VR leaves the Cave - Again

For 40 years Virtual Reality (VR) has not gone mainstream. In 1966: Ivan Sutherland invented the head-mounted display suggesting it was a window into a virtual world. VR has been a nich market used by those with R&D budgets, Intel, IBM, the Defense Industry and the NSF. It just never caught on and entered the mass market through at least 3 Gartner hype cycles and even product introductions. Yesturday 1989 - the Mattel Power Glove. Today - the Wii controller, Tomarrow - Microsoft Natal?.

Virtual Worlds or MMOG have been around as long, since the 80s.

Now the hype is Augmented Reality but remember it was 16 years ago, 1992: when Tom Caudell coined the phrase Augmented Reality while at Boeing helping workers assemble cables into aircraft. The idea has been there, even the technology and yes the Best programmers and scientists have been onboard, but........ That Killer App still illudes.

Below snipped from: Wired, By Priya Ganapati, June 18, 2009

3D Conferencing System Allows for Virtual Light Saber Duels

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Intel have created a system that can support collaborative physical activities from different geographical locations.

“We can capture motions of the human body in real time and bring them together on a big screen,” says Ahsan Arefin, a doctoral student currently involved with the project.

The project called ‘Tele-immersive Environment for Everybody’ or TEEVE hooks up two off-the-shelf 3D cameras to a PC with a Firewire port. A gateway server at each site sends and receives the different video streams using standard compression techniques. A renderer is used to project the virtual interactions on a big screen monitor, creating a real-time virtual 3D effect. It’s like web conferencing, but with a virtual reality twist.

The idea has applications beyond gaming. It can be used in business, sports and medicine, says Arefin. An experiment by the University had two dancers from different locations dancing together on a large screen.

Arefin says TEEVE can work on PCs with high-end Intel processors.

“Our goal is to make the system portable and easily deployable because of its use of off-the-shelf components,” he says.