Virtual reality has long been a sci-fi pipe dream, up there with Back to the Future-inspired hover boards and the Jetsons-inspired flying cars that came before it.
But virtual reality is becoming more science and less fiction with every passing year.
“Last year, there was a purchase by Facebook of a company called Oculus,” explained Luis Alvarez, CEO and namesake of Alvarez Technology Group, on Power Talk 101.1. “And Oculus was pretty much just known for their virtual reality goggles. And so a lot of people asked ‘Hey, so what’s Facebook going to do with that?’ Well, it turns out they’ve been spending lots of money on research and development to create a lot of new technology to make virtual reality, reality.”
So, how does virtual reality work, exactly?
“You wear these goggles that are able to project a 3D environment in front of you, and some of it is just created artificially, think of Avatar the movie, how it was all CGI, special effects. But a lot of it is actually film… especially the sports events. There’ s a company out of LA that’s now specializing in sports events and filming sports events in three dimensions, and then you wearing the goggles can actually watch this event and actually walk on the court, on the field, go pretty much anywhere you want to wearing these goggles and it seems like you’re right there.”
So the technology’s there, but what about the content? After all, a TV is just a boring box unless you can tune it into a program.
“One of the other interesting things about this whole virtual reality phenomenon is that a lot of these companies that are producing the goggles and the technology to view virtual reality are counting on the crowdsourcing phenomenon to help them create content. Content is something that’s really going to make or break virtual reality. They’re hoping that all those people on the internet that get enamored with this technology will start creating content and streaming it to these goggles to make them relevant, to make people want to buy them.”
With virtual reality on its way (content pending), maybe we’ll get our hover boards next…
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