# data[].attributes.body
Home page in Dutch :-( , but from there many nice examples of VR, often in English.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: March 14, 2018.

You'll probably never go to Mars, swim with dolphins, run an Olympic 100 meters, or sing onstage with the Rolling Stones. But if virtual reality ever lives up to its promise, you might be able to do all these things-and many more-without even leaving your home. Unlike real reality (the actual world in which we live), virtual reality means simulating bits of our world (or completely imaginary worlds) using high-performance computers and sensory equipment, like headsets and gloves. Apart from games and entertainment, it's long been used for training airline pilots and surgeons and for helping scientists to figure out complex problems such as the structure of protein molecules. How does it work? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: Virtual reality means blocking yourself off from the real world and substituting a computer-generated alternative. Often, it involves wearing a wraparound headset called a head-mounted display, clamping stereo headphones over your ears, and touching or feeling your way around your imaginary home using datagloves (gloves with built-in sensors). Picture by Wade Sisler courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

What is virtual reality?

Virtual reality (VR) means experiencing things through our computers that don't really exist. From that simple definition, the idea doesn't sound especially new. When you look at an amazing Canaletto painting, for example, you're experiencing the sites and sounds of Italy as it was about 250 years ago-so that's a kind of virtual reality. In the same way, if you listen to ambient instrumental or classical music with your eyes closed, and start dreaming about things, isn't that an example of virtual reality-an experience of a world that doesn't really exist? What about losing yourself in a book or a movie? Surely that's a kind of virtual reality?

If we're going to understand why books, movies, paintings, and pieces of music aren't the same thing as virtual reality, we need to define VR fairly clearly. For the purposes of this simple, introductory article, I'm going to define it as:

A believable, interactive 3D computer-created world that you can explore so you feel you really are there, both mentally and physically.

Putting it another way, virtual reality is essentially:

1. Believable: You really need to feel like you're in your virtual world (on Mars, or wherever) and to keep believing that, or theillusion of virtual reality will disappear.

2. Interactive: As you move around, the VR world needs to move with you. You can watch a 3D movie and be transported up to the Moon or down to the seabed-but it's not interactive in any sense.

3. Computer-generated: Why is that important? Because only powerful machines, with realistic 3Dcomputer graphics, are fast enough to make believable, interactive, alternative worlds that change in real-time as we move around them.

4. Explorable: A VR world needs to be big and detailed enough for you to explore. However realistic a painting is, it shows only one scene, from one perspective. A book can describe a vast and complex "virtual world," but you can only really explore it in a linear way, exactly as the author describes it.

5. Immersive: To be both believable and interactive, VR needs to engage both your body and your mind. Paintings by war artists can give us glimpses of conflict, but they can never fully convey the sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel of battle. You can play a flight simulator game on your home PC and be lost in a very realistic, interactive experience for hours (the landscape will constantly change as your plane flies through it), but it's not like using a real flight simulator (where you sit in ahydraulically operated mockup of a real cockpit and feel actual forces as it tips and tilts), and even less like flying a plane.

Artwork: This Canaletto painting of Venice, Italy is believable and in some sense explorable (you can move your eyes around and think about different parts of the picture), but it's not interactive, computer-generated, or immersive, so it doesn't meet our definition of virtual reality: looking at this picture is not like being there. There's nothing to stop us making an explorable equivalent in VR, but we need CGI-not oil paints-to do it. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We can see from this why reading a book, looking at a painting, listening to a classical symphony, or watching a movie don't qualify as virtual reality. All of them offer partial glimpses of another reality, but none are interactive, explorable, or fully believable. If you're sitting in a movie theater looking at a giant picture of Mars on the screen, and you suddenly turn your head too far, you'll see and remember that you're actually on Earth and the illusion will disappear. If you see something interesting on the screen, you can't reach out and touch it or walk towards it; again, the illusion will simply disappear. So these forms of entertainment are essentially passive: however plausible they might be, they don't actively engage you in any way.

VR is quite different. It makes you think you are actually living inside a completely believable virtual world (one in which, to use the technical jargon, you are partly or fully immersed). It is two-way interactive: as you respond to what you see, what you see responds to you: if you turn your head around, what you see or hear in VR changes to match your new perspective.

Types of virtual reality

"Virtual reality" has often been used as a marketing buzzword for compelling, interactive video games or even 3D movies and television programs, none of which really count as VR because they don't immerse you either fully or partially in a virtual world. Search for "virtual reality" in your cellphone app store and you'll find hundreds of hits, even though a tiny cellphone screen could never get anywhere near producing the convincing experience of VR. Nevertheless, things like interactive games and computer simulations would certainly meet parts of our definition up above, so there's clearly more than one approach to building virtual worlds-and more than one flavor of virtual reality. Here are a few of the bigger variations:

Fully immersive

For the complete VR experience, we need three things. First, a plausible, and richly detailed virtual world to explore; a computer model or simulation, in other words. Second, a powerful computer that can detect what we're going and adjust our experience accordingly, in real time (so what we see or hear changes as fast as we move-just like in real reality). Third, hardware linked to the computer that fully immerses us in the virtual world as we roam around. Usually, we'd need to put on what's called a head-mounted display (HMD) with two screens and stereo sound, and wear one or more sensory gloves. Alternatively, we could move around inside a room, fitted out with surround-sound loudspeakers, onto which changing images are projected from outside. We'll explore VR equipment in more detail in a moment.

