Beyond fun and games: VR as a tool of the trade
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Cruz-Neira, Carolina
The recent resurgence of VR is exciting and encouraging because the technology is at a point that it soon will be available for a very large audience in the consumer market. However, it has also been a little bit disappointing to see that VR technology is mostly being portrayed as the ultimate gaming environment and the new way to experience movies. VR is much more than that, there has been a wide number or groups around the world using VR for the past twenty years in engineering, design, training, medical treatments and many other areas beyond gaming and entertainment that seem to have been forgotten in the public perception. Furthermore, VR technology is also much more than goggles, there are many ways to build devices and systems to immerse users in virtual environments. And finally, there are also a lot of challenges in aspects related to creating engaging, effective, and safe VR applications. This talk will present our experiences in developing VR technology, creating applications in many industry fields, exploring the effect of VR exposure to users, and experimenting with different immersive interaction models. The talk will provide a much wider perspective on what VR is, its benefits and limitations, and how it has the potential to become a key technology to improve many aspects of human life. 
 Okay, so our next speaker is Carolina Cruz-Nira, and she's going to be speaking about Beyond Fun and Games VR as a tool of the trade. Carolina is a pioneer in the areas of virtual reality and interactive visualization, having created and deployed a variety of technologies that have become standard tools in industry, government, and academia. She is well known worldwide for being the creator of the cave virtual reality system and her PhD work and for VR jugular. All right, I'm ready to go. Well, good afternoon, everybody. I'm actually going to take a little bit of flexibility here because my talk was actually a guest talk. So as a guest speaker, I have a little bit more freedom to talk more in general. And I also thought because it was the last talk of the day, it would be a nice way to hopefully bring together all the exciting things that we have heard throughout the year. So I'm going to start my talk with a very simple statement. As I've been going around talking in the last couple of years, we are starting to sort of lean in the direction that when we talk about virtual reality, we immediately think head mounted displays. In a lot of cases, that's the case, that's the situation. So when I give all my talks, this is always my first slide these days. Okay? There's a lot more to virtual reality than just head mounted displays. To me, virtual reality is whatever kind of technology that puts you there. And there can be pretty much anything. It can be the coolest game in the planet, but also it could be the inside of a human body. It can be an engineering design. Or it can be a travel to time through time to understand history events. So with that in mind, I'm going to spend the next five minutes taking us back in history. So this is why I put it here for you because this is how we were over 20 years ago. If you look at this picture, just remember this picture a little bit later because a lot of this sounds very familiar from what we have today. My place doesn't show up. We have Jaron Lanier with the VPL iPhone. We had the virtual reality guys. A bunch of other exciting things. And that was 20 years ago. And it seems sometimes that there's no memory in our community that we've been doing this for a long, long, long time. However, for me, I came into this world at that time in 1991. And my first experience, like probably most people today, first experience in virtual reality, was with a head mounted display. I was a very young graduate student at the time. And like everybody else, the mom and I put it on. What did I do? Whoa! Which you still hear a lot of people that have that try on Oculus Rift for the first time. Vibes, Gear VR, whatever. It's all like, whoa! This is super cool. But then, after I did that, because of course I was a PhD student on the hunting for a PhD thesis, I had to take a step back. And I started reflecting on what is exactly this thing doing for me. So the first thing that it did for me, I have to say as a disclaimer, I'm originally from Spain. So I'm very social. I like to be with my friends. I like to be with my people. I like to be with my 300 cousins and all that kind of thing. So when I go into virtual reality, the first thing that happens is I lost my friends. I lost my own body. I lost my environment. And I'm totally somewhat else that I don't have my usual frame of reference, which is, for example, my peripheral vision, where I see my hands, where I see my banks, where maybe I see the tip of my shoes. So to me, that was very annoying, again, after I went through the guao stages. Of course, perhaps because I'm a girl. You know, this whole thing on my head was just too much of stuff on me. I had things on my head. I have cables. I had things that kind of sucked into