Non-game VR: Perspectives and Opportunities on the Web - Interview with VR enthusiast Martin Splitt, Archilogic
Recently, my friends began to appear strange boxes in which they insert their mobile, hang it all on his head and disappear somewhere.
It is surprising that virtual reality can be made from a mobile phone and a piece of cardboard. But another question: why is it needed and what can we do with it? The games are understandable, but this is still a very narrow segment. Could the web be the growth point that will make VR a really common technology? How can you use virtual reality now?
')
To find out, we interviewed Martin Splitt, who has been a hot fan of this topic for a couple of years now .
- Please introduce yourself.
- Hello! My name is Martin Splitt. I'm @ g33konaut on twitter and avgp on github. I live in Zurich and work as a senior fullstack engineer at Archilogic . And I speak Russian badly ;-)
- What is your experience with VR and why is this topic so interesting for you?
- VR changes the rules of the game, because it shifts the process of perception: you are not just watching, you are directly involved in something. Also, people react to the VR experience in a completely different way than with just 3D.
I work with WebVR almost from the moment it appeared - starting in October 2014. From the beginning of 2015 we use it in production. In spaces.archilogic.com, users can use Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive to walk around offices or apartments in VR. We got an interesting experience working on the product. Therefore, I give presentations to share this experience, and follow the development of WebVR standards in the W3C consortium.
- For the first time about VR started talking in 1950 . And since then, we continue to think and talk about VR. But why so much interest in her right now, what has changed?
- If you look at the “sword of Damocles” - the first VR device, you will see that it was a rather scary, cumbersome, ingenious invention. A big barrier to the spread of VR, apart from the cost, complexity of installation and device size, was the lack of available content. In the 90s, there was a second wave of VR devices such as Virtual Boy , but the high price and lack of content prevented their distribution.
Another major obstacle was the lack of technology for a convincing dive. Only recently, we learned that VR at less than 90 frames per second causes motion sickness in many people, which violates immersion. We grew up with virtual worlds without immersion: we got used to computer graphics in movies, the Internet, games. This makes us more susceptible to this category of content. Computers have become powerful enough to render virtual worlds with the performance needed for VR. There are devices at an affordable price - cheap Daydream VR, GearVR and Cardboard and not as cheap, but affordable for Oculus and Vive enthusiasts. Therefore, all that stops us now is the lack of VR content. But content can be created by almost anyone. Thanks to technologies like Unity, Unreal Engine and A-Frame . Something has already appeared in SteamVR or Oculus . The amount of content is growing rapidly.
- What is the current status of VR? What are the challenges facing VR and webVR?
- We are still at the very beginning, we need experiments and research. A lot of things have not yet come up. There are no conventions that we can rely on in creating VR experience and content.
Now we have a highly fragmented ecosystem in terms of device capabilities, and here WebVR can fire. The web and its developers are used to fragmentation and responsiveness, although responsiveness for VR is a completely new game.
Here are some tasks to be solved: what do we do with many different input methods? How to build bridges between VR and non-VR content? How will the interaction and movement occur in the VR world? What will the UI look like in this world?
- What is the importance of VR? Obviously, VR and AR are great for gaming. The stunning success of Pokemon Go is a good example. But what are some useful uses for VR? Often, people do not take VR seriously, but only as another toy.
- We do not really use all the visual and interactive features of the web. Whenever you work with data displayed in space, you can use 3D (and therefore VR) to make it better perceived.
VR can be used in many areas. Games are the most obvious application. There are interesting applications in journalism ( infographics during interviews with Michelle Obama ), tourism ( page with VR tours ), education (for example, with Cardboard Expeditions ), data visualization ( Brexit visualization ), entertainment ( Oculus Rex ), architecture, real estate ( Archilogic ), e-commerce and porn.
Another aspect of VR is that it gives a new level of social interaction. VR will never replace reality to the end, but it will be the best surrogate of all. If you cannot be somewhere - due to disability, medical indications or geographical location - with VR you can get experience with other people (as it would not be possible in the real physical world).
- Do you think the web will change under the influence of VR? How will the links work, scroll and how to save the property of the web - the user's ability to move from anywhere to anywhere?
- Absolutely exactly what will change. And this is one of the fields of study and research now.
There are some amazing research done by the MozVR and GoogleVR teams and our team. We still do not know how to do it, but we are experimenting. An amazing time, isn't it?