Non-immersive

A highly realistic flight simulator on a home PC might qualify as nonimmersive virtual reality, especially if it uses a very wide screen, with headphones or surround sound, and a realistic joystick and other controls. Not everyone wants or needs to be fully immersed in an alternative reality. An architect might build a detailed 3D model of a new building to show to clients that can be explored on a desktop computer by moving a mouse. Most people would classify that as a kind of virtual reality, even if it doesn't fully immerse you. In the same way, computer archaeologists often create engaging 3D reconstructions of long-lost settlements that you can move around and explore. They don't take you back hundreds or thousands of years or create the sounds, smells, and tastes of prehistory, but they give a much richer experience than a few pastel drawings or even an animated movie.

Collaborative

What about "virtual world" games like Second Life and Minecraft? Do they count as virtual reality? Although they meet the first four of our criteria (believable, interactive, computer-created and explorable), they don't really meet the fifth: they don't fully immerse you. But one thing they do offer that cutting-edge VR typically doesn't is collaboration: the idea of sharing an experience in a virtual world with other people, often in real time or something very close to it. Collaboration and sharing are likely to become increasingly important features of VR in future.

Web-based

Virtual reality was one of the hottest, fastest-growing technologies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the rapid rise of the World Wide Web largely killed off interest after that. Even though computer scientists developed a way of building virtual worlds on the Web (using a technology analogous to HTML called Virtual Reality Markup Language, VRML), ordinary people were much more interested in the way the Web gave them new ways to access real reality-new ways to find and publish information, shop, and share thoughts, ideas, and experiences with friends through social media. With Facebook's growing interest in the technology, the future of VR seems likely to be both Web-based and collaborative.

Augmented reality

Photo: Augmented reality: A heads-up display, like this one used by the US Air Force, superimposes useful, computer-based information on top of the things you see with your own eyes. Picture by Major Chad E. Gibson courtesy of US Air Force.

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have put what used to be supercomputer power in our hands and pockets. If we're wandering round the world, maybe visiting a heritage site like the pyramids or a fascinating foreign city we've never been to before, what we want is typically not virtual reality but an enhanced experience of the exciting reality we can see in front of us. That's spawned the idea of augmented reality (AR), where, for example, you point your smartphone at a landmark or a striking building and interesting information about it pops up automatically. Augmented reality is all about connecting the real world we experience to the vast virtual world of information that we've collectively created on the Web. Neither of these worlds is virtual, but the idea of exploring and navigating the two simultaneously does, nevertheless, have things in common with virtual reality. For example, how can a mobile device figure out its precise location in the world? How do the things you see on the screen of your tablet change as you wander round a city? Technically, these problems are similar to the ones developers of VR systems have to solve-so there are close links between AR and VR.

What equipment do we need for virtual reality?

Close your eyes and think of virtual reality and you probably picture something like our top photo: a geek wearing a wraparound headset (HMD) and datagloves, wired into a powerful workstation or supercomputer. What differentiates VR from an ordinary computer experience (using your PC to write an essay or play games) is the nature of the input and output. Where an ordinary computer uses things like a keyboard, mouse, or (more exotically) speech recognition for input, VR uses sensors that detect how your body is moving. And where a PC displays output on a screen (or a printer), VR uses two screens (one for each eye), stereo or surround-sound speakers, and maybe some forms of haptic (touch and body perception) feedback as well. Let's take a quick tour through some of the more common VR input and output devices.

Head-mounted displays (HMDs)

Photo: The view from inside. A typical HMD has two tiny screens that show different pictures to each of your eyes, so your brain produces a combined 3D (stereoscopic) image. Picture by courtesy of US Air Force.

There are two big differences between VR and looking at an ordinary computer screen: in VR, you see a 3D image that changes smoothly, in real-time, as you move your head. That's made possible by wearing a head-mounted display, which looks like a giant motorbike helmet or welding visor, but consists of two small screens (one in front of each eye), a blackout blindfold that blocks out all other light (eliminating distractions from the real world), and stereo headphones. The two screens display slightly different, stereoscopic images, creating a realistic 3D perspective of the virtual world. HMDs usually also have built-in accelerometers or position sensors so they can detect exactly how your head and body are moving (both position and orientation-which way they're tilting or pointing) and adjust the picture accordingly. The trouble with HMDs is that they're quite heavy, so they can be tiring to wear for long periods; some of the really heavy ones are even mounted on stands with counterweights. But HMDs don't have to be so elaborate and sophisticated: at the opposite end of the spectrum, Google has developed an affordable, low-cost pair of cardboard goggles with built-in lenses that convert an ordinary smartphone into a crude HMD.

Immersive rooms

An alternative to putting on an HMD is to sit or stand inside a room onto whose walls changing images are projected from outside. As you move in the room, the images change accordingly. Flight simulators use this technique, often with images of landscapes, cities, and airport approaches projected onto large screens positioned just outside a mockup of a cockpit. A famous 1990s VR experiment called CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), developed at the University of Illinois by Thomas de Fanti, also worked this way. People moved around inside a large cube-shaped room with semi-transparent walls onto which stereo images were back-projected from outside. Although they didn't have to wear HMDs, they did need stereo glasses to experience full 3D perception.

