Key concepts of Virtual Reality. Now that we have established these basic display technologies in the remainder of this video, I want to talk about these key concepts. The seven key concepts that I've chosen for us to focus on are autonomy and agency, presence and immersion. We would talk about embodiment and avatars, cognition and empathy and we're also going to talk about proprioception and motion sickness and then haptics and pseudo-haptics. Finally, we're also going to talk about this concept of boundary and redirected walking. Now, we're going to look at each with a little bit of an example and then I think we have established some of the key concepts that we should be familiar with before we learn about the technologies that really implement some of these concepts. The first concept is autonomy and agency. I wanted to give a few examples here. The first example is the user can actually choose their own perspective in the scene. The user is actually in control of the virtual camera. My second example is, the user can usually choose to navigate the scene in many different ways, so most VR environments allow you to teleport or provide some kind of menu functionality. But if you're using a six degrees of freedom headset, you can actually obviously physically walk. Then the third example here for autonomy and agency is the user can choose to interact with any objects, that is really important. Basically, everything you show to them, unless it's color-coded in some specific way, they may choose to pick up any object and they expect that it behaves when they drop it. Physics and gravity are usually things that are also expected by users. In a nutshell, the user can choose their own perspective on the scene, the user can choose to navigate the scene in many different ways, and the user can choose to interact with any objects that they see, both in the virtual law but also in the physical world. Let's talk about presence and immersion. According to Mel Slater, they're two things going on when you're entering a virtual world. There is this idea of plays illusion, which really answers this question of am I there, and the more time you spend or the better the world is designed, you may feel like, wow, you are there. There is this plausibility illusion which really answers the question, is this happening? It's overcoming this question in some sense, the suspension of disbelief kicks in, and then these two things will play together. The place illusion and the plausibility illusion will make you forget that you are in the are. The main concept often used in virtual reality is immersion. Immersion, we usually distinguish between something is less immersive and something is more immersive, but what does that mean? I want to give you some examples. I'll start on the very left here, less immersive. My first example is 2D images and videos and that you probably would agree it's not that immersive, and you will more agree when you see the other things I put up there. 360 images and videos on a phone. What I mean by that is, you have the 360 content and you're moving your phone around. Obviously, according to the [inaudible] and external media in the phone, the inertial measurement unit, the IMU, it adjusts the perspective. It is arguably more immersive than looking at a 2D image and video on just a screen. Now, what is more immersive is when you actually have the 360 image or video in a headset. Even if it's just cardboard, you being in there and looking around and having this whole rendering in your face through stereoscopic views and really a high field of view. Anyway, when you're comparing the experience of 360 photos and videos on a headset as opposed to a phone, you would probably agree that the headset is more immersive. The question becomes, how can we get even more immersive? Well, and then I put on 3D images and videos. Now, we're talking about three degrees or freedom handsets. I use the Oculus ago, and then you have a three degrees of freedom controller. It can figure out the orientation and the three degrees of freedom headsets so it knows where you are looking, but it doesn't know position, it just knows orientation. That is arguably not as immersive. Why is 3D image and video more immersive than 360? Well, that's because it has real depth and that really plays a role as we enter even more of the immersion spectrum here, so we're going towards 3D images and videos with a six degrees of freedom headset. For the six degrees of freedom headset I just grabbed as an example, the Oculus Quest. Six degrees of freedom headset means you can actually not just look around, but also walk around. Now, let us make it all have sense for a 360 because 360 is usually captured at one static position where sometimes a 360 camera is moved through the scene, but your movement usually doesn't make a difference in a 360 photo or video, it's really just the orientation. But for a 3D, where we actually have real depth, you can now actually start to walk around and we can track this with a six degrees of freedom's headset. My last example here is a six degrees of freedom headset with haptics and other senses being stimulated. There are ways to make it even more immersive. Basically, the more senses receive input where the more interactive the condone is, both implicit, how you explore it with a headset but also express it like how you touch it, how you voice-activate it. How much you become part of the story of whatever the virtual reality candidates, that really drives the immersion. My example here for immersion is like this, I'm getting up, I'm like in the Oculus Lounge again, and the first thing I actually did, was actually just looking at this view and just looking around and feeling like being there. It wasn't exactly a feeling of presence, obviously, I think the more time you spend in a VR experience also contributes to you forgetting about the real world. On the emergent level, this was really quite immersive. It really is a beautiful scenery, done in multiple layers and actually quite a lot of detail. Let's talk about embodiment and avatars. Here, I will continue with the example and what I'll do, is actually just show you my avatar. I'm going to that mirror to actually take a look at myself, and after I've been experimenting a little bit with the options that I have, I decided this is actually quite cool. Well, I look like a cool guy in the mirror, I could live with that. These were the first three concepts I wanted to illustrate. Now, we're going to look at the second set of concepts, so cognition and empathy, proprioception, and motion sickness, and also haptics. Not so much pseudo-haptics in this example, and the example that I have here is, we are going back to me driving in this ready car from [inaudible]. Yeah, so here you see me in my car. I'm in the virtual reality headset now. This is six degrees of freedom inside out tracking, so quite immersive, just to say. Then obviously, I have the steering wheel