The Virtual Reality ENIGMA

             Simply put the purpose of virtual reality is to trick your brain into perceiving and not believing. The technology can’t make you forget that you are wearing a pair of goofy googles and standing in your living room. What it can do is trick your senses so well that no amount of conscious knowledge can shake the illusion. Just as roller coasters are scary even though you know they are safe V.R (Virtual Reality) feels real even though you know it is not.This is fascinating because it’s kind of all or nothing. If the brain is fooled well enough one can experience intensely powerful close to real scenarios. if it is not fooled well enough that’s when you get eye strain and motion sickness.so if V.R (Virtual Reality) is not done perfectly it isn’t work doing at all. That so many people are confused about the sudden resurgence of V.R (Virtual Reality). The technologies used in the rift are essentially upgraded versions of the features of the old V.R (Virtual Reality) arcade games.as advancements have improved the experience enough to cross that visible threshold in the brain between nauseating and awesome.That’s why people are excited and that’s why there’s so much money being spent on V.R (Virtual Reality) today.

How virtual reality works..?

So how does our brain and our senses get tricked so perfectly? As it turns out its hard-so hard that it requires a handful of clever tricks across the board. Display and optics.

Let’s start with the simplest problem V.R (Virtual Reality) developers need to solve: 

How to put an image in front of the user’s eyes.

The rift uses two display panels and two lenses with each screen covering a different eye which produces a 3D effect. Note that this is different from 3D movies which are designed knowing exactly where the user’s eyes are (and thus knowing the right perspective to emulate). In a 3D movie you must display the same stereo image to everyone no matter where they’re sitting, and that means that it’s never actually perfect. Objects don’t look like they’re the right size and many people get eye strain if they aren’t sitting in the exact centre of the theatre.

• Tracking and rendering.

1)The rift also needs to know when the users head moves to update the image on screen properly-and this information should be known quickly and accurately. when the user moves or turns the rift only has about twenty milliseconds to change the image on screen without the brain noticing the delay.If the image updates too slowly the immersion is broken and the user feels sick. Twenty milliseconds are not a lot of time. 

         

2) If you are rendering at a modest 30 fps simply math says that each new frame takes 33 milliseconds to render. Thats already too slow and without considering the time it takes to measure the motion send the data to the display and change the pixels.So, V. R requires a fast renderer and that’s why it needs such a beefy P.C. The rift happens to run at 90 fps which is faster than most high-end pc games. At this speed, each frame takes 11 milliseconds to render leaving 9 milliseconds to handle everything else. The OLED screens can switch pixels in about 1 milliseconds leaving 8 milliseconds to measure the heads positions and get all the data back and forth across the cable. 

         

3)As it turns out, no current sensor is existence is fast enough and accurate enough for VR, the fast ones are too inaccurate and the accurate ones are too slow. So, the rift uses two sensors; one fast and one accurate .The fast one is an accelerometer like one in the smartphone, which can detect motion at an extremely high refresh rates but it has some flaws too.

         

4)VR is the creation of a virtual environment presented to our senses in such a way that we experience it as if we were there. It uses a host of technologies to achieve this goal and is a technically complex feat that must account for our perception and cognition. It has both entertainment and serious uses. 

 The technology is becoming cheaper and more widespread. We can expect to see many more innovative uses for the technology in the future and perhaps a fundamental way in which we communicate and work thanks to the possibilities of virtual reality.

Written By:

JAYESH JAIN

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