Datagloves

See something amazing and your natural instinct is to reach out and touch it-even babies do that. So giving people the ability to handle virtual objects has always been a big part of VR. Usually, this is done using datagloves, which are ordinary gloves with sensors wired to the outside to detect hand and figure motions. One technical method of doing this uses fiber-optic cables stretched the length of each finger. Each cable has tiny cuts in it so, as you flex your fingers back and forth, more or less light escapes. A photocell at the end of the cable measures how much light reaches it and the computer uses this to figure out exactly what your fingers are doing. Other gloves use strain gauges, piezoelectric sensors, or electromechanical devices (such as potentiometers) to measure finger movements.

Photos: Left/above: EXOS datagloves produced by NASA in the 1990s had very intricate external sensors to detect finger movements with high precision. Picture courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC). Right/below: This more elaborate EXOS glove had separate sensors on each finger segment, wired up to a single ribbon cable connected up to the main VR computer. Picture by Wade Sisler courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

Artwork: How a fiber-optic dataglove works. Each finger has a fiber-optic cable stretched along its length. (1) At one end of the finger, a light-emitting diode (LED) shines light into the cable. (2) Light rays shoot down the cable, bouncing off the sides. (3) There are tiny abrasions in the top of each fiber through which some of the rays escape. The more you flex your fingers, the more light escapes. (4) The amount of light arriving at a photocell at the end gives a rough indication of how much you're flexing your finger. (5) A cable carries this signal off to the VR computer. This is a simplified version of the kind of dataglove VPL patented in 1992, and you'll find the idea described in much more detail in US Patent 5,097,252.

Wands

Even simpler than a dataglove, a wand is a stick you can use to touch, point to, or otherwise interact with a virtual world. It has position or motion sensors (such as accelerometers) built in, along with mouse-like buttons or scroll wheels. Originally, wands were clumsily wired into the main VR computer; increasingly, they're wireless.

Photo: A typical handheld virtual reality controller (complete with elastic bands), looking not so different from a video game controller. Photo courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

Applications of virtual reality

VR has always suffered from the perception that it's little more than a glorified arcade game-literally a "dreamy escape" from reality. In that sense, "virtual reality" can be an unhelpful misnomer; "alternative reality," "artificial reality," or "computer simulation" might be better terms. The key thing to remember about VR is that it really isn't a fad or fantasy waiting in the wings to whistle people off to alternative worlds; it's a hard-edged practical technology that's been routinely used by scientists, doctors, dentists, engineers, architects, archaeologists, and the military for about the last 30 years. What sorts of things can we do with it?

Education

Photo: Flight training is a classic application of virtual reality, though it doesn't use HMDs or datagloves. Instead, you sit in a pretend cockpit with changing images projected onto giant screens to give an impression of the view you'd see from your plane. The cockpit is a meticulous replica of the one in a real airplane with exactly the same instruments and controls. Photo by Javier Garcia courtesy of US Air Force.

Difficult and dangerous jobs are hard to train for. How can you safely practice taking a trip to space, landing a jumbo jet, making a parachute jump, or carrying out brain surgery? All these things are obvious candidates for virtual reality applications. As we've seen already, flight cockpit simulators were among the earliest VR applications; they can trace their history back to mechanical simulators developed by Edwin Link in the 1920s. Just like pilots, surgeons are now routinely trained using VR. In a 2008 study of 735 surgical trainees from 28 different countries, 68 percent said the opportunity to train with VR was "good" or "excellent" for them and only 2 percent rated it useless or unsuitable.

Scientific visualization

Anything that happens at the atomic or molecular scale is effectively invisible unless you're prepared to sit with your eyes glued to an electron microscope. But suppose you want to design new materials or drugs and you want to experiment with the molecular equivalent of LEGO. That's another obvious application for virtual reality. Instead of wrestling with numbers, equations, or two-dimensional drawings of molecular structures, you can snap complex molecules together right before your eyes. This kind of work began in the 1960s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Frederick Brooks launched GROPE, a project to develop a VR system for exploring the interactions between protein molecules and drugs.

Photo: If you're heading to Mars, a trip in virtual reality could help you visualize what you'll find when you get there. Picture courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

Medicine

Apart from its use in things like surgical training and drug design, virtual reality also makes possible telemedicine (monitoring, examining, or operating on patients remotely). A logical extension of this has a surgeon in one location hooked up to a virtual reality control panel and a robot in another location (maybe an entire continent away) wielding the knife. The best-known example of this is the daVinci surgical robot, released in 2009, of which several thousand have now been installed in hospitals worldwide. Introduce collaboration and there's the possibility of a whole group of the world's best surgeons working together on a particularly difficult operation-a kind of WikiSurgery, if you like!

Industrial design and architecture

Architects used to build models out of card and paper; now they're much more likely to build virtual reality computer models you can walk through and explore. By the same token, it's generally much cheaper to design cars, airplanes, and other complex, expensive vehicles on a computer screen than to model them in wood, plastic, or other real-world materials. This is an area where virtual reality overlaps with computer modeling: instead of simply making an immersive 3D visual model for people to inspect and explore, you're creating a mathematical model that can be tested for its aerodynamic, safety, or other qualities.

