BY BRIAN BARTH
Virtual Reality is making a leap. Will landscape architects be ready"
From the December 2015 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Early next year, Oculus?a company recently purchased by Facebook from its founder Palmer Luckey for $2.3 billion?is expected to release Rift, the first mass-produced virtual reality headset. With a price tag around $300 to $400, the Oculus Rift will allow video gaming enthusiasts to slay each other in an immersive, true-to-scale, viscerally realistic three-dimensional world?a world where gamers on any continent can join each other inside their goggles.
Gaming junkies are far from the only crowd salivating for access to the technology. The software industry is falling over itself to produce new web and media applications for the Oculus Rift, ranging from immersive 3-D movies (think IMAX inside a pair of ski goggles) to tutorials on how to properly dissect a human cadaver to combat simulations for the military. At its core, virtual reality (VR) is an advanced way to experience a 3-D model of anything a designer can come up with; naturally, architects, engineers, and landscape architects are also standing in line for a chance to plug their designs into the new technology. Computer engineers have been chasing the idea of VR since the mid-20th century, but the current incarnation is a quantum leap in two ways: one, the price is better; previous versions were priced for well-funded university research labs, not design firms. A...