Besides the metaverse I’ve already mentioned, here’s another one:
Through my work I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to use CAVE environments developed at UC Davis and UC San Diego in analysis of planetry data. Search for “3d CAVE” on youtube and you should fine plenty of videos showing what this experience is like.
The effect of being able to immersively interact with this data is incredible. The classic example I gave visitors was some of the first published data to come out of the UC Davis computer science / geology visualization partnership: a buckling of subduction zones that was previously unknown despite having sufficient data available for the last century at least. They loaded earthquake data overlayed on a globe basically as a test of the system, and almost immediately discovered the subduction buckling from straight visual inspection.
Analyzing geometric data directly in an immersive 3D environment is so much more productive than traditional techniques, because it exploits the natural machinery we have inbuilt in us for aggregating and extracting out details of sensory data. Already it sees use in many areas—I sat next to someone on a plane once who’s job it was to install these things in oil exploration ships, where the energy companies would use it to quickly analyze the terrabytes of data coming in from the sea bed.
I expect that in nearly all fields of engineering, physical science, and biology there are great efficiencies to be gained by utilizing the immersive CAVE experience. But a traditional CAVE will cost you half a million dollars, putting it way outside the reach of most organizations. An Occulus Rift + Kinect + decent graphics card puts you back less than a thousand dollars, on the other hand.
(BTW, experience in immersive CAVE environments is that with suitable precision and capability in the technology motion sickness-like symptoms disappear for all but a few percent of the population)
I actually agree with you here. As I mentioned in my first reply, I can easily imagine virtual/augmented reality headsets being used for creative professions, and I can also easily imagine them being used for science/engineering and so on. It’s just hard for me to imagine them being widely used in gaming, at least in their current form. Maybe future, more advanced iterations of the technology would have better chances.
Besides the metaverse I’ve already mentioned, here’s another one:
Through my work I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to use CAVE environments developed at UC Davis and UC San Diego in analysis of planetry data. Search for “3d CAVE” on youtube and you should fine plenty of videos showing what this experience is like.
The effect of being able to immersively interact with this data is incredible. The classic example I gave visitors was some of the first published data to come out of the UC Davis computer science / geology visualization partnership: a buckling of subduction zones that was previously unknown despite having sufficient data available for the last century at least. They loaded earthquake data overlayed on a globe basically as a test of the system, and almost immediately discovered the subduction buckling from straight visual inspection.
Analyzing geometric data directly in an immersive 3D environment is so much more productive than traditional techniques, because it exploits the natural machinery we have inbuilt in us for aggregating and extracting out details of sensory data. Already it sees use in many areas—I sat next to someone on a plane once who’s job it was to install these things in oil exploration ships, where the energy companies would use it to quickly analyze the terrabytes of data coming in from the sea bed.
I expect that in nearly all fields of engineering, physical science, and biology there are great efficiencies to be gained by utilizing the immersive CAVE experience. But a traditional CAVE will cost you half a million dollars, putting it way outside the reach of most organizations. An Occulus Rift + Kinect + decent graphics card puts you back less than a thousand dollars, on the other hand.
(BTW, experience in immersive CAVE environments is that with suitable precision and capability in the technology motion sickness-like symptoms disappear for all but a few percent of the population)
I actually agree with you here. As I mentioned in my first reply, I can easily imagine virtual/augmented reality headsets being used for creative professions, and I can also easily imagine them being used for science/engineering and so on. It’s just hard for me to imagine them being widely used in gaming, at least in their current form. Maybe future, more advanced iterations of the technology would have better chances.