The topic of futuristic television and games have been all the rage these days. With the release of Oculus Go, the new and improved Oculus hardware, we are drawing one step closer to the Matrix world. But what does that mean for our daily lives.
The BBC unveiled this year a new way to view the World Cup. That is from a private seat in Russia. You wouldn’t actually be going to Russia, but your avatar will. Via the BBC virtual reality app you would be in the centre of all the action with the most expensive seat in the stadium. Sounds like a dream come true for any hard-core football fan doesn’t it?
This raises another question – will the future of television be purely virtual? Will we even need television if we can just pop our visor on and be transported into the centre of the action. We don’t know yet. It seems far fetched to think that we will have so much new flow of information available to us. Then again, with the invention of drones (drones have substituted helicopters when it comes to aerial movie shoots) and the advance of virtual reality hardware, why wouldn’t we be able to see the royal wedding up close or the inauguration of the next US president from the speech podium? Not to mention movies. If we can travel everywhere with just our headset, why couldn’t we have a fully interactive movie?
The BBC have taken a bold move with introducing VR into their news segment, be it only for the sports section for now. This opens the floor for other companies to see the benefit and attempt the same thing. This success only proves that there is further to go in exploiting what benefits virtual reality can give us. Hopefully we don’t have to wait 10 years for that to happen.
