Blurring The Lines Between Virtual And Reality
Gamification seems to be the hot word lately. Sectors ranging from the automobile industry to medicine are increasingly embracing the concept. It does not necessarily mean making a game out of anything but rather, implementing game-design elements and game principles in traditionally non-game contexts. This approach aims at cultivating a competitive and self-improving mindset that is rewarded by what games are famous for: instant gratification. However, some technologies are taking the gamification concept one step further by effectively blurring the lines between gaming and real-life. As enticing (or not) as it may sound, these technological prowess aren’t making news without raising a few eyebrows.
In a move that some are calling Black Panther-esque, Nvidia wowed its crowd by demoing in real time a car being driven remotely via VR during its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) two weeks ago. Here’s a very short footage showing it in action right here:
“He’s not with us,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said motioning to the “invisible” driver on the stage. “He’s looking at this virtual world through live video.”
“There’s Tim right there, the invisible man,” added Huang. “Tim’s view is very broad, he can see all of his hands and get a full perspective of everything that’s going on in the car. In the future, we can represent all kinds of lidar systems and everything.”
All of this was made possible thanks to Nvidia’s Holodeck software and an HTC VIVE headset. This is very much still a proof of concept. In the demo, the driver is seen to drive very slowly in a parking lot. Huang even exclaimed “we don’t know what to call it. What do we call it?” We’re still far from mass adoption but this puts a new twist in the whole autonomous machines market by coupling a “game-y” aspect to it.
This gamifying approach has been increasingly adopted to other sectors of late. Microsoft’s Hololens has been in use by medical students at Case Western Reserve University for a few years already and new companies like AiSolve are investing in the field by creating simulations for rare medical cases to train doctors. The advantage for using VR as a learning tool over just watching the same thing on a regular screen is what psychologists call “embodied cognition”, that is giving the user an active rather than passive experience just like one would have by actually doing what they see in VR.
While this all sounds very promising, it raises questions when it comes to safety, hacking and questionable use. When posed with this dilemma in a recent National Geographic interview, Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interactive Lab at Stanford University, replied by saying that “you shouldn’t do things that you wouldn’t do in the real world. If there’s some heinous activity—however you define that—in the real world, you shouldn’t do it in VR”.
The applications of these technologies in real-life settings are up to your imagination and the misuse thereof is also. It might be hyperbolic extension at this time but you can humor the thought for a moment...
