Virtual reality is all about the real world around us

The writer realised virtual reality really is not exactly what we thought it would be. It’s actually far more real than virtual, literally like being there.

A visitor using Google’s Daydream View virtual reality headset during an event at Google’s Kings Cross office in London. Simon Dawson / Bloomberg

It’s funny, the times and places where you realise what the future is going to look like. For me, the latest – literally – was at a Cleveland Indians baseball game this summer.

I was playing with the new Samsung Gear 360 camera, a ball-shaped device that scans everything around you and then stitches it into a spherical photo. I conspicuously held the camera over my head to take a picture and the people around me naturally got curious.

I explained what the Gear 360 was and what it could do. Everyone instinctively posed. When I showed them the result on my phone and how you could swivel around the photo by swiping the screen, the reaction was universal amazement. Strangers started adding me on Facebook and giving me their email addresses so that they could admire the photo later on and show their friends.

When I got home, I inserted my phone into the Gear VR – Samsung’s associated virtual reality headset – to take a look. I was just as astonished. Not only could I see the entirety of the stadium and my fellow attendees, all smiles and fun poses, I could take it all in simply by turning my head. It was literally like being there.

It was then that I realised virtual reality really is here but it’s not exactly what we thought it would be. It’s actually far more real than virtual.

With the springtime release of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, plus the arrival of PlayStation VR last month, this year was supposed to be virtual reality’s coming out party. But that particular flavour of VR – consisting mainly of games set in computer-generated worlds – hasn’t really set the real world on fire.

Oculus sold only about 50,000 systems in its first six months of availability, while HTC moved 100,000 units over a similar time frame. The mediocre results are because of the hefty cost involved. Not only do the headsets themselves sell for US$599 and $799, respectively, they also require high-end computers, which typically add several thousand dollars to the bill.

Mobile VR – represented by the likes of Samsung’s $100 headset – has fared much better. The company shipped about 1 million Gear VR units last year, while Google moved more than 5 million of its own inexpensive Cardboard viewer, which sells for as low as $20.

The lower cost of these mobile headsets, which use inserted smartphones as their processors and displays, is driving the quick adoption, but so is user-generated content – the sorts of photos I took in Cleveland.

The cost to produce such content is also rapidly approaching zero. Spherical cameras such as the Gear 360 or the Ricoh Theta S are relatively inexpensive, at about $350 each, but they’re not even necessary to take basic photos.

Google’s Street View app, available for Android and iPhone, lets users shoot a sequence of photos with nothing but their phone while turning around on the spot. It then miraculously stitches the group of shots together into a full spherical image. The results aren’t as flawless as a proper 360 camera – you often see the bottom of your legs in the picture – but they’re still good enough to elicit a “Wow”.

The proof is there. I’ve added a few dozen 360 photos to my publicly viewable Google Maps account over the past few months and I just hit 100,000 views the other day. Nothing I’ve ever shared before has garnered so many hits so quickly.

Google’s just-released Daydream View raises the bar on $100 mobile VR headsets. Covered in soft fabrics, it’s comfortable to wear and its lenses don’t fog up. It also has a Nintendo Wii-like hand-held controller for navigating on-screen menus.

Most importantly, it comes with Google’s two killer apps – YouTube and Street View, where the wearer can dive into all manner of user-generated photos and videos.

Samsung has so far tied its Gear VR to its own phones, but Google is smartly opening the Daydream View to other manufacturers. It only works with the company’s own Pixel phones for now but additional Android device compatibility is coming soon. That will inevitably drive these trends even faster in 2017.

For at least the foreseeable fut­ure, virtual reality isn’t likely to be made up of far-out dream­scapes and fantastical worlds, as we’ve been led to believe. Rather, it’s going to consist of millions of people sharing images of the actual world that’s all around us, to be viewed in a completely new and different way. Literally.

Peter Nowak is a veteran technology writer and the author of ­Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species

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