Virtual Reality

A lot of them are investing in VR right now. I can't say anything specifically, but there are multibillion-dollar game development studios doing serious work in VR. But they're not the people who are here showing off demos in the hallway. They're the ones working internally to make sure it's something that's polished and that they can show and not get criticized for it because they're under a lot more scrutiny...

Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

If, like me, you see people as sacred centers of experience that should be surrounded by a kind of moat of respect, you might find it a little creepy to find yourself in a world in which software can be connected directly to the brain. This could create extraordinary artifacts of power where some people might control a transpersonal phenomenon, while others would have no power at all. So I think it’s worth being conservative about the core of personhood.

Virtual reality is not a new medium. It’s been around for decades. what’s new are the viewing devices, in which you’re able to view it. For decades, I had been writing, trying to marry words with pictures. With VR it’s spherical video and the story is a stream that never ends. With VR you have the ability to take them inside the picture you tried to create through writing. With VR for example, our nation’s veterans are able to take virtual tours of places like Washington DC to see its monuments. We’re also using VR technology to take people inside homeless camps for veterans, so that people can really see how our nation’s homeless veterans are living

Yes, but no worries, the great majority of VRML 2.0 plugins will read your 1.0 code. Just don't forget to specify in the header which version you used.

Just put the # character before your comment line, just like // for JavaScript. Remember that if your comment has two lines, you must put the # before each line!

We have an Oculus research lab in Seattle that we've talked about, and that's really more pure research, like long-term. I work more on the near-term productization team. And it's in terms of there is R&D, but it's not years out, it's in the near-term like getting the next product out the door and making it as good as possible-type of R&D.

Primitives are basic geometric shapes that are built into the language. The shapes available are: Sphere, Box, Cylinder and Cone. You should abuse these nodes because they are defined in a small number of lines, keeping the size of your document at a minimum.

Scene graphs are a hierarchical representation of all the objects, visual and/or audio, that composes your virtual world. The representation is made through node statements that have fields and values to be determined, similar to HTML tags and their parameters.

VRML stands for Virtual Reality Modeling Language. It is an ISO/IEC language developed by a combined effort of a group of companies and 3D designers and programmers for describing 3D scenes on the Web (fortunately from the beginning the effort converged to make it standard, no such luck with HTML until W3C was created). The documents have *.WRL extensions that can be viewed by a browser with an appropriate plugin or helper-application.

I don't think they understand why it's relevant to them yet. A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo. I was about to correct myself and say another game, but that's what a grandmother would say: "Oh, you're going to plug it into your Nintendo and play Halo."

But that type of perception is going to change as virtual reality becomes more mainstream and they get to see things like VR cinema or 3D-360 degree panoramas or communicate with people over long distances. They're going to see this is relevant to them in their daily lives as a not-pimply-faced-teenage-kid.

In order to experience virtual reality, you’ll need a VR headset such as a Google Cardboard, the HTC Vive, or the Oculus Rift. You can purchase a Google Cardboard from several recommended vendors. See Google Cardboard’s website for more information.

It's going to take good content, units in the field, and a probably lot of grassroots evangelism. I don't think a television ad and can nearly be as effective as showing people this thing.

This is a fascinating modality because it’s the one with the highest bandwidth. It would open access to cognitive powers that seem to be innate, such as the ability of the hands to find harmonically correct paths between chords on a piano without the need for conscious thought. Whole body haptics would allow us to enter, explore and virtually experience structures that we cannot even see.

We've known it would be important for a long time. Even since the beginning of the company, people said "what's the long-term vision of how these headsets are going to work?" And it's very clear--in the future, it's all going to be headsets with onboard computing power... We knew mobile would be an important component, we just didn't know it would be so soon.

That’s complex because there are so many different kinds of work. But my vision is that the virtual world will become the place in which each individual can achieve a form of success that suits his or her character. That’s what a successful future for mankind looks like. Over the last couple of centuries, every time a technology has gotten better, it has put some people out of work. But it has also created new jobs. And the new jobs are usually more dignified and pleasant than those they replaced. Looking ahead, therefore, the question of human dignity is the only question that matters. It is the only purpose of developing technologies.

You can use any text editor to write your VRML code, there are also a great number of programs available in the Web for different platforms, some for free and others pretty expensive. For viewing your work, as I said before, you'll need a browser with a plugin, there's quite a variety that you can choose from for different platforms. If you have some programming knowledge learning VRML will be piece of cake, if not it still pretty easy.

We can find it at the VRML Consortium site

Yes! The most common errors are from mis-typed case letters.

No. Unlike Java, VRML doesn't need to be compiled at all. That's why it requires a plugin for viewing it.