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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