Cardboard & cell phones, tethered headsets with USBs and HDMI cables. All promises of access to a powerful technology: virtual reality. When thinking about this promise, it was difficult to not get excited. It was also difficult to put into words what the experience was like or how it affected me on such a fundamental level of humanity. Thanks to friends, I was reminded of a movie my family, especially my daughter, thoroughly enjoyed...The Greatest Showman. What an awesome story. But, the lines that struck me most in the movie resonated in the same way that experience with modern virtual reality did. The lines are from a song, A Million Dreams…in fact, they are the opening lines.
“ I close my eyes and I can see
The world that's waiting up for me That I call my own Through the dark, through the door Through where no one's been before But it feels like home”
VR feels very much the same to me, a world I can call my own…a place no one has been before, but feels like home. Of course, equity in access to this technology has not been that easy. Cardboard brought it more to the masses, but only the masses with a capable smart phone. And those in education began the dance of finding phones that would work while still at a small price point. We became familiar with terms like pyrometer and accelerometer as we bought prepaid and unlocked Android phones that had mixed results for VR use. The cost aside, the smartphone didn’t give the greatest experience either. Low resolution and shoddy experiences would create another issue in what would be called virtual reality sickness. Many factors lead to this ache outside of the quality of experience, but it does play a large role in that disoriented sick feeling
So what about today? Over a year ago, you could hear educators proclaiming one possible solution, and it was so clear to those in education what needed to be done. Cell phones were becoming more powerful, but increasingly expensive for the simple fact it connected to a cellular service provider…something not really needed in a VR experience. What about a self contained device that didn’t require inserting a cellphone into a headset? A standalone vr experience that would have the strength of the most powerful cellphones, but not the expense of a cellular enabled unit. And maybe this standalone could even rival the tethered units someday. Shortly after this grassroots idea spread, Google announced their plans to develop a standalone VR device. They were not the only ones to come forward with such an idea. PICO released their own three degrees of freedom headset, the Goblin and Oculus announced they too would develop a standalone unit called Oculus Go. What do these lower cost standalone units mean for education, business, humanity? It means more diverse peoples can to experience virtual reality as I did.
“ I close my eyes and I can see
The world that's waiting up for me That I call my own Through the dark, through the door Through where no one's been before But it feels like home”
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