Alright this is going be week 3 of the Weekly Mission. This week’s theme is all about ideology of Immersion& Presence within the Virtual World. I decided to go with the WATCH option, in which you supposed to watch Unite Europe 2016 – Genius Loci in VR: Building presence in VR . Unite Europe 2016 was a huge conference that centered around Virtual Reality, Machine Learning and lots of other technological ideology. This video, indeed, was a small part of the conference which focus the Presence aspect when creating a Virtual Reality environment. The speaker, Carl Callewaert, works for Unity Technology for over 9 years, now with the Global Director of Evangelism. Here is their mission statement:
Our team operates as the front line for Unity to EDUCATE the development community of today, IDENTIFY the developers of tomorrow, and ENGAGE & GROW relationships with managed customers.
– Carl Callewaert
With that being said, the guy did not disappoint us with his talk, in fact I found it a lot more interesting and funny than the majority of the Tech Talk out there. This guy was actually funny! He was like Fluffy the comedian for techies.
During the talk, he drilled on the idea of experiencing VR with “one eye”. To be truth, I was confused for the majority of the talk as the idea did not resonate with me. Why would you want to see things with one eye, when you can see with both? 🙂 Second time around, I learned that the idea of “one eye” – with the Latin name of Occulus- comes with 11 different cues, but when incorporating both eyes, lots of the visual cues from the left and right cancel each other out , therefore reduce to only 1, 2 if within 10 millimeters of distance, visual cues. This huge different is the reason why “one eye” method of seeing could be superior in certain technical scenario. Be aware that he was not telling us to walk around with eye patch on!
With one eye, we can see and understand the space through Perspective, Relative and Absolute size. These 3 visual cues are extremely important to our Vision Perception, hence determine whether the scene is reality or virtual. Shadow and Shading are also crucial component on how we view depth and perceptions. The same object repeating on itself can create depth, and the strategic shapes and size of the dome ceiling makes it appear taller. Several more visual cues proves monocular -“one eye”- to be superior to binocular -“twp eyes”. To complicate the issue even more, our vision perception changes as we move around, which create different angles, shades, motions that make object appear different.
I particularly like the visual illustration that he showed in this talk. A touch of the “Golden Ratio” here and there, different painting on the Eiffel Tower, the shadings of the European Domes, and etc. These visual cues have been known for centuries, and they have helped architecture & artists worldwide to create a bit of finesse in their work. Now, these visual cues are again put in good use in our creation of Virtual Reality. In conjunction with the VR tech from companies like MXTReality, all of our physical senses are in sync in the virtual world. As human evolution break through to a new level, we like to test out our boundaries in this physical world, then defy those ‘rules’ through codes within the Virtual World.
I can see a day, not too long from now, that we can make Virtual Reality so real to the point it is hard to distinguish between what is real and not.
Future is coming faster than we think. Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride!
Virtuoso Journal 