Today at the start of my graduate graphics class we showed a VR metaroom demo with multiple people in the classroom wearing Quest VR headsets, holding controllers and collaborating over WebVR. We made it even more interesting by having the entire scene — the room with all of its furniture and the avatars of all…
This last week or so I’ve been building a parallel world. I measured all of the sizes in a section of our lab — walls, floors, tables, and so forth. Then I built a computer graphic copy of that world, matching the real thing down to the centimeter. I can walk around in my parallel…
Today I surprised the 27 students in my graduate computer graphics class. I handed out an Oculus Quest VR system to every student. They will each get to use the Quest for the rest of the semester. They will be able to take the Quests home with them, and use them any way they like.…
My favorite thing to do when I teach my graduate computer graphics is live coding. Don’t get me wrong. I love working through mathematical principles on the whiteboard. I really enjoy free-ranging conversations with the class on various topics. But live coding is in its own category. That’s the moment when the class sees me…
A few years from now you go out to a local hangout with your date. The two of you, together with lots of other people in the room, put on your XR glasses,. Suddenly you are all sharing another world. You can walk around in that world, listen to stories, play games, experience moments of…
I was asked to give a lightning talk this week, part of a series of lightning talks on related topics. I was told that the talk is to last 15 minutes, and that I can’t use more than five slides. I found this contraint to be highly refreshing. Rather than meander all over the place,…
I have been rather concerned recently that major industry players are missing the boat on the potential of virtual reality. This was confirmed for me this past Friday, when I attended an industry panel on the future of VR narrative. To my bewilderment, the panelists described market scenarios and economic models that were, on the…
In the NYU Future Reality Lab we spend much of our time thinking about the near future, because that’s what we can actually prototype and then study. But what about the far future — not five years from now but perhaps fifty years or more from now? One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently…
We are well into the era when what we expect to see computer graphics characters in a live action film. Unlike characters in animated films, CGI characters in live action films are expected to be at least plausibly fit into the real world — although we are usually talking about a fantasy version of the…
This morning Kris Layng and I got up in front of several thousand people and accepted the award for Best Art Paper at the Siggraph conference. The paper was about CAVE, our shared VR experience for large audiences, first shown at Siggraph 2018 (and thereafter at the Tribeca Film Festival). Our coauthors on this are…