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Is Virtual Reality Dead?
DarkZero asks: "In the early '90s, virtual reality was considered to be 'right around the corner'. Books, magazines, movies, and TV specials told us it'd be around in the next five years, and in 1995 Nintendo's Virtual Boy gave us a brief glimpse of 'the future of video games'. Well, the Virtual Boy died pretty quickly, and now, in 2001, the books, magazines, movies, and TV specials about virtual reality are gone, and web searches about virtual reality lead to web sites that stopped updating in 1996 and corporations that went bankrupt long ago. Is there any hope left for VR hardware and software in ANY fashion, corporate or independant?"
I personally am working on building a small cave lab at my school right now. We're trying to take an open approach to it using x86 machines running Linux and free available libraries. While I think that the hype about has come and gone, it's probably because there isn't a great deal of new and orginal research being done with it. The current application base is pretty limited (more or less to training simulations and pretty pictures) but there is room for development of standards, applications, better user interfaces, and the like.
This is what I'm hoping to work on once everything is up and running. Once a few breakthroughs are made throughout the industry, I'm sure the hype will start up all over again and with the current developments of 3D graphics on the market, it will probably be more realizable since the cost of everything has dropped significantly. We can only look forward.
CyberBlood
I don't think VR is dead. Perhaps most realize that VR is just a concept a little above our time. Calling a headset with earphones and a display that makes a game's depth a little more realistic isn't what I would consider VR. When we have the technology to actually monitor and manipulate senses in the brain, we can "simulate" anything we want. Here's a question. If what we consider as the perception of time is relative (i.e. the very definition of something being long or short is relative to our experience and opinion) and that the calculation of time is based only one definitions that we have set (we define one second as a unit of time and the only way to convince to someone how "long" a second is by either using another unit of time as a comparison or by giving an example (i.e. setting a starting point and announcing an ending point when the actual length of a second is over)), then is it possible to adjust our perception of time by convincing the brain that we are spending 24 hours in some virtual reality when in fact we only spent a few seconds? By slowing down the reaction time of the brain and adjusting conditions in our virtual reality to convince the brain that time is moving slower or faster, the possibilities would be endless. 2 week vacations in a virtual Bahamas in only 5 minutes? Maybe a 2 year stay in virtual France in only 1 second. Just a thought. Heck, even if it isn't theoretically possible, it would make a great movie.
The problem with VR is that it had a lot of things that would be cool, but never panned out.
Part of this is the model that made sense to the researchers didn't make sense to everybody else. Stock traders still don't use cool VR views of it, they stick to what makes sense to them, even though it could be done better, for example.
What you see the most applications of VR in are various forms of visuilization, a few choice applications that caught on, and games.
So what you have is consumer-grade 3D hardware for FPS games, and then the really expensive stuff for scientists.
Gentoo Sucks
No technology takes off until there is a killer app. One never arose in VR. There were several reasons, but all boil down to the concept being ahead of the products available to implement it.
I remember seeing the first cave and talking with the student who came up with it. She was quite interesting, and the ideas pretty solid, but the workstations available at the time were completely insufficient for anything but proof of concept stuff.
I guess Caterpiller bought one (they were near University of Illinois in downstate Illinois), but their needs were quite simple. They were just testing operator visibility in prototype tractors.
Even today, they are expensive to build and operate.
However, now that the triangle counts are up and the displays getting better (check out Emagin for the next generation of oled displays the size of a postage stamp) the technology is ready, but we've many years of practice in mobil computing and still no killer app.
Until now.
Here's a system that can be built today, and, like many technologies hooks on to the one known good selling center in society. Sex.
Take a portable computer, add a headmount. On the headmount add a couple video cameras. You need two in order to do distance mapping. Now you can send the unadulterated video stream to each eye in the HMD and the person is getting real life, but the computer knows what's going on. Distance to object, object identifcation and other messages can be displayed on the HMD as an explanation to the wife/boss as to why the device is valuable.
Of course the real reason it's valuable is because of the 'skins' that will be available on the net. These skins will be used by the PC to replace the normal appearance of that chick walking by with Miss January. And because you're only remapping a portion of the image, the framerates from todays hardware is sufficient to present realtime images.