my face, created wrinkles, which I don't want wrinkles, you know, all that kind of thing. So it was really cumbersome. As much as I tried really, really hard, and again, I'm talking 1991, I cannot imagine a group of people sitting together with multiple headmounds that is placed on to share experience. And again, yeah, we're doing collaborative VR and all that kind of thing, of course. I still don't see that. Here is my typical scenario. Mom, dad, the kids, and grandma just finished dinner, and now we're going to watch the movie after dinner. I just don't see that as scenario with five HMDs in the living room, you know, and maybe I'm just sort of the weirdo of the virtual environments community. I just don't see that happening. I see scenarios where this technology, of course, is really helpful and very good, but there are some other scenarios that I think we're trying to force into the technology versus force the scenario drive, the technology. And then another thing that I noticed in 1991, which to me is still very familiar to what we do today, is really a lot, a lot of emphasis and focus on the entertainment value of this technology, and there is not much information to the public. Again, in community like ours, of course, we know, but to the public that this is way, way, way bigger than gaming and 3D movies. So, and then since I come from the background of computer engineering, of course, you know, we had the fact that we don't have, again, talking 1991, a very common infrastructure to develop applications. If you look at this, a lot of these points are still valid today. I mean, we have things like the Unity game engine that a lot of people are using through tools like middle of VR and tech v's and some other things, but still it's very difficult sometimes to move from platform to platform your applications. You cannot run something that runs in this particular application easily ported to a different technology. So, you know, we have the issue of simplicity as well, you know, how simple is simple and how complex is complex, you know. Nowadays, things are a lot simpler, you know, we have devices that you get your smartphone, your smartphone, you slap it in the device and you have a fairly amazing virtual reality device. Of course, we didn't have that back in the 90s. So, from all these in the 90s, this was what drove me to accept the offer from the electronic visualization lab to do my PhD in virtual reality. And then, you know, basically say, you know, I really need to figure out something to do that goes beyond this observation. So, I guess as part of my PhD research, you know, we developed the other VR, you know, that other thing out there, which basically was, well, let's build a physical space that is big enough that we can all bring ourselves into the virtual space and bring our friends with us into the virtual space, but still be there, that mysterious there that we want to be. So, that was the origin of the cave. I put you some historical pictures in here, you know, back in 1992 when the cave was shown for first time at SIGGRAPH, you can see people, people waited in line for five, six hours dancing in the audience, he remembers that as well. There was a lot of people because it really opened a lot of possibilities. So, between all the wealth of research that was being done with the display and the sort of side track of something like the cave, we leave the moment in time that was as exciting as it is today. I would say that timeframe between 1994, 1995, until about 2001, 2002 is what I call the booming years and we're in the second phase of those booming years. There was a lot of work that was being done, you know, a lot of exciting applications, a lot of engineering companies went to do virtual reality, we saw entertainment, we saw historical things, we saw scientific work and then suddenly, oh, I have a little digression here because this is, I was putting this because a lot of people have been asking me this throughout the day, that caves today are still unusable because they are a million dollars, that's just a little bit of a myth. With today's technology, we can build caves at a very, very inexpensive level. We have built a number of caves and they're 40, 50 thousand dollars, I'm currently developing one that by the time it's finished, it will probably be under 15 thousand dollars. Again, is it the top of the line? No, but if we are willing to make compromises in head mounted display technology like we are doing with the consumer technology that we see today, we should be prepared to do the same kind of compromises in these other technologies. Of course, you can buy a two million dollar head mounted display, you want a military grade, but you can buy three or four hundred dollars, HMD, if you compromise. Same situation with the cave, so this is my little digression in there, so for those of you that were asking me this morning about that. Going back to the time frames, we went through a period that I would say about ten years, which I call also the forgotten years of virtual reality, but the media just forgot all about us. I'm not sure what happened, I think part of what happened is that a