The Future of Virtual Reality | Phil Kauffold | TEDxSonomaCounty

please welcome to the TEDx Sonoma County stage Philip kaufold all right so I'm guessing pretty much everybody here is at least passingly familiar with virtual reality it is kind of the newest ladyish shiniest fanciest technology to kind of come out lately and I bet it's not a lot of Christmas lists on top of that being a game developer I'm sure you know for everybody else I'm sure it can be seen as nothing more than a new way to play video games but it's an amazing technology and it really has the potential to be a lot more and this and while I'm a game guy I'm again I'm the technical lead for the game department at the Academy of art I gravitate towards video games but there's a lot of other things that it's being used for it's an amazing experience but telling you about it doesn't really do anybody a whole lot of good what I'd actually like to do is ask who has never tried virtual reality new people so how about you come on up so have a seat we have a head and have you put that on and we can are you okay I'm just going to tighten up for you a little bit so good okay so right here oh and run no you're okay go ahead and sit face forward yeah so you move it okay so take a look around for a second it's just a lovely swings with some trees nothing to be afraid of all right so go ahead and face forward oh you have a disembodied body there so all right so we're just gonna have a nice little swing and now we're just going to bring you back down to earth there so as you can see so so it feel like you're actually moving very much so you kind of get the butterflies in your stomach kind of fell out from underneath you all right let me help you take that off there real quick all right yeah thank you thanks so anyway that's very much the power and excitement of VR as you can see not necessarily the best-looking trees they couldn't cast shadows just because it takes up too many too much processing power kind of decent mountains but you're very much transported to the place and it very much does feel like you're in this world it's a very powerful and very visceral experience so I just wanted to talk a little bit what exactly is virtual reality so technically it means any computer artificially computer-generated world that can be experienced and interacted with technically any video game ever has been virtual reality even if you're just playing it on screen or your phone or what have you it can be out of space it can be a maze you're running through it can be just about anything what is actually come to refer to are any experiences where the user uses special equipment to completely immerse themselves in that world and the complete immersion is the important part most of these experience are designed to completely block out whatever's going on around you this is in contrast to some other technology and may or may not heard about this is augmented reality which is also made a bit of a splash this year on the developer side that's the microsoft hololens on the right there that's actually Pokemon Go which so so augmented reality is different and that you're actually experience in the real world still you're still seeing what you're seeing we just put a layer over it I could be looking at you and see zombies or throw spiders on you or I don't know why I'm being so cruel but that's the sort of thing that you could actually do so virtual reality deals with the head mounted display this is the visor or visors that actually go over your face there are others but these are the big three right now the vive the Morpheus and the oculus rift and what actually is going on inside of those each eye sees a different image stereoscopic image and as your head moves it tracks where you're moving and changes the image appropriately it can be a little scary at first like all new technology can be maybe seem a little bit Oh peon like you're completely cut off from the real world maybe corporate control I don't know but and if you've ever actually seen anybody in it it's a little bit strange it can almost be looking like somebody with an affliction if you've ever been walking down the street and been walking next to somebody talking on a Bluetooth headset you don't necessarily know if they're actually talking on the phone or if they just blew a fuse and virtual reality is not entirely different but what what is actually going on inside is a little bit of a different story so you could actually be defending your castle with a bow and arrow from a bunch of enemies you could be then tada you actually be painting in 3d space with an entirely new medium or instead of a canvas you can actually paint walk around see what you're doing or you could be training to become a wizard so anybody here ever want to go to Hogwarts because you are totally going to be able to go to Hogwarts so in reality no pun intended virtual reality is really nothing new everything from panoramic paintings to stereoscopic photographs have all been an attempt to further immerse ourselves into art or fictional worlds and in the 20th century we've had numerous attempts to use film television that sort of medium to actually bring ourselves even further in and even of late start you know probably in the 90s we've had attempts to commercialize that everything from the Gameboy to different pods but for the most part what's actually been available has either been too expensive or just didn't work well enough to actually give you a comfortable experience which brings us to what we have currently which is again as the headsets these are all tethered to a computer and we have the mobile ones which are actually very interesting too because it makes it much more accessible to other people the one on the right in particular is the one I want to talk about this is the Google cardboard so the New York Times actually distributed 1.6 million of these in its paper to his readers this actually makes it the most widely distributed virtual reality platform to date and it costs about $10 it works with your phone you just download an app but that actually brings me not so much the technology but what it can actually be used for we've been talking a lot about how to see the world differently how to experience it differently and this is where virtual reality plays a role in that so this is actually an image from the New York Times the fight for Fallujah documentary this was one of the first 360 degree virtual reality documentaries actually shot in an active war zone so literally you can actually feel like you're in the middle of a firefight a company called skopic did one called refugees that documented the plight of the Syrian refugees again rather than just seeing this on the news rather than just reading about it on the web or in the paper or even seeing a photograph you can actually be placed inside of the camp and I would not even begin to suggest that that's the same as being there but it certainly gives you a deeper understanding of what these people are going to on a day to day basis these two experiences for me are very powerful when I was younger I read a comic book by the name of mouse which was a story of a older Holocaust survivor telling a story to his younger son and it was a deeply personal story and it actually changed the way I looked at the world because to me these things no longer happen to people they happen to persons and I think that sort of distinction comes across in these sorts of things additionally we're also seeing the use in medicine they're actually finding that putting