For example, experimenting with portals and teleportation, but there may be other ways. Here we are limited only by imagination!
- Is it possible to make web pages more VR'istye?
- This is also an area of ​​active study. There are interesting studies with responsive VR, where you have a regular website with some kind of 3D content, where you can use the mouse / touchbar and keyboard. But if you have a mobile device, you should use sensors to improve your user experience. VR will work when a VR device is available to us. You can read more about this in the article by Boris Smus from the Google WebVR team.
- With all these amazing things, we should not forget the basic principle: you can't break the web. Suppose we re-invent the web and browser, create a full-fledged virtual web. How will the old 2D sites be maintained without breaking the virtual world experience?
- Great question. There are several ways to do this.
One of them is to insert the site into a virtual frame and improve it with some kind of static environment. Samsung's GearVR browser does just that. You are standing in a room and you see a floating screen with web content on it.
There are various experiments with modes where the site can be rotated 360 ° around itself, but I find it too strange. But this is another field open to ideas!
- Is the browser API good enough? The overall web API should be worse than a more specialized mobile or VR device. Does this mean that we have to keep in mind a bunch of different devices in order to create really cool VR content? How do you approach this problem?
“It is for this reason that I support the standardization efforts.” This is a continuation of the long-standing battle of Web vs Native, from which we learned the lessons. WebVR API provides the same or very close to native capabilities, but compatible with a wide range of devices. This is the advantage of the web over most native VR SDKs and applications.
It would be untrue to say that designing a wide range of different VR devices is easier than a steamy turnip. But this is possible and much easier than in the native case, because we have a common API for accessing sensors.
- We have another group of users, and this can not affect the developers. Should web developers learn something new to work with VR? What skills will be in price?
- We are just beginning to understand how VR should work. Therefore, we still understand what development for VR can look like. From personal experience, I can say that debugging tools are in their infancy. And although WebGL Inspector, WebVR emulator and higher level tools are on the way, A-Frame, Three.js and Unity are beginning to pay more attention to VR.
Regarding skills: high-level tools eliminate the need to know a lot of mathematics. However, the performance characteristics are completely different from the classic 2D web. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how the GPU pipeline and WebGL work.
Another topic that developers need to be aware of is empathy. VR gives a very realistic experience. Many things happen to the user in the subconscious, so it is easy to frighten or even injure users. Developers need to understand what people will feel when they get into the created world for the first time.
- Can you tell me more? Empathy is good, but it's a human factor, and people make mistakes. Are there any standards, rules that should be followed when developing VR?
- If VR is done correctly, the user perceives it as a full immersion-presence. What this means: situations where a person can get scared, really scare him, because the environment and everything that happens in it seems real.
Example: Imagine that you are in a room with several steel pipes. Suddenly, the pipes start to explode, pieces of metal fly in your direction.
And although physically you will be completely safe, the impressions will be much more intense, traumatic than the same thing would happen in a normal movie or game. When things fly into your head, you run physiological reactions. Some people may scream, fall to the floor, hurt themselves.
This rule seems to me one of the most important: you must keep your personal user space clean. Should not fly through it, the floor should not break, it is impossible that other players or characters could grab or hit it (there was already a precedent for sexual harassment in VR )
Also remember that your experience and skills with the UI are not necessarily transferred to VR. Google and Oculus have guidelines on this.
- Who would you not recommend VR?
- I would not recommend VR6 to people prone to motion sickness. In this case, it is worth trying only high-quality devices like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Mobile VR content often does not have the proper FPS and cannot accurately track your location inside the room.
I advise you first to focus on exploring the world or creating something in it. For example, try Tiltbrush , Google Earth or Fantastic Contraption . Do not immediately take the game, which can cause fear or stress.
- A couple of words about the VR community. Where can I distribute VR content, find like-minded people? Where to begin?
- There is a great free book and Slack for WebVR . You can try to create something with Three.js , A-Frame or Unity.
- You are going to us on December 11 in Moscow on HolyJS . What are you planning to tell?
- I am grateful that I was offered to share my experience with WebVR, and I hope that I will be able to raise the enthusiasm and interest in this topic among the audience. We need more bright minds to embrace this topic, to understand how everything should work. I want to tell you what I know: what the current landscape of VR devices looks like and how to start working with them. Finally, I will ask a few questions and tell you about several problems that we are now solving.
