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What Ever Happened to Virtual Reality?
bergeron76 writes "It seems like it's been ages since I heard of any advances in "Virtual Reality" technology. Was Virtual Reality just hype? Are there any new or existing projects that have made any significant inroads (aside from the first-person shooter games)?
Is total virtual immersion a worthless persuit / dead industry? If not, what are the bottlenecks that are delaying it?"
It's all virtual of course!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
See Doom 3 or Half Life newblah.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Virtual reality became so good you can't tell if your inside it, or outside it!... except that inside it, you don't hear anything about virtual reality.
from the British Red Dwarf series. Need I say more?
The Matrix scared everyone.
We've been through this.. the most impressive VR advancements are going on at general motors, outside of the military training programs. read more
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
In 1995, Virtual Reality systems reached the apex of all conceivable technological possibility, realised its own state of perfection, and ceased to advance for lack of further necessity.
The computer loves you.
Now get back in your pod and shut up.
VP? Is that "virtual post"?
Developers probably don't want to take any inovative "risks"...remember what happened with the Virtual Boy, so that's my guess as to why we haven't seen a lot of VR stuff.
Ah, the irony. I love my job.
- The ArchitectNintendo killed it when they released the Virtual Boy
Virtual Reality is on TV every night of the week!
Buh-doom-boom-Sis.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
With all the advances in 3D (gaming) technology, I suppose that the hype has worn off. It's just not newsworthy anymore to be able to simulate a virtual environment.
One area in which Virtual Reality has been generating very positive effects is, unexpectedly (?), therapy against phobias and traumas. An example is fear of heights where people can confront their fears in a simulated (and thus controlled) environment and gradually let go of them.
So yes, I'd say that Virtual Reality does improve people's lives in at least one way that doesn't involve shooting at things.
see a Text Widget
It's spelt pursuit, not persuit.
And AR (Augmented Reality) seems to have taken the place of VR lately, lots of progress has been made in that end.
More importantly, VR equipment and tracking is usually prohibitively expensive, which I'd guess is partly responsible for the lack of any apparent progress.
Also, the suspension of disbelief in VR is quite important - not so in AR, since it only attempts at adding more information to the existing reality.
Virtual Reality (Vert-you-al ree'-al-utee), n: Bad games.
"Whatever happened to virtual reality, the milkman the paperboy evening tv.."
Yeah, I might have spent too much time at the terminal this weekend.
Was Virtual Reality just hype?
There is NO THING such as Virtual Reality, Mr. Anderson.
I work with a guy who started up a video game company called Park Place Productions (Which Sony ended up gobbling up in a hostile takeover years ago.) He was responsible for the Madden series of football games among many other things.
At one stage he was working on a virtual reality headseat (Similar to the VirtualBoy style visor) except you wore it on your head and controlled it with two handheld sensors / input pads.
It was phenomenal, until during a demonstration with an investor, the user got tricked into thinking it was real and actually stepped backwords and fell over the couch he was standing in front of and twisted his ankle. The product did not sell.
So yes, the bottleneck is definable in one word: Liability.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I Googled "Virtual Reality" Results 18,100,000 Hits for Virtual Reality. It seems the technology is everywhere.
VR was ahead of its time , it was trying to skip a few steps in the eveloutionry chain.It really was a step beyond its ability , VR is still used for treatment of those suffering mental traumas(physical and pyschological) so it was not an entier dead end. Its jsut the entertainment industry was at the time not ready for it , and in pushing it has set it back a while as its seen as a joke. ,the Reality of Virtualy reality may soon come around . Right now though , its still a joke .
With the advances in 3d Graphics and so forth
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
This whole on-line interaction is virtual reality.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
pr0n. oh and what an app it is!
Stuff like the shifty floor seen a while back here on /. (http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/081104/Shifty_ tiles_bring_walking_to_VR_Brief_081104.html are helping advance the non-graphics side of things, anyway. Lots of work on haptic interfaces seems to be working on the feedback side, not sure what the current state of that art is though.
