Virtual Reality

I'm basically doing the same things I always have been: Working with the hardware team on the next generation of our hardware and productizing stuff. I'm also making sure the company's direction is on track, which as the company grows is something that becomes very important; You can't take it for granted as much when you're just a few guys doing the same thing day after day.

Google Cardboard is basically a cardboard box that allows you attach your cell phone to the box and experience VR. You can get it for $20 at [insert link]. There are other virtual reality devices on the market, like the Samsung Gear VR. The Samsung Gear VR functions much like Google Cardboard. Your cell phone snaps into it and the VR app is automatically deployed. Another device is the Zeiss VR One, which uses the same VR apps as Google Cardboard.

Moore’s law and materials science. On the Moore’s law side, pretty good levels of 3D rendering have become commoditized and are already miles ahead of what we could do not so many years ago for millions of dollars. Cheap, fast computing power is thus the muscle that’s driving this today. Materials science, on the other hand, is bringing us better chips, improved optics, sensors, actuators and displays. These things are driving our experiences in the virtual world and opening up great new possibilities.

The structure of the VRML document is a header, scene graphs, prototypes, routes and comments. It's very important to put the header on the first line of all of your documents preceded by a # character. When the browser starts reading them it will search for the VRML's version you used, so get it right otherwise you might not get a correct response from the browser.

For version 2.0: #VRML V2.0 utf8.

And for version 1.0: #VRML V1.0 ascii.

Nodes are the basic blocks for creating your scene. Each kind of node has specific field, values and children statements that are always inserted between { }, so never forget to close your nodes.

This language is gaining more and more acceptance as a technology for displaying 3D graphics because it's a simple and accessible way to create interactive worlds. Also an important feature is that VRML is encoded in UTF-8 (Unikey) format, similar to your web page's HTML encoded in ASCII, so you can make very detailed 3D scenes using very small files, that can be downloaded quickly - which is one of the main concerns when putting something on the internet. For example: you can make a 3D animation logo embedded on your homepage that takes much less time to be downloaded than an usual animated gif.

Some of the challenges as a storyteller is the limitations of the equipment. If you truly want HD 360 video you have to shoot with 16 different cameras and stitch the videos together. Sometimes these cameras will get off sync and make the process a little difficult. There are a lot of VR jams that are held, which are coming up with solutions to the challenges VR is facing.