Below is an excerpt from Kyt Dotson’s novel City of Paradigm, a science fiction tale about a fictional 21st century city situated somewhere in California. Each City of Paradigm column is two parts: an excerpt from the novel and an editorial describing the real-world context of the technologies described in the story. Readers may find more City of Paradigm here on SiliconANGLE.

OC Lollipop’s cutesy anime avatar materialized on computer monitor near Jimmy. In a bit of humor, she grabbed the company logo (a constellation of stars connected to form words) and pushed it out of the way.

“I just received word from Yi Ling Sim, she is the director of the Mitsubishi Electric Virtual Reality Group. The conference has been set up,” she said. “Your VR headset is already on standby on your desk. I suggest that you remain seated as you don it and move your chair back away from your desk at least six feet. You may need some room.”

Jimmy took the headset from the desk and used his feet to roll his chair out of his cubicle into an open area. The device was fully wireless, so he could take it anywhere in the office, but he had already cleared an arena near his workstation expecting this.

“They don’t need me to be standing?”

“No,” OC Lollipop said. “I am told that is not necessary…” She paused for a moment and then nodded. “You may activate and don the headset now. I am being told that the session is ready and you will be loaded in. Have fun! I will be here if you need me.”

“Thanks, Lollipop,” Jimmy said, smiling at the anime girl who winked back at him and then gestured for him to get on with him. He nodded and pulled on the gloves that came with the headset (to act as additional controllers) then he slid the headset down over his eyes.

The virtual reality headset consisted of a visor to that covered Jimmy’s eyes and fit snugly against his brow, although he felt it put an uncomfortable pressure on the bridge of his nose—as experience served, however, he would become accustomed to it within a few minutes. The headset also slid over his ears where the headphones sat and small strips of cloth covered plastic ran down his jaw and under his ear.

The sound of gentle surf accompanied the image of an endless blue ocean with a white sand beach hovered just in front of his vision. The view surrounded him even in the periphery of his vision. At first the illusion felt flat, two-dimensional, but after he fastened the VR headset properly the image gained depth and he began to see small whitecaps amid the endless blue. Moments later he began to be aware of stars in the sky above and the glitter of the sand on the beach as details filled in he looked around the virtual space provided.

“Hello, Mr. Ito,” a voice said to his right. Jimmy turned and saw a young Chinese woman wearing a suit, her dress shoes sank into the white sand of the beach. “I am Ms. Yi Ling Sim. I will be giving you a tour of the virtual simulation software we have constructed for Ex Astris.”

She held out a hand, Jimmy took it and shook. He could feel a slight constriction on his hands from the gloves and while it did not feel like a natural handshake, it felt real enough to be uncannily present. Sim nodded and gestured to the ocean that stretched horizon to horizon.

“Welcome to Upsilon Andromedae 2, an imaginary world that my production team instantiated ten minutes ago for the purpose of holding our meeting. It is a randomly generated world with a variety of terrain features, and due to the randomization mechanism, apparently most of those features are beneath an ocean that spans over ninety-two percent of the surface.”

“It’s very beautiful,” Jimmy said, bending down—even as he did so in his chair, he saw the ground near his face. He reached down and cupped some sand in his hand—he only briefly felt his hand scrape the floor of the office—and came away with some virtual sand. “How much of this is processed locally?”

“The hardware has a processor dedicated specifically for rendering the VR inputs, but the GPU in your computer is doing the heavy lifting,” Sim said. “The world we’re standing on is computed in the cloud and the broad strokes are available via API, as well as adjacent regions for rapid transition. The software can also manage UI elements through the VRPU. Let me show you.”

While she spoke, Sim lifted a hand into the air and a globe appeared—it expanded to present a world that could have been Earth, had it not been almost entirely blue with a single blob of green on one side, although it did have white caps on both poles.

“We are on the world’s only dominant continent,” she said. “On the beach, of course, but to continue this demonstration we will have to enter the water. Ordinarily in a virtual world we would not worry about breathing underwater, after all, we are not actually here. However, my team has also been working on virtual reality immersion for space suits—which I understand will work well with your space video game—so this gives me a chance to demo that technology.”

Sim knelt down and a black helmet with a blue visor and a re-breather appeared in the sand. She picked it up and passed it to Jimmy. “If you will put this on, Mr. Ito, we can enter the water where we will meet Mr. Nori Mizushima and Ms. Meifeng Wu, members of our production team, who will assist me in demonstrating the immersion and physics engines we will be delivering. They can also answer any of your business questions.”

