The sounds of the
ending credits of the movie was quickly drowned out by our excitement at
praising and criticizing the movie. Our
voices echoed throughout the vast white space around us. “You know you should decorate this room with
more than just a TV and couch,” one of my friends commented as he looked around
at the bare space around us. I replied, “Eh,
the bare essentials is good enough for me.
I’ll be right back, I think I hear my cat asking for food again.” I
press a button the vast whiteness suddenly turned dark. I removed the head set from my eyes and
confirmed my cat clawing at my pants while meowing.
This could soon be our reality! The consumer version of the Oculus Rift comes
out some time next year and with it the untapped potential of its revolutionary
technology. I believe that this device
will be the starting point for a new chapter in digital media technology. The theoretical applications of this device
have ranged from simple office usage to enhanced gaming technology. If linked to a social network or a program
like Skype, one could create a 3-D digital chat room where the users can look
at each other and hold a more realistic conversation (this being even more
enhanced with emerging 3-D sound software).
From a social standpoint, it would make friends separated across the
world to meet together in their digital rooms and play together. I believe it would be trivial for these rooms
to display screens where friends can watch movies together or play games by
using input from real controllers to play games on a virtual screen. Movie theaters could use this technology to
create a new level of immersion for the audience. Imagine having a headset on that allowed you
to look away from the action and turn to the scenery around yourself and more
fully appreciate the beauty of the scene (of course this would depend on the quality
of the movies utilizing this technology, but that’s not what I will discuss
here). I have seen a university
developing the next generation of roller coasters using the Oculus Rift. They have discovered that when the human body
is experiencing centripetal force from a turn in a roller coaster, it is unable
to discern the exact degree of change.
This allowed students to create a digital ride that masked on top of the
existing roller coaster, but completely changed the path while giving it a new look.
Despite such an optimistic outlook on the potential of the
Oculus Rift, there is one area of concern that I have with this emerging
technology. Ever since the start of this
class, I had been disturbed by my discovery of how many people (primarily the
younger generations) are concerned and obsessed with things such as social
media and smart phones. I have known
people who literally cannot keep their hands off their smart phones to check
something every few minutes. When my friends
and I go out to eat, we sometimes have everyone stack their phones into one
pile so that we would socialize with each other instead of with our
phones. From what I recall, the price of
the Oculus Rift is slated to be around $500 or more. If this price were to drop low enough, I
could imagine that owing an Oculus Rift, or any similar device, being as common
of a sight as owning a smart phone. Imagine
people simply laying or sitting down all day while communicating through their
headset instead of even bothering to walk 3 blocks down to actually meet with a
friend. The final destination of this
train of thought lead me to the movie “Wall-E” where the surviving humans move
around in floating chairs and don’t even bother looking left or right because
they had a screen in front of them to talk too.
They are lost inside a virtual world that makes them ignore the real
world.
To me, the Oculus Rift brings joy and concern. This technology is the starting gate for the
creation of immersive virtual worlds. I
can imagine large vast recreations of popular worlds such as Middle-Earth from
The Lord of the Rings. Being able to
look around and explore the creations of creative developers would be awe
inspiring. Therein lies the danger that
people may become too immersed in this technology. This brings me to my final question, what’s
next? I will leave this next portion as
a separate blog post, but I will reveal that my next post will relate the
Oculus Rift to a similar technology introduced in the anime “Sword Art Online”
called the NerveGear.
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