Facebook and virtual reality? Really? Did Mark Zuckerberg really expect us all to don high-tech scuba masks just so we could watch kitten videos in 3D on our news feeds?
Exactly one year and one day later, Facebook made its intentions for Oculus a teensy bit clearer. Addressing developers at its annual F8 conference yesterday, Michael Abrash, chief scientist for Oculus, took the stage. His purpose? To blow our collective minds.
In a TED-style keynote, Abrash demonstrated just how unreal our notions of reality really are using a series of classic optical and aural illusions, thoroughly messing with the heads of the thousands of Facebook developers in the audience.
Abrash demonstrated how the brain makes assumptions about color based on which hues surround it (forever after known as “the Dress” effect).
(Business Insider)
See those red and blue pills? They’re really gray. No, really, they are.
He also showed how our brain makes assumptions about size and shape based on the angle and proximity of other objects. Here’s an alternate version of the classic Shepard’s Tables used by Abrash.
(ScienceChannel.com)
The red and green tables shown above really are red and green, but they’re also the same size and shape. To prove that to his skeptical viewers, Abrash had audience members take envelopes out from under their chairs that contained a version of the same graphic, only with a way to pop out the surface of the vertically oriented table and lay it over the horizontal one. Yep, same size and shape.
He also demonstrated the McGurk Effect, which shows how our brain interprets audio signals also using visual clues.
(Bite Sci-zed/YouTube)
The girl in the video is saying the same thing each time, but whether you hear “bar” or “far” depends largely on the shape her lips are making.
The reason all these illusions work is that our brain takes signals from our eyes and ears and then infers a model of reality that is right nearly all the time — just not any of these times. VR also works by messing with how your brain infers what is real.
Bottom line? All reality is virtual.
VR technology today is good enough to create a believable experience, “but just barely,” says Abrash.
The latest Oculus Rift prototype, code-named Crescent Bay, would still need 20 times more pixels to re-create the experience of a standard monitor seen at a normal viewing distance, he says. To re-create a retina display, it would need 200 times more pixels.
Abrash sees VR as the next great leap forward in the technology revolution that started with the PC itself, then moved through the graphical user interface, the Web, and smartphones. Getting there will need a deep-pocketed partner. Enter Facebook.
“Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus was an important moment in the history of technology,” Abrash said. “It meant there was no longer any doubt that VR would get the runway it needed to achieve its true potential.”
In addition to screen technology, VR still needs significant improvements in haptics, or nonvisual feedback; the ability to manipulate objects in a virtual environment using our hands; and better tracking of our eyes, face, hands, and body in virtual space. All of that is on the horizon, Abrash says, and Facebook’s checkbook can make it happen.
“Once the technology gets good enough,” Abrash says, “it has the potential to re-create any experience that’s possible in the real world or any experience we’re capable of having.”
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