Games and entertainment

From flight simulators to race-car games, VR has long hovered on the edges of the gaming world-never quite good enough to revolutionize the experience of gamers, largely due to computers being too slow, displays lacking full 3D, and the lack of decent HMDs and datagloves. All that may be about to change with the development of affordable new peripherals like the Oculus Rift.

Pros and cons of virtual reality

Like any technology, virtual reality has both good and bad points. How many of us would rather have a complex brain operation carried out by a surgeon trained in VR, compared to someone who has merely read books or watched over the shoulders of their peers? How many of us would rather practice our driving on a car simulator before we set foot on the road? Or sit back and relax in a Jumbo Jet, confident in the knowledge that our pilot practiced landing at this very airport, dozens of times, in a VR simulator before she ever set foot in a real cockpit?

Critics always raise the risk that people may be seduced by alternative realities to the point of neglecting their real-world lives-but that criticism has been leveled at everything from radio and TV to computer games and the Internet. And, at some point, it becomes a philosophical and ethical question: What is real anyway? And who is to say which is the better way to pass your time? Like many technologies, VR takes little or nothing away from the real world: you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

The promise of VR has loomed large over the world of computing for at least the last quarter century-but remains largely unfulfilled. While science, architecture, medicine, and the military all rely on VR technology in different ways, mainstream adoption remains virtually nonexistent; we're not routinely using VR the way we use computers, smartphones, or the Internet. But the 2014 acquisition of VR company Oculus, by Facebook, greatly renewed interest in the area and could change everything. Facebook's basic idea is to let people share things with their friends using the Internet and the Web. What if you could share not simply a photo or a link to a Web article but an entire experience? Instead of sharing photos of your wedding with your Facebook friends, what if you could make it possible for people to attend your wedding remotely, in virtual reality, in perpetuity? What if we could record historical events in such a way that people could experience them again and again, forever more? These are the sorts of social, collaborative virtual reality sharing that (we might guess) Facebook is thinking about exploring right now. If so, the future of virtual reality looks very bright indeed!

A brief history of virtual reality

So much for the future, but what of the past. Virtual reality has a long and very rich history. Here are a few of the more interesting highlights...

Artwork: The first virtual reality machine? Morton Heilig's 1962 Sensorama. Picture courtesy US Patent and Trademark Office.

1890s: Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson pioneer the Kinetograph (a camera for recording pictures) and Kinetoscope (a projector for playing them back)-in effect, the first one-person "movie experience."

1895: French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière open the first movie theater in Paris, France. Legend has it that one of their movie shorts,Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, is such a convincing depiction of reality that people in the audience scream and run to the back of the room.

1929: Edwin Link develops the Link Trainer (also called the Pilot Maker), a mechanical airplane simulator. His work pioneers the field of flight simulation.

1950: US Air Force psychologist James J. Gibson publishes an influential book,The Perception of the Visual World, describing how people see and experience things as an "optic flow" as they move through the world. These ideas, and those of contemporaries such as Adelbert Ames, help to form the foundations of the 20th century psychology of visual perception, which feeds into academic studies of computer vision and virtual reality.

1956: Cinematographer Morton Heilig begins developing machines that can produce artificial sensory experiences. In 1957, he develops apioneering 3D head-mounted display. In 1962, he's granted a patent for a machine called theSensorama (a kind of updated, highly sophisticated Kinetoscope) that can immerse its user in artificial vision, sound, smell, and vibration. Many people regard Heilig as the true father of virtual reality, though he has seldom been acknowledged as such.

1961: C. Comeau and J. Bryan make Headsight, the first real head-mounted display.

1962: Ivan Sutherland, pioneer of human-computer interaction, develops the lightpen and a program called Sketchpad that allows people to draw on a computer screen-opening the way for the kind of computer graphics later used in virtual reality.

1965: Sutherland develops Ultimate Display, a sophisticated HMD.

1968. Sutherland produces a HMD with stereo (3D) vision.

1970s: Computer scientist Myron Krueger opens Videoplace, a pioneering VR laboratory.

1975-1976: Programmer Will Crowther develops Adventure (also called Colossal Cave Adventure), a highly influential, text-based computer game in which players explore a virtual world, solving problems through a question and answer dialog.

1977: Dan Sandin, Richard Sayre, and Thomas Defanti produce the first dataglove.

1980s: Fast 3D graphical workstations, notably those developed by Silicon Graphics, accelerate the development of scientific visualization, visual computer modeling, CGI movies, and VR.

1982: Tron, a pioneering CGI movie, tells the story of a software engineer (played by actor Jeff Bridges) who ventures into the software of a mainframe computer.

1983: Computer scientist Myron Krueger coins the term "artificial reality."

1983: Writer William Gibson invents the related term "cyberspace."

1989: Computer scientist and musician Jaron Lanier: coins the now preferred term "virtual reality." His company, VPL Research, garners huge media attention and develops pioneering VR peripherals, including a HMD and dataglove. Lanier has been popularly referred to as the "father of virtual reality" ever since, though, as this timeline demonstrates, he was quite a late entrant to the field!

1992: The Lawnmower Man, another influential VR film, based on a Stephen King story, is partly inspired by the story of VPL.

1993: Brothers Robyn and Rand Miller create Myst, an extremely successful graphical computer game, in which players explore an island in non-immersive virtual reality.

