What's Next For VR? - An Interview with Matt Sonic, Part II

We sat down with Matt Sonic a few weeks ago, amidst the hustle and bustle of GDC 2015. Between running the San Francisco Virtual Reality Meetup and being a general VR Jedi, he took the time to impart some pretty heavy knowledge on us. In fact, it was so heavy we had to break it up into two parts.

Part two: Matt talks about VR's shiny, bright future.

BLI: What are you looking forward to as far as VR development in the next few years?

Matt: I'm really looking forward to VR's oncoming broad consumer adoption and what will come from that, which is the creativity that you get from the masses. We saw the mobile uptake and what happened with that -- who would have said we'd need all these apps to run our lives the way they do now? Mobile changed the way we live. I'm looking forward to the things I can't predict, which will come from the general public.

I'm also looking forward to the potential augmented reality (AR) applications on the horizon, specifically, light field display technology that we're currently seeing from NVIDIA and Magic Leap. Google has invested half a billion dollars into Magic Leap. Half a billion dollars and they have no product yet that they've publically shown.

Light field display technology is supposed to solve the stereoscopic disparity problem that can cause some people to have headaches when shown two different images, one to each eye. Perceiving depth as the disparity between images seen by each eye is a very dominant way we humans see, but there are other depth cues that don’t come from that, like each eye's focus and not necessarily the difference between the two. We have a big problem reproducing that with current display technology, like the Oculus, Morpheus and new HTC device. Light field display is different in that it has several depths that are shown to the eye at the same time. For example, the Magic Leap is supposed to have nine different depths that it shows to the eye. So when you focus on something it seems natural -- it's like you're focusing directly on the object.

These companies are taking light field display technology and incorporating that with incredibly high-quality, real-world tracking and creating augmented reality displays. So instead of having VR where you have to forcibly look around to perceive your virtual surroundings, you're having a really comfortable and intuitive AR experience within your natural environment. You can completely turn a display into a VR display -- you can black the world out, have a fake world that you're looking at, that's totally cool. Or you can have an AR application where you have a virtual piece of paper or a virtual computer, you can have a virtual 'anything in the world' within your natural world and it feels comfortable. Microsoft has one called the HoloLens, which integrates with the Kinect so they're really in a good position to do this. And the Magic Leap has a ton of money, so much money that they could do something really incredible.

I think what's next for VR is we're going to solve the VR problem -- I believe we already have in a lot of ways. We can create amazing VR right now, I mean amazing VR. We will soon see AR and VR merge so that there will no longer be this delineation -- people aren't going to care anymore. We will have this device that will allow us to do this stuff, and we'll either black the world out and go to Mars, or we'll see through it and get some work done.