;)
I suspect the questioner is actually looking for a holodeck though, we're still quite a ways from that
Game dev and music blog
Like most "hot" technologies of the past, virtual reality has lost its buzzword factor and instead has found real applications which save real money. It's used as a visualization tool (CAVE), primarily in the automotive industry. The buzz has moved on to "augmented reality", which combines a virtual reality with the real environment. Both technologies are still held up by the lack of affordable and lightweight high resolution displays. Virtual reality therefore typically surrounds the user with big stationary screens. That is not feasible for augmented reality. The more interesting applications are in the augmented reality field, so there's your hold-up.
It became so realistic that no-one can see it anymore... or at least they don't know when they do.
If you ask me VR has never started up because it's a health hazard. Putting two screens next to a person's eyes to falsify a sense of 3D has been proved to be harmful, potentially causing dizziness and other nasty effects, and IIRC in some rare (but not insignificant) cases it would even cause permanent sight problems. Remember all those warnings that came with the Virtual Boy? And that was just half-assed VR, imagine one using modern technology.
What about the patent Sony has on the Matrix-esque technology?
I do, however, post this drunk, this did infact happen (the whole university thing) but should account for lack of grammer and spelling.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
If VR porn doesn't show up then this technology will never reach the masses.
Doom3, the Sims etc. these are all virtual realities. People just got over the whole helmet thingy.
I though all realities were virtual.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
"Virtual Reality" was a grossly inaccurate prediction of the future of entertainment. As it turns out it is completely impractical, and more then that people are generally happy with plain old boring 2d entertainment in the first place.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
York University in Toronto has an interesting facility:
York's virtual reality room turns perception on its head
Home to Canada's only fully-immersive environment
TORONTO, March 31, 2005 -- Jumping into the virtual world of a
videogame is helping York University researchers understand how humans orient themselves on solid ground and in outer space.
Professor Michael Jenkin and his team at York's Centre for Vision Research have developed a 'virtual reality room' called IVY (Immersive Virtual Environment at York) in order to study our perception of gravity and motion, and how we orient ourselves spatially.
"We're displaying an environment from [the popular videogame] Doom right now, but of course that's just an example of one simulation," Jenkin says.
The room is the only six-sided immersive environment in Canada, and one of a mere handful internationally. Its walls, ceiling and floor are comprised of pixel maps generated by a cluster of computers running Linux. The entire structure is made of the same glass used in the CN Tower's observation deck. The floor alone took two years to complete.
Researchers are able to manipulate the environment within IVY, changing the scenery and its orientation, in order to understand how people become disoriented and how their internal perception of 'up' and 'down' is informed.
"Some people become incredibly confused. I've actually seen people fall over in there," Jenkin says.
The research is being used by the Canadian Space Agency and National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) to find ways to help strengthen astronauts' sense of 'up' and 'down' in zero gravity environments.
Jenkin's team also hopes to find methods of counteracting the gradual loss of spatial orientation that occurs as we age.
One of the most challenging aspects of IVY's design was to create a system that allowed subjects to experience both the look and feel of moving through the virtual space.
A graduate student developed a wireless 'head-tracking' device that follows subjects' movements and alters the displays accordingly. Users wear stereo shutter glasses which give a 3-D effect.
"The computer compensates when you move around so it looks correct. It knows where you've moved, where your eyes are," says Jenkin.
As the country's only truly immersive environment, IVY is also in demand from private industry for a myriad of projects.
"If someone brings us their data set, we can render it and they can walk through and interact with it," says Jenkin.
"We're constantly pushing the boundaries and learning how better to do VR."
-30-
Is this sig nificant?
Who needs virtual reality when you have reality tv?
Everyone has an agenda. Except me. --Michael Crichton
I hate to retread a previous comment, but according to the movie "Jurassic Park," it was replaced by UNIX systems.
