I saw Peter Seale speak on Virtual Reality on Thursday night.

North Houston .Net Users Group was the venue but Mr. Seale was upfront about admitting that the Houston VR meetup group going on at the same time was probably a better forum for the subject matter of the evening. Indeed, Peter Seale basically just had the crowd play with the HTC Vive headset for an hour and a half, so what was .NET specific about that after all? In attempt to tie the "talk" into .NET he said that Unity Engine and the Unreal Engine were the ways to go to build your own stuff. They both support C#. Unity is actually of C# and Unreal of C++ with good C# support. No matter how good your skills may be with C# however there will be a steep learning curve. Before I get into what Virtual Reality is, let me mention what it is not: Augmented Reality. When you are overlaying gunk onto existing real world visuals, such as is the case with what Pokémon Go does to what your phone's camera sees or what Google Glass does to what your eyes see, that in Augmented Reality. Microsoft's HoloLens is another example. Maybe you get rendered 3D objects with it, but you are not, in that case, immersed in a 3D environment. You are in Virtual Reality however. You, therein, go into an exclusively faked (as far as the eye can see) space at, ninety frames per second, with the perspective adjusting based upon where you turn and move. Peter thought the Vive's resolution was 1440 pixels by 900 pixels per eye. You may have a headset on independent of the Vive to fool your ears as well as your eyes and you hold controllers in each hand to do things you might do with your hands. (The Oculus approach has things you strap to your wrists instead of controllers.) Things like motion trackers for the feet and backpacks to hold something broadcasting a wireless signal so that there isn't a cord to trip on are coming in this space but not really a reality in virtual reality yet. The Vive controllers very often appear in Virtual Reality as 3D representations of Vive controllers and when it was my turn to use the Vive they certainly did when I was inside of Tilt Brush, a painting (with neon lights) app. This was great. I couldn't see my own hands in there so I needed something to relate to. However, in games such as "The Lab - Longbow" in contrast controllers are often represented as weapons or other game-flavored things. In the image here, a volunteer is pulling back a longbow with the controller out of sight in his right hand while holding the bow at the controller in his left hand. We see what he seeing at the right. He is aiming at what looks like an AOL Yellow Running Man that is black instead of yellow as that is a villain that would ultimately make its way up to him to "kill" him I suspect.

The picture above also shows two devices set atop sticks which define the cattycorner corners of the top of a cube of space which is the active area to move about in. If you approach the edges of the box you will see a green grid laid against the boundary. Looking down at the cube from above at a 2D perspective of the cube, the cube may be as small as three feet by three feet and as big as twelve feet by twelve feet.