Those of you who do not know Jaron Lanier, he was a pioneer of virtual and augmented reality in the 1980’s. And those of you who want to know what augmented reality is, it is a technology which renders virtual images in a view of the real world. So you stand in the real world but what you see using this technology may or may not pertain to the environment you are standing or sitting in. This has been done so far with one person at a time. What researchers in the Microsoft lab of Jaron Lanier are trying to do is experimenting with multi-person augmented reality. It is hoped that beyond gaming, the virtual and augmented reality could prove useful for communications, collaborations and for new ways of accessing and handling information.
The multi – person virtual reality project that Lanier is working on is called Comradre (and pronounced “comradery”). Several projects were developed for this major one by student interns. Some headsets were given to different people and more than one person was asked to interact with the same virtual object or phenomena. These headsets were made using smartphones and laptop computers, and the tracking of a person’s head movements was performed using external sensors. Most of the footage was also shot through one of the headsets.
The various experimental applications developed for the project and featured in video are: testing the social implications of the technology with a system that highlights physical interactions with virtual effects by Andrea Stevenson Wonof Stanford University, Judith AmoresandXavier Benavidesfrom the MIT Media Lab created a way for real-world blocks to correspond with virtual objects and animations, offering a way for children to play in mixed reality, even if not everyone is wearing a headset, Andrzej Banburskiof the Perimeter Institute for Advanced Physics, for example, developed a tool for visualizing mathematical equations, andKishore Rathinavel, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, created a system that allows sound waves to be detected and then shown visually.
Augmented and virtual reality, are currently the talk of the town as far as technology circles are concerned. Facebook, Google, and Sony are all developing headsets and software for virtual reality. Microsoft also demonstrated its HoloLens last week but Lanier says that his work on the multi-person augmented reality project is different from HoloLens. According to Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, “The critical aspect for multi-person virtual reality is that you have to track everybody’s movements very accurately in their own scene.” But he also believes that Lanier is the man for the job as he is into this since decades.
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Author:Technology Blog