The concept of VR has amused me for a very long time. It's what makes watching movies like "Lawnmower Man" so amazingly funny in this day and age.
I've been taking a 3D modeling class, and it has about three paragraphs dedicated to VR. The content is pretty worthless - but the picture of a dolphin leaping out of a monitor towards a man who is leaning back to avoid it is completely priceless.
In all seriousness, there was a short blurb about full-room "holodeck" like simulations being used for engineering work - but it didn't go into any details. Anyone know anything more about that?
Virtual Reality was just made up word to get pass the delay of Three-dimensional environments, which isn't an issue now. So gone it went.
Slashdot posted on article on uses of virtual reality the other day.../ 1819253&tid=126&tid=10
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/30
whats the point of virtual reality, when its what ever you want it to be in the first place :)
I think progress in VR is going on all the time its just not labeled as such because it is such an expansive category. If you look at the next generations of games that are coming out and the pushing of PCI-express and the new graphics cards, graphics are progressively looking closer to Reality. Now having said that that is only part of the VR question. Interacting more realisticly with that world is essential. We are seeing new steps into 3d Projection,almost holographic displays, and what I feel is the most important step experiements using brainwaves to control movement in simulated enviroments. The techologies havent collided yet into a single form but when they all catch up to each other then we will have true VR. Forget about Virtual Boy which as most of us no was neither true 3d nor Virtual Reality, also excuse the PS2 Eyetoy which are both just novelity items.
Trix are for kids!
People still have too many problems with the 2-d monitor and the standard 104 or 101 keyboard. Adding anything to this design at this point would only highten the learning curve and would generate less interest. Perhaps there is a handful of people who can honestly make good use of VR but the majority of us (not just Joe Sixpack) aren't living up to the potential of the box sitting on our desk.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
do browsers still support it? I haven't seen a page using that in about 10 years.
Because noone wants to wear those silly headsets. The technology was cool but the application was clumsy.
It was *ages* ago that i donned the ForteVR helmet and played Duke Nukem 3D on a Pentium 120Mhz. 3D accelerator cards weren't around yet. 3D sound cards weren't around yet. LCDs were low resolution, low refresh -- no wonder it made us sick as dogs! The helmet had a serial connection to the PC! I'm waiting for LucasArts to pave the way by bundling a bluetooth wireless force-feedback lightsabre and helmet with some future incarnation of Jedi Knight. You *know* we'd all buy one, even if it was *expensive*.
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
The dodo bird and your sensibility *removes clothes* Ahhh, brisk!
I seem to remember reading a few months ago about some online game where you can buy your own island...
I personally am more afraid of the .hack// senerio of "bad things that can happen in VR".
None the less, the main reason I am waiting for VR is to play an mmorpg like the one in .hack// =?
Speaking is NOT communication
I once took a class back in college which discussed some of limitations of virtual reality (this was back in '93). Until some of these things are addressed, and not just the economic factors, VR might not really ever take off.
For example, how do you address the gravity problem? How can you virtually simulate something that has physical weight, like throwing a virtual ball and catching it?
And if we have public access to VR devices (assuming it's still economically unfeasible for mass market personal purchasing), how do you cope with the "icky" factor? Would you want to use some VR helmet or gloves after some greasy, unkempt guy just used it?
Perhaps true VR may not be possible unless it was purely a sensory experience (like in The Matrix) or using artificially created matter (like holodecks), and the best we're going to get are fancy 3D displays with some amount of immersion.
Not sure about VR but as a sidepoint I'd love to see a system that uses my "EYES" as a pointing device for objects on the screen.
Imagine being able to just lookat a buttin and then mash a joystick type button held in the hand! Everything from first person shooters to regular computer tasks would/could seem to take half the time - being that everything is happening minus the mouse or trackball.
Smile.
