Microsoft bets on Multi-User Virtual Reality

Microsoft researchers are exploring multi-person virtual reality at VR expert Jaron Lanier’s lab which will enable people to share the experience of “mixed” or “augmented” reality, MIT Technology Review reported.

“Augmented or mixed reality, which renders virtual images in a view of the real world, can be spectacular to experience. But it may be even more fun when you bring a friend”, the report said.

Virtual reality (VR) is an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. Multi-user virtual environment applications incorporate computer graphics, sound simulation, and networks to simulate the experience of real-time interaction between multiple users in a shared three-dimensional virtual world.

Microsoft is developing a VR headset HoloLens, the first fully untethered, holographic computer that enables high definition holograms to integrate with the real world, which will begin shipping in first quarter of 2016.

Lanier emphasizes that his project “Comradre” is distinct from HoloLens and does not reveal how that product will develop. Speaking of Lanier’s project, Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says the key problem with creating virtual experiences for more than one person is tracking movement.

“The critical aspect for multi-person virtual reality is that you have to track everybody’s movements very accurately in their own scene,” he says.

MIT Technology Review says that both augmented reality and virtual reality are currently hot areas of research and commercial development at several technology giants such as Facebook, Google, and Sony - all developing headsets and software for virtual reality. Multi-person mixed reality could prove useful for communications, collaboration, and for new ways of accessing and handling information.