A middle-aged white man sees himself as a young black woman being taunted by a racist.
An Israeli grandmother glimpses herself as a Palestinian teen. A star athlete experiences what life would be like in a wheelchair.
These are not plots of dystopian movies. They are experiences that take place in virtual reality, which technologists believe will be the next major platform for everything from gaming to social interaction and perhaps even global diplomacy. Marketers predict virtual reality headsets will soon top wish lists for kids and young adults from the Silicon Valley to Hong Kong.
Photo: Bloomberg
The computer-generated images beamed to devices strapped around a person’s head allow users to experience “presence” — the sense that they’re entering video games or movies, climbing a treacherous Vietnamese mountain or scuba diving at a coral reef. Potential benefits include hands-on teaching with a classroom of far-flung students, or holding a business meeting whose global participants sense they’re rubbing elbows.
The upcoming rollout of the Oculus Rift — a US$599 headset offering studio-quality virtual reality to the general public — is expected to jump-start industry sales. Sony meanwhile announced at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco it would launch its PlayStation virtual reality headgear priced at US$399 in October. Many others have virtual reality equipment hitting the market.
Along with its cousin, augmented reality, virtual reality is forecast as a huge market that could push aside smart phones and computer tablets.
Photo: AP
FROM A CALIFORNIA GARAGE
Virtual reality has been a dream of futurists and tech geeks for decades. But until recently, devices were relegated to research labs because of their exorbitant cost, clunky construction and quality issues that included motion sickness.
At Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, experiments were done until 2014 with a US$40,000 device that gave users neck aches; now the lab uses a lightweight Rift at a fraction of the cost.
“I believe in virtual reality and I believed it could be amazing, but that was not a view that was shared by everyone,” Rift inventor Palmer Luckey said.
The Rift, created in 2011 by Luckey in his parents’ California garage when he was 18, uses images and sounds (smell and touch may come later) to convince users’ brains they are flying over a city or standing on a skyscraper.
At the San Francisco conference, users pivoted to shoot would-be attackers and flinched at imaginary flying objects.
“Vision is really important. You rely on it for a majority of your senses,” said Jason Rubin, who as head of worldwide studios oversees content development for Oculus.
“So if we can take over your eyes, we can get control of your belief system.”
Oculus, bought by Facebook in 2014 for US$2 billion, is competing with companies such as Google, Samsung and Sony in creating virtual reality devices, with analysts expecting sales of 12 million headsets by the end of this year.
‘BIGGER, MORE DISRUPTIVE’
But Tim Merel, founder of technology advisory firm Digi-Capital, says virtual reality will be eclipsed by augmented reality within a few years.
virtual reality is fully immersive, meaning a user can’t walk down a street wearing a headset. Augmented reality is partly immersive: a person can do everyday tasks while augmenting them with virtual images, using holograms (such as flying dinosaurs) superimposed on the user’s field of vision. While Merel thinks virtual reality will cannibalize video games and become a US$30 billion market by 2020, he sees augmented reality as taking over the smartphone and tablet market and accounting for US$90 billion in annual sales in the same period.
“Our broad view is that augmented reality will be bigger, more disruptive and faster in terms of its effects than mobile was compared to the original Internet,” Merel said.
While most virtual reality content now focuses on gaming, it has the potential to impact everything from architecture to military training to travel.
Developers envision its use in dealing with phobias and addiction, or in helping youngsters combat bullying. The UN is using a virtual reality film to give people a sense of living in a Syrian refugee camp. The New York Times and others are using virtual reality films for immersive news reports.
Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford professor of communication who founded the lab, said school children might use virtual reality for empathy training. But he acknowledged limits.
“Could this work in the Mideast conflict? I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not a magic bullet or anything.”
There also are potential risks, such as overuse or people discovering they’re more comfortable in a virtual world.
“When porn feels like sex, how does that affect reproduction rates?” Bailenson asked.
The Rift, about the size of a brick but considerably lighter, will be shipped at the end of this month to customers who pre-ordered it. Oculus is not yet saying when the device will be available in stores. Many users will need a new computer to run the Rift, potentially tripling the US$599 price.
Luckey, who attended the developers conference in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and flip-flops, acknowledged the Rift is still too expensive and limited in its capabilities, but that with improvements “it is going to go well beyond being a toy.”
“I think it’s going to be the next smartphone and the last smartphone. Once you perfect virtual reality, there’s no reason to create anything else,” he said. “I see people continuously moving between the real world and the virtual world.”
Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal. Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.” Chang
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but