Add to that suitable audio, and the world becomes a much more interesting place to wander around in.
Just far, far underground...
Check out my URL - I am one of the "underground" sites (though I haven't had much time to do anything lately) - there are others out there.
Cybermind are the rebadged form of W Industries - and seem to still be a big player in the commercial entertainment uses of VR (mostly in Europe and some parts of the US).
Other areas VR is being used in is commercial and academic research - mostly CAVE-style setups. NASA helped start up (via a grant) Flogiston, which sells the "flostation", with an interest in using it to train astronauts. The DOD has their "Dismounted Soldier" training project (a good site is Rudy Darken's site, but it appears to be having problems).
One thing I desperately want to do is republish, in CD form, the entire PCVR magazine archive (of what I have - which is all of the back issues, and a bit of the software that came on floppy). I have tried to contact the original publisher through numerous leads, but no luck (his name is Joeseph Gradecki - if anyone knows of his whereabouts, please contact me). I tend to wonder what the response would be if I did something like this. I figure it would at the minimum help the homebrew VR community (what little is left of it).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I piloted an Airbus A320 for about an hour in one of those nice CAE toys . It is really amazing. You can feel the irregularities of the asphalt as you accelerate on the take-off ramp, and the inercia makes you stick in the seat. All the commands and movements of the cockpit are perfect. The graphics of the landscape are good, but they don't get close to photorealism.
To make the things work, they use an IBM RISC/6000, equipped with several boards and equipments that are present on fly-by-wire systems of the actual planes. There are also special boards to control the hydraulic systems that make the whole thing swing. The instruments that are in the cockpit are also the same of an Airbus A320.
It doesn't have anything to do with helmets, gloves or helmets, but they are a demonstration of the cool things VR can do.
Outside of standalone games (I played a pretty rockin version of VR MechWarrior at Dave and Busters a few weeks ago), VR never lived. VRML was dead before affordable PC hardware (3Dfx) could make it worthwhile, and the software available sucked. If you really wanted VR, then you had to get the special goggles and headphones, which would run you probably more than your PC did (or does now). Paying an extra $300 to get my PC ready to play Red Faction is okay. Paying $1300 extra is not.
Will it ever live? But what are the real uses of VR outside games? Not many. Virtual tours of homes or museums or other buildings, maybe. But I don't think there's enough interest to spend the time and money to build these VRML worlds. We're having enough trouble getting broadband and real time audio/video to homes, let alone something a bit more bandwidth-consuming like this.
Just now, with the Final Fantasy movie are we beginning to see what I would call virtual reality. Everything before that was a joke. Game Boy? Please give me a break.
When we get real-time Final Fantasy movie quality or better images, then we'll be getting close to VR. When the AI has advanced to the point where I can have a real conversation with a Virtual Person and that Virtual Person interacts with its environment logically, then we'll have VR.
The media blew what was possible out of all proportion, people got tired of the hype and being disappointed, then tired of waiting. That's what happened.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
virtual reality (from what I have seen) has been restricted to visual information. I don't know about you, but my reality has more than one sense, and I expect a virtual reality to take that into account.
Sight - this one VR is pretty good at, movement, perspective etc.
Sound - what can you hear right now? the problem with reality is that you don't always hear what you want to hear... there are layers apon layers of sound... right now I can hear the office air conditioning humming, phones ringing, groups of people talking in 3 different directions and someone making a weird metal clicking kind of noise that sounds frustrated. That's reality.
Smell - this is a part of body information a lot of people forget about. You sense of smell can tell you a lot about your environment. The smell of the sea... that weird smell at the movies, part popcorn, part excessive vacuuming...
Taste - this is the sense I think VR will have the most trouble capturing. If you've ever been too close to a campfire, you'll know that smoke has a taste as well as a smell. Then you've got your more pedestrian taste situations, like eating a meal...
Touch - not quite as elusive as taste, but far more complex is the sense of touch. Touch measures so many things, instantly. Texture, pressure, temperature, movement... as well as shape recognition. Even when you're not touching anything, your skin is giving you loads of sensory feedback.
