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I'm in a wheelchair. Having someone take a future-Lytro-scanner into a building and send me the result would let me answer the "is this building accessible" question much more easily. I was hoping for this kind of thing with Google's Project Tango but it didn't eventuate.

Working hard to get the site back up and running as we speak.

EDIT: Site is live now!

I like to watch movies with friends, how do we do it in VR?

I like to watch movies while eating dinner, how do I do it in VR?

Easy, match up light field cameras with light field displays. Think polarized 3D screens, except a billion times better - they can project the light as if the objects literally are just behind the screen.

Add eye tracking and put the screens across every surface and you can make the views follow your field of vision.

Or you use AR glasses that essentially project images in front of you.

How do I shovel food into my maw when I'm wearing VR goggles? What happens when my spoon misses the bowl?

AR = augmented reality. You still see your own world and your own spoon and bowl. You can definitely have the view projected anchored in space above the physical things you interact with.

I can hear the complaints already: "Ouch! Dropbox Sync just kicked in and lagged my AR while I was eating dinner. Now I've got hot ramen all over me... fml."

There's transparent screen AR, like with HoloLens and Meta glasses from http://www.spaceglasses.com

> Just from personal experience, playing video games in VR is cool and all but when people can watch a movie from the perspective of someone inside the scene or meet up with people in a live-scanned remote environment, I think they'll be hooked.

Exactly, I definitely want to feel this in the first fps movie.

Hot pursuit, Steven Seagal's fights, gunfights... It should be freaking immersive.

Well, no. That would be pretty awful in my experience. First person in VR is already dodgy if you're watching/playing from a chair and your avatar is standing or walking. Still, the only thing worse than a mismatch between your position and the avatar's position is a first-person viewpoint where you don't control the camera or movement.

Watching a movie from the first-person perspective of an actor would be one of the barfiest things you could do in VR. Ideally you're observing things from a vantage point but everything is in 3d with full 360-degree spherical range of motion. You can lean around or closer to look at something.

Now, even a mostly fixed viewpoint can be disorienting when you don't have a "body" to look down at (you feel like you're floating and disembodied) but it's probably second to the motion issues. Not sure if people will develop conventions that become generally accepted (like some sort of placeholder/amorphous body for reference) but overall, think more "fly on the wall" than "I'm Duke Nukem!"

Exactly.

What is going to be cool is stuff like standing right on or slightly above the field in the middle of a sports event, or right on stage at a concert next to Mick Jagger and being able to move around a bit.

Unfortunately there will need to be a globe roughly the size of the range of motion somewhere to capture the light rays... at least for now until future physics are invented.

If you dropped once of these in place of the wire cam over {insert field sport here}, millions of dollars.

You wouldn't have more than limited head tracking (or live motion without turning off tracking and turning it into a virtual window), but being able to have presence from 10' above the QB in American football for each snap?

$$$s where you start counting the zeros instead of the digit in front.

Imagine every roller-coaster video clip you've seen be filmed with this thing, every 360° video on youtube, putting these on drones, etc...

Oh, and every high security facility in the world would love these as they're capable of mapping out 3D positioning, enabling very precise face detection, etc...

And imagine live concerts sent to be displayed on VR headsets!

Also, in many cases you can likely use 4-6 in a grid to capture the entire scene.

Remember: desync'd head motion w/ virtual camera perspective motion = violent nausea.

So limit the applicable use cases to where that isn't going to happen.

The excitement about this is that it makes that no longer a concern for sufficiently small values of head motion. Read: the motion that occurs when the best of your body is not moving.

Won't there be issue in the ball from {sport} hitting the camera?

Not if they do it at the current height. I know for NFL they've already got a wire cam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skycam#

And I'd imagine a fair amount of the current height is not due to interference, but rather getting the best perspective.

Yeah. Everyone in the whole world will simultaneously be able to have better than the current best seats in the house.

Courtside? 50 yard line? Right by the mid tower in Dota2?

One other thing to consider is that of trauma/PTSD. Things that we find exhilarating in more traditional media may in fact be too stressful/terrifying in VR. Horror experiences in particular seem to be proving this out, but I could see the same for the type of extreme violence that currently seems fun or exciting onscreen.

Example: Movie The Road was quite true to the book, but much more viscerally horrifying. A VR "you're there" version would indeed be significantly ... less fun.

I think the opposite actually. First person perspective of someone else will be the least exciting way to do a movie. I think it will be more like a really, really awesome guided tour of the movie's sets as the plot progresses. You're there, doing your own thing, examining what is most interesting to you, as the plot unfolds around you.