lot of industries started to absorb the technology as part of their workflow, as part of the routine work, so it was not exciting anymore, and of course, it was not primarily in entertainment, it was in other aspects of human life, like engineering design, military training, mining operations, and some other things. I even did baby diapers designed for protein and gumball, fluid dynamics on baby pee and things like that in the cave, so that's my joke, but for some reason the press did not pick up on this, so we went through these kind of dark ages of virtual reality, and then suddenly around 2012, hey, we're back on the map because all of us know what happened with Oculus Rift, you know, and that being as a relatively modest project of an individual, it went into Kika started, the initial asking was about $200,000, got over $2 million, got a lot of attention, got the connection with Facebook, and here we are all today. So this is where we are today. When you talk about virtual reality, when the press does you what virtual reality is about, this is what we get. Now, this picture is all photographs from 2014 and 2015, and the little guy on the corner is my son, and that was just a few days ago, so this is very recent pictures. Now, let me back up to the one from the 80s. I see an issue here, guys. Do you guys see the issue? We are stuck where we were 20 years ago, and I don't mean to be negative, I just want people to realize where we are. Yes, we of course know a lot more of what we need to do to make it work. But if you look at what the media was promoting 20 years ago and what the media is promoting today, it's the same. What's the difference? Cheaper? Of course it's cheaper. More commodity hardware? Yes, okay. There used to be more women in the past, that's true. So to me, like I said, since it's the end of the day, I just want to give you some food for thought for the rest of the, for tomorrow, since tomorrow will be the main day for the engineering of virtual reality, because I think we are going on the same path that we were going 20 years ago, and I don't want that to happen. I really don't, because this is a very exciting technology. There's a lot of great things that we can do with it. A lot of the speakers today have presented amazing new technologies that are coming up, so we need to keep ourselves a little bit in focus on what exactly are we doing 20 years later? So my personal approach, Carolina approach, I'm like your financial advisor and your virtual reality advisor. Diversify. What are the point in history where we can be extremely diverse in virtual reality? So all these pictures are from my new center at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. So we have a Humongous Cave, 26 projectors, more pixels that your eye can see, all that kind of cool stuff, some notes, cluster, la, la, la, la. But we are going, for example, as spherical screens as well. We are doing omnidirectional 360-degree as spherical stereo, utilizing ray tracing, so we compute the stereo at the pixel level. We are doing semi-mercy devices. We have a couple of virtual tables that are just with enough 3D and stereo to perform the task at hand on those tables. Touchable displays, of course, Oculus, Vibes, VR VRs and all that. And we are also experimenting with 3D mobile devices, which they are coming. The picture doesn't show, but again, my little son is my model. So that little tablet that he is using there for augmented reality is actually an autostereoscopic tablet to do that. So I think our approach to this should be diversification on the platforms. That brings a lot of challenges, of course, because developing for these platforms to have your applications, to be able to, I guess, using a term borrowed from the military industry, doing interoperability between all our displays and settings, is actually a really, really hard problem, both from the software engineering aspects as well as the hardware, because there is a lot of performance-related parameters that take into play and a lot of optics and some other issues. So but with this diversification, what is being really cool is that it has allowed us to do a number of interesting applications throughout the years. I have a few applications here and I'm going to let Chris wave at me when I run out of time. So I'll tell you some that are not entertainment, because again, my goal today was to get us to think a little bit beyond entertainment, but they're all very practical applications. The first one is very dear to me because I started doing this work when I was a graduate student and I finished it all when I was an assistant professor at Iowa State University, where we were actually starting to use virtual reality as a front-end to supercomputing simulations. So we were using a pretty, on those days, I was using, for those of you that are my age or older, we were using a connection machine, if you remember the famous connection machines. So I had, I remember it was about a thousand processor connection machine solving the molecular dynamics on the fly connected directly with a fiber optic link to the cave. So as the scientists were in the middle of the cave, they