1994: Dave Raggett, an influential English computer scientist who has played a key role in the development of the World Wide Web, coins the term VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language).

1999: The Matrix, a movie starring Keanu Reaves based on virtual reality, grosses over $450 million at the box office.

2011: Palmer Luckey develops the Oculus Rift, an inexpensive homemade HMD, in his parents' garage.

2014: Facebook announces its acquisition of Oculus in a deal worth $2 billion.

2016: Oculus begins shipping its Rift headsets to customers to generally positive reviews. Meanwhile, a variety of smartphone makers (including Samsung and HTC) produce rival VR systems, VR also appears for PlayStation, and Google announces it has shipped over 5 million cardboard head-mounted displays for smartphones.

2017: Sony reveals that it sold almost a million PlayStation VR headsets in their first four months on the market.

2018: Neurable announces a "brain-scanning" headband with built-in electrodes that gives hands-free control of virtual reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is virtual reality? - A simple introduction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: March 14, 2018. You'll probably never go to Mars, swim with dolphins, run an Olympic 100 meters, or sing onstage with the Rolling Stones. But if virtual reality ever lives up to its promise, you might be able to do all these things-and many more-without even leaving your home.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Enter your email address below. If your address has been previously registered, you will receive an email with instructions on how to reset your password. If you don't receive an email, you should register as a new user

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
SURF | Best practice CineGrid Medical: operatie in 4K-video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In het CineGrid Medical-project is samen met UMC Utrecht en de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen een live ooroperatie uitgevoerd. Medisch specialisten en studenten konden de operatie haarscherp volgen met UltraHD-beeldkwaliteit en direct met elkaar overleggen via veilige lichtpadverbindingen tussen de locaties vanwege privacy van de patiënt.

# data[].attributes.headline
Roundtable session about 4K and 3D filmed with a 360 camera

# data[].attributes.subject
Roundtable session about 4K and 3D filmed with a 360 camera

# data[].attributes.body
Watch it directly on YouTube with a Google Cardboard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Roundtable session about 4K and 3D filmed with a 360 camera

# data[].attributes.headline
Roundtable session about 4K and 3D filmed with a 360 camera

# data[].attributes.subject
Roundtable session about 4K and 3D filmed with a 360 camera

# data[].attributes.body
Possible uses/advantages of 3D:

- immersive, concentrate on task;
- important to be able to interact with virtual objects, by speech, controllers, body movement;
- look at expensive or otherwise inaccessible objects
- augmented reality: combine real world with information overlay-ed;

# data[].attributes.headline
Ideas from Quick Dive sessions (360 degrees)

# data[].attributes.subject
Ideas from Quick Dive sessions (360 degrees)

# data[].attributes.body
Possible uses/advantages of 360 degrees:

- streaming meetings live  (see example above, short clip of the round-table session);
- teacher training (view both teachers and pupils);
- reflect on discussions;
- will grow due to affordable equipment, Facebook roadmap on 3D;

# data[].attributes.body
Possible uses/advantages of VR:

- 'Gamification', e.g. doing forensic research in a VR Lab;
- Virtual field trips, expeditions;
distance learning, be part of the learning experience;
- learning to operate machines etc.;
- access to limited spaces, e.g. labs;
- support to overcome certain fobia

# data[].attributes.body
Possible uses/advantages of 4K:

- better readability of texts (sharper characters, e.g. on computer monitor).
- in medical sciences, e.g. recordings of operations
- high res microscopic images (zoom in)
- geographical information
- more data on the screen, e.g. 4 graphs instead of one.
- CAD/CAM images
- useful for displaying mathematical derivations

# data[].attributes.body
Watch it directly on YouTube with a Google Cardboard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At The Media & Learning conference 2016 we did roundtable sessions about 4K and 3D VR This is a short 360 impression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bell & Howell Key Wind Filmo camera model 70 A

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The single lens Bell & Howell Key Wind Filmo camera model 70 A came out in 1923. It was the first camera marketed to consumers instead of movie companies. The 16mm camera was a high-end luxury item priced almost equal to a new car at the time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Geoffrey Morrison

As we all expected, the big news at CES this year was Ultra HD 4K displays. It seemed that every TV manufacturer had one, ranging from massive LED LCDs to midsize LED LCDs to midsize OLEDs.

We've talked about this before, but now with more info, and definitive product announcements, let me explain in exacting, excruciating detail why 4K TVs are still stupid.

Allow me to start with the most important point:

1. I love 4K
It is my fault for trying to make a nuanced argument on the Internet. I have a 102-inch "TV" and sit 9 feet from it. I would love to have 4K. When I expand out to fill the full 10-foot-wide 2.35:1 screen, I can see pixels with some projectors. I look forward to more 4K projectors. Projectors are not TVs; 4K TVs are a waste. This is because...

2. The eye has a finite resolution
This is basic biology. The accepted "normal" vision is 20/20. In response to my previous articles on the stupidity of 4K TVs, many people argued they had better vision, or some other number should be used. This is like arguing doors should be bigger because there are tall people. Also, just because you have better vision, doesn't mean most people have better vision. If they did, it wouldn't be better, it would be average.

