"In five years' time you might pay £50 for a ticket, but to say whether it was a film or a game, or a piece of theatre or a piece of VR might be less obvious because it's something that goes across all of those," says Coffey. That's not to say traditional forms of theatre will be replaced, but new technologies can augment it. The business models are still being built, and it might be ten years before this technology is ready for the big theatres, but the National Theatre wants to ensure it's not left behind once the audiences start expecting it. The National Theatre's All Kinds of Limbo is a VR musical tour through the influence of West Indian culture on the UK's music scene. Playing the game, and stepping out of the Tardis onto a dark alien world, even if I knew I was, in reality, walking across a white-walled warehouse in London, was genuinely thrilling - even if for me the fear of a) looking stupid and b) walking into a wall in the real world did take away a little of the the excitement. One example: Dr Who's Tardis can really be bigger on the inside in a VR game like The Edge of Time for the HTC Vive Cosmos headset, which I tried out when researching this feature. These games can take advantage of the way that VR can allow developers to create impossible worlds that could not be experienced in the real world except through fiction. It's one thing navigating a figure on a screen across a narrow bridge using a controller it's another thing entirely to try to do the same thing wearing a headset, even if you are 99% (OK, maybe 95%) sure you aren't really going to be hurt in the real world if you fall off in VR. You aren't just aiming a controller and moving about on screen, you're using your feet to walk around and waving your arms, or turning around to spot something behind you. This is different to - say - console or PC gaming - in one important way, because it becomes a full-body experience. The best-known uses are in gaming, which can require the headset being tethered to a powerful computer that provides the necessary processing power. VR is easier to define as a market because the headset blocks off the real world to provide you with a digital alternative. It's perhaps fitting that if you try to describe one of these VR experiences, it's a bit like retelling a dream - nonsensical and inexplicable to those who weren't there. Over time, virtual rollercoaster rides and space missions will not in themselves be enough to sustain VR and AR, even if they do provide a guaranteed source of colour for journalists writing about the often-dry subject of technology. These technologies, although clunky, are at a similar stage to cinema in the early twentieth century, or TV in the 1930s: it's a new type of media - even a new way of seeing the world - gradually taking shape.Īt the same time, VR and AR need to get past these 'fun' visions if they want to become ubiquitous technologies. That the potential is now increasingly clear is what makes VR and AR so exciting. Moving around in a VR world is confusing and can even make you dizzy, and using controllers with too many buttons when you can't see your hands means it's easy to get actions wrong.īut even with the current imperfect state of the art, it only takes a limited suspension of disbelief to almost believe you are wherever the VR designers want you to be, or that the digital objects overlaid on the AR display are as real as you are. Part of the fun is still in spotting the glitches in the VR matrix. They can be prone to stuttering and delivering images that are fuzzy or blocky, or in the case of AR, creating virtual objects that don't behave as they should, like a chair floating in mid-air. Sure, even the current crop of headsets, some with their own accompanying backpacks, are too heavy, too sweaty and too clunky. SEE: Executive's guide to the business value of VR and AR (free ebook) VR and AR have been about five years away for at least two decades now. That vivid impact has led to a steady stream of predictions over the years that these technologies are about to become mainstream. That's why something like a VR headset, which can completely alter what we think we can see, can have a profound impact - especially once headphones and additional effects (like a breeze or some smells) are added. Humans are an extremely visual species, with around a third of the neurons in our brains devoted to vision. There's a reason why AR and VR have such an impact on us.
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