Virtual Reality is not a new concept. I am wiring this article in 2019. I have known virtual reality in my college days in the early 1990s. Perhaps, virtual reality must have evolved much earlier, if I have seen its applications in 1990.
What took so long for virtual reality to reach the general public? Or should I say it has not yet reached the general public? Why has it taken so long for such a powerful tool to reach general use?
The answer perhaps to this is immense computing power required behind its development and usage. Virtual reality has been known as huge resources gorger. It required huge workstations to develop and present the application of virtual reality in the 1990s.
Today, computing powers have risen tremendously. The power of a cellphone is much larger than yesteryear’s workstation. This has opened the way for virtual reality to find ways of reaching common applications. But I would stay, even today virtual reality requires much more resources for development and presentation, as compared to other general computer applications.
A lot many companies are venturing into developing platforms for virtual reality. They have faced the challenge of reducing the resources for development and launch. One such initiative is pixel streaming. This is a new concept which would change the world of computing in the coming future and make way for virtual reality to reach general people.
Virtual reality applications require immense computing while they run. If all this computing is done at the users' end, it required huge hardware resources. Through pixel streaming, all the computing is done at the server end. Users can just login the server like a normal website, take controls and view the outcome on their devices. All the computing is performed at the server and results are just streamed to users like a video. This saves users from possessing heavy resources to use virtual reality applications.
In my opinion, pixel streaming and similar technologies like cloud computing and cloud gaming are the future of virtual reality. Many such services are already available and we are eagerly waiting for other giants like Google to launch their service. As I write this article, I hope Google’s service would start in another few months.
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