Virtual Reality With Unreal Tournament

thegrommit writes: "It seems someone has been hacking the UT OpenGL driver to produce a relatively cheap VR environment. " It's really just another Cave thing, but it's still something to lust after. Imagine using a treadmill instead of pushing the up arrow. If only I was attached to my general pear-like shape.

Comments

real FPShooter simulation

[SirSlud]

VR can only take you so far.

I am curious about extending 'laser tag' like games to include splash damage capabilities, wide beam fire .. basically, to facilitate all the features of modern FPS games into a laser tag like game, including a visor that projects a 3d world exacly the same as your physical 'arena'.

I'd imagine your walls, floors, etc would have to be set up to instruct your base computer when and where they were hit, and then distribute damage if players are within a blast radius set for the 'weapon' being used by the shooter ... but can anyone divine whether this is technically feasible? Or has anyone attempted something like this?

I know it sounds like laser tag deluxe, but I'm thinking deluxe deluxe deluxe ... laser tag taken to its utter extreme technological limits. I think that would be cool. Ideas? Comments? Anyone wanna work with me on just laying what this would require, technically, by catalog surfing or whathaveyou?

Re:real FPShooter simulation

[crawling_chaos]

I think you'd have to look at some of the stuff the U.S. Army's been working on for training. It's probably partially hype, but some infatrymen came out of the Gulf War claiming that the training was more difficult than actual combat. Of course, the training probably assumed competent leadership on both sides of the conflict.

Anyway, my point (I did have a point when I started this post, I think) is that since most modern casualties are caused by "splash" damage from arty and whatnot, the Army's training program has probably worked out some of what you're after. The rest of it might come from some of the "smart" infantry weapons they've been working on, since they incorporate some VR and heads-up tech. I don't think any of that stuff is production grade yet. At any rate, it will be used to really kill people a long time before you and I can use it to play games.

Re:real FPShooter simulation

[bhsx]

One of my first jobs, when I was sixteen, was working at the first lazer arena(in the midwest anyway), Lazer Zone. It was fun and the owner built all the equipment himself; they had reset machines that were really just electric magnets that created a 'circuit' of sorts when you placed the gun between them, generating a point for the other team. There were light sensors on the front of the gun, a small one on the battery pack (which you wore on your hip), and a ton of sensors on your little electro-yamaka... which had no functionallity besides being a good target. Of course, the die hard players had all the cheats/hacks just like today, only then it took some imagination.

They would come in with pen-lights, electric tape to cover the sensors, and the best team (their name now escapes me, it was a long time ago... oh wait, Team Wild) even came in with speaker magnets to reset their guns(which went dead after you got shot, until you hit aforementioned reset booth) and a hacked electric key to restart the timed battery packs.

Having it be a sole-proprietorship was great for him too, it gave him the ability to do whatever he wanted. It was all black-lit with flourescent tape around the edges of the 'shields' and ramps, with white lite projected as the 'laser.' By the time we closed the place down we had nerf footballs hacked into flash grenades and huge burst cannons on the ramps for each team. He had some really good ideas, and testing/implementing them was always fun. That was 1987 or so, but what the hell, the impetus to shoot people hasn't left me, count me in... :)

Re:real FPShooter simulation

[praedor]

Can't recall the link but do a search for "tetanizing laser". COOL! It shoots an electric bolt, of sorts, for hundreds of meters. Using twin UV laser beams to ionize an airpath between you and your target, a very high voltage (user-settable and with enough power behind it you could dial in anything from stun to kill) is sent down the ionized path.

It is, in principle, even able to shoot around corners with appropriate mirrors properly situated.

I want one.

Re:real FPShooter simulation

[_ph1ux_]

I have thought about this as well. When I was at Intel - I was thinking it would be great to have levels that are designed exactly as the physical environ that you are in - and that you view it from a visor so that you can see all the effect etc, plus have the walls have much more awesome detail.

but there are a couple of problems:

1. death. when you die in Qx - you return to a spawn spot, but if you get fragged in a meat-space-quake - you would still be standing in the same physical loc that you perished in. So you would have to have your visor turned off for 5 seconds or so so that you cant see the play field - and you would disappear from other peoples display so taht they knew that you were fragged - but this brings us to problem 2.

2. COLLISION DETECTION! you would have to wear a helmet and football pads to play this - as you get fragged and disappear off the playfield for a short time, somebody might run into you - and hard. The other thing is that all players would be used to the fact that you can run through other players - and may forget that in this version you cannot. Maybe when a char gets fragged the system would place a false wall around them - that all other players would see - and try to avoid running into?

3. terrain: sadly most geeks cant run for more than 10 feet at top speed - and let alone the jumping factor that was already mentioned.... so the levels might end up being rather bland. No falling into lava pits, hyper jumping between platforms suspended in nothing etc...

4. you would want some sort of feedback - so maybe paintballs would be the best method - so that you *knew* when you got hit... but you would have to wear a vest that was able to sense each hit and deduct the damage from your overall health. which relates to 5.

5. ammo - if you had to use paintball etc... then you would be required to physically reload the weapons. unless they were like 500 shots only - and when you ran out of ammo - you had to drop it off at an ammo station and pick up a new one - and there would be a gun-monkey behind the wall reloading the guns for everyone?

anyway - it would still be fun no matter what - but until we have direct synaptic interfaces, we will have to address the challenges of getting meat space fragging on par with what Q3 can offer. Or maybe we just have to drop the whole comparison altogether - and accept that they are two separate stimuli.