Jimmy held the helmet for a moment, the tactile response in the gloves did not give it any sense of weight, but he could feel pressure from the gloves. Although he could see his virtual hands with the virtual helmet, it still took some effort to believe he was holding it.

“Thank you,” he said and moved his hands to put the helmet on. The moment the helmet slid on he could see his peripheral vision darken, but then a HUD opened up in front of him and the entire view changed—turning side to side he could see the edges of the helmet, and the sound of the ocean muted somewhat.

Sim had already donned her helmet. She was now wearing what looked like a bulky diving suit, black with grey stripes running along her contours, the suit displayed a prominent red Mitsubishi logo on the breast—other details included a belt with canisters attached, and a grey tube that ran from a backpack along the back. Jimmy suddenly became aware that with each breath he took he could hear a pneumatic hiss followed by a gentle cough as if he were breathing through a SCUBA mask.

“I look forward to meeting them,” Jimmy said and he followed.

— Excerpt from The City of Paradigm, novel by Kyt Dotson, © 2015

Modern day VR on the brink of a new dawn

Virtual reality is the stuff of science fiction made reality; it is the next evolution of entertainment and immersion as much of a perception shift from radio to television. Virtual reality adds not just another dimension (3D vision over 3D on a 2D screen) it’s designed to place the user “inside” the virtual space. This alone opens up a novel variety of ways to allow people to interact with computers either for entertainment: VR films and videogames. VR has implications for education: with “hands on” working models that simulate dangerous or difficult situations for surgeons, mechanics, and other professions that work with difficult-to-replicate conditions. The technology also has a broad variety of social implications including telepresence for holding meetings with far away people and still get the benefit of facial expressions and body language as if sitting right next to them.

In the City of Paradigm story above, Jimmy Ito experiences the beginning of one of these telepresence settings. In fact, if we were to let the story unfold, he would have been shaking hands (underwater) on an imaginary world 44 light-years away with people over 9,000 miles away (the approximate distance from Paradigm to Singapore).

Virtual reality found its way into the public consciousness as a dream and a promise, emerging in films such as Tron, 1982 to Code Lyoko, 2003 and other animated features that romanticize and mystify the idea of going “into” computers and videogames.

Fast forward to 2012 when the first Oculus Rift prototype found a stage at the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo. There had been other virtual reality rigs developed and presented before, but the Rift was one of the first that promised to be cheap enough for consumers to buy and it also wasn’t a giant ten-pound helmet that would bend the neck of prospective users.

In the last three years the presence of the Rift started an avalanche of interest from entertainment companies across the board in virtual reality consumer products. In 2014, Facebook, Inc. made the surprising move to acquire Oculus VR for $2 billion–during the same year Sony announced Project Morpheus, now known as PlayStation VR. The same year, Google revealed a novel approach to VR headsets by turning smartphones into a VR screen to be strapped to a user’s face with a cardboard enclosure, fittingly named Google Cardboard. Early 2015, video game distributor Valve Corporation joined smartphone maker HTC Corporation to build yet another VR competitor, the HTC Vive.

Image credit: Bago Games via Flickr (license)

Oculus VR and the better virtual reality headset

In the City of Paradigm story above, Jimmy Ito puts a non-descript “headset” on that snugly presses the screen over his eyes and covers his ears. This basically describes the modern approach to VR headgear as virtual reality setups work to take over the user’s entire field of view and hearing. These two senses provide a great deal of information about our environment and controlling them allows the production of a sense of immersion.

Since 2012, Oculus VR has come a very long way and now the Rift is a sleek, black headset that contains the screen and headphones with an adjustable band to allow it to fit most any head and accommodate most prescription glasses. The 2016 consumer version has 2160 x 1200 resolution across two OLEDs that can push over 233 million pixels a second.

In the story, Jimmy also puts on a special pair of gloves that provide tactile response as controllers–while this is still a little bit in the science future, controllers are an important part of VR setups. Oculus provides tools called the Oculus Touch–read at Gizmodo for a detailed hands-on. The Touch controllers work a lot like the Wii’s nunchucks, which allow the tracking of hand motion while also putting a thumb-controlled analog stick in both hands. These are modified gaming controllers that anyone with a gaming console is already accustomed to.

