Virtual: The Reality Click

Now on BBC News, it's time for Click.

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

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

This helmet is from the mid-1990s but it wouldn't be the first bit

of amazing looking tech to simply fade into novelty.

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 the content to watch, the phone might overheat

You might fear 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 had to navigate to the content

That 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?

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

It certainly seems that VR is struggling to become commonplace

in the home at the moment, but that is not the end

Mark has been to Hollywood to see VR that has been given

Here in Los Angeles, a company with a pedigree in movies

If the living room is not the best place for virtual

IMAX are most famous for giant cinema screens,

which is probably why the foyer in its new virtual reality

experience centre looks a bit like a cinema.

Here, players purchase tickets to try out a variety

Each one of these pods has got more than enough space in it for any

virtual reality experience that requires the player to move around

This space is, in effect, a modern version of a video games arcade.

Cables connecting the headset to a computer are fed overhead

to avoid the player tripping up on them.

So the game I am playing here is basically a wave shooter,

there are just waves and waves of robots attacking me,

From what I am wearing on my back, I can feel a little bit of rumbling

So far, so straightforward, but are some experiences

What they have built is a little bit of set here.

It is a tie in with the new Tom Cruise Mummy movie.

So I am sat on the side of the chopper, and it feels

like the helicopter has a little bit of movement to it as well.

There's a little bit of rumble underneath the seat.

So, it feels like the rumble of the helicopter blades.

While the helicopter effect is convincing,

the rest of the gameplay is a bit samey.

Spaces like this one at least allow people to try VR

without all of the mess of having VR kit in the living room.

But, taking this experience to the next level need even more

room, and for that, we have to travel to a state

which is all about wide-open spaces...

Scottsdale's Octane Raceway is the home of the first large-scale

VR space in America, from a company called Zero Latency.

The key with this next level VR is in here.

The thing is, when you put on a VR headset, this empty space becomes

a gigantic virtual canvas, on which you can paint

64 cameras track the player's movement, with the grid on the floor

assisting and allowing the computer running the show to know

So, I'm suited up and ready to go, I've got my virtual reality headset

on, which has got tracking balls on top of it so be system

in there will actually know where I am in the virtual space.

On my back is a computer, with all of the cables

between the headset and the computer hidden so that I will have total

freedom of movement when I am in the room.

Zero Latency is the brainchild of a team based in Melbourne,

It's almost a brief escape from reality, but in the sense that

you are transported to a different place.

We find that the more games incorporate walking,

and the sense of moving through a much larger virtual space,

than the physical space, that seems to ramp up the immersion.

The game I'm playing today is called Zombie Survival,

and I'm equipped with a rifle which will provide the physical

sensation of being fired when I pull the trigger,

as I try to ward off hordes of zombies.

I'm supposed to repair barricades, preventing the undead from getting

close to me as I wait to be rescued by a helicopter.

Unfortunately, I get a bit carried away.

I can see zombies coming at me from every single direction!

So, it's time to recruit extra troops.

Up to six people can play in here at once.

You cannot do this in your living room at home.

Moving around with this much space with a whole bunch

OK, so attempting that with a whole bunch of people made it

I got by with a little help from some friends.

This little fellow is called Sea Turtle.

Facebook revealed it will lodge a new service in October. Allowing

publishers to create a pay wall to their content. If you've still got a

MySpace account lurking around, it might be time to think about

deleting it. A massive security flaw might mean others may be to get

access. Steps, long the enemy of the Daleks, have claimed another victim.

So, humans took the only logical next step. This one sent first

picture. And you will soon be able to visit the ISS for yourself. And

Google announced it will be available on Street view. Or is that

space view? This little fellow

is called Sea Turtle. Designed to move, like,

you guessed it, a sea turtle, his arms are shaped

like the fins found in nature. He has been developed by researchers

at Arizona University to detect landmines, and sadly

for him, detonate them. Unsurprisingly, current deep

mining bots on the market, cost a pretty penny,

but Sea Turtle has been made Powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero

