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…
I was going through some of my older experiments and I came upon this picture. It’s not much — just the visual interface for a simple computer graphic xylophone. Yet as I looked at it, I remembered how much time and care I had taken in designing the colors. My general plan was to go…
Our Future Reality Lab has been focusing our efforts on creating extended reality experiences, by inviting people to share an alternate reality that exists nowhere in the physical world. But not all XR experiences are virtual. This past week I visited several amazing places in Silicon Valley. One of them was Facebook, which makes the…
This morning I was working on an algorithm for being able to write text quickly by drawing with a VR/XR controller without needing to look at the controller. Technically this is called “eyes free” writing, because when you don’t need to look at what you are doing with the controller, your eyes are then freed…
The problem with talking about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet. Sure, you can extrapolate from current trends, make predictions, follow patterns to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. But you don’t actually have that crystal ball, all polished up and ready for the gazing. So you’re sort of winging it. And the people…