To track the operator and the controllers, the Oculus Rift also has satellite system that uses an infrared tracking camera called “constellation.” Ordinarily two of these cameras are setup looking into the field where the operator will stand so that the VR world that the user is standing in can reliably adjust to the surroundings. The cameras also allow the software to easily tell what direction the user is looking in and where their hands are (in this scenario, Ito’s gloves would be visible to the cameras adding extra fidelity to the experience).

In the past months, Oculus VR has presented development kits for release as well as prototypes for developers to make use of. Interested in developing for Oculus? Order a kit today and read up on the documentation before it ships for real in Q1 2016.

Sony’s Project Morpheus

Video game consoles and virtual reality: PlayStation VR

When it came to the motion-tracking wars, Sony Corporation came out on the bottom versus the amazing promise of the Nintendo Wii with the somewhat terrible PlayStation Move. However, when it comes to producing an interesting virtual reality rig, Sony has done a much better job with the PlayStation VR (formerly known as Project Morpheus).

The PlayStation VR is also slated for a 2016 release. The rig is designed for the PlayStation 4, but it can be used without a PS4, but it’s unlikely it will be backwards compatible with the PS3. It will provide a 1920×1080 pixel, 5.7-inch OLED display with 100 degrees of vision and run at 120 frames per second. The headset itself is sleek and shiny with white and black sections and lights on the outside (which cannot be seen by the operator so they’re aesthetic and not distracting).

There is no price announced for the PlayStation rig, but if it’s going to keep up with the market it’s expected to cost around $400 or it may be sold at a discount along with a PS4.

As PlayStation VR is designed for a video game console, the company has already prepared a line up of games to appetize potential buyers. The list is quite extensive with popular developers all stepping up but stand-outs include Eve Valkyrie from CCP Games, Ark: Survival Evolved from Studio Wildcard and War Thunder from Gaijin Entertainment. Already almost sixty titles have been floated by Sony as potential at-launch or near-launch releases for the headset.

Photo Credit: HTC Vive, courtesy of Valve Corporation

The best looking in show: HTC Vive

In an unexpected move, HTC (HTC Global Services, Inc.), best known for building and shipping smartphones, teamed up with Valve Corporation, best known for Team Fortress 2 and the digital game distribution platform Steam to develop the HTC Vive. Looking at the other two dominant headsets coming to market, the Vive has by far the most science fiction aesthetic–no doubt some amateur videographer wants this potentially expensive device just to be a prop as some high tech headwear.

The Vive supports a 1,200 by 1,080 pixel screen in front of each eye and a 90 frames per second refresh rate. To keep track of the operator, the system has an inbuilt gyroscope and accelerometer that can track down to 1/10th of a degree. The system also comes with two base stations (similar to the Rift “constellation” detailed above) that allow the user to define a 15 foot by 15 foot space that the operator can then “walk around” within to explore the virtual space.

On the Steam side, Valve is launching an entertainment portal for accessing and delivering virtual reality games and VR films called SteamVR. This means that owners of the Vive will immediately have a huge selection of games (and potentially films) right at their virtual fingertips with a built-in distribution system delivered by the world’s leading video game delivery service. Steam has seen almost 10 million concurrent users during peak times during the last 48 hours and exceeded 125 million active users this year.

2016: The Year of VR

These three VR rigs listed above are not the only VR products coming out in Q1 2016 but above is the vanguard of the consumer side technology. Entertainment is going to lead the way with video games, films, and a not-as-yet explored social experience that can be provided in the living room and on the couch.

Games have been some of the first entertainment technologies to adapt to virtual reality (through the Oculus Rift originally) and now there’s a headset coming out from a game console company and one in direct partnership with a video game distribution service.

However, as many readers of SiliconANGLE and City of Paradigm may know by now: the consumer angle is not the only angle.

Virtual reality has implications for enhancing education by providing a “hands on” experience in that living room. Allowing instructors and classrooms to actually come into the homes of students and participants. Getting VR headsets into the hands of consumers is a good way to open up an audience of potential students who could then benefit from VR classes. There’s just no audience yet.

This is the same obstacle for almost every other potential use of VR: business and group meetings that allow for greater interactivity and visualization of problems; telepresence for a worker thousands of miles away giving instruction or directly controlling a robot to fix an engine (or perform surgery).

The consumer adoption of VR in 2016 will drive expectations for years to come and most importantly it will put headsets in hands and provide the first audience for secondary markets to emerge from.

Featured image credit: SiliconANGLE