people in virtual reality in hospitals actually measurably reduces the amount of pain medication they need pain is something very insistent on its own importance and with some distraction whether it's actually watching a movie or maybe seeing the dolphin swim by or throwing snowballs at penguins you can kind of get away from that same thing with the dentist office I got an awesome dentist but I could use a little distraction so this is probably one of the more interesting ones and actually one of the most effective ones to date is the use in treating PTSD uh what it does is basically allows for the sufferers the people have gone through combat to re-experience what they went through in a safe controlled environment still being studied very much funded by the military for of course obvious reasons but at the same time they're seeing a lot of promise and it actually reduces the way the brain responds to these things over time you don't get quite as radical of an emotional response over time and it actually is helping them to live normal lives again so this is where VR basically is right now it's obviously not everybody's using it not everybody has it it's very cost prohibitive right now even with mobile mobile versions I wanted to make any prediction as to where this will become more common and I think it is our friend professional sports the NBA and the Olympics have already done 360 degree experiences where you can actually be it feels like you're there and I think eventually you will see broadcast by the NFL or the NBA where you can be courtside or you can be behind home plate or you can be on the 50-yard line and maybe with the push of a button you can be up in the bleachers or behind the goal posts or wherever you want to be in the house sports people spend a lot of money on sports I think that's something that people will actually embrace VR to take advantage of the future this is some obvious ones museums media business virtual shopping centers training people already working on these these will become a thing in the future but one of the other presenters I believe said you can't escape her own perspective which i think is a great statement and virtual reality can't completely change that but I want to show you at least one way in which you can this is one of the most interesting experiments I've seen man on a woman sit in the same room back-to-back but they have cameras mounted on the VR so the man is seeing the woman's perspective the woman is seeing the man's perspective and they communicate how they actually move what they do so you can actually see what it's like to actually live in somebody else's body again a very interesting change of perspective on their a machine to be another if anybody would like to look that up on that it will never replace travel but it can certainly expose you to other cultures and certainly for education this could be a great thing you could potentially place a camera in the middle of Shinjuku or Rome or Damascus or any note any number of places to give people a sense of what it's like to actually live in another place I think historical reenactment could be an amazing thing as time goes by as we lose people with living memory of events history becomes more and more abstract it would easily be possible to recreate the moon landing an obvious one maybe the First Continental Congress to actually give you a better sense of what happened the one in the upper left is actually from the Martin Luther King jr. a Washington DC rally and especially this year that's not an accident that I put that one in there so it's an amazing speech an amazing moment in American history but this doesn't necessarily give you the perspective of what it was like to be there whereas we can actually do that I could put you in the audience you could be next to somebody visibly moved maybe or 100 yards away we can alter the audio so that you're actually hearing it the way you would have heard it if you were actually there I think especially in terms of civil rights finding out what it's like to be somebody who is discriminated against what it was like maybe to have somebody screaming at you when you're just trying to go to school there are numerous ways to create new kinds of empathy so the one I kind of want to round out a little bit with here is one I feel very passionately about and that's education so this is the picture of the School of Athens so I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that the public school system is kind of a mess right now with numerous numerous problems - like I could literally do an entire TED day on all that but it can't address some problems so once again one of the most important elements of VR is how transported of it is it puts you in a new place this is actually a very lovely school and I kind of wish I'd gone here myself when I was younger but not every school can be like this not every public school is rules schools have a lot of difficulty with funding and certainly those need to be addressed but in terms of a learning environment this could be where your kid goes to kindergarten literally well not literally but that's bad use of 'literally we talked about that earlier virtually would be a much better but it's surprising what a different environment can do like that I had one student create a game where you fall through the trapdoor into a dungeon it's kind of dark and dimly lit and you have to go solve puzzles to do that and I had one person tell me that when he dropped down in there he was in the environment it relaxed him which is not what we were going for but a very interesting reaction nonetheless but it kind of made me think okay what happens if you do take somebody who's maybe not coming from the best background they're in a rough situation the school is not great well suddenly all the distractions from the outside are gone the teacher could have much more control over what goes on in terms of the learning process what the lessons would be like nobody really knows what that's like yet just trying to take one thing and translate it into another never works we're finding that a lot with video games what we used to know for design does not translate into virtual reality very well and certainly the example we all give was a film the first films were of course plays or some of the first films replace visits they knew of narrative structure took them a while to actually develop movies into their own language and I think for education certainly again the obvious oh look you're on the Sun now we can learn about the Sun you want to learn about World War two maybe don't put them on Normandy but certainly someplace that you could talk about that but I think actually trying to teach somebody math again no more distractions the guy next to you throwing spitballs I can't throw a football zone you actually Oh anymore because he's in VR too and he can't see you it all works out well but it's real this is really just an idea this has a long way to go it's very much in its infancy I'm very passionate about it myself and for those of you who are artists or designers or just tinker's on anything I encourage you to get involved with this there's a lot of truly amazing work being done and there's a there's no reason that we can't try out any and all ideas and I hope you do thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 177,854

Rating: 4.8212996 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Technology, Design, Empathy, Future, Games, Video Games

Id: d-HRgfJbPvk

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2016