Porn drives innovation in ways that Bill Gates can only dream about. Bring on the 3D titties now, and in a few years 'legitimate' uses will be commonplace.
- head mounted display (HMD), which has the following functional requirements:
- 3D motion tracking/telemetry
- high resolution display
- "ease" of use
- Full body tactile feedback suit also supporting basic telemetry (i.e. position of limbs)
- devices for simulating body position (i.e. treadmill for walking, chair for sitting, etc.)
All this stuff can use USB2 or firewire to interface with the computer. Then all you need to do is write the driver and application support code (like currently exists for joysticks, headsets, and DDR pads). The problem is, the current VR devices cost too much for your typical gamer to buy it just to play counterstrike in full immersion.The biggest hurdle right now is the quality of display technology.
g /
t ml
The cost of a small display devices, that can provide fast response times, vibrant colors, and aren't heavy and power intensive is the big issue.
These devices are approaching, and will happen eventually, but the HMD that you used to see that looked like giant insect heads that probably needed a big counter weight on them.
As technologies that allow the image to be drawn directly on your eyeball, and LCD technology shrinks you will see the possibilities of virtual reality, and more specificly, "hyper" reality bearing fruit.
I think we will see people using "hyper" reality technology in the work place much sooner then we'll have full sensorium virtual reality systems.
Boeing already is experimenting with hyper-reality systems, which are images displayed on goggles much like heads up display systems that map out the wiring maps for jumbo jets. Allowing the builders of the airplanes to see where things are going, with out having to take their eyes away from what they are working on. Boeing has been using or experienting with this since 97.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9711/21/t_t/jet.set.wirin
http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex02_08_01b.h
As long as computer nerds like us yearn to have sex with famous models, celebrities, and porn stars, there will never be month or a year where progress is not made in virtual reality technology.
To keep suspicions at bay, advances in VR were removed from this new reality.
It's hard on the US people, but that was the only way the world could keep their growing nuclear arsenal at bay. On the bright side, GWB is just a bad dream (one they will never wake up from).
This post will not be posted on the VR version of slashdot.
Anybody know why Apple doesn't support Quicktime VR for OS X? I used to use the QTVR panorama stitcher to create QTVR's, but since 9 I haven't seen an X version.
Heres an intersting VR blog.
http://www.mediavr.com/blog/
VR is very much alive and a lot of research is being done. It is just not being used in home entertainment and gaming. In areas like Industrial Design and architecture however VR is just now starting to come into its own.
The problem is that the concept of VR has run into the physical limitations of hardware. For example, you can play a game where you can look around and hold a gun like device and point it at people. But once you try to walk, duck, roll, etc, you run into the limits of the system quite quickly.
So while we can trick the eyes and the ears, we've still got some senses that are firmly grounded in this reality that keeps it from being totally effective. VR does have some practical applications in the medical and manufcaturing fields, but as it was envisioned for entertainment, it's not quite there.
If we can ever manage to figure out a way to connect a computer to all human sensory input, it won't really get much further. That could mean using some sort of body suit that can fake the sensations of movement, etc, or perhaps a direct interface into the brain.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This is not quite VR, but it is 3D immersion through video eyeware. In the future I am going to attempt to build a teleprescense robot using this, if I can get the money...
http://www.icuiti.com/
What happend to holographs? I mean it seemed like such a cool technology, are there any future plans of development? Or is there some huge use that I don't know about going on?
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
TrackIR! It rules for flight simulators, http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/
Allows you to use your headmovement instead of a hatstick to change your view direction in the game!
This presentation from Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier reveals the Top Eleven Reasons VR has not yet become commonplace. He identifies a number of factors that have held back the adoption of VR by consumers, including key limitations in hardware capabilities and backlash from unsound business practices in its early days. He also points out where research still needs to be done. However, he concludes with the observation that VR has already succeeded as an industrial technology, where it is used regularly in product design and other automation tasks.
