How to Get into VR

What AR not-so-obviously does is takes the internet and changes it from a limited access interface, wherein its a technology that has points of access that are limited to terminals that you have to actively access to an interface that you passively interact with.

An interface that you have to seek out, to an interface that seeks you out.

It's quite something to use one of these systems, I was responsible for maintaining one a few years ago. Our demonstration trick for visiting guests was to put a chair inside the cave that matched the coordiantes of a virtual helicopter cockpit command chair. We could sit guests in the chair, turn the system on, and ask them if they could comfortably reach the switches above their heads. They'd stretch out their hands and be able to give a confident yes or no within seconds.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environ... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STMcWUtQr1Y

Before that, there was Ivan Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles" - arguably the real beginning of AR/VR (Philco had an earlier system, but it was meant for tele-operation, whereas Sutherland's system used computer generated graphics):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Damocles_(virtual...

Interestingly about this system - and isn't mentioned much - is a part of it called the "Twinkle Box" - it was a three-dimensional position tracking system that used light "beams" (generated by some form of slit-scanning mechanical system) to track an object...sound like anything familiar?

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1500278

Further back than that? Well - Hugo Gernsback had some kind of idea about a TV or such you strapped to your head:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/ralph-124c-41-a-...

One of the main players in that area is a man named "Rudy Darken"; he was instrumental in quite a bit of the "Dismounted Soldier Training System (DSTS)" - and developed quite a few interesting input devices (one was a 360 degree treadmill with force feedback - think of two overlapping treadmills at 90 degrees to each other, with the surface made of rollers place parallel to the direction of travel of the belts - the part in the "center" of the intersection is such where you can walk, and move both belts at the same time, and your direction of walking determines the relative speed of the belts).

They've also long had networked simulator training systems, which also were setup to participate as part of "real" on-the-ground training and war-game simulations (that is, ones using live bodies and vehicles, aircraft, etc).

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if your scenario wasn't part of that already.

It seems that some people (software developers) can do this, and others struggle. Myself, I'm kinda in the middle - then again, I haven't really tried anything with shaders beyond simple examples and such. But my "aha" moment in parallel calcs of this nature came to me during the course of the original 2011 ML Class (MOOC) taught by Andrew Ng - it used Octave as the programming language, and we had to implement a neural network.

The "serial implementation" was first implemented (and was really slow), but then we were "challenged" to do the same using only vector/matrix math. I struggled wrapping my head around it, but then a lightbulb went on, and I realized what it was all about. Granted, behind the scenes a still very-much serial process was happening (likely using BLAS), but I could understand the conceptual underpinnings (and that they applied to all similar parallel systems - like clustered processors and GPUs). It was a real revelation to me at the time.

Even so, there is something special about these people who can see and do similar things at a "frame buffer" level; some of that stuff is down-right beautiful and amazing to watch (and the code oftentimes so small, as you noted).