惠普使我们更加接近虚拟的明天

视频会议的好处，特别是在COVID-19大流行期间，就是让我们不必离开家。除非你有人把病毒带进你家，否则，如果你能减少去办公室或学校，远离飞机和公共交通，感染病毒的几率就低了。

但是，即使有最好的工具，你仍然没有同样的感觉在那里，仍然处于不适应地位。虚拟现实 （VR） 承诺只需与其他人一起戴上耳机，并在虚拟世界中进行模拟操作。现在，惠普已经迈出了相当大的一步，将我们引导到一个未来，在那里，我们基本上可以存在于虚拟的，而不是真实的办公环境中——不仅完成更多工作，而且更安全。

我们这些人能够穿上一些硬件，并获得一个全新的身份，在一个逼真的虚拟世界。我也是LitRPG 的粉丝，那里的故事围绕着生活在这些未来虚拟世界中的人。我们正在以令人印象深刻的速度创建虚拟世界，但我们错过了几个关键元素，其中包括测量嘴和眼睛，使虚拟头像上的嘴唇与文字逼真移动，表情更逼真。我不在乎头像有多逼真， 如果它的脸从不移动， 它看起来令人毛骨悚然。我们还需要一个虚拟环境来工作，从控制器移动到触觉手套，并最终到触觉套件或气动舱。第一步是让耳机正确使用 ，捕获所需的信息并将其转换为虚拟环境。

惠普全能

上周，惠普宣布惠普 Omnicept，这是一个解决方案，从一个特殊的耳机开始。Omnicept 提供了创建虚拟会议室所需的关键元素，并为创建虚拟世界奠定了基础，我们中的许多人最终可以尝试运用。

惠普已经修改了其最新的第二代混响耳机：G2，以添加一些关键功能——从耳机开始。

Reverb G2从每只眼睛的高分辨率屏幕 （2160 x 2160） 开始，一个阀门设计的扬声器，音频清晰度，四个摄像头内置跟踪，90% 的覆盖范围，通过全范围的运动来检测手臂，以及段中最舒适的头带之一（因此您可以使用它几个小时）。Omnicept 版本增加了眼动跟踪，通过渲染来降低系统负载。它可以翻译事件表达和心率，以报告用户的健康和压力水平;也具有和嘴和面部表情有关的关键面部摄像仪器。将此转换为解决方案是一个灵活的决定。其中一个合作伙伴是Nvidia及其非凡的Omniverse Machinima努力，允许用户创建一个虚拟环境使用游戏资源，动画头像与工具。

这些相同的工具可以创建虚拟会议空间，让使用 HP Reverb Omnicept 等耳机的用户能够识别具有生物识别标记的用户，并记录到虚拟会议室。对于多样性，会议室可能是过去，空间，或一个虚构的世界。用户控制的头像可以以周期建立或使用用户的虚拟图像。

在该房间，您可以握手，进行侧对话（由会议室的 AI 管理），将任何虚拟墙转换为演示空间，甚至使用 3D 对象，并可能在虚拟空间中录制事件，以便未来的观看者可以在 VR 中体验会议。

总结

HP 的 Omnicept，加上 Nvidia 的 Omniverse 和其他类似工具，将使我们更接近我们未来的最终虚拟办公室。如上所述，我们仍然需要摆脱游戏控制器，如一些手套，将让我们使用我们的手更自然，然后我们需要能够创建这些虚拟世界。

旅行、工作或任何地方的时间——甚至可能包括假期（记住总召回）将成为虚拟的。鉴于这一流行病将使我们现在认为为暂时性的许多做法成为永久性的，我们需要尽快获得这种能力。惠普只是让我们走近了一大步。还有许多的工作要做，但有了Omnicept，我们现在就可以开始看到一条很长的隧道尽头的光了。

The benefit of video conferencing, particularly during this COVID-19 pandemic, is not having to leave home. Unless you have people bringing the virus into your house, the odds of catching the virus fall if you can cut down on going to the office or schools and stay off of planes and public transportation.

But even with the best tools, you still don't have that same feeling of being there and still are disadvantaged against those who take the risks of going to the meeting or event venue.

Virtual reality (VR) held the promise of merely putting on a headset, along with everyone else, and meeting in a virtual world where you could manipulate, in simulation. Now, HP has taken a considerable step to usher us to a future where we really can mostly exist in a virtual, rather than real, office environment; and not only get more done, but be safer as well.

Those of us who are fans of the book and movie "Ready Player One," there's this promise of being able to put on some hardware and gain an entirely new identity in a photorealistic virtual world. I'm also a fan of LitRPG, where the stories revolve around people living in these future virtual worlds.

We're moving at an impressive rate to create virtual worlds, but we have missed several critical elements. Those include instrumenting the mouth and eyes so that the lips on virtual avatars move with the words realistically and expressions are more realistic. I don't care how photorealistic the avatar is, if its face never moves it looks creepy.

We also need a virtual environment to work in, move from controllers to haptic gloves, and eventually to haptic suites or emersion pods. The first step is to get the headset right -- to capture the needed information and translate it into the virtual environment.

HP Omnicept

Last week HP announced HP Omnicept, which is a solution that begins with a special headset. Omnicept provides the critical elements needed to create a virtual meeting room and lays a foundation for creating a virtual world where many of us could eventually spend much of our time.

HP has modified its latest second generation reverb headset, the G2, to add some critical features -- starting with the headset.

The Reverb G2 starts with high-resolution screens (2160 x 2160) for each eye, a Valve-designed speaker for audio clarity, four camera built-in tracking with 90 percent coverage to instrument your arms through a full range of motion, and one of the most comfortable head straps in the segment (so you can use it for hours).

The Omnicept version adds eye-tracking, which lowers system load through foveated rendering. It could translate event expressions and heart rate to report on the user's health and stress levels; and the critical face camera instruments of mouth and facial expressions.

Making this into a solution is a flexibly licensed SDK and a growing number of partners. One of those partners is Nvidia and its extraordinary Omniverse Machinima effort that allows a user to create a virtual environment using game resources and animate avatars with tools like this Omnicept effort.

These same tools could create virtual meeting spaces where users with headsets like the HP Reverb Omnicept could identify users with biometric markers and log them into the virtual meeting room. For variety, that meeting room could be in the past, space, or an imaginary world. The avatars controlled by the users could bee made to be period correct or be built from an enhanced image of the user.

In that room, you could shake virtual hands, have side conversations (managed by the room's AI), transform any virtual wall into a presentation space -- or even work with 3D objects -- and potentially record the event in virtual space so future viewers could experience the meeting in VR.

Wrapping Up

HP's Omnicept, coupled with Nvidia's Omniverse and other similar tools, will get us a lot closer to our eventual virtual office of the future.

As noted above, we still need to get rid of the game controllers and go to some glove that will let us use our hands more naturally, and then we need to be able to create these virtual worlds.

We are getting ever closer to a time when our travel, work, or anyplace -- maybe even including vacations (remember Total Recall) will become virtual.

Given the pandemic, which will keep many practices we now think of as transitory to be permanent, we need this capability as soon as we can get it. HP just took us one giant step closer. There is still a ton of work to do, but with Omnicept, we now can start to see the light at the end of what has been a very long tunnel.