Nooface
In Search of the Post-PC Interface
320x200 pixels, (or even 640x480) might be ok when it's on a monitor - 10% of your field of view, but when it's your entire field of view, as with VR glasses, it's horrible.
There are now VR glasses which are lightweight and even aesthetically discreet, but the resolution remains atrocious. I'm not an engineer, so I don't know why that is, but my guess is that anything commerically viable has to use off-the-shelf LCDs that are physically small, which basically means low resolution.
Hopefully, DLP micromirrors will offer a way to put decent resolution into something that looks not much bigger than eyeglasses, but it may take a while for the price to come down. (Again, just guessing)
What's wrong with VR? Hmm, this was the first tech subject I ever investigated in depth, and it's kind of amusing it hasn't gotten much better after all these years. I was just ranting about this a little while ago, but I'll go more in depth here:
There are some real problems with latency. Modern operating systems have a really hard time with the idea that there are hard deadlines that must be met on a sub-100ms basis. Even some graphics programmers hold onto the myth that 30fps has anything to do with how fast the human eye can detect motion. The reality is that we detect different faults at different rates, but anything that's tied to our own sense of motion has to be accurate at somewhere around the frame rate of touch.
The frame rate of our haptic senses is something on the order of 3000 frames per second.
That doesn't mean you need to update a display at 3000fps (though ironically enough, that's approximately the frequency of the fluorescent backplane on an LCD), but it does mean that if you're trying to show someone something at the same time a touch simulator is telling them they are, frames need to interrupt-updated at a speed that even the core operating system has trouble handling.
What do I mean by touch simulators? Nothing so complex as this per-finger force feedback weirdness that pulled back on each finger as I touched a virtual cockpit back at SIGGRAPH. No, anything involving a head-mounted display and a position detector is a touch simulator; the "feel" comes from within your head and neck and the reaction is to be visually accompanied by a display of motion.
But the display is always, always, always late! Look at the monitor. Now move your head and eyes, look at whatever's 90 degrees off to the right. For a noticable sub-second interval, you went blind, so that your brain would not need to contend with this blurry streaky mess. To be immersive, VR systems need to detect your motion, synthesize the appropriate blur-frames, and (hardest of all) have a convenient stable frame in front of you as you're escaping motion-blindness.
Everything head-mounted fails this just brutally.
There are vague successes in VR, of course. Driving simulations work fantastically, but it's not like driving is a massively natural feat for our brains to have adapted to in the first place. Screens on every window clean up the above quite neatly. And the phobia work functions because the fears operate on such a low level that your brain isn't able to employ resources such as "heh, that spider's moving wrong". These are useful and impressive successes, but in terms of general purpose "you are elsewhere" mechanisms -- until latency is dealt with appropriately, this will continue to be broken tech.
--Dan
i was reading an article on another site where they were speculating on nintendo's new console, and the guy was talking about a panel of directors including peter jackson talking about how in the next few years they're gonna add some simple 3d to theatres. one of the guys from the panel apparently claimed that a game console would beat them to it. it was some stereo technology to allow images to still appear in 3d without glasses.
"I'm feeling baklept... talk among yourselves, talk among yourselves!"
Lanier was VRs biggest promoter in the late 80's. I remember seeing him give a demo at the time, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It was a pretty exciting and compelling talk about cool stuff just around the corner. But then, years passed, and nothing happened.... He recently gave a talk about why VR hasn't happened, after all: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20030909/#1
Anybody else here ever get a chance to try the Disney Magic Carpet ride at Epcot? I was one of the chosen few when they were first building it and demoing it to the crowd ... and it basically let you fly around on a magic carpet as you wore a near-weightless (supported by wires) headset, and you straddled a motorcycle-seat like seat. Very cool stuff ... not sure if it ever turned into a mainstream ride or not ... but lots of fun.
It's being used by architects to inspect their yet to be buildings.