Try this. Go to the beach (or a big sandbox, or a baseball diamond). Sit down. Start counting how many grains of sand you can see next to you. Now do the same with the grains of sand by your feet. Try again with the sand far beyond your feet (like, say, 10 feet away). The fact that you can see individual grains near you, but not farther away is exactly what we're talking about here. The eye is analog. Randomly analog at that. So of course some people are going to see more detail than others, and at different distances, but 20/20 is what everyone knows, and it is by far the most logical place to start any discussion.

Is there some wiggle room thanks to variances in how people see? Yes, of course. Here's an awesome chart:

Carlton Bale

Let's skip ahead a step. Getting bogged down in the specifics misses the big picture. The eye does have a finite resolution, and if you want to argue it's better than 20/20, you're still conceding the point. You're just saying that smaller 4K TVs are viable. How much smaller? Well, not 50 inches. Probably not 60 inches, either. These are the sizes people are buying. Most people are buying even smaller TVs. Which leads to...

3. 84-inch TVs are never going to be mainstream
Never. Ever. Never ever. Like I said earlier, I have a 102-inch screen. I've also reviewed an 80-inch Sharp LCD. And let me tell you, it dominates the room. It's massive. There is a significant difference between a screen (effectively, the wall), and a Device of Unusual Size. Enthusiasts might be OK with this thing in their room, but most people won't. Ask your spouse. Ask your spouse's friends. Screen sizes have been inching upward, but not linearly with price. More specifically, the prices of big-big screens have fallen much faster than their sales have increased. I don't know what the upper limit is for what the average consumer decides is "too big" for their room, but I'm positive there is an upper limit, and this limit is far smaller than screens that need 4K.

I should clarify what I mean by "TV." I'm specifically talking about the televisions we know today. When OLED becomes something you can paint on your wall, or so paper-thin it hangs like a poster, then absolutely people will get bigger screens (presuming they're cheap). However, this is years (decades?) away. This future awesomeness is different than TVs of today. Will we still call them "TVs"? Yeah, probably, but their presence in the room will be radically different, hopefully because these future wafer-thin "TVs" won't have a presence in the room. They'll be part of the wall.

4. Viewing distance hasn't changed with HD, why would it change with UHD?
In the old days of 480i CRT tube TVs, people sat roughly 9 to 10 feet away from their TVs. There were good reasons for this (scan lines). Modern TVs offer significantly better resolution, so people can sit closer. Except...they don't. Most people still sit the same distance from their TVs as they did before.

Could people sit closer? Sure. A lot closer, actually. This ties in exactly with point No. 3. Sitting closer would be like getting a bigger screen, as it takes up more of your field of view. Just as people aren't getting as big a TV as they could, people aren't sitting closer, either.

So they can sit closer now, but don't. Why would anyone assume that because of UHD, people would suddenly sit closer. It doesn't make any sense. And just like with No. 3, I don't think most people would want to sit closer. Some of you might want to sit 5.5 feet from a 84-inch screen, but you are a tiny minority.

And speaking of viewing distance, this is precisely why comparisons to the Retina Display iPad are specious. The viewing distance is rather different between a TV and a tablet. Or, as President of DisplayMate Technologies Corp. Raymond M. Soneira says, your TV is already a Retina Display.

5. Why 4K?
Ah, now this is an interesting question. It's clear many seem to think TV manufacturers are some sort of altruistic entities that only do new things if there's a benefit to the consumer. How adorable, but no. Ultra HD isn't the "new technology" it appears. Modern TVs are made from huge sheets of "motherglass." From this big piece, companies slice up smaller pieces to make televisions. It's easier (read: cheaper) to make a big piece and cut it into smaller TVs.

Originally this was in case there was a problem with part of the glass, the rest could still be sold as TVs. When you read about "yields" as part of TV manufacturing, this is largely what they're talking about.

But manufacturing has gotten really good, so most of these pieces of motherglass are fully used. Instead of slicing up one piece of motherglass into four 42-inch 1080p LCDs, what if you just kept the whole thing as one piece? What would you have? You'd have an 84-inch TV. Use the exact same (or similar) drive elements/electronics and all the various bits, and you've got a 3,840x2,160-pixel, 84-inch UHD TV. .

You see, TV companies are pushing 4K because they can. It's easy, or at least easier than improving the more important aspects of picture quality (like contrast ratio, color accuracy, motion blur, compression artifacts, and so on).

6. 4K is easy to market
OK, so 4K is easier to manufacturer than an actual new technology ( ), but there's more to it than that. Ultra HD is an easy sell. It's a number, greater than another number; therefore it's "better." In the confusing world of televisions, simplifying "superiority" down to a single number is marketing gold.

This is just like megapixels on a camera. An 18-megapixel camera does not necessarily take better pictures than a 16-megapixel camera. I guarantee my SLR takes better pictures than a "higher-resolution" point-and-shoot. Numbers are easy to understand, and for nonenthusiasts, distilling a TV down to a single number is desirable. This was rampant in the early days of 1080p. I actually heard people say "I don't know what 1080p is, but I know I'm supposed to want it." And looking at a spec sheet in BigBuy, 1080p is more than 720p, so it's better, right? 4K is an easy sell: it's higher than 1080p. It's also an easy demo...

