We are over 260 episodes into the series,
but believe it or not, we haven't had a single
episode on virtual reality.
So at this point, you probably know that this
paper has to be really good.
The promise of virtual reality is indeed truly
incredible.
Doctors could be trained to perform surgery
in a virtual environment, or even perform
surgery from afar, we could enhance military
training by putting soldiers into better flight
simulators, expose astronauts to virtual zero-gravity
simulations, you name it.
And of course, games.
As you see, virtual reality or VR in short,
is on the rise these days and there is a lot
of research going on on how to make more killer
applications for it.
The basics are simple - we put on a VR headset
and walk around in our room and perform gestures,
and these will be performed in a virtual would
by our avatar.
Sounds super fun, right?
Well, yes, however, we have this headset on,
and we don't really see our surroundings within
the room, which makes it easy to bump into
objects, or smash the controller into the
wall, which is exactly what I did in the NVIDIA
lab in Switzerland not so long ago.
My greetings to all the kind people there,
and sorry folks!
So, what could be a possible solution?
Creating virtual worlds with smaller scales?
That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't
it?
There has to be a better solution.
So, how about redirection?
Redirection is a simple concept that changes
our movement in the virtual world so it deviates
from our real path in the room in a way that
both lets us explore the virtual world well,
and not bump into walls and objects in the
meantime.
Most existing techniques out there either
don't do redirection and make us bump into
objects and walls within our room, or they
do redirection, at the cost of introducing
distortions and other disturbing changes into
the virtual environment.
This is not easy to perform well because it
has to feel natural, but the changes we apply
to the path deviates from what is natural.
Here you can see how the blue and orange lines
deviate, which means that the algorithm is
at work.
With this, we can wander about in a huge and
majestic virtual landscape or a cramped bar,
even when being confined to a small physical
room.
Loving the idea.
This technique takes into consideration even
other moving players in the room and dynamically
remap our virtual paths to make sure we don't
bump into them.
There is a lot more in the paper that describes
how the whole method adapts to human perception.
Papers like this make me really happy because
there are thousands of papers in the domain
of human perception within computer graphics,
many of which will now see quite a bit of
practical use.
VR is going to be a huge enabler for this
area.
Thanks for watching and for your generous
support, and I'll see you next time!
