Gadgetory

captain's personal log I'm entering the ship's holodeck where images of reality can be created by our computer highly useful in crew training highly enjoyable when used for games and recreation Star Trek's holodeck is the ultimate unreachable gold standard for a virtual environment right now we're still just working on getting little pieces of it right and a lot of the time these attempts are either boring or just plain bad and most projects vastly over promised whatever somebody says oh it's like the holodeck your first instinct should be to run away so why are we here at Virginia Tech's Institute of creativity Arts and Technology looking at one of the closest adaptations yet because it's a big weird ambitious step into the future of VR research okay turn to your right 90 degrees and you see the red column running up and down the middle yep okay that's the actual tornado funnel that is extending down to the ground I'm gonna point but I can't help myself that's where the actual funnel is coming out we're a Research Institute that brings together researchers from science and engineering and art and design together to collaborate in projects and the cube is one of our seven studios that really allow these researchers to collaborate in different kinds of environments nobody would ever be where we're standing in a real storm you'd be dead if you were here even where you are right now you're actually inside they're about to penetrate into the funnel if you look up through the funnel you'll see it's clear sky so these 24 motion capture cameras follow you as you move through the virtual world that data is sent up to some computers that are up above and then sent down the model is calculated as to where you are and then that image is then sent to you and rendered by your local computer onto your oculus so now you look up around we have a rigid bottom body model of you and you can through that environment so these balls on the top of my head make me look like an idiot but they create a pattern of dots that tells the room where I'm standing they work off the same principle as motion capture suits which you'll find in both film and VR but one of the interesting things about the cube is that it contract 24 different markers across the whole room which could mean 24 people or 12 people and 12 objects and so on if you still want to track a tablet for example it turns into a window onto a virtual house if your friend has a tablet too you can see each other as you walk around the rooms one of the beauties of the environment is that I can explore this area in this space and the model within this space with you in there and with everybody else in that environment as well looking at different aspects of the model so sort of like what we have in gaming where you can move through a game and there are other people in the game and they see what they see and you see them you see how much of an improvement is this over being able to render it on a screen in 3d and sort of scroll through it the way you would a video game yeah the screen the screen is what I call 3d and 2d it looks 3d but it is really 2d and so you can't go inside of it you have to stay outside the perimeter but it is our opinion that what we're seeing right now could never be seen on a 2d screen stepping into a virtual reality tornado is certainly a lot cooler than looking at a 3d model on a 2d screen but is it really conveying information I couldn't get otherwise I've never gotten a great answer and it doesn't necessarily feel like making the information bigger makes me understand it better what the cube can do though is make collaboration more natural we each get to interact with this big detailed canvas on our own terms but we exist in it together and all he has to do to show me something is point it's like the difference between showing someone the Empire State Building on your laptop and building an architectural model neither is real but one of them feels more accessible and some things you just have to experience the key to the cube is the addition of the oral environment that surrounds you you're surrounded by one level of 64 speakers those 64 speakers can place the sounds within this space here and using different techniques one of the new tech makes is something called wave field synthesis what we can do is now begin to synthesize exact sound locations in space that surround the cube if you're not using headphones right now you might want to put them on if you close your eyes you can almost forget that you're standing in black box and imagine the wind swirling around you or a house being ripped apart above your head you might have to be in a specific place to hear something or a designer can make the noise follow you around the sound lives up to the holodecks promise it sounds real because on some level in Israel the crazy distant you know what's physically possible future is yet to shine laser light into the ice itself just like the oral environment doesn't touch you you don't have to wear anything to get the oral environment wouldn't be neat if you didn't have to do that with a visual environment so right now we've moved between screen onto commercially available devices like the oculus but the eventual goal is to move all of that off body we're not even close to that goal obviously a lot of parts don't live up to the holodeck you can't even walk around on your own in VR without someone to carry a computer behind you what's exciting about the cube is that it's a blank canvas for architects musicians scientists designers companies and pretty much anyone else to work with Virginia Tech isn't trying to bring virtual reality to your living room but it's creating a space for people to build the most ambitious virtual worlds possible with as much freedom as 24 cameras dozens of speakers and 1,600 square feet will allow