Skip to main content

Virtual Reality - Samuel Greengard ***

This is an entry in a new series of pocket-sized guides which take on subsets of what would be covered by a typical book (I'm looking forward to Recycling in the same series). It covers the genuinely interesting topic of virtual reality, but the way it does so shows a degree of exaggerated expectation. The technology is simply not up to the promise yet.

 Even Samuel Greengard acknowledges this when he writes 'Although virtual technologies have been around in one for or another for a few decades, the hype has mostly exceeded the reality.' Unfortunately, said hype is present through most of the book. Greengard tells us that we have experienced 'a massive wave of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality'. Not in my world, we haven't. I'm not anti VR, but I think any technology that involves strapping something on your face will always be niche. The maximum the mass market is likely to put up with is the inconvenience of glasses, though even those proved too much faff for 3D TV to succeed. It's okay for the occasional visit to the cinema, but not use every day.

 The book begins by spending the first chapter somewhat tediously defining virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, then giving examples, only to spend much of the second chapter doing the same again. (Then, later in the book, we get yet more of lists of examples of what's to come.) The technology chapters give significantly more information, but tend to be lists of technologies with little narrative flow.

 I'd also say that the history is a little off as it implies that the first commercialisation of 3D pictures was Viewmaster, but 3D was a huge commercial technology in Victorian times (much more so than virtual reality is now). One other detailed moan - in his enthusiasm to give examples that normal people use, Greengard gives the example of banking apps on phones used to scan cheques, where he claims that putting a frame around the cheque when viewing it through the app is augmented reality. But if that's the case, the frames in camera viewfinders have been augmented reality for at least 100 years - stretching the definition to make an application seem more prevalent is not attractive. 

 Overall, I think the real position is summed up nicely when Greengard enthusiastically tells us that 'Gaming and entertainment are also taking on new and different forms. In 2016, for instance, a movie theater in Amsterdam became the world's first permanent VR movie cinema.' After explaining the experience he then has to throw in that 'the theater shuttered its doors in 2018.' That went well, then.

 I'm not anti-VR. I'm sure it has good, interesting, specialist applications already and will eventually become mass market beyond the likes of Pokemon Go when it can be done in a less intrusive way. But, for the moment, I would suggest that a good book on virtual reality should be clear about its shortcomings and realistic about timescales - and I don't think that happens here.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more