Virtual: The Reality Click - Short Edition

Coming up shortly is Newswatch, but now on BBC News,

It's fun, but it's not going to change the world...

It wouldn't fit in as much as, say, my phone would.

Not really what you want to hear when you are talking about VR.

Especially since the technology has actually been around

But it wouldn't be the first bit of amazing looking tech to simply

One of the problems is the media goes mad over it and then everything

gets overhyped, not that we would be guilty of course...

But the truth is, sometimes stuff gets overblown and the people

who buy the thing end up getting disappointed by the thing.

Well, this week, the BBC, in partnership with Ipsos Mori,

has published research into the reality of virtual reality.

16 ordinary people were given Samsung Gear VR headsets for three

months, and asked to use them in their free time at home.

And for any long-term observers of tech, the results

Actually finding your headset in the first place, it might be

shoved in a drawer or somewhere, under your bed, dust it off,

it might be dirty, it might not be totally clean.

Getting your phone and putting it into the headset,

if you have a mobile-driven VR headset, and making sure

that the phone has high battery because that will often be

Finding a piece of content to actually watch, the phone might

overheat and the experience will then stop.

You might be a family, friends or flatmates pranking

you as you are doing it so you will feel self-conscious.

Your hair might be messed up, or your make up, whatever.

And all of those various barriers come to be quite significant

behavioural hurdles to get people to do this.

These things just aren't ready for prime time yet.

They are not easy to use and they are not easy to share.

For example, as soon as I take this off my head,

it switches off to save power which means I cannot get something

going and then give it to someone else to enjoy.

It will switch off and they have to navigate to the content

It means I've ended up putting a sticker over the sensor so it does

not know when it's been taken off, which is stupid!

There's really no argument that VR can blow your mind.

But after those initial experiences, keeping people interested

Once they are exhausting the key experiences,

the novelty experiences around the roller-coaster rides,

and the horror experiences, those kinds of things,

then their enthusiasm ebbs away quite quickly.

And one of the reasons why people get bored is that there was not much

With VR content, I think there is a bit of a chicken

Obviously, to encourage more people to buy VR headsets,

it would be good to have more and more VR content.

But it costs a lot of money to make and you don't necessarily

want to invest in making the content unless you are confident a lot

So, it is difficult to put a lot of money into something

if you do not know that people will buy the headset but then

to convince them to buy the headset, maybe you have to do that?

It's a problem that's also beset Blu-ray, 4K,

We've moved incredibly far in the last two is in terms

of what has been produced, but there was a lot

There is consumer uptake of headsets, technology needs to be

better for production tools to produce that.

All of these things are happening at once and incredibly fast,

This might explain why last week Facebook cut the price

of their Oculus headset for the second time.

It's a lot to shell out for something that might just end up

By reducing its prices, oculus will probably appeal to more

people who were already considering buying the headset,

but I'm not sure it will convince many people to buy it,

It still costs about the same as a games console.

And it's not just the price of the headset itself,

you need to have a pretty high-end machine to run these things on.

And even Sony, the company that provides a high-end PlayStation 4

with its VR headsets, which has sold 1 million

of the things, told us not to get too excited about it.

I think that, in the last six months to a year,

we have seen a little bit of overhyping of

We saw this as the start of a very long process of bringing VR

You will see a lot more technology innovation.

I think content makers, game makers, and others,

including folks making television programmes,

they are really only just starting to learn what the tools are to make

Everybody knows it will take some time before we produce really good

and compelling content, but we are inventing a new medium

here and that is obviously going to take time.

But unless we start somewhere, we will never do it.

So we need to wait a few years while you guys get it right,

so there is something worth watching?

LAUGHTER You cannot develop anything unless it is in conjunction

with the audience too, say if we have no audience,

we would never be able to create something and make it really

This robot has been built to detect landmines, and sadly, sometimes he

finds them. Understandably, some can be expensive. But he has been made

on the cheap. Made with a raspberry Pi computer, this is ?50 a pop.

Every time it makes a good move, it essentially gives itself positive

reinforcement in terms of trying back again. If it is negative, does

not do well, then that is negative reinforcement. It does not try that

type of motion, reinforcing it by giving it good and bad feedback. Not

only could it potentially save lives on Earth, it could also be used to

further research in space. We want to use this to manufacture robots in

space. Rather than changing the design of the robot on Earth where

we don't have the environment it will be deployed, we can actually

just trek the material into space and manufactured the robots on the

spot. -- take. Currently, it gets tied after three

hours. So they want to put solar panels on the back. They also want

to automate them so swarms of them working together can quickly cover

large areas. This robot is good at going through sand. Not just

landmine detection, but farming, anywhere you don't want an expensive

robot interacting with dirty environments, this robot is good for

that. I have had a stutter since I was

six. It doesn't get in the way of things I do. Although it is not

curable, he has found a way to treat it as best as he can through virtual

reality. I hope to aim to benefit people who stutter. He is using a

headset which can track eye movement, something which can be

severely affected when someone is stuttering. The eyes came close,

Flickr, adjust on a place. -- flicker. It can work as therapy for

those who start. He is able to suggest similar exercises and

techniques, and in the future, he hopes his research may be used by

speech therapists in treatment. When a person is in the environment, they

will see an animated avatar. They can talk to them about a certain

topic like a favourite holiday. At that time I will be tracking their

eyes. I will advise what to do and how to improve speech as well.

Gareth has previously used a more basic headset to improve confidence

by simulating an entire audience for them to speak in front of. Although

he is only addressing the eye movement and not speech directly, he

hopes this research will improve the confidence of those who stutter, and

indeed, those who don't. And that is it for me short Click. The

full-length one is on line right now. Thank you for watching. We will

see you soon.