were able to do drug design interactively with the goal of not necessarily find a specific drug for a particular disease, but the goal of this application was to try to reduce the amount of experimental lab testing that the molecular biologists had to do. They had some intuition of some molecular structure that might or might not work, and they were using the cave to try to reduce that spectrum to then minimize the laboratory work. Down the line, we started our evangelical mission to tell engineering companies that this was a technology that will help them tremendously. So my first sort of experience was with John Deere, which is a company everybody knows. We, at least myself personally, worked with them over 12 years. So they were having a design problem that couldn't really figure out through traditional tools. So we used an immersive environment with, of course, 3D stereo and head tracking. And without getting into too much details, we, we helped them to find the problem that they've been really wrestling for months trying to figure out where the problem was. Some other applications, for example, we are working since a number of years now on using virtual reality as a certification tool in different disciplines that are very expensive to certify, like in this case, fire marshal certification for some complicated construction projects are very expensive where depending on what it is that is being built, sometimes they had to build a mockup. And by a mockup, I mean a real, almost half a scale something and then actually burn it and see what happens when there is a fire. So of course, this is a very expensive way to test that. So we've been doing a lot of different virtual reality simulations to helping this kind of testing and certification. I have a couple of quick videos that I wanted to show or something a little bit more recent since I'm out of time here. So let me just show this video real quick. So this is just something recent that we've been, we've been doing. This actually we send it out for SIGGRAPH, the deadline was yesterday for the VR village exhibit. So this is our little 3D table. It has a narration, but I'm not going to go through that. So let me skip a little bit where you can see it. So here you have our environment. Again, it's a lot simpler to use. Right now we have a smart drive just because we recycle it from the lab. So it gives us the right level of immersion, the right level of stereoscopic to do this particular task at hand, which is interactive dissection of a virtual cadaver. So this particular project is in the process of being commercialized and transferred to different medical schools because at this particular level that's what they need. They need to have their master physician that is teaching anatomy with the students in the surrounding kind of nearby looking at it the same way they would be looking at a cadaver, but at the same time they need to be able to see each other so they can have some conversations and some saying look at this, look at that, look at that. So there are a lot of interesting things out there that are beyond, again, gaming and entertainment that I think our technology can significantly help. And I'm going to skip real quick. You give me 30 seconds. Basically, I tried to condense my 20-something years of experience in like 15 minutes, but some of the things that I learned over the years, it certainly hurts a lot. I know we get very excited about what we're doing. I know we like people around us to get very excited about what we're doing, but we have to be a little bit careful to say, hey, this is all the things that we can do when in reality we're not even quite there yet. We have to be very, very careful with that. Another thing is one size doesn't fit all, and that applies really, really well for VR. There's a lot of flavors. There's a lot of varieties for virtual reality. So let's not just get hung up on one particular kind of virtual reality. Keep in mind it's just technology. A few years from now there will be some other things, but the concept is really how do we get to this there that there is generated in the computer. Another thing too, of course, is that in many contexts sometimes being able to have a group of people face to face, sharing the virtual space is what you need. And again, we can do collaborative virtual environments with representing your own body through avatars and all that. It's not the same. The face to face, the body language, the smiles, the little twitch on your face and all that is still very, very important in certain contexts for communications. I cannot say any more. It's a lot more than a really cool gaming and entertainment platform. But at the same time, when we get outside gaming, I see lots and lots of people doing work that is just flying through pretty models. There's a lot more to gaming, but there's also a lot more than just flying through pretty models where really nothing really happens. And then, of course, the infrastructure to do these things is still not quite at the level that it should be, so we can really unleash our own creativity. So that goes to all the people developing SDKs and that kind of thing. And we have very little interoperability between different platforms. I can guarantee you right now what I run in my devices is going to be really, really hard for you to run it in your own devices. And when you run on your device, it's going to be really hard for me to run it in my device because we don't have a lot of common infrastructure to do that. So with that, this is what I think is going to be hopefully the next 15 years, 10 years or so. Again, remember your financial VR advisor, diversify. All right, so with that, I appreciate your time and thank you very much.
