[MUSIC]

Virtual reality, then, to get more flexible than this,

you can't film, you can't take analogue media, and

make it much more flexible than watching a static story.

So, it's when we get to the digital age that we start to see

that we can get what we now consider to be virtual reality.

The key parts being that the person can move around,

they can choose their own point of view in the film, and

they can experience audio from a first person point of view.

So a seminal system of this

start of this digital age is Ivan Sutherland's Sword of Damocles System.

So this was built in 1968 and is

really what most people considered to be the first digital, virtual reality system.

It was quite a large contraption.

It's a head mounted display,

which is suspended from the ceiling from a mechanical gantry.

But it had all of the facilities that we expect of virtual reality,

in that the head mounted display tracks what the person is doing with their head.

So they move around, it changes the graphics.

Those graphics are rendered from a first person point of view.

So as they move around and look, the graphics would change in the same manner.

So this being so early was quite crude.

Of course it was y frame graphics and

very low fidelity, but it's got some of the essential features and

we'll see throughout the head mounts displays.

So if we jump forward 10 years, or 20 years even,

we get to a system that is now starting to be built in industry.

So this is a system called the VIEW workstation from NASA.

This was built in the 80s.

And this picture's from the 1989.

And what you can see here is sort of the prototype of what we now consider to

be a virtual reality system.

No large mechanical assembly, what you can see is something that sits on the head.

It's got a large box at the front with screens and

the person can move around freely.

You can also see that the user is wearing headphones and

also that they have gloves on their hands so that this system

can track their finger movements, it can also track where they're pointing.

So this system was used by NASA for

various projects, including training astronauts.

And then, this was sort of the start of the industry in the 1990s.

Some of this technology was then taken by a company called VPL, and

which was in part founded by who's a name you'll come

up against in many histories of virtual realities,

being the most visible of the pioneers of the early 90s.

So what I'll show you now is where I get started in the field

when I was a Ph.D student.

So, what you see in this,

this video is really what the state of the art was at the time.

This is a virtual reality system based on a head mounted display called the virtual

research flight helmet and driven by a system called the division provision.

Now, I have the head mounted display here, it's not functional anymore.

But it's got all the bits that we might expect to see in a head mounted display.

Now importantly, it's got on here, a tracking devices.

This is a tracker.

So this tracks where this whole head mounted display is.

It also, inside, has two screens.

And this has been taken apart for various experiments.

And actually pull the screens out and these little television screens,

portable television screens from the late 1980s, early 90s.

So, together with a fast computer you can use the headmount display

tracking information to generate a picture on here that the person can see.

Now, there's one important bit which I haven't shown you because I've taken it

out to show separately.

And that's this.

This is the leap optics.

This is the optical system that goes inside the head mount display.

And this, if you hold up to your face,

generates a very wide field of view of the screen.

So the screens are quite small but once you put this in,

you're seeing about a 100 degrees field of view.

So, it has a great sense of immersion inside the virtual world.

But as you can see in the video, that world is quite crude.

So it's not very visually realistic, it's only got a few hundred polygons in it.

But even then, we were starting to see some interesting phenomena.

So this is a part of a demonstration we've had in 1993.

And this shows somebody standing on a plank, looking over an edge down into.

Now this phenomena, this experience for the user is quite dramatic.

Though when the person looks at the image, and remember they've got a head-mounted

display, and they're looking down, they're showing signs of fear.

And it's very crude graphics, as you can see.

It's only got a few hundred polygons, there's just a box with a plank.

There's a plane, looks about 20 feet below you, where you could fall on.

But the person is visibly shocked.

And their fear of heights was something we noticed very early on, and

that virtual reality, even when it was quite so crude, was able to elicit.

So those systems were then, that one inspired our research and similar

phenomenon inspired a lot of people over the past 20 years in virtual reality.

And these days you can find that plank illusions or virtual drop illusions can be

found in almost all consumer virtual reality systems.

So it won't be too hard for you to find one to try yourselves.

So in the 1990s there was this big interest in virtual reality and

you could find it in quite a few places.

So here I'm showing a picture from a commercial system, which you can find in

many arcades or tourist attractions, called the virtuality system.

And this was a fairly bulky head-mount display, but it had all the same elements.

It had head tracking.

It also had trackers for the hands so that you could point at things in the world.

And you could play various games in the system.

And these, although they're expensive to store and run,

were quite popular for about ten years.

But the big problem was really that you needed

a lot of compute power to drive these systems.

Computers at the time of course, home computers, were not very powerful at all.

It was actually quite rare to have a 3D graphics accelerator.

So our systems were expensive and the systems in arcades were also expensive.

But over the next ten years, systems did get cheaper and

people did try to make consumer electronics.

So this is a VFX1 Forte head mounting display.

And it's one of an example of many examples of people trying to commercialize

virtual reality systems for the consumer market.

It didn't take off at the time, and to be honest, the main reason for

that is just the quality of the graphics.

And also a phenomenon that it's quite disrupting to the user which is lag.

So unfortunately when the person moves their head around,

the images would take a little bit time to catch up.

And this with the two computers at that time would be quite long.

So 100, 150 milliseconds wasn't too uncommon.

But having said that, what you can see is that there was a lot of interesting

research done on virtual reality, and

we can see in this video again from our laboratory.

