In high school, I got to try out the Oculus Rift developer kit that my AP Computer Science teacher had. In the 5 years since, I’ve been able to try out the HTC Vive several times. Even in this 5 year difference, the power in these devices has improved drastically. Sitting in a virtual reality space no longer feels as disorienting as it used to. Virtual reality feels much more immersive than it did 5 years ago.
Virtual reality is a great technology that has been developed for decades. It continues to be developed not because it’s some fad, but because plenty of people see it in terms of its potential. While plenty of enthusiasts have had a great time playing videogames in VR, it also has more practical applications out in the real world. For example, virtual reality could have a significant impact on our experience of architecture and interior design.
Right now, if an interior decorator wants to plan out a space, they must rely on their mental visualization of what a place could look like. How would I, as a customer who wants to decorate a home or an office space, know that what an interior designer has imagined is exactly what I’m looking for?
That’s why a lot of designers will render 3D images of what they visualize a space would look like. However, it’s a large jump for our brains to look at a rendered picture and trying to imagine yourself walking around and interacting in that space. This is where virtual reality can help.
With the addition of a virtual reality headset, you can walk around the designed virtual space. Instead of approving a design based on some rendered photos, you can experience it for yourself.
However, I think that virtual reality still has limitations. Even if 3D models, lighting, the screens inside VR headsets, and headtracking were of the highest quality, a projection still doesn’t compare to our own senses. In real life, you can feel physical objects and their textures. You can reach out and move things around. In virtual reality, you can only look around and interact with objects through controllers. While the experience is very interesting, it’s nowhere close to real life.
If you gave me a to-scale model of my house in virtual reality, even if it was an incredibly realistic virtual environment, it still would be a drastically different experience. That’s why I think that while virtual reality can be a very good tool for designing virtual spaces for application in the real world, it will never be the perfect tool. I think our brains would still over-estimate or under-estimate the size of 3D models in the virtual world. If an office chair is replicated in virtual reality on a one-to-one scale, and it is placed in a virtual space and in the real world, I believe that we will always have thoughts like “oh… I thought that chair was bigger in virtual reality than it is in real life”.
While virtual reality can be a useful tool for placing furniture and designing spaces, I don’t think our human brains will ever acknowledge a virtual space as an accurate representation of reality.