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"Virtual Motion" for Future Video Games?
Piete writes "The BBC's Tomorrow's World has just shown an item on MotionWare.
It looked very impressive.
By stimulating the inner ear, the user feels that they are moving.
Some very impressive shots of children swaying and falling over! "
Wow. Lemme tell you, I have a hard enough time keeping ahead of all the script-kiddie attacks on IRC-- do you really think I'd PLUG something into my HEAD that can make me puke?
...So I'm happily playing Descent 5 some evening, with my linux-supported USB (hey, I can dream) Verti-go-go, when some '7337 haxor-type decides that the Ping of Death isn't enough and sends me an Oversized Packet of Core Dump... but it's not X that barfs, it's me. No way, Jose.
What's next? Virtua Fighter arcade machines with a little springy boxing glove to knock the wind out of you? How about the new ultra-VR goggles from STB that burn your retinas out if you look at the flare from a BFG 9000? Ooh! I know! The ultimate in teledildonics-- USB vice grips so you can get blue balls whilst on IRC!
-- You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Think of the horrors for all of the motion sick people in the world.
Keyboards will need to be much more waterproof.
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Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I could see passenger boats carrying a few of these onboard to stick on the heads of those feeling nauseous - after all, if you think you're walking around in whatever virtual world, you'll probably feel better.
If you're referring to HeadGames's "eXtreme" series with that first one, their games are already good enough at making people vomit...
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
So, why do we get disoriented all the time playing VR games, Quake, etc?
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Well, basically, your eyes & ears are telling you one thing ("Woo - I'm running & weaving down a corridor") and your inner-ear is saying another ("Dude, you're sitting on yer ass!"). As a result, your brain hearkens back to the 'good ol days' back in the savannas/trees when, if your eyes & ears didn't agree with your inner ear, it probably meant you'd eaten something nasty that you'd better get out of your system fast. Thus - PUKE-O-RAMA!
I was speaking to a NASA guy *way* back in 93/94 in Boston who was delivering a speach to a VR group. He noted that being weightless meant that your eyes & ears told you one thing, but your inner-ear said another. "Brain to stomach - hello - evacuate!"
When the shuttle went up with mission specialists, many were seriously affected by motion sickness. Every minute that someone is in space costs a fortune, so it was not a good look to have them working at less than peak efficiency. So, NASA wound up using lots of nifty toys to simulate the disorientation on the ground so space-cadets could build up resistance to the nausea, etc. These included slowly rotatating a person who was strapped down sideways with their inner-ear at the center of the rotation. They'd then project images of the inside of the shuttle on the walls as the person rotated, thus inflicting the disorientation that can occur in space.
Now, of course, they can also use a VFX-1 and Descent to produce a very similar result at much less cost (and probably more fun for the space-cadet
Another way of getting a resistance to the disorientation is to have someone drive you around in a car. You sit in the back, facing backwards. Then, get a mirror and position it so you're looking forwards in the direction of travel. Focus on the mirror. Grab your barf-bag and tell the driver to start the car moving. Won't take long
So, the upshot is that yes, you get VR disorientation and this thing could be a cool aid to prevent puke-a-thon's during Quake/Descent/Aerobatics+VFX-1/etc. The problem to me appears to be that if you spend sufficient time wired in VR gear + this gismo, you stand a very real chance of reprogramming your reactions, etc.
Who's played DOOM/QUAKE/etc for hours on end and then tried to walk/drive home? Oh yes, great fun
Oh well, I guess I'll just have to buy one and try it out *grin*
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I'd probably misconfigure it so it would only make me throw up after I did something like deleting /etc/passwd...
Automated kick-me-while-I'm-down machine.
OTOH, it would be an interesting experiment in negative reinforcement (can you train a good sys admin by causing pain every time he screws the system over?).
by simply increasing the voltage, you can experience ultra-real sensations when you're hit by one of those lightning-bolt guns in Quake 3.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's commonly repeated that humans have five senses... touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smell.
However, I contend that humans have six senses, but for some reason, one gets no respect. The sixth, of course, is balance. You could also call it a sense of gravity. Think about it.
Any theories on why we have the popular notion of only five senses? I've never come up with a good one myself.
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I wonder if this might have the same problem as VR headsets have had? Speaking with several people who do testing with VR headsets they've noted problems with depth perception and motor skills after using the headsets. They've even had to limit usage to make sure employees can drive home safely.
Very basically put the problem tends to stem from the fact that the simulations are real enough to fool the senses (obviously the intent). However, the physically the body gets out of sync with the senses. They've suited the effect and have found that the effect takes place after only a few hours for a while afterward. While with after a few hours of such exposure the effects are negligible, they've recorded worse problems after exposure of a few hours each day over a few weeks that even employees noticed outside of testing. The effects so far do seem to wear off in a week or so, but studies of regular usage over more than a few months have not been completed (or at least they haven't released them).
Why the hell wouldn't you patent this? It's not like it's some really obvious computer algorithm. It's a thing. It's an invention that other's shouldn't be able to steal until the designer has been allowed to make a fair profit on their R&D.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
> (I'm imagining a bunch of teenage kids still living at home never leaving their "lair" rather than to eat and drink... or maybe not even that)...
Too Late. This's already happened. I'm one of them.
The real concern that I raise from this is one of health. If we use these things, and slowly train our mind not to react from motion the same way, we're putting ourselves in danger from things. We rely on our instincts and such to help us physically react properly in bad situations, and it seems that reaction would be dulled using this.
Imagine symlinking /dev/null to the usb or serial port with one of those things plugged in. And then give certain files different "signatures." You could set it up so attempting to delete /etc/passwd would make you throw up. Preventative systems administration is here, now :)
Poopdick.
