Virtual Reality has been an elusive dream for entertainment creators for decades. Over the years various tech companies have created and shipped a variety of headsets that failed to live up to the hype, and in the late 90s and early 2000s the focus on virtual reality shifted towards more complicated and gimmicky hardware seen in academia or arcades. Fast forward to 2012: tech startup Oculus VR blasts onto the scene with a relatively inexpensive, responsive, visually compelling device that was, best of all, incredibly easy to develop for. Valve Software has been at the forefront of VR delivering the highest fidelity VR user experiences. And more recently competition has sprung up with Sony announcing it's own headset, Project Morpheus.
With Facebook’s recent $2 billion acquisition of Oculus, we’re about to witness a new era of interactive entertainment. More than that, we see the vision of the Oculus founding team and backers, expressed in the words of Mark Zuckerberg - “VR is the next major computing platform”.
Now, immersion is big within the gaming community, as evidenced by the obsession with next-gen graphics, and Oculus and Sony have taken great pains to perfect the viewer’s level of immersion, or “presence”. The headsets accomplish this with high definition native resolutions (both at 1920 x 1080) and 960 x 1080 resolution per eye. Coupled with an OLED display in the Oculus and LCD in the Morpheus, the headsets aim for a clear, photorealistic image. Both have also addressed latency and refresh rate issues, making sure the headsets track player head movement effectively, and preventing FPS lag, to prevent viewers experiencing pronounced VR "motion sickness". The resulting experience is extraordinarily realistic and profoundly more impactful than video. Say, for instance, the palpable joy this 90-year-old woman experiences with the simple Oculus Tuscany (Italy) demo. This is the tip of the iceberg.
Since day one, WemoLab’s virtual ocean experience theBlu was conceived as a fully immersive experience with high fidelity species and environments created by Academy Award winning artists. We applied immersive design principles including first person viewing, ability to explore move and interact, scene continuity, 3D sound, degree of user agency, etc. The technology we built serves as the underlying platform for any number of open explorative VR worlds.
As a team and a company we are doubling down on this exciting and exploding opportunity. The team is an one of a kind mix with decades of experience in film CGI, motion capture and machine vision, camera rigs, high end console game development, social web, mobile, data science and interactive entertainment. WemoLab is building the VR software layers to become a core provider of technology and essential product features that will unlock VR content potential. And we’re leveraging our technology to create some killer VR experiences for the upcoming Oculus launch.
Check out wemolab.com/vr for more. See you in the metaverse!