Video games company Crytek puts the business case for virtual reality
Danny Palmer demos Crytek's VR software and dodges pterodactyls while director David Bowman explains how VR is not all about fun and games
Virtual reality software provides an immersive scalability that makes it ideal for data visualisation and use in industry fields varying from the military to medicine.
That's what's David Bowman, director of production at video games company Crytek said after providing Computing with a virtual reality demonstration using a modified version of the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift VR headset and the CryENGINE graphics engine.
Many firms are taking serious steps into the worlds of augmented and virtual reality technologies. Among them is Microsoft with its Hololens, which Computing tested at the Build conference earlier this year.
Titled Return to Dinosaur Island, the Crytek demonstration allows the user to take the role of a person climbing up a cliff face as pterodactyls take off right and left and dinosaurs go about their business on the ledges. The technology enables the user to become fully immersed in a 3D environment and look at anything in it in detail.
While the demo was essentially a first-person video game, Bowman believes that virtual reality has the potential to play a significant role across many business and industry sectors.
"It's data visualisation, it's anything that you need scale for. You could look in detail at the butterflies or the rock or the grass on the ledge - and then you look off in the distance and see a huge dinosaur," he explained, before listing some examples of where this could be useful.
"That sort of scale is useful in medicine, it's useful in planning of all sorts; cityscape planning, all that. There's obviously a big use in military and they've always been the leaders in these technologies," Bowman continued.
"There's also the whole entertainment spectrum; it's anything where you need that sense of scale and that sense of intimacy," he added.
The demo also featured augmented reality displays and Bowman told Computing "both virtual reality and augmented reality have a future - they're both going to be important".
"We think augmented reality is part of the future so we want to put it in [the demo] as well," said Bowman, explaining that AR "has a chance to do some really interesting things".
"You could compare what you looked like 10 years ago or a 100 or a 1,000 years ago and just overlay on top," he added.
Bowman believes that virtual reality will go mainstream in the next few years and while business is likely to benefit from it, it will be games and entertainment that push it into common use.
"The full spectrum is going to get content and we just want to make sure we're the premier content, we're the thing that gets people who say it was worth my money to buy the headset and want to share it with my friends. If successful, I think we'll see this push forward very quickly," he said.