My battle with the undead took place at the Bellevue office of VRstudios, of which Herrick is CEO. Inside a trussed 15-by-18-foot space rimmed with eight cameras that tracked my motion, I was firing at zombies that emerged from glowing red catacombs beneath a 19th-century London alleyway. As zombies are wont to do in shooter games, they came at me with increasing frequency; soon, I was surrounded.
I fired away, blood splattering in viscous red streams. (The experience is a bit visceral — a customer in Dubai asked the zombies’ blood to be colored green.) I was rapidly spinning in circles as the zombies came from all directions. When they were close enough, I instinctively pulled back my arm to keep from touching beasts that weren’t really there.
But in five years, Herrick expects enterprise applications to make up the bulk of the company’s revenue. The condo model I saw could be used by a landowner to show off properties to customers, a home builder to allow customization, or a retailer to let a customer see how products will look before buying them. Design firm Teague uses VRstudios’ technology to simulate aircraft interiors. Other companies across the Eastside and the rest of the Puget Sound are following VRstudios’ footsteps into the nascent virtual reality sector. The technology is having its first major resurgence since it flopped in the early 1990s, and many believe it could be as disruptive as the smartphone. But for VR to become a transformational medium, for its suspensions of reality to weave into our everyday lives, it needs to handle the more mundane everyday tasks as well as it handles shoot-’em-up zombie games.
In an incredibly brief and collaborative process (of the intellectual property relationship between Valve and HTC, O’Brien said, “It’s a really strong partnership, I’ll tell you that much”), the two companies built the Vive, the lone consumer headset coming out this year that operates at room scale, meaning the user can walk around the virtual space instead of navigating with a controller. It’s a goal straight from Star Trek. “This is the holodeck — putting people in the middle of the content and not looking at it like it’s a museum or from a seated position,” O’Brien said. When the Vive is released in April, Valve will pump content through its SteamVR store.
VR software is much easier to make than it was in the ’90s thanks to 3D game engines, particularly those from Unreal and Unity Technologies, that were popularized by mobile gaming. “Now, a middle schooler can download (a 3D engine) on their computer for free, and in an hour have their own little game that might have been a million-dollar game 15 years ago,” said Forest Gibson, a founder of Pluto VR.
One demo puts a Vive wearer on the hull of a sunken ship as a blue whale swims by. The whale really appears to be 100 feet long, its eye big as a dinner plate, and it grumbles a throbbing bass that’s distinctly aquatic. There are VR jet packs, roller coasters, and scary films that are more tense than their fixed-screen, two-dimensional counterparts. Shooting games are hilariously fun, and the potential for gaming as a whole is obvious.
Still, VR’s not flawless. The high-end headsets are tethered to a PC, and most PCs can’t meet mettle. Graphics-chip maker NVidia estimates only 13 million current PCs — less than 1 percent of the global total — are beefy enough to run VR. On the content side, people are barely scratching the surface; nobody knows how to make a feature length VR movie yet.
THE VR MARKETPLACE begins at the game studios. Game designers know better than anyone how to guide users through a 3D setting. As a result, video game firms see themselves playing a larger role in the VR landscape. “Our sweet spot is in games, but, in terms of authoring, we’re taking an agnostic view,” said Tony Garcia, Unity’s chief revenue officer, said in the company’s Bellevue office. “Instead of games, we call them experiences.
The company’s product, the Envelop Virtual Environment, or EVE, lets the user position multiple windows in what amounts to a columnular environment. The software optimizes two-dimensional programs for a three-dimensional virtual work space. It’s not totally intuitive — when I played with Web browsers and Excel in EVE, I had to focus on utilizing extra space instead of staring straight at the position my physical monitor would occupy — and the column, which lets you position windows so high you can’t see them, feels quite narrow.
for firms with international clientele.
“As these technologies mature, and we start having collaborative spaces to allow people to work together in VR, we’ll see the number of companies able to work remotely increase,” Berry said. “If that number increases … it will be massively disruptive for the commercial real estate industry.
It could improve commute times because less people actually need to go into the office.” Matt McIlwain, managing director of Madrona Venture Group, which led Envelop’s $5.5 million Series A round, agrees that the ability to transcend geography is a major selling point for VR.
“The dream was full immersion,” said Jake Rubin, who founded the company on Mercer Island before moving it to San Luis Obispo. “There’s a difference between strapping a screen to your face and a system like ours. You feel like you’re there.” AR, on the other hand, could be more commonplace. By superimposing digital imagery on the physical world, AR has a greater volume of practical purposes, and could provide what Berry called an “annotated reality” that layers relevant data (restaurant reviews, book stores, driving directions) on the real world.
“When you look at the convergence of big data, machine learning, machine vision, AR/VR display technologies, the cloud, and artificial intelligence — that’s going to be a system that knows what we want to see at any given time. That’s the 10- to 20-year time frame,” he said.
A NEW MEDIUM is distinguished by the senses it lassos. Radio gave consumers the ability to listen. Television combined movement, visuals, and audio. VR’s currency is presence, an ambiguous term denoting the feeling of being inside content as opposed to watching it.
Some technical thresholds make presence easier to accomplish. Latency must be minimized; your field of view must move with your head. It’s best if the field of view is around 120 degrees and the screen refreshes around 90 times per second; come in below those, and the mind can flag what it’s seeing as a digital fake. But once the technical requirements are met, presence becomes subjective. To some, a blue whale swimming by in a Vive is a profound experience, while to others it doesn’t compare with compelling documentary footage.
Finally, Robinson found a room occupied by a familiar face (username? avatar? What does one label a person in the virtual space?) and began chatting. “Hey, Otonka. I’ve got a journalist here, so I’m going to hand him the headset. Don’t mind my avatar shaking.” I slipped on the Gear, and was transported to a very realistic home theater. The room had five recliners, four of which were occupied by myself and three other floating-head avatars. Our seats were trained on a huge screen, primed for a Twitch feed. There was Bronx Antiguan, a yellow-hatted cowboy from New York; Anthony UK, a fox from England; and Otonka, a white cat from England. Robinson told me Otonka never changes his avatar to remain familiar and act as an usher for new Oculus Social users.