Gadgetory

I'm here at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies in LA since it was founded in 1999 ICT has been where people go to research how we might teach learn move and talk in the future it's where you go to see how things that seemed like science fiction 10 or 20 years ago could become a basic part of human communication this is one of the centerpieces of ICT the wide five a professional-grade VR headset that's nearly ten years old the red lights on those horns talked to a tracking system that covers the room and you can put them on anything gloves shoes even a drone so first time I've ever moved my feet in VR I think I like seeing my avatars feet in VR yeah so it's a big deal right if you're tracking hands and tracking feet and tracking torso it completely transforms the experience you can see the path it that you walked this is an experiment and redirected walking I feel like I've been exploring a whole compound but some clever visual tricks mean I'm really just going in circles the goal is to implement this in various training regimens so the Army has a system called dismounted soldier training system where they take a squad of men and women and they put them in head-up displays and then they run them through a virtual scenario turns out that it's much more effective if you start to involve the body as well as the mind in an immersive scenario so the lab has gotten pretty good at this and we can we can fool you into thinking that a small track space is a bigger space the next steps that the lab is working on is what happens if I now have two people in the space because now I have to keep them from running into each other so imagine being able to play Madden and move around and do Madden without getting in each other's way what we're really focused on is how can humans use this for training and learning opportunities we know that robots and drones and all of these autonomous semi-autonomous objects are going to be part of the landscape the whole sort of steampunk ethos of I'm gonna put my Wi-Fi up on a drone and I'm gonna put my sensor systems up on the drone and I'm just gonna have portable sensors wherever I want is gonna come through once you put those sensors up they can do something like tell a drone in a disaster area exactly where to go no matter how much it gets knocked around so the computer is telling it to stay in this spot see now it's upset because I'm basically giving it more to push it up and then it realizes that it wants to go back down ICT gets funding from the US military and one of the things that's produced is project blue shark a prototype for the future of ships it's an augmented reality command center made from an oculus rift and a bunch of displays which could show pictures and controls or be totally blank the images could be projected onto them with a headset it's supposed to make you feel like you're right up in the crow's nest even if you're really in a dark room miles away the actual design would have to be a lot more sophisticated than this but that's up to the Navy and a future VR designers the reality is it's going to change the way that you design the ship it's going to change the way that you design the ships complement the number of people the type of tasks that they do the structure of the Navy itself it all changes because you can now start to immerse people in these environments and once you hit robot arm so this is an example of connecting a physical world object with the virtual these prototypes are never going to go up for sale to the general public but the effects could trickle down the whole sensor market so wearable sensors you know Apple watches of is kind of a bad first generation but Apple will evolve it and get it better over time to do a limited set of things but body sensing is going to be huge all of that stuff is going to start to crash together and we'll probably wonder how we got along without it as long as it doesn't end up becoming Skynet even if it's not Skynet does making military technology raise ethical questions any technology has the ability to be used for positive outcomes and it can be used for negative outcomes is it is it ethical to scan one of our employees and then make him dance ICT was working on VR years before the oculus rift type but there's still a lot of work left one of the biggest obstacles is haptics which companies like Disney have been working on and that ICT is interested in too if you want to immerse someone you need to immerse all of the senses and right now we're very far along the way on the visual and we're very behind on all of the other senses so I think that's those are areas that are really ripe but they're really really difficult problems if you look around I see teas lab you can see the past and future of technology whether that's drones or light-filled video or body scanning or a predecessor to Google cardboard it's tied in to everything that we talk about when we talk about virtual reality augmented reality and telepresence and if I came back in a year I'd probably see even more