7. 4K makes a great demo
Our own Matt Moskovciak tweeted this at CES:

I'm a 4K TV skeptic from a real-world image quality perspective, but I could see them selling -- they have a wow factor from up close #ces

-- Matthew Moskovciak (@cnetmoskovciak) January 8, 2013

Exactly. Take a look at the picture at the top of this post. Better yet, look at this one:

Dennis Burger

Sexy bald head aside, when people talk about seeing 4K, they are way closer than they would normally be. Up closer, yeah, 4K looks amazing. This is, of course, how they'll sell in stores. People will walk right up to the screen and go "Wow!" This ignores points Nos. 2 and 4, but try to explain either one to a nonenthusiast. It looks neat, it has a number greater than another (point No. 6), and I'm sure it will sell.

Eventually...

8. The lack of content is not the problem
So much coverage has focused on the lack of 4K content. This is not the issue. It was years before HDTVs had meaningful amounts of content. Presuming points No. 2, 3, and/or 4, quality upconversion can add some detail to 1080p content, making it appear a little sharper than nonupconverted 1080p on a like-size 1080p screen. Again, this is presuming you're close enough to see it. Upconverted content is not the same as real 4K content, but it's a step.

There are other, better uses for Ultra HD TVs as well. Passive 3D is far more pleasing to watch than active 3D, but you lose half the vertical resolution (i.e. 1,920x540 pixels per eye with 1080p). This is still the case with passive 4K TVs, but you can afford to lose it. Passive Ultra HD TVs are still greater than HD resolution, at 3,840x1,080 pixels per eye.

This also opens up possibilities for viewing two different programs on the same TV. Using polarized glasses that block the same lines for each eye, two different 3,840x1,080-pixel programs could be enjoyed by different people on the same couch. So the Missus could watch the game while you watch "The Bachelor" (presuming you have two cable boxes or an antenna). This is somewhat possible now (though this is half-HD resolution) and Samsung demoed a prototype version at CES, so this isn't strictly a 4K thing, but it is an interesting use.

9. There are bigger issues
My biggest complaint about Ultra HD is what it doesn't address. Resolution is not the most important aspect of picture quality. Nor, as we've discussed, is it even a problem with current picture quality. How about improving contrast ratio, color, and compression artifacts? These all have a significantly greater effect on picture quality than resolution.

I'll add another problem to the list of things 4K doesn't address: motion resolution. All LCDs suffer from motion resolution problems, in many cases, losing upward of 40 percent of their visible resolution when anything on the screen moves. All announced (and most of the previewed) Ultra HD displays are still just LCDs, with all of that technology's shortcomings. These so-called "next-generation" televisions will still have poor off-axis picture quality and mediocre contrast ratios. They'll likely have poor picture uniformity, too, as many models are edge-lit. True, they all have higher refresh rates, but without motion interpolation, higher refresh rates do little to fix motion blur. If the drop in resolution with current LCDs is any indication (and No. 5 shows it is), these "2160p" TVs will resolve something like 1,296 lines with motion.

Perhaps this is why nearly every demo at CES of 4K and 8K TVs showed slow pans and still images. Check out "What is refresh rate?" for more on motion resolution.

Will some models offer methods to combat motion resolution that don't cause the dreaded Soap Opera Effect, like black frame insertion? Many will, yes, but not all.

10. Ultra HD OLED
Sony and Panasonic previewed 4K OLED TVs at CES last year. Since OLED does address the contrast ratio issue, I have no problem with 4K OLED. When I saw LG 4K OLEDs at the CEDIA Expo, they looked amazing. This is because OLEDs create a better overall picture, regardless of their resolution.

During the CES lest year I tweeted the following:

55-inch 4K or 55-inch OLED? Duh, OLED. 4K is just better tires on an old car. OLED is a whole new car.

-- Geoffrey Morrison (@TechWriterGeoff) January 8, 2013

You see, I want us all to have a new car, not just get stuck with our aging Pintos or fermenting Omni GLHs with a slapped-on set of shiny new Pirellis. (And I'll leave it up to you to decide which one of those is LCD and which is plasma.)

11. There are no standards
This is, perhaps the biggest problem with Ultra HD displays available right now/soon. HDMI 1.4, the most common standard, allows for a maximum of 4,096x2,160 pixels at 24fps. Granted this is slightly higher than the 3,840x2,160 of the current crop of Ultra HD displays, but it is not enough to do 4K 3D. It's not enough to do higher frame rates, either, which may or may not come into play ( though with computers, it certainly will).

HDMI 2.0 will offer more bandwidth, so higher resolutions and frame rates can be transmitted over everyone's favorite cable, but that will require different transmitter and receiver chips. This won't be a software upgrade, many of the current Ultra HD displays are already obsolete. Remember, this isn't as simple as swapping out a new cable; the hardware in the TV won't be able to accept the higher data rates. I don't hear any manufacturer mentioning that upgrade path for their $20,000 televisions.

When there is a final standard, who knows what it might have? Maybe they will improve some aspect of color (either in better color depth or in a wider color gamut or both). These Ultra HD displays won't be able to take advantage of that, either.

