Pantomime Corporation is delivering on a virtual reality vision that first thrilled the world decades ago — that consumers will reach into realistic animated 3D worlds.
And we’re not making you wear special clothing or buy a new gadget to do it.
Whether you have a virtual reality headset or not, you can reach directly into the 3D worlds with your mobile devices — seeing the VR world, and exactly how we’re affecting it, through all your beautiful computer screens.
Background
When Pantomime co-founder Levitt was a research scientist and product manager with VPL Research, the inventors of virtual reality, they had three prerequisites for a VR system:
• a way to reach in, in 3D
• shared reality — support for multiple users and viewpoints
• graphically and physically realistic worlds
VPL offered a DataGlove to provide 3D input, while its flagship Reality Built for Two VR product offered networked multi-person worlds. Expensive graphics computers and custom hardware brought the full 1992 price to $500,000, which only a few huge corporations could afford.
When Dr. Levitt joined VPL, thanks to an amazing infrastructure by lead VPL engineer Chuck Blanchard, he added realistic gravity, collisions, and throwing a ball into the VR system for physical realism.
But two decades later, we have become so impatient that our new systems don’t always meet the original criteria.
Head-mounted systems like the Oculus Rift offer no way to reach in. In demos, visitors twiddle a 1980s style game joystick. And users don’t natively network — in an Oculus demonstration you don’t see the other users in the VR world — not even the other players sitting alongside you in the demo.
Redefining Immersive Reality
We’ve solved this without asking users to spend hundreds of dollars on a headset – when we already have gorgeous screens in our bags and pockets.
After all, times have changed since last century when Pantomime’s founders helped invent virtual reality. In today’s world of ubiquitous computer screens, immersive reality is about all our devices harmoniously sharing rich animated realities — whether they’re on our desks, in a cafe, in a friend’s or a stranger’s faraway family room, on our heads – or in our hands.
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