 Okay, so our next speaker is Carolina Cruz-Nira, and she's going to be speaking about Beyond  Fun and Games VR as a tool of the trade. Carolina is a pioneer in the areas of virtual reality  and interactive visualization, having created and deployed a variety of technologies that  have become standard tools in industry, government, and academia. She is well known worldwide  for being the creator of the cave virtual reality system and her PhD work and for VR  jugular.  All right, I'm ready to go. Well, good afternoon, everybody. I'm actually going to take a little  bit of flexibility here because my talk was actually a guest talk. So as a guest speaker,  I have a little bit more freedom to talk more in general. And I also thought because it  was the last talk of the day, it would be a nice way to hopefully bring together all  the exciting things that we have heard throughout the year. So I'm going to start my talk with  a very simple statement. As I've been going around talking in the last couple of years,  we are starting to sort of lean in the direction that when we talk about virtual reality, we  immediately think head mounted displays. In a lot of cases, that's the case, that's the  situation. So when I give all my talks, this is always my first slide these days. Okay?  There's a lot more to virtual reality than just head mounted displays. To me, virtual  reality is whatever kind of technology that puts you there. And there can be pretty much  anything. It can be the coolest game in the planet, but also it could be the inside of  a human body. It can be an engineering design. Or it can be a travel to time through time  to understand history events. So with that in mind, I'm going to spend the next five  minutes taking us back in history. So this is why I put it here for you because this  is how we were over 20 years ago. If you look at this picture, just remember this picture  a little bit later because a lot of this sounds very familiar from what we have today. My  place doesn't show up. We have Jaron Lanier with the VPL iPhone. We had the virtual reality  guys. A bunch of other exciting things. And that was 20 years ago. And it seems sometimes  that there's no memory in our community that we've been doing this for a long, long, long  time. However, for me, I came into this world at that time in 1991. And my first experience,  like probably most people today, first experience in virtual reality, was with a head mounted  display. I was a very young graduate student at the time. And like everybody else, the  mom and I put it on. What did I do? Whoa! Which you still hear a lot of people that  have that try on Oculus Rift for the first time. Vibes, Gear VR, whatever. It's all like,  whoa! This is super cool. But then, after I did that, because of course I was a PhD student  on the hunting for a PhD thesis, I had to take a step back. And I started reflecting  on what is exactly this thing doing for me. So the first thing that it did for me, I have  to say as a disclaimer, I'm originally from Spain. So I'm very social. I like to be with  my friends. I like to be with my people. I like to be with my 300 cousins and all that  kind of thing. So when I go into virtual reality, the first thing that happens is I lost my  friends. I lost my own body. I lost my environment. And I'm totally somewhat else that I don't  have my usual frame of reference, which is, for example, my peripheral vision, where I  see my hands, where I see my banks, where maybe I see the tip of my shoes. So to me,  that was very annoying, again, after I went through the guao stages. Of course, perhaps  because I'm a girl. You know, this whole thing on my head was just too much of stuff on me.  I had things on my head. I have cables. I had things that kind of sucked into my face,  created wrinkles, which I don't want wrinkles, you know, all that kind of thing. So it was  really cumbersome. As much as I tried really, really hard, and again, I'm talking 1991,  I cannot imagine a group of people sitting together with multiple headmounds that is  placed on to share experience. And again, yeah, we're doing collaborative VR and all  that kind of thing, of course. I still don't see that. Here is my typical scenario. Mom,  dad, the kids, and grandma just finished dinner, and now we're going to watch the movie after  dinner. I just don't see that as scenario with five HMDs in the living room, you know,  and maybe I'm just sort of the weirdo of the virtual environments community. I just don't  see that happening. I see scenarios where this technology, of course, is really helpful  and very good, but there are some other scenarios that I think we're trying to force into the  technology versus force the scenario drive, the technology. And then another thing that  I noticed in 1991, which to me is still very familiar to what we do today, is really a  lot, a lot of emphasis and focus on the entertainment value of this technology, and there is not  much information to the public. Again, in community like ours, of course, we know, but  to the public that this is way, way, way bigger than gaming and 3D movies. So, and then since  I come from the background of computer engineering, of course, you know, we had the fact that  we don't have, again, talking 1991, a very common infrastructure to develop applications.  