Sketchy VR

[Angry Black Man]

While it is "Virtual Reality" none the less the design is very sketchy. To get CaveUT working right you have to do a LOT of tweaking. You will want to have the view rotations and axis in the exact right place. I've seen this in action and it really is not worth the trouble it took to get it working. To tell you the truth it is cool to look at for a little bit but not all that much more fun to play with.

The mouse/keyboard is really not a good setup for such an immersive environment. Real VR can map the movement of the head to look around and control movement etc with some other mechanism (usually either a handheld device or foot controls). CaveUT doesn't have real time head tracking. To get a real VR experience out of UT would be cool but it would not be cheap and that would defeat the whole purpose of this project (keep in mind it is developed to be an interesting alternative to real virtual reality gaming). The VR games out there now are pretty lame and I admit it would be very cool if they got games like UT and Quake III working very well in VR.

None the less, the OpenGL code is made for MS Windows only. However it would not be difficult for it to be recompiled for Linux and there is still no version of the driver for the Mac.

Retrofitting workout equiptment for VR....

[Nijika]

How damn hard would it REALLY be to hook a cheap exercise bike to something like an optical mouse? I'd love to try it if I ever got the time. I always thought the only thing missing in 3D shooters was the stabbing lung and heart pain from running around at like 25MPH. I sorta miss it after playing sports in "real life".

VR experience

[Man of E]

When I was in Korea some time ago, I ran across a multiplayer Unreal Tournament VR setup in an arcade. Basically, we would wear goggles and hold gun-shaped gamepads while standing in little pods. I played "Fractal" deathmatch against three other guys, and ended up incredibly dizzy five minutes later. The only VR feature that was really available was aiming by head-movements - jumping, running, firing, etc, were all controlled from the game pad.

This cave system would be a cool improvement, since it would probably be much less dizzying than wearing goggles. Running and jumping might be fun as well, but your range and of movement in real life would be much restricted compared to the things that can be done with a gamepad. I'd like to see it though.

We've got something sorta similar...

[mikeage]

well... not quite. Using WireGL from stanford, we've had great success running UT on 12 computers at a resolution of 4096x2304 (16:9 widescreen), with a physical screen that's over 13 feet wide, and 7.5 feet tall (15+ feet diagonal), which is something like 100 square feet of violent blood and guts. Quite cool to see. No UT hacking required. The only bad part is that the game assumes you're just using a monitor, which takes up maybe 15-30 degrees of your view, so when it becomes a full 90 degree view, it gets a little overwhelming, but hey, that's half the fun. Anyone ever in the princeton plasma physics lab, stop in to the high res wall and check out quake3 or our VR walkthrough using UT.

This is cool...

[cr0sh]

But way out of reach for the average /.'er - these kinds of mods seem to be the only thing happening anymore in "homebrew" VR (and I use the term "homebrew" here in a very loose sense - there is nothing "home" nor "brew" about this mod, other than tweaking the UT software - everything else is closer to the high-end "commercial" realm of things).

Which is very sad, considering today's "state-of-the-art"...

The site I run (see my URL) has a ton of links and info on homebrew VR - but I receive little comment on it. I would love to hear about someone homebrewing a CAVE of their own using a few 100 inch TV projectors, a set of SEGA stereo glasses (or similar), and a PowerGlove. I know it can be done - but nobody is tackling it. If I could ever find the time, I would tackle it myself - but I already have too many projects on back burners (which is why the site hasn't been updated in so long).

Hey, /.'ers! You see this stuff, drool over it, and want it for yourself? BUILD IT! PLEASE! It can be done, and cheaply - hell, a cheesy TORUS-style screen CAVE could be done using all off-the-shelf equipment for under $2500 (including projector!) - it could be done cheaper using homebrew projectors. Or, if your want an HMD, hack a StuntMaster or VFX-1 off Ebay, or build one yourself using cheap LCD TVs from Frys.

For a long time, I have expected an "explosion" in homebrew VR - a lot of people "oohhh and ahhh" over it whenever demos like this are shown, but everyone seems to think it is impossible to play with anymore - that you have to have big $$$ to do anything - UNTRUE! REND386 and AVRIL were born out of this falacy, and used modest and cheap hardware of the time to do a whole heck of a bunch - PCVR (the magazine) was born, and for a while, it seemed like VR was the next "thing" - then the bottom seemed to fall out, the internet became "big" and VR has been nearly forgotten...

Sad...

Re:Errm slight problem with this as a UT environme

[praedor]

That would be about the best option, though expensive. Full movement in all directions...but momentum would be a problem without expensive correction. You start moving (in your hamster ball) in one direction and then suddenly stop...but the ball's momentum carries on and you end up face-planted on the floor.

More expense: use computer control and drive motors to work with you. You stop suddenly and the controller actively brakes the ball to match your movement.

The ball would have to be reasonably large, I would think, to reduce what would otherwise be REALLY substantial spherical error and distortion.

Like Ender's Game?

[maddogsparky]

I kinda like the idea of flash suits that freeze the appendage that has been hit. I don't know what could do that though...maybe some fluid between two membranes that solidifies in an electric field? Of course, motion feedback would be even better.

Descent

[dbowden]

I have a pair of the original i-glasses!, and the only game I ever enjoyed playing with them was Descent. The resolution (320x200) pretty much bites, and the head tracking is useless for aiming.

It was always fun letting friends use the system though, because anyone who wears the glasses while playing a game inevitably ends up looking like Stevie Wonder, turning their heads around at wildly exaggerated angles, trying to control the game.

I used to have to stop and reorient myself every so often or I'd end up with my head between my legs staring at the ground, or straining to try and turn my head around backwards, just to go straight ahead.