It's also used in the medical industry as well, apparently it's particulary useful as a mean of viewing strings of DNA in.
When VR first emerged it was thought by many to be the next big thing for gaming, but not a lot of people thought about it being used in the industry.
I guess these days it's the other way round.
I think it's matured enough to be useable by now. People just need to find out how.
My guess is they realized "Virtual Reality" won't really have much potential (which translates to profit) until there are better ways to interact with the games then a keyboard/controller/clunky motion sensors. Not to mention decent head-mounted displays are still quite costly.... I for one can't wait till input systems improve, and you aren't limited by the controller.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I remember back when MUDs were considered text-based virtual realities (something I still consider to be true, BTW). Once you get past the futuristic visions of jacks straight into the brain and funky head-mounted displays, you'll realize that virtual reality and cyberspaces are already here, and are every bit as addictive as predicted. They're just being used so people can imagine they're fantasy warriors, instead of doing their taxes in 3D.
VR hasn't died, it's evolved. Apparently.
Back in the days of VR being a buzzword, I, like many others, was most interested in the game potential. The problem of the VR world not being very touchable lead me (like others I assume) to imagine games where the VR word corresponds to real-world walls, but the VR supplies the fantastical element. Eg, Like how a game of laser-tag is played in a building, but key your headset so that a circular wall becomes the base of a kilometre-high tree or something, or other players are sometimes depicted as non-combatants or ghosts or animals, depending on how the game is intended to play.
It seems like running around a solid world with a real-world-aware VR headset is a an easy low-tech way to solve the locomotion and tactile problems of VR.
So, are you simulating a person who has that opinion?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/20 04-05/04-117.html
the first round just finished up today but next week there is another batch of projects to be seen. These are all products of the electronic writing/music program, there are also lots of scientific visualization projects ongoing. VR is more than just HMD's and datagloves.
Dude,
:-)
Have you _played_ GT4? Why would you even ask?
Macs as a fetish property
A researcher here at University Of North Carolina at Asheville (just recently hired) in the Psychology department uses VR to run people through highly realistic but controlled environments.
His name is Dr. Patrick Foo, and he uses an Alienware machine to do the hard work. Pretty cool really
I'm still working on it! How am I supposed to get anything done with you people interrupting me every 5 minutes?
Damn kids.
Ah, you must be one of the people who took the blue pill.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The University of Missouri-Rolla does some work with virtual reality. I'm not involved in it but you can find out more http://web.umr.edu/~vrpl/news.htm here. I found a pic of what they call the http://web.umr.edu/~vrpl/pictures/cave04.jpg "cave". Plenty of other pics and information there for those who are interested.
http://www.force-dynamics.com/video.shtmly namics_301-rbr-rallyschool.wmv
Direct link to video.http://www.force-dynamics.com/video/force-d
http://www.answers.com/spelt&r=67
Idiot. Kill yourself before I hunt you down and smash your fucking head open.
They haven't used steel for standard wiring in over a hundred years! Why do you call it "ironic," then?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Anyone ever notice while reading Snow Crash that Stephenson never described how users work their avatars? He mentions goggles and lasers that track the user's eye, but stuff like the ubiquitous VR gloves or even a damn joystick, not a blip. I don't think this is an oversight, btw, but more a very clever example of what NOT to write.
Terminate and stay resinous.
There are some virtual reality setups that have been going for years and keep improving - and are very important - flight simulators. The modern airline training flight simulator is a very high fidelity virtual reality system which allow airline pilots to practise situations that are just too dangerous to carry out in training in a real aircraft.
The military are also big on flight simulation too and have been for years.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
On Technocrat.net they just posted an article from the Washington Post about using VR to treat PTSD
3 60-2005Mar22.html?nav=rss_technology
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58
Still alive and well at Iowa State: http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/facilities.php
"Virtual Reality" is a buzzword. The submitter would do good to precisely define what he/she understands virtual reality to be and what parts of it are significant in the context of the question. Just "interacting with a realistic virtual world" isn't exactly contructive for a conversation -- it'd kind of be nice to know what we're talking about.
