Name: 「仮想現実」って何？魔法のような技術が創造する未来 | 5 Levels | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-09T08:46:34.000Z
Duration: 15 min 53 s
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I'm the Chief Technology Officer for Oculus.

I've been challenged today to talk about one concept at five levels of increasing complexity.

So we're going to be talking about reality and virtual reality, what the technology allows us to do today, what it may allow us to do in the future, and whether that should even be our goal to approximate reality.

It's like a video game, except it feels like you're in the video game.

That's actually a really good description.

The idea is that if you've got a system here that can make you see whatever we want you to see, then we can make you believe that you're anywhere else, like on top of a mountain, or in a dungeon, or under the ocean.

When you look at a TV on the wall there, like a picture of a mountain or something, how can you tell that it's not just a window and there's something else behind it?

Because it always doesn't look quite right.

If you have a static picture of a person on a screen and you move around like this, it's not really changing.

Those are things that we have to figure out the ways around it to fool you in virtual reality.

We need to figure out when you look at something in reality, how can you tell whether it's real or not?

Have you been to a 3D movie where you put on the little glasses?

So what they do, the trick for that is, if you're ever at a theater and you take up the glasses and you look at it, you'll see it's blurry, where there's actually two pictures that they're showing at the same time.

And what those little glasses do is they let one eye see one picture and the other eye see a different picture.

So then your eyes can say, oh, it looks like I'm seeing right through the screen, or something is floating out in front of it.

In the VR headsets, what we do is there's actually either two screens or one screen split in half so that it draws a different picture, a completely different picture for each eye.

And we make sure that each eye can only see the picture it intended to.

And that's what can make things feel like they've got this real depth to them, that it's something that you could reach out and touch.

And it doesn't feel like a flat TV screen.

Try and look over there and concentrate on his face over there.

Can you see me waving my hand without turning your eyes?

So at some point, you can probably see it right now.

So without moving your eyes, this is kind of hard, tell me how many fingers I'm holding up.

And you see that even in, like, if you hold out your hand and you focus on your hand, then your foot would be blurry because there's that difference there.

Like, you can then focus on your foot and your hand gets blurry because your eyes can see different amounts of detail in different places.

So we're hoping in the future that hardware can be like that, where we can make a display that puts lots of detail right where you're looking.

And every time you look someplace else, it moves the detail over there.

So we don't need to render a hundred times as much as we've got right now.

Figuring out where you're looking is a pretty hard problem.

What we try to go about this is by taking a camera and looking at people's eyes and then try to figure out, is the eye looking over here or up here?

And we're working hard on stuff like this right now so that we hopefully can have a virtual reality that's as detailed and realistic feeling as the reality that we've actually got around us.

But it's going to be a long time before we get to where we can really fool people.

So do you have a basic sense of what latency is?

So my understanding of what latency is, is it's basically the time delay between the rendering at different points.

So it's basically a delay and it happens in all parts of the system.

Consumer televisions can often have 50 milliseconds or more of latency just in the TV part.

And then you've got the processing in the computer and all of these add up to the total latency.

The latency is, in my opinion, the most important part of VR because if you have that offset, your body is no longer immersed and you gain that motion sickness, which can pull a lot of people out of the experience.

Games that feel really good, they've got that sense that it happens It really is a testament to this kind of technology and how it's developing and how over time it's going to just be, you're going to be able to pack more pixel density in those displays and it's going to get a lot more immersive.

Like 30 years ago, you had desktop PCs, which were, you spent whatever on that.

But there was always this idea, well, you can spend a million dollars and buy a supercomputer and it's going to be a lot faster.

For scalar processing, when you just do one thing after another, a high-end overclocked, cooled gaming PC is about the fastest thing in the world.

Yeah, for some things, you'll get some IBM power system that might be a little bit faster, but not a whole lot.

So if I'm looking at this and saying, we need to be five times faster, what do you do?

You can't just say, make each thing faster.

As a developer, you're making a trade-off.

I can put my effort into making this more efficient or making it more fun and more fun usually wins out for very good reasons.

So there's some good judgment and trickery that goes into the design of things.

You can always design a game that will just not work well.

I mean, in the old days, games had to be so precisely designed.

Old games are running off of 8-bit and that's all the data you can have.

Any crazy idea you do now, you can probably make a pretty good video game out of it, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

But VR makes you have to give up a little bit of that freedom.

You have to not do so many crazy things so that you can wind up having it be as responsive and high quality as it needs to be.

You know, an interesting topic is what are the limits to what we can do with virtual reality, where I'm pretty pleased with what we have today, what we can show people and say, virtual reality, it's cool.

But we're still clearly a very, very long ways from reality.

That kind of notes back to realism in our history and how realism was a response to romanticism.

And realism was meant to capture the mundane, everyday lives of individuals and not idealize any of their activities in any way.

And I think that that's really important for virtual reality.

I think it's kind of like a rite of passage for any kind of art technology to go Mostly in VR, we talk about the display and optics, the visual side of things, but we should at least tick off the other senses.

And haptics is an interesting thing about virtual reality really doesn't have that aspect of touching things.

You can move your hands around, you could do everything, but it's a disconnected experience because, you know, you don't have the actual solidity there.

And I am pessimistic about progress in haptics technology, about almost all other areas.

I'm excited about what's coming up, but I don't have any brilliant vision about how we're going to revolutionize haptics and make it feel like we're touching the things in the virtual world.

So I've tried the demos where there's at VRLA, there's one that has waves, like audio waves, I believe, that come up and then you can put your hands through that and feel the waves whenever you're supposed to be feeling bubbles or any kind of force field or something.

I've seen some pretty interesting things that you could do with audios.

You can cut down a lot of the storage, I guess, and the power that you would need in order to power a huge you can just mimic the sounds of those scenes actually being there and then not actually build them out.

For example, a professor at USC would have the sound of a train drive-by without ever actually rendering the sound, and you'd feel like you're deeply immersed in this world without having to have such an expensive scene built around you.

And that is one potential quality improvement that's still on the horizon, is when we do spatialization, we use the HRTF, the head relative transfer function, to make it sound like it's in places.

But usually we just use this one generic, here is your average human, HRTF function.

And it's possible that, of course, if you are right in the average, then it's perfect for you, but there's always people off to the extremes that it doesn't do a very good job at.

And there may be better ways to allow people to sample their own perfect HRTF, which can improve the audio experiences a lot.

It all comes down to all these trade-offs.

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「仮想現実」って何？魔法のような技術が創造する未来 | 5 Levels | WIRED Japan

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