Ok, now all we need is a quake III patch to support this wonderful piece of hardware.
Imagine if you will millions of teenagers across the globe puking their guts, without alcohol being involved.
I came up this idea when I was ten or so, right about when the phrase "virtual reality" appeared. Although my version involved magnets and iron filings. (Don't ask...)
By the way, in response to the many that have already posted about it, this gadget would actually eliminate motion sickness if used properly. AFAIK, motion sickness happens when your eyes and your inner ear are getting conflicting signals. Usually people solve this problem by changing what they're seeing, (by leaving the cabin and going up on deck, or turning off Quake, for example,) but fixing the input from the inner ear to match what they're seeing should work just as well.
Anyway, this gives me the opportunity to bring up something a little off-topic... What ever happened to head mounted 3d displays? A few years ago, they were supposed to be the wave of the future; there were even a few consumer devices with game support. (I always wanted to play "Magic Carpet" in 3d...) But they were clunky and expensive, because A) LCDs were lousy and costly, B) it was hard to get driver support, and C) computers had trouble pushing the polygons quickly enough anyway.
Now we have much better LCDs, MS-imposed standard driver interfaces, and ubiquitous 3d accelerators. So where the hell are my head-tracking 3d goggles?!? I'm not talking about specialized hardware, I'm talking about a $300 "Head Blaster" from Creative Labs or Diamond. (Or more likely, both.)
Wouldn't they enhance the gameplaying experience immensely? Am I the only one who thinks so?
MSK
The reason motion is not a sense is because it is just part of your nervous system. it's like calling pain a sense. Humans feel motion by the stimulation of the krista (sp?). A mushroom looking structure that moves in a gellatenous fluid. when the krista moves, and in turn, the fluid. it stimulates the nerves around that area stimulating certain impulses in the brain, AKA movement.
The above blurb, however, brings up some very important questions about manipulating the senses via external stimuli (read:cochlear implants). I'm not sure this is alltogether good. An article in the Feb. 2000 issue of Wired features a gentleman who will be implanting a transceiver in his arm to stimulate his nervous system (if a success, the experiment should be able to generate muscle movement via outside sources. this could possibly even lead to an electronic soma. If you were feeling blue, you could just send happy waves via computer to your own brain).
While i, for one, am a HUGE advocate of the modernization of the world, including new technology and such...where exactly do we draw the line?? Just something to think about the next time you see a blind person plug an optic nerve emulator into the back of his head, ala the matrix. (think that sounds a little outlandish? so did I, untill i saw a documentary about it on the history channel.)
-FluX
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
It's actually two senses:
Rotational accelleration.
Linear accelleration/gravity.
Look at the inner ear and you'll see three loops at mutual right angles, embedded in the skull. At the point where they connect to the rest of the inner ear, there are nerve ending hairs protruding into the channel, similar to those that connect to the membrane down the center of the coclear spiral to sense sound. When you increase/decrease the component of the rotation of your head around the axis of one of the loops, the fluid in the loop lags behind the structure, pushing the hairs.
I think gravity/linear accelleration is measured by similar hairs with a mass on the end embedded in fluid (for damping) in the same structure - but I'm not sure.
You also have position sensors in your muscles and tension sensors in the tendons, which allow you to figure out the position of your body and the force you're exerting/having exerted on your limbs. This is in addition to the pressure sensors in your skin.
There is some question whether people have a weak magnetic directional sense. There's magnetite in some nerve cells in the same region of the nose as the nerve endings which processes smell. This spot is also is fixed to the skull and thus ideal for navigation. It might also be used to smell magnetic dust in the air. Or it might be random evolutionary morpholigic junk or a vestigial leftover of something ancient and now defunct.
The (rest of the?) sense of smell consists of a number of molecular shape detectors, plus sensore for the electric field from ions. The shape detectors seem to be part of the same system that produces antibodies: People with weak senses of smell are sometimes cured when they have a strong immune reaction (such as toxic shock), and smell becomes much more sensitive during a viral prodrome. (Ever notice that your house smells REALLY dusty and everything else smells annoyingly strong the day before the cold/flu hits?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wow, this is great. It could be hooked up to emacs, and used whenever somebody wrote the words <FLASH> or window.open, the user would experience a sensation of nausea. This would simulate the end-user's experience quite nicely...
It's been a while since I dealt with this study, but here are a few different reasons for VRD, or Virtual Reality Dissonance, the problems with people not being able to handle various 3D visuals:
The screen can be 75fps, but if it takes more than about 50ms (1/20s) to register an intended move from peripherals to environment, user can get woozy. (Since we're talking about a write-device, instead of a read-device like a head-tracker, it may have different effects but I bet it still would cause suffering.)
A small monitor does not cover a lot of the wide area of the user's view. The THX movie theatre standard has constraints that a certain number of degrees of arc from left to right be covered by screen; this is for a sense of immersion. Sit closer to a smaller screen, pending the next item...
3D algorithms assume a certain "viewing frustrum," where a given angle of view is assumed. From the angle of view and the size of the monitor, that means the viewer's eyes should be at a specific distance from the monitor. The rendered perspective should match that perspective, or subtle bearing cues the brain has learned are not acting properly. Regardless of the focus, the brain will work to refocus to correct the perspective. Try sitting closer or further away.
One dropped frame at 72fps can tear your brain out of your skull, if it's pretty accustomed to watching the continuous motion of smooth acceleration. Turn off your Apache server or whatever else is chewing unpredictable CPU.
Some people just can't sit in a car if they aren't anticipating the road bumps and curves with their eyes. Same goes for simulations, only more so. If you like roller-coasters, you don't have a strong cochlear sympathy; your brain can decide whether to trust gut or ear or eye on command.
Some people just don't get ill even on the wrong setup. Who knows why?
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