It is surprising that virtual reality can be made from a mobile phone and a piece of cardboard. But another question: why is it needed and what can we do with it? The games are understandable, but this is still a very narrow segment. Could the web be the growth point that will make VR a really common technology? How can you use virtual reality now?
')
To find out, we interviewed Martin Splitt, who has been a hot fan of this topic for a couple of years now .
- Please introduce yourself.
- Hello! My name is Martin Splitt. I'm @ g33konaut on twitter and avgp on github. I live in Zurich and work as a senior fullstack engineer at Archilogic . And I speak Russian badly ;-)- What is your experience with VR and why is this topic so interesting for you?
- VR changes the rules of the game, because it shifts the process of perception: you are not just watching, you are directly involved in something. Also, people react to the VR experience in a completely different way than with just 3D.
I work with WebVR almost from the moment it appeared - starting in October 2014. From the beginning of 2015 we use it in production. In spaces.archilogic.com, users can use Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive to walk around offices or apartments in VR. We got an interesting experience working on the product. Therefore, I give presentations to share this experience, and follow the development of WebVR standards in the W3C consortium.
- For the first time about VR started talking in 1950 . And since then, we continue to think and talk about VR. But why so much interest in her right now, what has changed?
- If you look at the “sword of Damocles” - the first VR device, you will see that it was a rather scary, cumbersome, ingenious invention. A big barrier to the spread of VR, apart from the cost, complexity of installation and device size, was the lack of available content. In the 90s, there was a second wave of VR devices such as Virtual Boy , but the high price and lack of content prevented their distribution.
Another major obstacle was the lack of technology for a convincing dive. Only recently, we learned that VR at less than 90 frames per second causes motion sickness in many people, which violates immersion. We grew up with virtual worlds without immersion: we got used to computer graphics in movies, the Internet, games. This makes us more susceptible to this category of content. Computers have become powerful enough to render virtual worlds with the performance needed for VR. There are devices at an affordable price - cheap Daydream VR, GearVR and Cardboard and not as cheap, but affordable for Oculus and Vive enthusiasts. Therefore, all that stops us now is the lack of VR content. But content can be created by almost anyone. Thanks to technologies like Unity, Unreal Engine and A-Frame . Something has already appeared in SteamVR or Oculus . The amount of content is growing rapidly.
- What is the current status of VR? What are the challenges facing VR and webVR?
- We are still at the very beginning, we need experiments and research. A lot of things have not yet come up. There are no conventions that we can rely on in creating VR experience and content.
Now we have a highly fragmented ecosystem in terms of device capabilities, and here WebVR can fire. The web and its developers are used to fragmentation and responsiveness, although responsiveness for VR is a completely new game.
Here are some tasks to be solved: what do we do with many different input methods? How to build bridges between VR and non-VR content? How will the interaction and movement occur in the VR world? What will the UI look like in this world?
- What is the importance of VR? Obviously, VR and AR are great for gaming. The stunning success of Pokemon Go is a good example. But what are some useful uses for VR? Often, people do not take VR seriously, but only as another toy.
- We do not really use all the visual and interactive features of the web. Whenever you work with data displayed in space, you can use 3D (and therefore VR) to make it better perceived.
VR can be used in many areas. Games are the most obvious application. There are interesting applications in journalism ( infographics during interviews with Michelle Obama ), tourism ( page with VR tours ), education (for example, with Cardboard Expeditions ), data visualization ( Brexit visualization ), entertainment ( Oculus Rex ), architecture, real estate ( Archilogic ), e-commerce and porn.
Another aspect of VR is that it gives a new level of social interaction. VR will never replace reality to the end, but it will be the best surrogate of all. If you cannot be somewhere - due to disability, medical indications or geographical location - with VR you can get experience with other people (as it would not be possible in the real physical world).
- Do you think the web will change under the influence of VR? How will the links work, scroll and how to save the property of the web - the user's ability to move from anywhere to anywhere?
- Absolutely exactly what will change. And this is one of the fields of study and research now.
There are some amazing research done by the MozVR and GoogleVR teams and our team. We still do not know how to do it, but we are experimenting. An amazing time, isn't it?
For example, experimenting with portals and teleportation, but there may be other ways. Here we are limited only by imagination!