If you look at this, a lot of these points are still valid today. I mean, we have things  like the Unity game engine that a lot of people are using through tools like middle of VR  and tech v's and some other things, but still it's very difficult sometimes to move from  platform to platform your applications. You cannot run something that runs in this particular  application easily ported to a different technology. So, you know, we have the issue of simplicity  as well, you know, how simple is simple and how complex is complex, you know. Nowadays,  things are a lot simpler, you know, we have devices that you get your smartphone, your  smartphone, you slap it in the device and you have a fairly amazing virtual reality device.  Of course, we didn't have that back in the 90s. So, from all these in the 90s, this was  what drove me to accept the offer from the electronic visualization lab to do my PhD  in virtual reality. And then, you know, basically say, you know, I really need to figure out  something to do that goes beyond this observation. So, I guess as part of my PhD research, you  know, we developed the other VR, you know, that other thing out there, which basically  was, well, let's build a physical space that is big enough that we can all bring ourselves  into the virtual space and bring our friends with us into the virtual space, but still  be there, that mysterious there that we want to be. So, that was the origin of the cave.  I put you some historical pictures in here, you know, back in 1992 when the cave was shown  for first time at SIGGRAPH, you can see people, people waited in line for five, six hours  dancing in the audience, he remembers that as well. There was a lot of people because  it really opened a lot of possibilities. So, between all the wealth of research that was  being done with the display and the sort of side track of something like the cave, we  leave the moment in time that was as exciting as it is today. I would say that timeframe  between 1994, 1995, until about 2001, 2002 is what I call the booming years and we're  in the second phase of those booming years. There was a lot of work that was being done,  you know, a lot of exciting applications, a lot of engineering companies went to do  virtual reality, we saw entertainment, we saw historical things, we saw scientific  work and then suddenly, oh, I have a little digression here because this is, I was putting  this because a lot of people have been asking me this throughout the day, that caves today  are still unusable because they are a million dollars, that's just a little bit of a myth.  With today's technology, we can build caves at a very, very inexpensive level. We have  built a number of caves and they're 40, 50 thousand dollars, I'm currently developing  one that by the time it's finished, it will probably be under 15 thousand dollars. Again,  is it the top of the line? No, but if we are willing to make compromises in head mounted  display technology like we are doing with the consumer technology that we see today,  we should be prepared to do the same kind of compromises in these other technologies.  Of course, you can buy a two million dollar head mounted display, you want a military  grade, but you can buy three or four hundred dollars, HMD, if you compromise. Same situation  with the cave, so this is my little digression in there, so for those of you that were asking  me this morning about that. Going back to the time frames, we went through a period that  I would say about ten years, which I call also the forgotten years of virtual reality,  but the media just forgot all about us. I'm not sure what happened, I think part of what  happened is that a lot of industries started to absorb the technology as part of their  workflow, as part of the routine work, so it was not exciting anymore, and of course,  it was not primarily in entertainment, it was in other aspects of human life, like engineering  design, military training, mining operations, and some other things. I even did baby diapers  designed for protein and gumball, fluid dynamics on baby pee and things like that in the cave,  so that's my joke, but for some reason the press did not pick up on this, so we went  through these kind of dark ages of virtual reality, and then suddenly around 2012, hey,  we're back on the map because all of us know what happened with Oculus Rift, you know,  and that being as a relatively modest project of an individual, it went into Kika started,  the initial asking was about $200,000, got over $2 million, got a lot of attention, got  the connection with Facebook, and here we are all today. So this is where we are today.  