While everyone else is tackling the technical issues, here's a social one.
Back in 1996-1997, I worked part-time in a commercial VR arcade, where people would play networked VR games against each other. The location was in the middle of a busy downtown district outside San Francisco, and had plenty of foot traffic. The location was very carefully decorated to be non-threatening, we always had a greeter on duty to explain to people what we did.. and so on.
Aside from the slightly prohibitive cost, the biggest problem we had with getting people into the shop was the VR helmet; most of the women who listened to the greeters (I'd estimate about 60%) would flatly refuse when they heard about the helmet. Most refused because they were afraid the helmet would disarrange their hair, although some gave other reasons (claustrophobia was another somewhat common reason given, for example).
Whenever one of the women would flatly refuse due to the helmet, whoever they were with would also usually decline, rather than split their group during the 10 minute VR session.
From a commercial point of view, we probably would have had more than double the number of customers, if we could have somehow accomplished the VR without the helmet...
from google:
:
o ur nal/v6/n4/index.html
:
vrpsych...
but there is a mailing list:
vrpsych-l
And risking mailing list Etiquette (and I'm chicken sh!t for annon posting) there is perhaps a call for help in this field from the open source community (note the following has been edited and links are not made directly clickable):
How about some temporary mirrors of some of the stuff below (anti-slashdotting effect) out of respect for these VR medical researchers?
In a recent email regarding an award this person recently received
"Dear all,
thank you for your warm congratulations. I'm really happy for this Award because it shows that virtual reality in health care is not a toy, but a real therapeutic tool that may have a deep societal impact.
By chance, in the last issue of Nature neuroscience Review there is an interesting paper by Maria V. Sanchez-Vives entitled FROM PRESENCE TO CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH VIRTUAL REALITY who underlines the critical role that VR may have in neuroscience and clinical practice
www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nrn/j
(subscription required)
It follows the review (for a list of the last papers and books related to this field, please have a Look at my web site: www.cybertherapy.info) published in the Journal of American Medical Association "JAMA" who underlines the same concept:
www.nida.nih.gov/pdf/toads/FakeWorlds.pdf
However, the effective impact of this field in the real world clinical practice is still limited: to use a virtual environment you have to buy it or to develop it...
And this, obviously, requires a lot of money. So, we need grants - that usually force you to a huge admnistrative work - and when they finish, the research ends with it.
This is really a WASTE of time and energy. Especially when you see that most resources are spent to develop four different supermarkets, five different rooms full of spiders, nine elevators, etc.
So, a suggestion I have for this community is to share, if possible, the tools developed.
On my side, you can download and use for free the different environments we have developed for the treatment of panic disorders with agoraphobia:
www.vrtherapy.net
You can download for free many books (they usually cost about 100 US$) related to virtual reality here:
www.emergingcommunication.com
Also, Prof. Stéphane Bouchard is giving for free the different environments he developed using game engines to treat spider phobia and acrophobia:
w3.uqah.uquebec.ca/cyberpsy/index-en.html
Finally, in Laval, Prof. José Gutiérrez-Maldonado allowed to share with this community his excellent body image scale. You can download it for free from this web site
www.ub.es/personal/rv/ecic.htm
At this point, if you have resources and no commercial limitations please share them!!
I hope to meet most of you in June at the CyberTherapy conference in Basel:
www.e-therapy.info
Ciao
Giuseppe"
Porn moved VCRs
Porn moved DVDs
Porn is holding up the BluRay / HD-DVD release
Porn moved BBSs
Porn moved the internet.
I'm not advocating it. I am saying that there are a lot of people that don't notice these things until they find a new way to get porn.
My mom says I'm cool.
whenever you move your mouse over towards the pr0n folder.
well i feel that its real anyway... =/
Dennis Miller also seems to believe it would extremely addicting: "If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka."
