 Star Trek's holodeck is the ultimate, unreachable gold standard for a virtual environment. Right now, we're still just working on getting little pieces of it right. And a lot of the time, these attempts are either boring or just plain bad, and most projects vastly overpromise. Whenever somebody says, oh, it's like the holodeck, your first instinct should be to run away. So, why are we here at Virginia Tech's Institute of Creativity, Arts, and Technology looking at one of the closest adaptations yet? Because it's a big, weird, ambitious step into the future of VR research. Okay, turn to your right 90 degrees, and you see the red column running up and down the middle? Yep. That's the actual tornado funnel that is extending down to the ground. I'm going to point, but I can't help myself. That's where the actual funnel is coming out. We're a research institute that brings together researchers from science and engineering and art and design together to collaborate in projects. And theCUBE is one of our seven studios that really allow these researchers to collaborate in different kinds of environments. Nobody would ever be where we're standing in a real storm. You'd be dead if you were here. And where you are right now, you're actually inside there about to penetrate into the funnel. If you look up through the funnel, you'll see it's clear sky. So, these 24 motion capture cameras follow you as you move through the virtual world. That data is sent up to some computers that are up above and then sent down. The model is calculated as to where you are, and then that image is then sent to you and rendered by your local computer onto your Oculus. So, now you look up around, we have a rigid body model of you and you can move through that environment. So, these balls on the top of my head make me look like an idiot. But they create a pattern of dots that tells the room where I'm standing. They work off the same principle as motion capture suits, which you'll find in both film and VR. But one of the interesting things about theCUBE is that it can track 24 different markers across the whole room, which could mean 24 people or 12 people and 12 objects and so on. If you still want to track a tablet, for example, it turns into a window onto a virtual house. If your friend has a tablet too, you can see each other as you walk around the rooms. One of the beauties of the environment is that I can explore this area in this space and the model within this space with you in there and with everybody else in that environment as well, looking at different aspects of the model. So sort of like what we have in gaming where you can move through a game and there are other people in the game and they see what they see and you see what you see. How much of an improvement is this over being able to render it on a screen in 3D and sort of scroll through it the way you would a video game? Yeah, the screen is what I call 3D and 2D. It looks 3D, but it is really 2D, and so you can't go inside of it. You have to stay outside the perimeter. But it is our opinion that what we're seeing right now could never be seen on a 2D screen. Stepping into a virtual reality tornado is certainly a lot cooler than looking at a 3D model on a 2D screen, but is it really conveying information I couldn't get otherwise? I've never gotten a great answer, and it doesn't necessarily feel like making the information bigger makes me understand it better. What the cube can do, though, is make collaboration more natural. We each get to interact with this big, detailed canvas on our own terms, but we exist in it together and all he has to do to show me something is point. It's like the difference between showing someone the Empire State Building on your laptop and building an architectural model. Neither is real, but one of them feels more accessible, and some things you just have to experience. The key to the cube is the addition of the aural environment that surrounds you. You're surrounded by one level of 64 speakers. Those 64 speakers can place the sounds within this space here, and using different techniques, one of the new techniques is something called wave field synthesis. What we can do is now begin to synthesize exact sound locations in space that surround the cube. If you're not using headphones right now, you might want to put them on. If you close your eyes, you can almost forget that you're standing in a black box and imagine the wind swirling around you, or a house being ripped apart above your head. You might have to be in a specific place to hear something, or a designer can make the noise follow you around. The sound lives up to the Holodeck's promise. It sounds real because, on some level, it is real. The crazy, distant, what's physically possible future is to shine laser light into the eyes themselves. Just like the aural environment doesn't touch you. You don't have to wear anything to get the aural environment. Wouldn't it be neat if you didn't have to do that with a visual environment? So right now, we've moved between screen onto commercially available devices like the Oculus, but the eventual goal is to move all of that off-body. We're not even close to that goal. Obviously, a lot of parts don't live up to the Holodeck. You can't even walk around on your own in VR without someone to carry a computer behind you. What's exciting about the cube is that it's a blank canvas for architects, musicians, scientists, designers, companies, and pretty much anyone else to work with. Virginia Tech isn't trying to bring virtual reality to your living room, but it's creating a space for people to build the most ambitious virtual worlds possible. With as much freedom as 24 cameras, dozens of speakers, and 1600 square feet will allow.