so today I would like to show you that
virtual reality is a great tool to hack
your mind and we will see that there are
three different kind of illusions and if
you have combined them appropriately can
make the big difference between a great
immersive experience and an immense
failure so my mind was hacked by virtual
reality the first time almost 25 years
ago so as a young teenager I went to
Berlin and attended there or visited an
amusement park called the cyberspace
cafe and what I saw there was basically
the first commercially available VR
games ever at that time so there were
some machines by W industry later called
virtuality and I could actually play my
first VR game this most dec tonight now
as illustrated here in the video so I’m
curious how how many of you have played
this game before so just two three
people so as you can see in this game we
have this checkerboard platforms in
which you can move around you had a gun
you had to shoot some dragons which
tried to catch you and you could
collaborate with a different player or
you can shoot other players as well and
despite the really low quality of what
you saw there so really low resolution
high latency immature trekking and so on
I was really blown away by this
experience I really had the illusion of
being there in the surreal
assha light world I really had the
illusion that the dragon tries to catch
me and I certainly had the illusion that
my friend was there with me it took a
couple of years until I got into
research and kind of understand which
was what was really going on there so
when we talk about virtual reality today
we talk about immersive technology and
this immersive technology allows us to
dive into a computer-generated world
with all our senses not only the visual
sense and the auditory sense but also
our inner body senses so while we move
we can explore the environment and it
has been shown that this immersive
technology tends to increase our sense
of presence which means our sense of
believing that we are in this
computer-generated world but the sense
of presence has multiple dimensions and
I would briefly summarize the three most
important
sorry for the formula here is a TEDx
talk so I was hurt I was not allowed to
use any formulas but this is the only
formula I showed to you so for those of
you who haven’t studied mathematics or
Greek symbols it just means that
presence for presence it’s essential to
sum up P C and Sigma and what I mean by
that I will explain in a second so the
first one P is an acronym for place
allusion and this refers to the illusion
that you really believe that you are in
this place that you are seeing so you’re
done on a head-mounted display for
example and then you are in this virtual
environment and for example we can just
use virtual pity on a heist icebreaker
you don’t not be a champion to see that
and you really have you are there and we
can actually measure that so you will
see that you have an increase heart rate
that you begin to sweat but this is
actually not enough for these illusions
it’s not enough that you just have the
feeling of being there and this brings
us to the next important point which is
sea plausibility illusion and this
refers to the illusion that you really
believe that the events which happen in
virtual reality actually occur so
whoever hears afraid of spiders
a couple so if we put you in a virtual
reality experience and you see some
virtual spiders as this human here which
goat for words your hand you should
really have this illusion that this is
happening to you at this point and we
will see how for what we can use it but
again just having this place illusion
and plausibility illusion is not enough
for a great experience and like all
technologies that we have today only
those get successful which really help
users in humans to get connected to each
other which brings us to the next
important dimension of presence which is
social presence which refers to the
sense of being there with another person
in this world and I just want to show
you a short clip from oculus connect
this year in which you can see mark
zuckerberg using virtual reality
together with some colleagues so what
you see in the next second is his view
here you see a 360 video of the
surrounding and you see two avatar
representations which represent his
coworkers which are somewhere else on
earth at that point and they are just
here together in this virtual reality
setup and they can card start to
communicate to each other and in the
following they Experian
some different kind of virtual
experiences and you can see that all
these experiences kind of provide a
sense of place illusion so you have
really the illusion here you are in the
ocean or you are on Mars or you are in
the living room of Mark Zuckerberg or in
an office space at Facebook we also have
plausibility illusion so you really
think that the shark is diving to you
and of course you have social presence
while really believing that you are here
together with your friends family and
beloved ones or coworkers
and all the applications which have
enormous potential for virtual reality
called killer applications will benefit
from the combination of place illusion
plausibility illusion and social
presence for example playing a game I
want to have the illusion that I’m there
that I’m there with my friends and the
events are really happening there so of
course virtual reality is not a new
thing it’s actually quite old and dates
back to some of the pioneering work from
the 60s so I’m curious how many of you