12. 4K TV is inevitable
When I first starting pointing out most people didn't need 1080p TVs (in the age of 720p flat panels), I knew -- and said at the time -- that 1080p was inevitable. I was just trying to save people some money. That's all I'm trying to do here. Nothing I say will have any effect on what the corporate giants decide to force on us mortals. I'm just trying to point out that increasing resolution in itself is not the improvement in picture quality it "appears" on paper. I'm trying to point out that even when these TVs come out, your money is better spent elsewhere. What I want is better, cheaper TVs and better picture quality for everyone. So thank you to everyone who made personal attacks against me for pointing out what should be obvious (that your favorite TV company is not your boyfriend).
Update: November 13, 2014
13. Nooooope
Since I wrote this article nearly two years ago, there are vastly more 4K TV available. There's also a lot more marketing money hyping 4K. But the facts haven't changed, and what I wrote then still holds true: In smaller screen sizes, 4K just isn't worth the money.

This year's TVs still haven't fully sorted out HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2, not all have HEVC (H.265) decoding, and none have any of the potential drool-worthy benefits of Rec 2020.

Things like High Dynamic Range, which could drastically improve picture quality, are still being overlooked for the sake of the almighty resolution number.

And OLED! 4K is definitely slowing the coming of OLED, even if LG showed a few models this year.

Eventually all TVs will be 4K, just as all (or nearly all) of today's TVs are 1080p. That's just how it works. There will be 4K content too, eventually. Wait a year, and the shiny you've got your eye on now will be cheaper, better, and actually able to play back some real 4K content. Save your money.

14. Beware what you see
Vast numbers of commenters have mentioned something that's worth addressing. The showroom floors of Best Buy, Costco, and the rest, have never, in their history, been adequate places to judge the picture quality of a television. Yet somehow, with the advent of 4K, they suddenly are? Illogical, but many are holding it up as truth.

Watching an immaculate 4K signal (that you can't get at home), on a $5,000 television, while it sits among $800 non- local dimming LCDs running barely HD feeds, is not a far comparison. Nor is it indicative of what a 4K TV will look like in your home, running mediocre 4K streaming signals from Netflix or Amazon.

And along the same lines, ultra-high resolution tablets and smartphones prove my point about resolution, not disprove. The closer the screen is to your eyeballs (or the bigger it is), the more resolution you need. That's all I've been saying from the beginning.

15. More voices
I'm not the only one talking about this anymore, thankfully.

CNET's own David Katzmaier just wrote Is now the time to buy a 4K TV?.

Check out Chris Heinonen's 4K Calculator to see if you'd benefit from a 4K TV given the size of the TV you're considering, and where you're sitting.

The Wall Street Journal weighed in.

Cinematographer Steve Yedlin ( Looper, The Brothers Bloom) wrote an interesting blog post about 4k..

And oh yeah, Consumer Reports did a side-by-side comparison: 4K content on 4K TVs, and the same movie on Blu-ray with a 1080p TVs. They found, "...yes--the 4K films did show a noticeable bump in image detail compared to their HD counterparts. But there's a caveat: These differences were not present on all movies, and were visible only when viewed less than 2 feet from the screen, and even then only on certain scenes. When I moved back about 7 feet from the displays, differences between 4K and HD content were not discernible to any meaningful degree."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Bottom line
Nothing I say will stop Ultra HD. Look no further than our own CES coverage for proof of that. TV manufactures are smelling margin like blood in the water. This is something they can do, now, and for a profit. So it's happening, whether it's necessary or not. Instead of improving aspects of the image that need fixing, we get 4K because it's easy to do, easy to sell, and easy to demo. Awesome.

So before you jump down my throat for being "anti-technology" or "anti-innovation," understand I just want better picture quality in the home, for less money, and Ultra HD 4K is not the best way to do it.
Update: November 22, 2015
A lot has changed in the nearly three years since I first wrote this article. Prices have fallen, new technologies have come out, and there's more (though still not a lot) of 4K content. Today, the best TVs on the market have local dimming, HDR, and Wide Color Gamut... and they also happen to be 4K. Even the best mid-range televisions are 4K. So at this point, if you want a TV that looks good in general, it's going to have Ultra HD resolution ( with some exceptions).

So for all to behold, 4K TVs are no longer stupid, and here's why (i.e. read that article first before you comment).
Got a question for Geoff? First, check out all the other articles he's written on topics like why all HDMI cables are the same, LED LCD vs. OLED, active versus passive 3D, and more. Still have a question?Send him an e-mail! He won't tell you what TV to buy, but he might use your letter in a future article. You can also send him a message on Twitter @TechWriterGeoff or Google+.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As we all expected, the big news at CES this year was Ultra HD 4K displays. It seemed that every TV manufacturer had one, ranging from massive LED LCDs to midsize LED LCDs to midsize OLEDs. We've talked about this before, but now with more info, and definitive product announcements, let me explain in exacting, excruciating detail why 4K TVs are still stupid.

# data[].attributes.body
Put your ideas, questions, remarks about 4K here....

# data[].attributes.body
Welcome to the padlet about, well, the title says it: 3D, 4K, Virtual Reality. I'd like to know if you need some background information ("what is it?") or want to dive into the subjects right away.

André Rosendaal (moderator)

# data[].attributes.body
Inholland University/Tom Visscher

360 video will be the next big thing on Facebook, this is what Mark Zuckerberg said in Barcelona at the Samsung unpack event.

Facebook and YouTube are frontrunners, HE will follow. My advice is just try all these new things and find out what is possible...
Watch my #360 Channel Canals of Amsterdam

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
#360 Video Canals of Amsterdam - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sign in now to see your channels and recommendations!