Virtual reality on the verge of take-off

Ready or not, here comes virtual reality. Gaming was the focus of the original Oculus Rift headset, the virtual reality viewing device that set off the recent wave of interest in the technology. But now companies like Samsung, movie studios and Silicon Valley startups are racing to create new types of video experiences for virtual reality - and in some cases, even the cameras they will need to film it.

“The videos, the games, the phone, the operating system: Everything needs to be from scratch to make this work,” said Nick DiCarlo, who leads the virtual reality efforts at Samsung. It is “really the dawn of a new era,” he added.

But really, where are we with the development of virtual reality?
The best virtual reality headset you can buy at the moment is the $200 (Rs 12,419) Samsung Gear VR - actually built in partnership with Oculus - which requires you to also own a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. The headset works by inserting the phone into the front of the goggles, and the phone acts as both computer and screen.

For a cheaper and more universal experience, Google created a template for Google Cardboard - virtual reality goggles made out of cardboard that will fit most any phone. Like the Gear VR, you slip a phone into the headset to get started. A few companies sell them already made for $10 (Rs 620) to $45 (Rs 2,794), or you can follow Google’s instructions and build your own from readily available materials.

Microsoft recently announced an augmented reality headset called HoloLens, which may come out this year. Augmented reality is slightly different from virtual reality because it lays virtual elements on top of the real world instead of taking you into an entirely contained experience. Google has invested more than $500 million in Magic Leap, a company that is also working on augmented reality technology.

Once you try virtual reality, even despite some technical and visual drawbacks, you can easily imagine that watching short videos, playing games or interacting with friends would be fun, immersive and transporting. It’s truly a new form of entertainment - once there’s something to watch.

And content is coming. Last week’s Sundance Film Festival, for example, featured a slate of virtual reality films that included immersive news programming from Vice, and a short companion film to the movie “Wild,” created by Fox Searchlight Pictures, that lets viewers stand on the trail alongside the movie’s star, Reese Witherspoon. And 8,000 Google Cardboard headsets were handed out so festivalgoers could watch.

Oculus announced a new division within the company called Story Studio, which is dedicated to creating computer-generated virtual reality films that respond to what the user does. At Sundance, Story Studios showed its first film, a project called “Lost,” whose length actually changes depending on what the viewer does within the experience.

Jason Rubin, head of content at Oculus, said the company would continue to work on games and other virtual reality content, in addition to computer-generated video.

“Entertainment will be the cornerstone in the short run” to the rise of virtual reality, he said. “In the long run, VR has so much potential in so many ways: education, architecture, tourism. The entertainment gets it started but the entertainment is not the end of it.”
To create the entertainment, though, new hardware is needed. That is where some Silicon Valley startups are stepping in. One, a company in Palo Alto, California, called Jaunt VR, introduced a short monster movie at Sundance called “Kaiju Fury,” which was created in a partnership with New Deal Studios.

Jaunt VR makes a 360-degree camera that uses 16 heavily modified GoPro lenses inside a 3D-printed shell to film scripted movies and live events like concerts. The company’s engineers wrote software that can automatically stitch together the images from all those cameras. And then Jaunt VR creates apps that can deliver content to various headsets.
Jaunt said its next step was to build a high-end camera that it would like to license or rent to future virtual reality filmmakers.

Some of those films could eventually show up on Milk VR, a service that Samsung announced at the International CES trade show in January, which will deliver streaming and downloaded virtual reality video to owners of the Gear VR headset.

At CES, Samsung announced a partnership with David Alpert, the executive producer of “The Walking Dead.” Alpert said his Skybound studio would create a fictional series for the service but gave no other details. Samsung also announced partnerships with Red Bull Media House and the National Basketball Association.

Matt Apfel, Samsung’s vice president for strategy and creative content, said the goal was to create original series for viewers. “Not just watching one-offs of Mount Everest or Burning Man,” he said, “but a 20-episode thriller or five or six NBA series.”

Samsung has created an early prototype of a camera it calls Project Beyond, which would capture 360-degree video in 3-D and eventually stream it to headsets. Few details and no release date nor price have been announced for the camera.

Despite the rush, virtual reality is still a couple of years away for most people. Streaming a live event is daunting: Video files created by cameras with 16 or more high-definition lenses are huge, up to hundreds of gigabytes. New technologies will be needed to easily move that much data.

And the virtual reality experience is still more virtual than reality today. Watching video on the Gear VR puts you so close to the Note 4’s display that you can see gaps between individual pixels - something called a screen door effect. It keeps you from feeling fully immersed, as you might imagine.

Oculus’ most recent prototype, the Crescent Bay, is said to reduce this effect, but it’s not yet available. But it’s coming - along with a load of hype.

“Until you put the headset on, which pretty much makes everybody a believer instantly, it’s pretty hard to explain what you’re saying and why it’s different,” Rubin of Oculus said about virtual reality. “I believe it’ll take a little while, but I think it’ll grow in a way that is obvious that it’s going to be huge.”

We’ll have to see how huge. But if the level of interest of powerful tech and media companies is any indication, we’re in store for a barrage of virtual reality products in the near future.