Looking at the Latest Advances in Virtual Reality

Scott O’Brien (Humense) is a pioneer in the fields of augmented and virtual reality. He’s working on a new project – generating ultra-high definition virtual reality scenes. A few days ago, I visited Humense’s lab environment for an early look at an 8K VR projection.

In this short video, Scott explains a bit about how Humense is achieving this type of high resolution.

The photo below shows a 2D image of the VR subject on a flat screen, but it doesn’t come close to the detail that’s available when wearing an HTC Vive headset. In 3D, you really can see a lot of detail, but even at an 8K output resolution it’s nowhere near as crisp as a 4K image on a flat screen. I suspect that you’d need to film with multiple 4K cameras (or higher) to get a real-life feeling in a VR scene. I’ve played with a lot of VR demos, and this certainly is much more life-like than most I’ve seen.

Scott also described (short video) the various ways that Virtual Reality content can be created, and become increasingly life-like.

VR has lots of potential commercial uses. Right now though, one of the biggest drawbacks of VR as a business tool is the clunkiness of VR headsets. After just a few minutes, I can’t wait to get rid of the head gear.

About the author: Shara Evans is internationally acknowledged as a cutting edge technology futurist, commentator, strategy advisor, keynote speaker and thought leader, as well as the Founder and CEO of Market Clarity.