VR may be at a historic inflection point not unlike the personal computer just before the IBM PC’s introduction, about to transition from a niche product to widespread adoption. What’s worrisome is that this transition was also predicted at least once before, in the early 1990s, when VR systems first became commercially available. What is different this time? This talk will review the history of VR, the development of the component technologies and several representative applications. We’ll review the key technical problems to be solved, assess their current state of effectiveness, and note how the situation is different now than during the last promising era two decades ago. We’ll conclude with a tour of remaining technical challenges (such as merging real and virtual worlds), a look at some new application areas, and speculate on why a VR startup company might be worth $ 2 Billion.
Henry Fuchs (PhD, University of Utah, 1975) is the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of three co-directors (together with Nadia Thalmann and Markus Gross) of the BeingThere International Research Center in Telepresence, collaboration between ETH Zurich, NTU Singapore, and UNC Chapel Hill. Active in computer graphics since the 1970s, Fuchs has written or coauthored some 200 papers on a variety of topics, including rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), graphics hardware (Pixel-Planes), virtual environments, telepresence, medical and training applications. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the 1992 ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award and the 2013 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award.