When you talk about virtual reality, when the press does you what virtual reality is  about, this is what we get. Now, this picture is all photographs from 2014 and 2015, and  the little guy on the corner is my son, and that was just a few days ago, so this is very  recent pictures. Now, let me back up to the one from the 80s. I see an issue here, guys.  Do you guys see the issue? We are stuck where we were 20 years ago, and I don't mean to  be negative, I just want people to realize where we are. Yes, we of course know a lot  more of what we need to do to make it work. But if you look at what the media was promoting  20 years ago and what the media is promoting today, it's the same. What's the difference?  Cheaper? Of course it's cheaper. More commodity hardware? Yes, okay.  There used to be more women in the past, that's true. So to me, like I said, since it's the  end of the day, I just want to give you some food for thought for the rest of the, for tomorrow,  since tomorrow will be the main day for the engineering of virtual reality, because I  think we are going on the same path that we were going 20 years ago, and I don't want  that to happen. I really don't, because this is a very exciting technology. There's a lot  of great things that we can do with it. A lot of the speakers today have presented amazing  new technologies that are coming up, so we need to keep ourselves a little bit in focus  on what exactly are we doing 20 years later? So my personal approach, Carolina approach,  I'm like your financial advisor and your virtual reality advisor. Diversify. What are the point  in history where we can be extremely diverse in virtual reality? So all these pictures  are from my new center at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. So we have a Humongous  Cave, 26 projectors, more pixels that your eye can see, all that kind of cool stuff,  some notes, cluster, la, la, la, la. But we are going, for example, as spherical screens  as well. We are doing omnidirectional 360-degree as spherical stereo, utilizing ray tracing,  so we compute the stereo at the pixel level. We are doing semi-mercy devices. We have a  couple of virtual tables that are just with enough 3D and stereo to perform the task at  hand on those tables. Touchable displays, of course, Oculus, Vibes, VR VRs and all that.  And we are also experimenting with 3D mobile devices, which they are coming. The picture  doesn't show, but again, my little son is my model. So that little tablet that he is  using there for augmented reality is actually an autostereoscopic tablet to do that. So  I think our approach to this should be diversification on the platforms. That brings a lot of challenges,  of course, because developing for these platforms to have your applications, to be able to,  I guess, using a term borrowed from the military industry, doing interoperability between all  our displays and settings, is actually a really, really hard problem, both from the software  engineering aspects as well as the hardware, because there is a lot of performance-related  parameters that take into play and a lot of optics and some other issues.  So but with this diversification, what is being really cool is that it has allowed us  to do a number of interesting applications throughout the years. I have a few applications  here and I'm going to let Chris wave at me when I run out of time. So I'll tell you some  that are not entertainment, because again, my goal today was to get us to think a little  bit beyond entertainment, but they're all very practical applications.  The first one is very dear to me because I started doing this work when I was a graduate  student and I finished it all when I was an assistant professor at Iowa State University,  where we were actually starting to use virtual reality as a front-end to supercomputing  simulations. So we were using a pretty, on those days, I was using, for those of you  that are my age or older, we were using a connection machine, if you remember the famous  connection machines. So I had, I remember it was about a thousand processor connection  machine solving the molecular dynamics on the fly connected directly with a fiber optic  link to the cave. So as the scientists were in the middle of the cave, they were able  to do drug design interactively with the goal of not necessarily find a specific drug for  a particular disease, but the goal of this application was to try to reduce the amount  of experimental lab testing that the molecular biologists had to do. They had some intuition  of some molecular structure that might or might not work, and they were using the cave  to try to reduce that spectrum to then minimize the laboratory work.  