know this person would you please raise
your hand so this is Ivan Sutherland who
is one of the creators of computer
graphics so whenever he is whenever you
see graphics today it dates back to some
of his book and in 1965 he wrote a
wonderful essay called
the ultimate display and there is
speculated what an idea
optimal ultimate computer display would
look like and he concluded that of
course such a display would be a room
within which the computer can control
the existence of matter and he gave some
example so he said a chair displayed in
such a room would be good enough to sit
in handcuffs would be confining and a
ballot would be fatal and I was always
wondering who wants to be in such an
ultimate display in which handcuffs
ballots and and these things are items
of the daily agenda but he also wrote
that with appropriate programming such a
literary display could literally be the
Wonderland into which Ellis Ward so the
ultimate display would be a computer
mediated reality which gets
indistinguishable from the real world
and this notion of virtual reality has
been used in science fiction literature
and cinematography to question whether
we truly know if our perceptions are
real or not and just three years after
he wrote is wonderful to say he was able
to build the first
augmented reality virtual reality
prototype and what you see here is an
original footage from the time in which
Ivan Sutherland uses his first augmented
reality display ever and what you see
here is him seeing a virtual cube on
this transparent screen you will see in
a second and a lot of cables and
electromechanical tracking is introduced
there so that he’s able to see a
stereoscopic cube in space and just
moving around and explored in a very
natural way we know that technology
advances exponentially the interesting
thing is Ivan Sutherland developed the
first prototype at the end of the 60s
that was exactly the same time when the
mouse was invented or the graphical user
interface or the Internet and why this
technology is vital today and we cannot
even thinking about living without it
virtual reality has not really made it
until now so we had the first type in
the 90s but at that time the major
problem was that the technical milieu
was not ready for virtual reality so
whenever you immersed somebody into a
virtual reality environment only what
they could see was a couple of shaded
polygons with really low field of view
really bad resolution and inaccurate
tricking their tracking and the term VRS
debt became a common narrative back at
the time and it became pretty clear that
virtual reality is not the future how
humans would interact with computers
back at that time the real revolution
came in a different form factor
smartphones just small enough to fit in
your pocket and the ironic thing is that
all the reefs the the reserves the
rebirth of virtual reality is based on
advancements which have been made in the
smartphone market because if you take a
look at today’s help on the displays all
the technology which is a valuable there
is basically grounded on advancements
from the smartphone technologies like
the OLED screens like inertial
measurement units gyroscopes and
graphics performance and today’s
ultimate display look like this so how
many of you have tried one of these
displays so after my talk there’s a
chance in the bathroom to test the
middle one here as you can see by the
specification
these displays are still not ultimate
but you kind of if you using them you’ll
get a glimpse of the future you get a
vision how these display might look like
just in a couple of years and the hype
is pretty much there now so I just want
to show you one example in which we try
to solve a very exciting challenge which
is one of the goals of Ivan Sutherland
the Wunderland into which Ellis walked
so that basically means we want to
explore computer-generated environment
in the most natural way this is not by
using a mouse or a keyboard or a touch
display it’s just how we do it in the
real world and how do we do that we just
walk we just walk through the
environment and to implement it is
actually very simple in virtual reality
so you can just track all the motions
and map that to a virtual world the
problem is that usually the virtual
environment illustrated here is much
larger than the space in which I can
actually move around so it actually read
it is we did a couple of hacking your
mind tricks actually by guiding users on
circular arcs in the real world while
they believe to walk straight in the
virtual environment and it turned out
that I could hack all your minds by let
you walk on a circle with the radius of
20 meter while you actually believe to
walk straight in the virtual environment
and it’s really cool to see how these
research work which is already quite old
called redirected walking is now really
applied in commercial products so in
Utah there’s a theme park called the
void in which you can actually go with
your friends and play like virtual laser
tech so you have an arena in which you
can run around with your friends
have plays illusion the affordability
loot and social presence in which you
can interact with some friends and they
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and this is now simply used in a game
context but you can easily use your
imagination and think what could you
display in such words and what could you
experience together with your friends
and your family or your colleagues and
really believing that this is a real
place and that the events are really
