Question: Do you think virtual reality is the next step for entertainment or do you think it will be something else.

Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 12 Nov 2018: last edited 12 Nov 2018 2:37 pm

Virtual reality has improved a lot recently. In my lab we bought a HTC Vive headset to work on a virtual reality tour of the ATLAS experiment (which I work on):

I think if it gets cheaper you would probably see more people buying headsets.

For me I think the next step in entertainment is likely to come with how cheap it is to create computer animations now. Big films etc are so expensive that it’s difficult for studios to take creative risks. If you make it cheap to generate amazing graphics and sound, then you open up the field.

One exciting new area something called a “Generative Adversarial Network”:

which is a computer program that gets fed in images of (in this case) bedrooms, and spits out images that look like bedrooms – but these are bedrooms that have never existed!

You can imagine some really fun videos and video games that you could make with this kind of program. Of course, there are ethical problems – once it becomes easy to generate realistic-looking video of events that never happened, you might have problems with fake videos. There’s no answer yet to this sort of problem, but people are also working on distinguishing real videos from fake videos.

These kinds of problems (generated content, telling real from fake) are, believe it or not, kind of related to my work: I spend a lot of time working on code that can discriminate different types of particle collisions from each other.