When people say Holodeck, they instantly imagine the iconic Star Trek virtual reality room where the environment changes to offer an experience tailored to each visitor's needs.
Because the special room exists in a show where faster-than-light travel and teleportation are possible, the Holodeck is advanced enough to require no special headsets. However, there are similar devices on the market today, and they provide a today's version of a Holodeck.
The CES 2016 showed that HTC Vive now makes use of external cameras, feeding back a user's position in a room, while displaying the walls of the room as wire-frame barriers. A new addition to HTV Vive Pre allows the user to add a number of people in the virtual reality environment.
It is easy to see why some would compare these features with a full-scale Holodeck.
HTC's virtual reality rival, Oculus, rejects the association as being far-fetched. Oculus experienced with external motion tracking on one of its headsets during the developing stage, but the feature was eliminated from the final design.
Max Cohen, Oculus' mobile VP, is sure that the road to a user experience resembling the Holodeck is still years ahead. Not less than 15 of them.
"Everyone wants the Holodeck, but we're not there tomorrow. We're not there in the next five years. In about 15 we'll be there," he said, as cited by Pocket-Lint.
He adds that the progress towards this goal will happen "incrementally," one step at a time.
One main issue that both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift is facing is that they rely on a wired connection to a powerful PC in order to work. There are exceptions to this rule, however.
Users of the Samsung Gear VR can enjoy the experience using wireless, but the difference is comparable to that of gaming on a PC and mobile-gaming. It is unrealistic to expect a high-end smartphone to compete with a high-end computer in terms of hardware performance.
Why not turn Oculus Rift into a wireless-powered device?
"Unfortunately, it's currently not possible to get the Rift experience with a wireless head-mounted display. And we're having spectrum problems all the time - I can't even use Netflix and my baby monitor at the same time," Cohen details.
Cohen makes it clear that his company aims to deliver an Oculus Rift wireless headset as soon as possible, maybe even before the Holodeck.