computer, this disposable device Not bad for a machine

that learns as it goes. And every time a robot makes a move,

it essentially gives itself some positive reinforcement, in terms of,

maybe I should try that again. If it gets negative,

or it does not do very well, in trying a new type of control,

then it is set negative reinforcement, then it does not try

that type of motion again. In reinforcing it, by giving it

good or bad feedback, it was able to learn

to walk upon its own. Not only could the lightweight

robot, potentially save lives here on earth, it could also

potentially be used to further One of our goals is to use this

in order to manufacture The idea is, rather than altering

the design of the robot here on earth, where we do not

have the environment, in which it is going to be deployed,

we can actually just ship the materials into space

and manufacture the robot Currently battery-powered,

Sea Turtle is fairly powered after about three hours of charge,

so researchers want to add solar cells to his back so that

he can charge himself. They also plan to manufacture

loads and alternate them, so swarms of bots working together

could quickly cover large areas. This robot is really good

at powering through sand, so not just landmines detection,

but applications such as farming, for anywhere where you do not want

a very expensive robot, interacting with very dirty

environments, this robot is very Back to virtual reality now

and I find myself in the immersive VR lab, in University

College London. Where the object is projected

onto the walls and floor, From the point of view

of my motion sensitive specs, though, the perspective is correct

and it actually looks, to me, like moving

through a 3-D world. Now, this research, actually

concerns how the environment feels, specifically if it really feels,

like this imaginary ball, It just feels, it is bouncy,

so as the ball hits the wall, I can feel it kind of

bounce back slightly. The secret is in the superfast

response time in the control. Although video generally looks

convincing if it runs at about 60 frames a second, your sense

of touch, is accurate to 1000th Any less and it will feel

like everything is spongy. As it is, the wall feels rock hard,

the walls in the foreground feel lighter, because I can

knock them over. This is great, because this

is one more step towards Where I will feel like I really am

in this virtual world. An alternative approach, of course,

is to use virtual reality technology in the actual world

that is around you. This is called augmented reality

and that is what Lara Lewington has I know many of you are eager to get

started with augmented reality, but let's show you

just how easy it is. Launched at Apple developer's

conference in June, the Apple AR kit It aims to make it easier

for creative coders, to get AR into their IOS apps

and games and developers have not wasted any time

in trying to kit out. There is the mouthwatering,

the mundane, the magical and a whole host of other amazing things,

prototyped on the platform. Apple says the AR kit could make it

the biggest AR technology platform After all, there are a lot of Apple

fangirls and boys out there. Nowhere more so than at Apple's

developer conference, where the audience were

suitably wowed by a hearty The director, Peter Jackson,

Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings, he is now really

excited about AR and to show you what he has in the works,

I am thrilled to introduce Wingnut Since this augmented reality,

you folks are in the shot too. Peter Jackson and his partner,

Fran Walsh, they had seen some AR demos of the hardware

and they were really excited about the creative possibilities,

and AR it is like a medium like no other, it offers so many

creative possibilities, Traditional storytelling

and entertainment concepts, and rolls around camerawork

and everything else, they don't necessarily work in AR,

so for the last year, we have been exploring that

and figuring out what is fun And of course, the question every

Lord of the Rings fan is asking right now, how long before

we have an augmented reality Lord I think it is an amazing

idea, there are so many I think, people would probably

love that experience, I don't know when we will see that

in people's living rooms, it is hard to judge how fast AR

will be, but we all know that it is coming over the next few

years and it will be exciting, These are the offices

of Amplified Robot, a London based studio specialising in VR and AR,

and they will be one of the first to get their hands dirty

with Apple's AR kit. There we go, yes, that looks

like a man who is walking around There are hundreds of areas that can

be brought to life with augmented reality, the medical field is one,

education for kids, entertainment, real estate, this is the promise

of augmented reality. These are some of the AR experiences

that Matt and his team have already created here without

using Apple's AR kit. Each app has to figure out

on its own how to attach its 3-D thing to the real world,

so lots of extra programming for developers and a consistent AR

experience between apps. Many of those apps rely on markers

to make the magic happen, that is either a special

image or normal pictures, like the images in this book

which the app then recognises Apple's AR kit uses a new technique

that does away with markers meaning Clearly this is still very early

days for AR as we know it, but with so many big

players like Google, Microsoft and now Apple

putting their weight behind the tech, our realities could be set

to get a whole lot weirder. I have had a stutter ever

since I was 16 years old. I don't let it get in my way,

in the way of things. Although a stutter is incurable,

Gareth has dedicated his Masters degree, to finding a way

to treat it as best he can I am creating a virtual

reality exposure therapy, and we are able to benefit

people who stutter and to Gareth is using a headset,

which has the ability to track eye movement, something that can

be severely affected The eyes can close, flicker

or fixate on a certain place and adjusting one's eye movement

is part of established speech By analysing the eye

movements of his subjects, Gareth is able to suggest similar

exercises and techniques and in the future, he hopes his

research might be used by speech I am a person who is in

the environment, if they see an animated avatar and can talk

to the avatar about a certain topic, their favourite holiday,

and over that time, I will be tracking their eyes and behaviours

and seeing what they do when they stutter, I will be

advising them what to do and how Gareth has previously used a more

basic headset to improve people's confidence, emulating a whole

audience for them to speak And although he is only addressing

the eye movement and not speech element directly, he hopes that this

research will be able to improve the confidence of those who stutter

and indeed those who do not. It is stories like Gareth's that

remind us that VR might not live or die just on its'

entertainment values. That is it from our VR Cave

here at UCL, don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter

throughout the week. Thanks for watching,

and we will see you soon. Although you may view that

as a somewhat hollow greeting once