Down the line, we started our evangelical mission to tell engineering companies that  this was a technology that will help them tremendously. So my first sort of experience  was with John Deere, which is a company everybody knows. We, at least myself personally, worked  with them over 12 years. So they were having a design problem that couldn't really figure  out through traditional tools. So we used an immersive environment with, of course, 3D  stereo and head tracking. And without getting into too much details, we, we helped them  to find the problem that they've been really wrestling for months trying to figure out where  the problem was. Some other applications, for example, we are working since a number  of years now on using virtual reality as a certification tool in different disciplines  that are very expensive to certify, like in this case, fire marshal certification for  some complicated construction projects are very expensive where depending on what it  is that is being built, sometimes they had to build a mockup. And by a mockup, I mean  a real, almost half a scale something and then actually burn it and see what happens  when there is a fire. So of course, this is a very expensive way to test that. So we've  been doing a lot of different virtual reality simulations to helping this kind of testing  and certification. I have a couple of quick videos that I wanted to show or something  a little bit more recent since I'm out of time here. So let me just show this video  real quick. So this is just something recent that we've been, we've been doing. This actually  we send it out for SIGGRAPH, the deadline was yesterday for the VR village exhibit.  So this is our little 3D table. It has a narration, but I'm not going to go through that. So  let me skip a little bit where you can see it. So here you have our environment. Again,  it's a lot simpler to use. Right now we have a smart drive just because we recycle it from  the lab. So it gives us the right level of immersion, the right level of stereoscopic  to do this particular task at hand, which is interactive dissection of a virtual cadaver.  So this particular project is in the process of being commercialized and transferred to  different medical schools because at this particular level that's what they need. They  need to have their master physician that is teaching anatomy with the students in the  surrounding kind of nearby looking at it the same way they would be looking at a cadaver,  but at the same time they need to be able to see each other so they can have some conversations  and some saying look at this, look at that, look at that. So there are a lot of interesting  things out there that are beyond, again, gaming and entertainment that I think our technology  can significantly help. And I'm going to skip real quick. You give me 30 seconds. Basically,  I tried to condense my 20-something years of experience in like 15 minutes, but some  of the things that I learned over the years, it certainly hurts a lot. I know we get very  excited about what we're doing. I know we like people around us to get very excited about  what we're doing, but we have to be a little bit careful to say, hey, this is all the things  that we can do when in reality we're not even quite there yet. We have to be very, very  careful with that. Another thing is one size doesn't fit all, and that applies really,  really well for VR. There's a lot of flavors. There's a lot of varieties for virtual reality.  So let's not just get hung up on one particular kind of virtual reality. Keep in mind it's  just technology. A few years from now there will be some other things, but the concept  is really how do we get to this there that there is generated in the computer. Another  thing too, of course, is that in many contexts sometimes being able to have a group of people  face to face, sharing the virtual space is what you need. And again, we can do collaborative  virtual environments with representing your own body through avatars and all that. It's  not the same. The face to face, the body language, the smiles, the little twitch on your face  and all that is still very, very important in certain contexts for communications. I  cannot say any more. It's a lot more than a really cool gaming and entertainment platform.  But at the same time, when we get outside gaming, I see lots and lots of people doing  work that is just flying through pretty models. There's a lot more to gaming, but there's  also a lot more than just flying through pretty models where really nothing really happens.  And then, of course, the infrastructure to do these things is still not quite at the  level that it should be, so we can really unleash our own creativity. So that goes to  all the people developing SDKs and that kind of thing. And we have very little interoperability  between different platforms. I can guarantee you right now what I run in my devices is  going to be really, really hard for you to run it in your own devices. And when you run  on your device, it's going to be really hard for me to run it in my device because we don't  have a lot of common infrastructure to do that. So with that, this is what I think is  going to be hopefully the next 15 years, 10 years or so. Again, remember your financial  VR advisor, diversify. All right, so with that, I appreciate your time and thank you  very much.
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