Do we actually need this?

So, welcome for Computer Graphics.

Today, we will speak about virtual reality and yeah,

you see we also prepared a little demo probably,

Most of you have already seen how these things work

or what it looks like, but nevertheless,

I think it's a good idea to show them again

and to also a little bit go into details

what is really needed for that technology

and also what is the graphics stuff behind that.

So today, we will speak about virtual reality,

and in fact, virtual reality is a very large area,

and these headsets here, these head-mounted display,

yeah, are only a small subcategory.

They have been rather popular in the last years,

but in fact, virtual reality can be delivered

by very, very different devices,

but today we will only speak about

these particular head-mounted displays, yeah?

Okay, so up to now, when we spoke about graphics,

we always thought about a setup,

we were mostly considering a setup

that we have something like a desktop computer

with a screen, it has a nice GPU built in,

and the screen has a refresh rate of maybe 60 hertz,

that means it generates 60 new images per second,

and this is about if we want to do interactive graphics

with moving objects and so on,

this is the frame rate we are targeting,

that we generate an image every 60th second,

and then this gives us a smooth animation on the screen.

What we will look into today are mobile displays.

Very often, our display is not fixed on a desk,

but we can wear it and we can carry it around,

or at least drive it around like in a navigation system,

but what we want to consider today

is more devices like a mobile phone

that we can carry around and do augmented reality,

I will also speak about that briefly,

or these head-mounted displays, yeah?

So these are displays that you can wear on your head,

and there's not only the difference that, yeah,

the display is maybe smaller and closer to your eyes,

but the device itself is aware of its position,

it is being tracked, so if you move around,

it knows about this movement

and can adapt the view accordingly,

and of course that has interesting consequences,

so for instance, with such a head-mounted display,

it's possible that you look around