what I'm trying to work towards is a essentially treating VR treating the VR environment like you would treat a normal computer meaning that there is some VR operating system that is running on the bottom of it but which really supports exchanging data between applications accessing your files in some form so in other words some kind of free DVR version of the kind of things you do normal operating system the main skepticism is that the virtual reality or 3d doesn't really add anything to the functionality of the system that anything we can do in VR you can also do using a normal computer but of course at much much much lower cost and that we found out is simply not true by shifting field work out of the field where you are not connected to the Internet but you don't have power where you have to wear H each day in the field costs a lot of money we can now do those things in our offices in comfort and over a much longer period of time we can just attempt to get data that we didn't even consider doing before for example we can send a team of students to scan an area after an earthquake at a very very high resolution using lidar and then spend months in the cave cleaning up our data to get not dozens but hundreds of measurements which not only give us a much more detailed view of what is happening along this fault during the earthquake but it also gives us information we simply didn't have before you