and the gear shift and that adds to the haptics aspects. But the example here is about cognition and empathy. As you watch me drive, I really develop this mental model of this map that I'm driving on. To be honest, I've now spent quite a few hours playing this game, and it's really hard to get better at it. It's very realistic simulation. I can definitely say that I'm building empathy towards race car drivers. That's not really the intention of this game, the intention of this game is probably to have fun and maybe get better and it's quite competitive. But it really allowed me to build this empathy towards the drivers of a rally car. The other thing I mentioned is proprioception, and associated with that, I have also mentioned motion sickness. Proprioception is really like, actually feels pretty good in this car, because I'm sitting and I'm moving around here, checking my mirror, I don't have a real mirror. Then I'm like driving around and I'm looking around while I'm driving and all of that feels really natural. The speed also feels okay, and I don't actually feel motion sick in this game, it's actually pretty solid. When I press the brakes or actually use the handbrake for drifting, the car responds as I would expect. Overall, I don't actually experience a lot of motion sickness. There's really a good mapping between what I do physically with my body and what happens in the virtual world. Finally, I wanted to talk about haptics and pseudo-haptics, and then I wanted to share the equipment with you that I'm using, because they really generate a quiet realistic experience, the good haptics, because I actually have a steering wheel, I have a gear shift and a handbrake. Obviously, the last piece of equipment is actually the VR headset. Now, that feels a little bit like a helmet, so I imagine that if you are a rally driver, you have a helmet, so it does feel still quite realistic to have something on your head. Overall, the whole experience is actually quiet realistic and immersive, and that's also why I showed it to you earlier, and obviously, it's quite fun, at least for the person inside there. What is interesting when you look at it from this outside perspective, I know where the gear shift is. I know where the handbrake is. I cannot see you through the headset, I just really took a few minutes to train them motor memory, if you will, so that I remember how to reach out. Where the pedals are, obviously, I can feel those. Yeah, this is like a hour over time, basically, through haptics and the whole physical layout and my motor memory is being trained and I know exactly where the gear shift is and where the handbrake is. But by me showing this to you now, I'm paying attention to making it fit into the camera view. But when I'm sitting in the seat, it's just there, I just know. This really translates nicely to this experience. Now I gave some other examples around pseudo-haptics, this idea of you lifting an object, but there's actually no force feedback. We can also do muscle stimulation and all these kinds of a little bit more crazy things, that I invite you to read about and maybe talk about in the forums. But I don't actually have these examples. There's no approved product right now that I know, at least, that does muscle stimulation. But I've seen a lot of research projects by really good colleagues. This is also an exciting concept. We talked about redirected walking. One thing that I definitely want to talk about is the virtual boundary. That's something you usually set up in the VI experience. I'm going to show you this as the last example. In this video I'm going to set up the station boundary, and introduce you to the concept of the VR boundary if you want. As it shows you in the video is, the safest way is to just mark really the area that is really safe to use. Now, I have a chair here, but that one moves all the time. That wouldn't be too much of a play area, but that is what it recommends. Now, what you wished you had, where obviously the whole room available for you to play. That's cool, but as you can see now the headset finds all these obstacles. There are lots of obstacles here in the room. It finds all these obstacles and then shows you that's dangerous potentially so be careful. Here's a couple of tips for how to do this boundary. We are going to use mostly the safe area, but then I'm going to do a couple of things to it to help me better understand the room layout. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to include my desk area, so that I stay in VR while I'm seated. I'm okay to accept these obstacles here, that's fine. At least I can enjoy VR while I'm seated. I'll leave this area of the room untouched. We really don't want to bump into the shelf and the wall. Then I'm going to actually mark the exit out of the room. It's not too much. I'm going to do that and that will help me illustrate something in a second. The first thing I'm going to show is when I sit down now, and I'm going to sit down, I'm going to re-center the menu because I'm seated. This is cool now. I can actually leave things that way. We're sitting down. I'm checking all that would work. I'm going to show you. I'm within VR, and even if I move, lean forward or something, I'm still in VR. That's useful. If I had not included the bounds down there, I would exit VR all the time. Because as I'm walking to the exit, if I exit that space now, I'll say you see the film set. This actually is really disruptive to a VR experience obviously. You want to make sure that you have at most the setup nicely, and be in an area where it's safe, and have it glanceable. So when you look down, if you're unsure where you are in the room, this happens sometimes, it'll show you and you really want to avoid bumping into areas like this. You don't want to go too close to the shelf or to the wall. When it becomes red, it's really an issue. I'm going to show you roughly what doing here. When I'm going too close to the wall, it's an issue or the shelf. You want to avoid that, but otherwise this is a few tips to keep in mind about the boundary. It helps to have a couple of areas marked to really understand the safe zones. This was my overview of key concepts in VR. I chose a few of them, there are more. I decided to do it by example and intuitively rather than giving you the cut and dry definitions. Some of these you can look up if it's better for you to have a texture definition of some of these concepts. The seven that I shared about autonomy and agency, empathy, cognition, presence, immersion, these are all some key terms that you should be familiar with, and that's what I wanted to accomplish. We also talked about haptics, to do haptics. Actually there was a lot of stuff in here. Now in the next video, we're going to look at how these concepts are implemented in technologies. These technologies are actually enabling the experiences that I was talking about, including obviously adding to this feeling of presence and immersion.