happening so what will happen in the
future what will happen with the
ultimate display in the future we have
seen it took 25 years from the first
prototype to the first VI huh we are
hide then it took 20 more years until
the next vr hive so you see the
intervals are getting shorter on typical
thing about exponential advancement so
let’s have a look maybe to 15 years so
what will happen in the next 15 years
the really nice thing about exponential
advancement is that you can easily
predict and extrapolate how computing
performance will evaluate so by this
exponential advancement we know
approximately every 18 months computing
performance will double
we know that in 15 years actually the
machines that we will have available
will be 1,000 times better than the
machines that we have today and this
will be true for storage this will be
true for network bandwidth and this will
be true for resolution and so on so all
of these aspects will be 1,000 times
better in the next 15 years what does
that mean so certainly we will have a
new device or a new paradigm shift
called smart glasses and these smart
glasses will be able to do both
augmented reality as well as virtual
reality and we will certainly see how
our current paradigm like smartphones
will kind of disappear and we will have
this new area of smart glasses and trust
me in 15 years in 2030 we will laugh
about how we walk today through the
streets while having our face pointing
downwards to our smartphones and walking
like a zombie smartphone users mombi’s
will also see how these glasses will go
smaller and smaller and eventually
collapse into something like contact
lenses and all big players today Google
Samsung Apple Microsoft they all thought
that patents for such kind of displays
and we will also solve a very
challenging task which is we will solve
the graphics Turing test so how many of
you have heard
the Turing test so the twist is here the
variant is here that it’s not about an I
should feel artificial intelligent
it’s about rendering a virtual object or
an entire virtual environment from which
I cannot tell if it’s the reality or if
it’s virtual and we have to do that in
real time so think about the computer
game which I play and I cannot tell if
this is like a video capture of the real
world or if this is a computer game so
in order to be able to have this
possibility to render and solve this
test it means we need like one petaflop
of GPU performance we are currently in
the range of one to ten teraflop having
a factor of 1,000 this will be easily to
be solved and just to give you a notion
what that means being a thousand times
better in terms of visual quality so for
knives when I finished school I spent
most of my time actually playing
computer game so Tom Breda was one of
the best games that you could play and
Lehrer Croft back at the time looked
like this just one and a half decade
later Lehrer cross looks like this so
this is approximately an improvement of
a sector 1000 and you can easily
extrapolate what that means being again
1,000 times better and it gets really
clear that we will have this situation
that we see virtual object virtual
environments from which we can not tell
if they are real or not and we will be
together maybe with various MATLAB
smartness and I might see people like
you and I can not tell at that point who
of you is really here as a human being
who of you is just an avatar maybe which
is displayed on my smart glass and
actually you’re somewhere else as the
remote location and who of you is
actually just an agent so somebody who’s
just here fulfilling the places basic
and these improvements will have
enormous effect on our society and there
must be some rules in which the kind of
state how do we want to live as humans
in such a digital world so for example
our lab came up with one rule called
immersion must not be concealed so
whenever I want to know I should be able
to know which is what is real know and
what is not so far it’s really easy I
just take off the head mount at this
plant then I can see but assuming having
like contact lenses I cannot be sure
about that so we saw these kind of
applications which will certainly
benefit from immersive technology and
the sense of presence today VR is
already used very effectively for these
kind of applications in which you have a
place illusion so you really believe you
are there in which there’s plausibility
illusion you really believe that these
spiders are real and you have social
presence in which you can for example
treat different kind of phobias like
fear of heights fear of spiders or fear
of public speaking but I think one of
the most important features that virtual
reality can provide as this one the
ultimate empathy machine so virtual
reality allows for example to swap your
gender so you can experience what it is
like to be a woman or a man you can also
switch your skin colour and can
experience what would it be to be
belonging to a different ethnic group or
what would it be to live in a camp in
szura as a refugee and this kind of
applications have the potential to
change our view of ourselves of others
as well as how we see the world so in
the 90s they said VR is dead and I’m
pretty sure that no that the situation
is different today the technical imager
is there and it will just take like a
very small number of years until we
really have this new revolution of
virtual reality augmented reality which
will revolutionize the way how we live
as human in the digital world thank you so much