That somebody is going into the head mounted display,

they're standing in a room which is actually a copy of the lab.

So the 3D model is of the lab.

They're wearing a different head mounted display,

this time it's a bit more sophisticated.

This is Virtual Research VR 1280.

This one still works.

It's actually still the highest resolution head mounted display

in the lab until about two years ago.

And it gives a more convincing sense of presence.

The computers have got better.

You'll see in the video, if you look carefully, you actually see a little 3D

model of the computer that we use, which was silicon graphics onyx system.

And what you see in the video is somebody using a virtual body,

and reaching out and touching.

And this experiment was one of several that we ran which were to show that

the virtual body has a big impact on how the person interacts in the virtual world.

Okay, so we've come to describe the early virtual reality systems,

so,now let's talk a bit about where it went.

So the public perception of virtual reality is that it went away,

in the late 90s and early 2000s.

But in actuality it became more of a professional system.

You saw Labs investing in equipment that could produce virtual reality but

at a higher cost because it was so interesting to study.

And an important system which many labs built is

a variant of a system called the CAVE.

So the CAVE is a recursive acronym, it stands for

cave automatic virtual environment.

And the first one was invented by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel Sandin, and

Thomas DeFanti of the University of Illinois.

And this has a very different structure to a head mount display.

In a head mount display you wear the images on your head, but

in a CAVE-like system the images are on the walls around you, so that you, you see

the projection and that the computer has to update the images on the walls.

You still need a head tracker.

You will need to wear some small glass,

because you want to have a stereo image inside for the user.

But the big advantage of these systems is that the perception of latency or

lag when you move your head is very low.

So actually in our system which we're showing here which is

the CAVE-like system that we have at University College London.

We almost never found anybody got ill or

suffered negative symptoms when using this system.

So this image shows a typical cave that's got three walls and a floor.

And each wall can be dedicated to a separate computer, so

you've got that idea of using multiple computers now to get the speed and

the quality of the graphics that you want.

And these became reasonably

common in laboratories that are interested in virtual reality.

They also became quite common in certain engineering disciplines.

So what we've got here is a picture of

a system that was built at Jaguar Land Rover in the United Kingdom.

And they used the CAVE-like systems to investigate aspects of their cars.

So, for example, how the user might interact with the car.

Not just using the steering wheel, but, for example,

fitting things, in and out, of the boot space in the car.

And that gave them big advantage compared to other means of doing that types

of task.

Because these are engineering tasks that are very three-dimensional.

You need to have a very good idea about where the objects are, and

how to manipulate them.

So CAVE systems, and head mounted displays of course, will give you a good sense of

the proximity and the space of the objects that you're looking at.

Of course if you had the budget, you could buy a very high end head mounted display.

So several companies were making head-mounted displays,

servicing industry, academia that wanted to get those high quality systems.

So this picture is of an NVIS 111 head-mounted display.

Which is an admittedly expensive but very high quality

head-mounted display that's about five to ten years old.

What I wanted to convey there is that virtual reality continued to evolve,

it continued to get better equipment and

the science of understanding virtual reality progressed quite dramatically.

But it's really with the confluence of 3D image generators,

graphics cards that were driven by consumer technology, that we really start

to see a vast acceleration in the quality of virtual reality.

And there's really a point to note, which is that in the early

2010s, so 2011, 2012, several groups were now sort of looking at

the possibilities of using consumer electronics for virtual reality.

So I'd like to mention just a couple of them.

One is the field of view to go system, or

FOV to go system from the University of Southern California.

And what they built was a system which you can make yourself, you can still make,

the plans are freely available.

That you could put a phone or an iPad in and

you could then have a virtual reality system that you could hold to your face.

And later on of course we come across systems like [INAUDIBLE] cardboard which

take the same principle and apply it to a much cheaper way of fabrication.

But the key thing of that is really of that system, the smartphones,

iPhone 4S in particular Had reached the level of quality of real time

computer graphics that they could be considered to be suitable for

putting inside head-mounted displays.

This is another system,

this actually is a system that we built at University College London.

It actually uses a very old head mounted display, or

relatively old head mounted display called a Sony Glasstron.

This is from the late 1990s, but it's driven now off a smartphone.

So it's driven off an iPhone 4S.

And that with generating a solid 60 frames per second,

so you could turn your head and you could see the same

virtual reality that you might see on one of these high end systems that we had.

That cost a lot more.

So now, you're looking at their components,

obviously this was an expensive head mounted display.

But you see, it's only got a couple of screens and

the images are generated by smartphone.

So there isn't much, more that we need, more specialized equipment.

So then, of course, we get to perhaps the most

disruptive system is that in 2012, 2013,

we start to see the emergence of truly consumer systems.

So with the system,

the Oculus Rift developer kit 1, or DK1 was launched in 2013.

And now we're here, so now we have the very cheap,

high quality, consumer head mounted display.

At the same time, we've got the power in our desktop computers that really means

that we can have effective high quality virtual reality in everybody's home.

And that's why we're here, that's the point of

this course is that to learn all about well how this

technology is going to be used in the next few years.

[MUSIC]

Part 2 | VR in the Digital Age

Introduction to Virtual Reality

Meet the Instructors