In this series I will briefly write about the current technologies in the field of commercially available Virtual Reality. The research on VR goes back many decades.

A couple of years ago Facebook acquired a company called Oculus. By combining off-the-shelf solutions in screen-, sensor-, 3d-graphics and lens technologies it was packaged into the Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 which developers could use for prototyping development of Virtual Reality applications. This has set into movement a spur of innovations taking advantage of highly capable sensor and computational techniques. Since then many startups have surfaced and devote their efforts in various fields using different software and hardware platforms.

How VR tricks your brain

When you put on a VR headset your left and right eye sees a sligtly horisontally shifted view of the VR game/experience. This gives your brain a sense of depth - something we are used to in everyday life. The actual world around you is completely blocked out and you will only see what is displayed inside the VR headset. When you turn your head the computer renders the game looking in the direction of your head. Thus creating a smooth visual update of the world 360 degrees around your head. This leads your brain into believing that what you see is in fact real (to a varying degree depending on the experience and your person). One interesting note is that the actual graphical objects you see do not have to be rendered in a super realistic fashion for your brain to believe they exist. What seems more important is consistent behaviour of the objects and a smooth and low latency rendering performance.

Technology one - Mobile VR

Using high end mobile phones users can start getting a taste of what virtual reality is about. However, in emerging markets the cost of entry for both consumers and developers is usually quite high. The VR market is no exception from this rule with mobile phones costing hundreds of dollars in order to give the user a solid experience. Two major high end solutions in this field is the Gear VR from Samsung and the Daydream platform from Google. The former lets you slide a selection of Samsung mobile phones into the Gear VR holder which is equipped with additional sensors and user interface buttons to support the mobile phone. The latter lets you slide a selection of Daydream capable mobile phones (one model being the Google Pixel at the time of writing) into the “Daydream View” holder. The user navigates and controls the experience using a hand controller capable of detecting rotational movement and acceleration forces.
A current limitation of mobile VR is the lack of positional tracking, meaning the phones can only detect head rotations but not head movements in space. They are capable of tracking motion in yaw, heading and pitch giving us three degrees of freedom - 3DOF.
A handful companies are trying to overcome these limitations using mainly “outside-in” tracking systems based on external camera sensors or magnetic field sensors.

Stay tuned for Part Two in this intro series where i'll start write about Technology Two - Desktop VR.