My first experience with virtual reality technology was almost two years ago, when I was hanging out at a friend's house (Michael's, to be precise, who wrote this a while back). He had managed to obtain an Oculus Rift Development Kit by backing the project on kickstarter, and we were busy testing its "Tuscany" program in his bedroom.
It soon occurred to me that head-tracking behavior similar to that of the Oculus could be replicated on a smartphone, and with a swipe and a click, I discovered a few VR apps already on the Google Play store. I was honestly a little disappointed at the discovery, because for a naive second I thought that I had actually stumbled on an original idea -- but no, of course I didn't.
With smartphones being a hardware platform ripe for Virtual Reality, I wasn't surprised when Google launched "Google Cardboard" last year. Leave it up to Google to come up with a four dollar way to replace a four-hundred dollar industry standard of VR headsets. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at the quality of the experience when I tried on my own Cardboard.
Of course, the magic of Virtual Reality comes largely from clever software, rather than hardware. Google Cardboard is clear proof of this. By downloading a handful of apps from the Play store (VRSE, Cardboard, Cardboard Design Lab, Tuscany Dive), I was able to "sit in" on an SNL Celebrity Jeopardy episode, explore a virtual island, interactively observe a Syrian refugee camp, and more. Being able to look around in a virtual environment is a really neat experience.
However, VR with smartphones is still far from being completely immersive. Individual pixels are visible, shading and textures are obviously generated, gaze-tracking occasionally glitches and wanders off, and ways to interact with the environments are severely limited due to a lack of input options (since you can't use the touchscreen).
Virtual Reality is still a new and burgeoning area of technology. Over the next few years, it'll be interesting to see how VR gets delivered to consumers by various companies (Oculus Rift, PlayStation, Microsoft, Google). I'd like to make a few predictions, based on my experiences:
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