When virtual reality stops being about image projection and sound, and starts mimicking real reality, I think it will be a lot more interesting to people.
Right now, my own reality kicks ass over a cave.
I'm not saying VR developments as they are are not impressive, but this is a young technology, don't expect too much from something not fully grown.
An adult VR could produce Better Than Life, Red Dwarf style... or, the Matrix...
This is a photo I took recently of one of the original sets of VR entertainment devices, the Virtuality-something.
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, mentioned in an ("Back In Time") interview that he believed VR's day would come soon. And I'm not inclined to dismiss that too quickly. However, up to this date it's like the Newton phase of PDA history.
It sounds like you are basing the entire idea that "VR is dead" because you don't like the Virtuality 1000 (which is what you pictured)...?
To be honest, the Virtuality 1000 wasn't a superb piece of machinery, but at the time, it was the lowest cost, best made solution for VR entertainment.
Was the HMD big and heavy? Yes. Was the HMD low-res? Yes. Was there "lag"? Yes.
But if you played properly, and "looked past" the pixels (instead of what too many people did, which was to focus on the pixels) - there was a whole 'nother world in that box...
The Virtuality 1000's HMD (the Visette) was actually a very nice HMD - its folded optics design allowed for a relatively wide FOV with full focus adjustment (so that if you wore glasses, you could still use it). It provided nearly full immersion. The 1000 was also based on a souped up (OC'd?) Amiga 3000, with a ton of custom processing boards for graphics and sound, as well as 3D tracking (you could, for instance, actually duck and croutch as you played).
Dactyl Nightmare was the "premier" game for the 1000 - a funky form of paintball where not only you shot at other players on this strange "floating" game arena, but you had to watch out for (and/or kill!) a flying pterodactyl that would grab you and drop you to your death!
Anyhow, you can't base your whole opinion on that one system - did you ever play the Virtuality 2000 system? Much lighter equipment, much lighter and higher-res HMD - great equipment.
I have yet to try out Cybermind's (which is who W Industries/Virtuality became) new systems - I hope to next time I visit Vegas - but I have no doubt that they will be great machines.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The problem with VR was the hype and our own phenomenal ability to imagine what we'd like. VR is alive in slightly different ways. While we don't have the display hardware, the hardware for the construction of these images has benefitted from VR. VR helped drive the demand for high end SGI systems. These improved a lot during the 90's, with the end being NVIDIA and ATI's monster cards.
As for VR being used, well, the VR application that predates VR - the flight simulator is still there and an integral part of learning to fly in most commercial and military situations.
The military is also sponsoring other VR work for simulations like Quake for various combat and peace keeping situations.
In medicine, VR training is coming. There is a conference called MMVR that keeps growing.
In a number of niche applications, mining, 3D sculpting and various other things, VR tools are being used in a production environment every day.
AR, augmented reality, is a field that has arisen and used knowledge gained from VR.
Really, it's like AI. In the 80's AI was going to solve everything and we'd have intelligent machines doing many tasks that require consciousness today. It didn't happen as simply as we would have liked, but the technology developed in expert systems and reasoning is being used all over the place in various ways. The same is true for VR, the hype has gone but the technology continues to go on and finds applications.
1) When the pr0nographers came by to say "great technology! Help us make virtual pr0n" from what I understand, he told them to get out of his office. Keeping in mind that the VCR got its start that way, ethics might have cost him
2) VPL (Lanier's company) got sold to a French firm that TOTALLY botched, ruined and shelved the company.
BTW Lanier = Jaron Lanier. Look it up.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Well I still play Doom and Quake with my VFX headset, I'm still waiting for some really good headsets to come along with a price tag that is not meant for the US military, I had hoped for the Sony one to be useful, unfortunately it still seems to be mono rather than stereoscopic, maybe with OLEDs the pricing will drop like a stone and we'll all be geeking out playing Quake on the way into work soon, now if we can just integrate some wireless networking gear into the system we can frag each other instead of burying our heads in the newspaper on the train.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God