惠普让我们离虚拟的明天更近了一步

视频会议的好处是，尤其是在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间，不必离开家。除非有人把病毒带进了你的房子，否则如果你能减少去办公室或学校的次数，远离飞机和公共交通工具，你感染病毒的几率就会降低。

但即使有了最好的工具，你仍然没有那种亲临现场的感觉，而且与那些冒险去参加会议或活动的人相比，你仍然处于劣势。

虚拟现实(VR)的前景是，你只需戴上耳机，和其他人一起在虚拟世界中碰面，在那里你可以进行模拟操作。现在，惠普已经迈出了相当大的一步，引领我们走向一个未来，在这个未来，我们基本上可以生活在一个虚拟的，而不是真实的办公环境中;不仅完成了更多的工作，而且也更安全。

我们这些书和电影《头号玩家》(Ready Player One)的粉丝，有这样一种承诺，即能够在逼真的虚拟世界中安装一些硬件并获得一个全新的身份。我也是LitRPG的粉丝，游戏故事围绕着生活在未来虚拟世界中的人们展开。

我们正在以令人印象深刻的速度创造虚拟世界，但我们遗漏了几个关键元素。其中包括在嘴巴和眼睛上安装设备，这样虚拟人物的嘴唇就会随着文字的移动而动，表情也更真实。我不管这个角色有多逼真，如果它的脸一直不动，它看起来就很吓人。

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，并最终移动到触觉套件或再现舱。第一步是让耳机正确——捕捉所需的信息并将其转换到虚拟环境中。

原文：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.