Virtual Reality Interview Preparation Guide

If you look at humanity’s carbon footprint, about 20 % of it is accounted for by transportation. So, hypothetically, we should be able to implement communication technologies that reduce the need for at least some of that movement. Yet that has obviously not happened as a result of the existence of telephony or email, or websites, or based on the current technology level of video-conferencing. So the question we have to ask is, could it happen if there were a more satisfying level of communication? I believe the answer is yes. So reducing our global carbon footprint could come down to how good an algorithm is at sensing the corner of somebody’s eye. Speaking very roughly, I think that top-quality services along these lines could probably reduce humanity’s global carbon footprint by a tenth in ten to fifteen years.

I don't think they understand why it's relevant to them yet. A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo. I was about to correct myself and say another game, but that's what a grandmother would say: "Oh, you're going to plug it into your Nintendo and play Halo."

But that type of perception is going to change as virtual reality becomes more mainstream and they get to see things like VR cinema or 3D-360 degree panoramas or communicate with people over long distances. They're going to see this is relevant to them in their daily lives as a not-pimply-faced-teenage-kid.

VRML stands for Virtual Reality Modeling Language. It is an ISO/IEC language developed by a combined effort of a group of companies and 3D designers and programmers for describing 3D scenes on the Web (fortunately from the beginning the effort converged to make it standard, no such luck with HTML until W3C was created). The documents have *.WRL extensions that can be viewed by a browser with an appropriate plugin or helper-application.

Scene graphs are a hierarchical representation of all the objects, visual and/or audio, that composes your virtual world. The representation is made through node statements that have fields and values to be determined, similar to HTML tags and their parameters.

Just put the # character before your comment line, just like // for JavaScript. Remember that if your comment has two lines, you must put the # before each line!

Yes, but no worries, the great majority of VRML 2.0 plugins will read your 1.0 code. Just don't forget to specify in the header which version you used.

Virtual reality is not a new medium. It’s been around for decades. what’s new are the viewing devices, in which you’re able to view it. For decades, I had been writing, trying to marry words with pictures. With VR it’s spherical video and the story is a stream that never ends. With VR you have the ability to take them inside the picture you tried to create through writing. With VR for example, our nation’s veterans are able to take virtual tours of places like Washington DC to see its monuments. We’re also using VR technology to take people inside homeless camps for veterans, so that people can really see how our nation’s homeless veterans are living

If, like me, you see people as sacred centers of experience that should be surrounded by a kind of moat of respect, you might find it a little creepy to find yourself in a world in which software can be connected directly to the brain. This could create extraordinary artifacts of power where some people might control a transpersonal phenomenon, while others would have no power at all. So I think it’s worth being conservative about the core of personhood.

A lot of them are investing in VR right now. I can't say anything specifically, but there are multibillion-dollar game development studios doing serious work in VR. But they're not the people who are here showing off demos in the hallway. They're the ones working internally to make sure it's something that's polished and that they can show and not get criticized for it because they're under a lot more scrutiny...

Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

Tridimensional shapes and routes are described using three coordinates X, Y and Z. Cutting down simple the X-axis is left to right, the Y-axis down to up and the Z-axis is back to front. The Z-axis requires a further abstraction if you want to comprehend it in a theoretical basis, but talking practical it's just the stretching of the image.

The unit for describing the distances in your virtual world is relative, but almost everyone uses the meter unit. Of course if your making a model of a molecule you're not going to use meters but rather Angstrom.

Angles' unit is radians, this confuses some but after a while you'll get around it easily. Just remember that pi = 180º, which is approximately 3,1416 rad, so pick up your calculator and divide, nothing more to it.