VR experiences right now are locked down to one-thing-at-a-time. There are menus you can access for some settings, or to answer a call in the HTC Vive, but for the most part once you are immersed in a virtual world you are there until you leave, with little-to-no interruptions and none of the multitasking of the real world.
It’s only a matter of time before platform owners like Valve and Oculus introduce more convenient methods of accessing a lot of the things you can in the real world — like listening to music or having a movie playing in the background. Think of all those apps on your phone or tabs open in the browser — those are things you should be able to access in a virtual environment as easily as you could in the real world.
While overlays and layers seem to be in the works for Oculus and SteamVR, we don’t see anyone using them for anything like this yet. However, a startup called V that began as an app launcher and marketplace is now looking closely at how to provide some of these features in today’s VR platforms.
“So V is not a plugin. It’s not an app in a app store. We developed a new approach we’re calling ‘In-situ’ to put a interface effectively inside another game,” wrote startup CEO and co-founder Tyler Andersen in an email. “Different platforms currently require custom solutions but generally the technique involves intercepting and augmenting calls between the running app and the graphics hardware. We avoid negative impact to performance by limiting the amount and refresh rate of the overlaid content and using separate processes for the web rendering.”
https://youtu.be/8g2vAfJk3JA
Andersen also hopes the layer and overlay features in the Oculus and Steam SDKs “become a fully supported and user-controlled method for different apps to draw over the same visual field.”
We’ll keep following V’s development as well as any other multitasking solutions. There’s a beta sign up on the V website if you want to check it out.
