We all know about virtual reality’s potential for revolutionising the world of home entertainment. But a remarkable event in Australia has just delivered a poignant reminder of how VR could also have a dramatic effect on our day to day real lives by effectively letting us be in two places at once.
As any parent knows, the birth of a child is about as powerful and emotional as life gets. So it’s not hard to imagine how distraught Australian father Jason ‘Jace’ Larke was when he discovered that an unavoidable work commitment was going to put him 4000 kilometres away from his wife Alison right at the time she was due to give birth to their third child.
Thankfully a thoroughly modern solution to this most painful of separations presented itself in the shape of Samsung’s Gear VR headset. By wearing the headset at his location in the remote Queensland mining town of Chinchilla, Jace was able to witness live the birth in distant Perth of his latest son Steele “almost as if he was in the room” with his wife.
The birth on February 20th was filmed on multiple cameras to deliver the VR effect, and to give you a sense of just how effectively it worked you can now share the experience yourself – minus any seriously gory bits! – via a Samsung LifeLIVE video on YouTube that covers the key moments of the story, including Alison preparing for the birth, Jason seeing his son for the first time, and Jason’s return home a week later where he gets to hold his son.
Speaking about the experience, Alison says: “After we found out I was five weeks pregnant with our third child, we watched our baby grow, found out he was a boy and dreamed about what the future may hold. Then, at 30 weeks pregnant, Jace’s contract roster was confirmed and it was more than likely he would miss the birth of our baby, pending a miracle. But that’s exactly what we got when we were given the opportunity to be involved in the Samsung project.
“For me it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” she continues, “knowing Jace would not be missing out on such a precious moment in our lives and we would virtually be experiencing the birth together. It has been an absolutely amazing, once in a life time experience that has changed our lives forever.”
Not surprisingly Samsung was pretty happy with how the whole thing turned out too. “Being a father myself,” says Samsung Chief Marketing Officer Arno Lenior, “I know how incredible the birth of a child is. Alison and Jason’s story is familiar to millions of Australians and the reality of being away from family and friends is a heart-wrenching experience that most of us understand. But through the power of the Gear VR technology we could help Jason welcome his third son into the world in an exciting, unique way. This is what technology is all about: enabling human experiences.”
It has to be said that the need for multiple camera recordings to create ‘live’ VR represents a significant hurdle to the world at large enjoying similar virtual quality family time without Samsung stepping in to help set things up. But at the same time, if a VR device as affordable as the Gear VR headset can deliver the sort of impact it has in this case then you can’t help but think that finally, after decades of false starts, VR’s time might have come.
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