The latest VR/XR hardware is evolving fast, but other technologies need to catch up if designers and engineers are going to make the most of this brave new world of capabilities, writes Andrew Bishop, creative director at Lightwave 3D
Virtual reality, or VR, has been around for a long time. But early headsets were expensive, low resolution and heavy, and the control systems on which they relied were unwieldy. There were wires everywhere. Even today, many headsets still suffer from excessive bulk and cost a great deal of money, especially in cases where users are determined to achieve the optimum speeds and resolutions necessary without being tethered. This frustrating situation, however, looks set to change.
First, what Apple achieved with its Apple Vision Pro was the required resolution – 4K per eye – with no wires and the ability to use hand gestures and movements in place of controllers. The headset is fast, fully immersive and non-fatiguing. It’s perfect for enterprise use, but priced at $3,499, it was never going to have mass-market appeal.
Now, headsets are emerging with similar specifications, but priced at below $2,000, and in some cases, below $500. They are super-light, truly innovative and deliver high-speed refresh at 4K per eye resolution. They are easy to set up and easy to use. Now everyone can have access, but product designers and engineers may be the people best-placed to get the most from the capabilities they offer.
Next generation headsets
It will take time for uptake to accelerate. New features in our most-used software packages will be needed to get the best results for this new generation of headsets.
Extended reality, or XR, involves extending reality with overlays, bringing your environment to life through XR/AR enhancement. From a 3D perspective, most of these types of overlays are created in 2D to keep memory overhead super-low. As a result, in the short term, 3D packages may be creating these types of assets, rather than fully immersive scenes, where the overhead would be too much for optical wear to handle.
For that to happen, I believe headsets need to take the form of sunglasses. And processing will need to be conducted on a secondary device, like a smartphone, and transmitted to the headset.
A second technology that will revolutionise the use of this type of headset will be transparent LCD, where graphics appear in your view but you can still see through them to the real-world scenario. Sadly, this is some way off. Currently, transparent technology doesn’t offer a dot pitch small enough to offer a sharp image via a pair of glasses. That said, the technology is advancing at a rapid rate.
By 2030, we may have the technology to enable this. The issue then becomes battery power requirements. A battery will not only need to be lightweight, but also support several hours of use.
Again, the next generation of solid-state batteries is around the corner, which promise to store lots of power and charge in minutes. As for transmission from a phone, this technology is already available so we’re already close to a situation where this solution will be workable.
At LightWave 3D, we’re working on superlow memory 3D geometry formats ideal for this type of product. We’re also working on next-generation real-time rendering technology, with our first implementation being Real-Time Preview Rendering (RiPR), included in our latest release, LW25. This technology is amazing, has a low memory footprint and will improve rapidly in the next two years.
It could potentially be embedded into these technologies, giving low-latency, low-memory Realtime HDR lit geo for use in Web, AR/XR and VR. New formats now include embedded real-time Alpha channel support, so floating objects fully animated with texturing and real-world lighting is fully possible.
Making VR a daily habit
While LightWave has included stereoscopic rendering for at least 15 years, it now also incorporates a specific VR camera for easy set-up 360 rendering. This reflects a shift we are seeing towards VR becoming more prevalent across design, engineering and architecture, as well as media and entertainment.
To push VR/AR/XR forwards from an exciting concept to a daily habit, there are a few milestones we need to hit. Hardware has to evolve: we need sunglasses-thin frames, sub-200g weight, 4K-per-eye micro OLED and transparent LC displays. This should be powered by phone-side compute and batteries that top up in minutes.
Bandwidth needs to be invisible, so that nobody has to think about cables ever again. I believe a common, ultra-lean asset pipeline is essential – think glTF-next plus RiPR – so a single file streams everywhere, without polygon triage.
Finally, mainstream authoring tools need to treat VR/AR output as a firstclass citizen: one click to publish, instant previews, and APIs that allow designers to bolt XR onto existing workflows.
When optics, formats and software align, prices will plummet and wearing immersive tech starts will to feel as natural as putting on reading glasses. And that’s when mass adoption will take off.
About the author:
Andrew Bishop has over 25 years of experience as an animator and studio director producing hundreds of CG shots for television and film.
A member of the team that purchased LightWave 3D two years ago, he is heavily involved in developing new technologies for the software and toolset.
This article first appeared in DEVELOP3D Magazine
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