Virtual reality isn’t just for rich nerds any more. Here’s the future of VR on a budget

Virtual reality headsets on the market today are mainly about what you can see and hear. Basically, the user gets his or her own IMAX theatre. But the technology is advancing fast and dropping in price, and in the not-too-distant future, a fully immersive experience that uses all five human senses could be achieved.

A recent research project at the Singapore lab of Metalworks, the creative tech division of global media agency Maxus, aims to show how companies can take advantage of the rising medium to transform their storytelling. They posted a video on Youtube about the assets and limitations of today’s VR offerings. Tech in Asia got in touch with Metalworks’ director of technology Tom Kelshaw to ask about the project.

"We’re trying to solve for scale, which demands accessible solutions. We can’t fill a stadium, or an emerging market campaign, with Oculus headsets and $1,200 computers. We can with VR One or Cardboard mobile headsets. So adding reassuring, grounding experiences such as hand interaction make the experience more natural to a wider audience than just the tech pioneers,” Kelshaw said.

Gesture control

"Most VR experiences don’t allow you to see your hands in the virtual world. This almost makes you feel like a body-less head floating in space," says Sarah Tan, a creative technologist at Metalworks, in the video. To overcome this disembodied sensation, many VR headsets are developing ways to incorporate gesture control.

Metalworks, like many others, achieves this using Leap Motion. The Leap Motion controller uses an infrared camera to detect human hands and let them interact with the virtual world.

Here’s a video of another project called Hovercast, a customizable menu interface for virtual reality applications:

The demo in Metalworks’ video is still fairly primitive. Yes, hands do show up in real time, but they can’t yet interact with anything. Kelshaw points out that the gap between getting hands to show up on screen and actually interacting with the virtual environment isn’t a big one, though. "Once you can put virtual hands in a virtual environment, interacting with the environment is easy. You’re essentially a video game character," he says.

The hands also don’t have fingers. Instead, they look sort of like mittens, or the hands of a Mii avatar on a Nintendo console. Tan says the performance of Leap Motion on mobile is fine, and detection of individual fingers isn’t the problem. But because realistic hands don’t look quite realistic enough, some users are creeped out. This is called the "uncanny valley" hypothesis. "Our brain knows there is something wrong, but can’t figure out just what it is," Tan explains.

@Oculus + @leapmotion Tripping

A video posted by Daylon Soh (@daylonsoh) on Jan 13, 2015 at 12:47am PST

The HTC Vive, an upcoming headset powered by Valve’s Steam VR software, is primarily designed for gaming. Like Oculus Rift, it doesn’t use a smartphone and has elected to forgo hand-tracking gesture control in favor of handheld controllers. It’s not as cool as just using your hands, but it will cut down on latency and probably be far more accurate – essentials for video games.