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Video Perspective

Perspective when room is room is 10X

Thoughts on perspective change

One of the hardest things to configure in the virtual reality toolkit is to make sure that the perspective is aligned. The entire experience of trying to adjust the size of the room and all the materials in it was cumbersome. We had to keep adjusting the size and testing with the actual headset to see if the perspective resembled a human’s perspective in a room. It is hard to put into words the feeling of being in a space that’s too small or too big. There is a difference between having different perspective in Virtual Reality and a game on the PC or a console.

Just imagine playing a game on a non-virtual reality console where the player’s perspective is that of an ant. While it is cool to see the environment scaled up and play as an ant, it does not provide an immersive experience as the player is aware of their surroundings. The player is still aware of his surroundings so player does not feel like he is completely in a different perspective. However, in virtual reality, the player is completely unaware of his/her surroundings. The player is completely immersed in a world with a different perspective. In this case, the entire experience is all the more entertaining and different because of complete immersion. The player actually feels like he’s in a world where the entire perspective has shifted.

When I scaled up the entire room and all the objects in it by a scale of 10, the first thing I noticed was that a some of the orientation was messed up. The space also looks completely different when compared to looking at from a 1:1 perspective. All the textures of the room were fine although it was hard to see the intricacies because the room is dark. While developing the room, to provide a scary feel for the game, I tried to keep the room as dark as possible and only kept some source of light near the players actual perspective. Hence, the area near the floor was extremely dark. I also found that in virtual reality, while there are boundaries and walls that the player is not supposed to be able to walk through, there is no physical object to prevent the player from moving through walls or other objects. This is one of the issues that is still to be resolved properly. There needs to be some way to prevent players from walking through obstacles.

The whole experience of being in VR when the entire room is scaled up is completely different. The entire space looks so big. I immediately felt like on the Lilliput’s in Gullivers Travels. Most of the objects were aligned correctly only because all the objects were scaled by the same amount. I felt tired walking the entire distance of the hallway. It was pretty interesting to see the objects that are much smaller than us in real life be so huge. I was reminded of the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This was one of my favorite movies as a child and I always used to wonder what it would feel like to actually be tiny in a big world. Virtual reality has made this somewhat possible which is amazing.

There are a wide range of applications for this. One such example is in the entertainment business where I believe people would be extremely interested in seeing things from the perspective of other living things in the universe. Some other places where this technology can aid people is in research. It is very hard to visually see what goes on in an ant’s brain or where it finds gaps in the room. For things like this, a virtual reality application can be extremely useful to figure out minute details of many things. It is much easier to see what goes on in detail if the perspective can be changed. Similarly, from a macroscopic level, it would be interesting to visually be able to see the world from the perspective of something else. This has many interesting applications in science and research.