Future is here and it’s real

AT THE sprawling Web Summit event last week, which attracted 42000 tech bosses, software engineers, media leaders and entrepreneurs from around the world to rainy Dublin, I glimpsed the future.

To do it, I had to stand alone in a room, wearing a bulky pair of goggles, connected by a cord to a large computer, and special gloves with game-like controllers.

As I stood there feeling foolish, my hands materialised in front of me as digital avatars, and as I pressed a button on my glove control, I could clench and unclench the hands with ease.

Within seconds, it felt so comfortably real that I had forgotten they weren’t my own hands and involuntarily let go of my gloves.

The goggles are known as Oculus Rift, a headset that can transport you into a virtual reality (VR) of the creator’s choosing. In this case, I was in a game environment called Toybox, which had an assortment of toys – balls, blocks, candles, lighters and sparklers – lying around on a table.

With my virtual hands, I could pick up the blocks, use the lighters to light the candles and sparklers, and sweep objects off the virtual table.

In this strange place, I was joined by another “person” – Palmer Luckey, the 23-year-old inventor of the Oculus Rift I was testing out.

Last year, Oculus was sold to social networking giant Facebook for $2-billion (R29-billion), turning the then 21-year-old into a millionaire overnight.

The real Palmer, dressed for the summer in a Hawaiian shirt, was standing in the room next door, but in the virtual world, we were side by side, and could chat as if we were together.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced its purchase, he wrote in a Facebook post: “People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives. This is really a new communication platform. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.”

Zuckerberg’s bet seems to be a safe one. Over the next nine months, some of the world’s biggest technology companies will launch a range of virtual reality headsets.

Samsung’s Gear VR launches at the end of this year, while Facebook’s Rift will launch early next year, followed by Sony’s PlayStation VR and HTC Vive.

For all the headset makers, the clearest early target market is serious gamers. The immersive element can turn game-playing into an adrenaline-filled adventure.

Oculus, for instance, has launched early development kits for developers to create their own 3D, virtual reality gaming experiences for the platform. Sony, meanwhile, is designed to be fully functional with the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita game systems and already has dozens of games crafted in VR.

But gaming is only the first play in the VR wars – Palmer emphasises that it can affect everything from healthcare to education, architecture and filmmaking.

It is already being tested as a therapeutic tool for conditions such as PTSD in veterans or phantom limb syndrome in amputees, and by major architects such as Foster and Partners, to design buildings.

One of the most exciting applications for virtual reality headsets will be in entertainment – cinematic experiences that make you feel like you’re living a thrilling moment, and one you can physically experience with loved ones across the world.

Companies like Sky and Disney have made their intentions clear by investing in VR content companies that commission and create movies, news reports and other immersive narrative experiences from artists, filmmakers and journalists who tell stories across traditional media.

One of the best-funded companies in this space is Jaunt. Founded by Danish entrepreneur Jens Christensen, the Californian start-up has raised $100-million from investors ranging from Disney to Axel Springer, Sky and the Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies.

It has built professional grade VR video camera, that media companies and filmmakers can use to film high-quality VR movies.

When I sat down with Christensen in Dublin, he fished out a pair of very basic VR goggles from his backpack, which he had ordered off the internet from a South Korean company called Goggletech.

While these goggles were a very low-tech version of the high-frame-rate, low-latency Oculus, which allows you to effortlessly slip into the virtual world, it was enough to experience one of the films that ABC News had built with Jaunt’s cameras.

Using just Christensen’s mobile phone and iPhone headphones, I was transported to a rooftop in Damascus, Syria in the aftermath of the bloody civil war.

Jaunt is currently “actively working with Sky” on cinematic VR experiences, according to Christensen.

The start-up also launched a dedicated production studio, Jaunt Studios, that is led by Hollywood veteran Cliff Plumer, who was the chief technical officer of Star Wars creator Lucasfilm.

The VR headset companies, meanwhile, are all launching their own content production studios that they hope will draw in a mainstream audience.

While the headset-makers will engage in their own battle to become the primary platform for our eyeballs, a new war will emerge between giant media companies, veteran Hollywood movie studios and talent.

The technology itself will fade into the background, and the fight to engage, entertain and delight people will enter a new frontier.