- Is it possible to make web pages more VR'istye?
- This is also an area of ​​active study. There are interesting studies with responsive VR, where you have a regular website with some kind of 3D content, where you can use the mouse / touchbar and keyboard. But if you have a mobile device, you should use sensors to improve your user experience. VR will work when a VR device is available to us. You can read more about this in the article by Boris Smus from the Google WebVR team.
- With all these amazing things, we should not forget the basic principle: you can't break the web. Suppose we re-invent the web and browser, create a full-fledged virtual web. How will the old 2D sites be maintained without breaking the virtual world experience?
- Great question. There are several ways to do this.
One of them is to insert the site into a virtual frame and improve it with some kind of static environment. Samsung's GearVR browser does just that. You are standing in a room and you see a floating screen with web content on it.
There are various experiments with modes where the site can be rotated 360 ° around itself, but I find it too strange. But this is another field open to ideas!
- Is the browser API good enough? The overall web API should be worse than a more specialized mobile or VR device. Does this mean that we have to keep in mind a bunch of different devices in order to create really cool VR content? How do you approach this problem?
“It is for this reason that I support the standardization efforts.” This is a continuation of the long-standing battle of Web vs Native, from which we learned the lessons. WebVR API provides the same or very close to native capabilities, but compatible with a wide range of devices. This is the advantage of the web over most native VR SDKs and applications.
It would be untrue to say that designing a wide range of different VR devices is easier than a steamy turnip. But this is possible and much easier than in the native case, because we have a common API for accessing sensors.
- We have another group of users, and this can not affect the developers. Should web developers learn something new to work with VR? What skills will be in price?
- We are just beginning to understand how VR should work. Therefore, we still understand what development for VR can look like. From personal experience, I can say that debugging tools are in their infancy. And although WebGL Inspector, WebVR emulator and higher level tools are on the way, A-Frame, Three.js and Unity are beginning to pay more attention to VR.
Regarding skills: high-level tools eliminate the need to know a lot of mathematics. However, the performance characteristics are completely different from the classic 2D web. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how the GPU pipeline and WebGL work.
Another topic that developers need to be aware of is empathy. VR gives a very realistic experience. Many things happen to the user in the subconscious, so it is easy to frighten or even injure users. Developers need to understand what people will feel when they get into the created world for the first time.
- Can you tell me more? Empathy is good, but it's a human factor, and people make mistakes. Are there any standards, rules that should be followed when developing VR?
- If VR is done correctly, the user perceives it as a full immersion-presence. What this means: situations where a person can get scared, really scare him, because the environment and everything that happens in it seems real.
Example: Imagine that you are in a room with several steel pipes. Suddenly, the pipes start to explode, pieces of metal fly in your direction.
And although physically you will be completely safe, the impressions will be much more intense, traumatic than the same thing would happen in a normal movie or game. When things fly into your head, you run physiological reactions. Some people may scream, fall to the floor, hurt themselves.
This rule seems to me one of the most important: you must keep your personal user space clean. Should not fly through it, the floor should not break, it is impossible that other players or characters could grab or hit it (there was already a precedent for sexual harassment in VR )
Also remember that your experience and skills with the UI are not necessarily transferred to VR. Google and Oculus have guidelines on this.
- Who would you not recommend VR?
- I would not recommend VR6 to people prone to motion sickness. In this case, it is worth trying only high-quality devices like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Mobile VR content often does not have the proper FPS and cannot accurately track your location inside the room.
I advise you first to focus on exploring the world or creating something in it. For example, try Tiltbrush , Google Earth or Fantastic Contraption . Do not immediately take the game, which can cause fear or stress.
- A couple of words about the VR community. Where can I distribute VR content, find like-minded people? Where to begin?
- There is a great free book and Slack for WebVR . You can try to create something with Three.js , A-Frame or Unity.
- You are going to us on December 11 in Moscow on HolyJS . What are you planning to tell?
- I am grateful that I was offered to share my experience with WebVR, and I hope that I will be able to raise the enthusiasm and interest in this topic among the audience. We need more bright minds to embrace this topic, to understand how everything should work. I want to tell you what I know: what the current landscape of VR devices looks like and how to start working with them. Finally, I will ask a few questions and tell you about several problems that we are now solving.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/315868/
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