#CannesYouFeelIt – Google Blurs The Lines Between Real And Virtual Worlds

Within the next decade the lines between the virtual world and the real world will be completely blurred. It may sound like a scary quote from the latest Hollywood science fiction movie, but that was the proud claim of Clay Bavor, Vice President of VR at Google, at the tech giant’s VR session at Cannes yesterday.

During the session – called ‘Google: Adventures in Virtual Reality’ – Bavor suggested that the tech required to make consumers “part of the story rather than just following it” was almost here. “Your phone already has most of the things you need,” insisted Bavor.

And to *literally* underline the point (get it?), Google asked an artist to use a HTC Vive and its VR Tilt Brush app to draw a 3D picture in virtual space (video below).

The new tool essentially allows artists, architects and designers to walk through their sketches in 3D as they draw them, and comes packaged with Valve & HTC’s Vive headset – which was released with limited availability on April 5.

The Vive is an impressive piece of tech and currently the first venture into ‘room-scale’ VR – which involves mapping out a room and tracking movement with infrared signals. The headset was the second consumer VR device released this year, with the Facebook-backed Oculus Rift launching merely a week before.

Pretty impressive stuff. Whether you think in 10 years’ time you will no longer know what is real and what is not – well, we’ll let you be the judges.