Of Mice and Apes

At Sensics, my company, we get our fair share of curious inquiries. It's one of the fun parts about this business: every day the phone rings with someone eager to use our panoramic head-mounted display for a unique application.

A few weeks ago, someone called to ask about the range of our IPD (Inter-Pupillary Distance). Just like binoculars the often allow you to adjust the distance between the eyepieces to accommodate different individuals, head-mounted displays allow the same.
- "55 to 72 mm", we said
- "can you do an IPD in the 30 mm range?", said the caller
- "???"
- "well, I want to use the HMD on apes"

Just a few weeks went by, and another person called. After discussing the merits of immersion - high resolution and panoramic field of view - the caller asked whether he can use the HMD on mice.
- "So you want to use the HMD on mice?"
- "Yes"
- "???"

The thought of a mice wearing an HMD triggered many interesting visuals. Maybe mice can also wear football helmets? Is there a market for mice-sized HMD?

As interesting as this proposed research might be, we're going to stick with providing human an unmatched visual experience.

Industrial VR in France and Japan

We just returned from two exciting trade shows: the Paris Air Show (Le Bourget, France) and Industrial Virtual Reality in Tokyo, Japan. Hundreds of visitors came to experience how a high-performance head-mounted display enables engineers and designers to be immersed in their 3D data in the most realistic way possible (without actually building a physical version, of course).

In Tokyo, we were visited by Many of engineers and executives from some of Japan's most recognizable companies including Canon, Mitusubishi, Honda, Sony, NEC, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Ricoh, Epson, Toshiba, Nikon, Fuji, Brother and more. Similarly, in Paris, big aerospace giants came to see how VR technology can make a difference on the effectiveness of their designs, training systems, and products. Amazingly, our visitors in Paris were able to concentrate on the demo, even when test pilots where performing air stunts with the newest fighter jets and passenger airplanes.

An HMD for every engineer is still a long way ahead of us, but the interest level and excitement that these industrial giants make us all believe that mainstream virtual reality will become reality.

Yuval

How Much Immersion is Enough?

Doug Bowman and Ryan McMahan of Virgina Tech wrote an interesting article titled "How Much Immersion Is Enough" which appears as a cover feature of July's IEEE Computer magazine.

They discuss several aspects of Immersion (defined as "the objective level of sensory fidelity a VR system provides") and presence ("a user’s subjective psychological response to a VR system") and talk about the main factors that drive immersion, including field of view, field of regard, resolution, stereoscopy, head-tracking, frame rate and more.

The article describes several studies that investigate how the degree of immersion impacts the performance of a person trying to complete complex tasks (such as planning the path of an oil well or visualizing a tunnel through rock structures) and describes the significant and measurable benefits attributed to higher degree of immersion.

It is nice to see measurable benefits tied to the "wow" feeling that people experience when they try on immersive head-mounted displays that offer both panoramic field of view and high resolution. My company has built several high-immersion models by optically stitching together small micro-displays. One unique side-effect of this approach is that during demonstrations, we are able to turn off individual displays and thus take a user through a full range of immersion options (e.g. from 150 degree field of view to 120 to 100 to 80) within seconds. This has been an excellent way to experience the benefits of true immersion.

Once you've had a chance to try a "business class" seat in an airplane, it's not easy to go back to economy. Similarly, once you try on an HMD or a CAVE with wide FOV, it will be difficult to go back to narrow displays.

Yuval

HMDs and "the last mile"

Remember the time that most home users could only use dial-up access to the Internet, even though the Internet backbone was very fast? These users could not enjoy the full Internet experience because of the bandwidth limitations in the "last mile" before their home.

Recent improvements in CPU and GPU power as well as rendering software, leads me to believe that the display quality of head-mounted displays could solve the "last mile" problem of bringing immersive virtual reality to the masses.

When I speak to audiences about head-mounted displays, I usually ask for a show of hands: "how many in the audience have Blockbuster or Netflx subscriptions or regularly rent movies?". A healthy majority usually raises their hands. "Now how many would still continue these subscriptions if all you had at home was a 3 inch black and white television?". Most hands come down. Without quality displays (with high resolution, wide field of view such as those offered by my company), the full potential of virtual reality will not be realized.

Yuval