My theory: some government agency is trying to crackdown on addictive things in our society (the DEA would be my guess), and with their recent doctrine of "preventive strikes," they're intentionally holding this technology back.
<looking nervously left and right, waiting for the black helicopters>
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
Where are my teledildonics? We were promised teledildonics!
Iowa State University does a lot of VR-oriented research: http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/.
The majority of the research going on here is driven by industry and military applications, with comparatively little funding for things for consumer use. One common misperception I've noticed is that many people assume VR == head-mounded displays, when in reality there is a great variety of possible displays (VRAC's facilities include a number of non-headset displays.) The Howe Hall auditorium, in which over 200 people can view a VR presentation (often a science- or engineering-oriented visualization, but there are many artistic applications as well) is an excellent way to show normal people that VR doesn't have to involve bulky headsets.
Although advancements in VR are generally oriented towards specific applications -- a better input device for a paint program, a new wireless sensor/transmitter system, etc. -- the field as a whole is still moving forward in leaps and bounds. Although it's debatable whether consumers will see any Virtual Reality products or devices in Wal-Mart anytime soon, industry use of VR is alive and well, and there is nothing to suggest that the field will go away anytime soon.
Mod parent up interesting please!!!!
So you mean this is actually the real world?!
Shit!
VR will be cool when the technology exists create a direct neural interface. Without it, VR can't exist.
the reason VR hasn't taken off, say, in websites, is because it takes a lot to program it, and because there isn't a common interface. If browsers supported a some common 3d environments that were open source, VR would have a chance. I've wondered if x3d (successor to vrml) could do this, but it isn't (yet) well enough supported.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right." -Isaac Asimov
In the 1990s it was suggested that interactive computer graphics coupled with new displays could provide useful methods for training, improving and testing skills and for visualization. However, people vastly under-estimated the cost in producing useful training applications. Try creating a training application for being a mechanic that uses a cyber glove or whatever. It would require millions of dollars and produce something that was probably inferior to giving them a go on the real thing. It has had some successes, particularly in the medical area, where the real training that doctors perform is on their live patients.
The main use for real time computer graphics is in entertainment. At SIGGRAPH 2000 at some panel it was suggested that the computer graphics industry is split 80 20 between entertainment and business applications. With the growth of the games industry it is probably more like 90 10 today. The thing is that entertainment hardly funds academic research. Today, computer graphics is being improved by ATI, NVidia, Sony and Microsoft but almost entirely for the purposes of creating entertainment. This leaves academic research in the weird position of being behind industry.
We don't and probably won't ever, have VR or AI, but we will find applications that use technologies developed whilst studying these fields.
After the matrix series, everyone realized that using the natural reality to cloak the spiritual reality is pointless. Nano technology is much better toward the future of having absolutely seamless virtual experience
//de ~ 9cimi
Who needs VR when you can get one of these: http://www.realdoll.com/. DUH!
A Few Links..
This one and
This one .
The later of which i would give my right eye for.. ;)
Virtual Reality changed all that!
BytesTemplar.com
Virtual Reality is still very alive, only not on a consumer level. There are several companies still making advancements in the VR field, but due to the expense of the technology involved, VR in the home is still a long way off.
For example:
http://www.fakespace.com/
http://www.christiedigital.com/
See subj.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The C6 at ISU is one example of immersion. There is a whole center devoted to VR and the C6.
http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/
If Sony's brain beam wasn't just to cause hype... we may well see true imersion virtual reality soon!
Our company has long worked with doing 3D immersive presentations, but always in the past just on flat screen's. For a project, we got to go all out and were purchased a bunch of equipment, by the people we were working for. Headsets, gloves, presentation projector screens, field-leading software...
The headsets don't work except with their pay-extra dongle, and not with the video card needed to run the projector system, and the gloves are nothing but a 5-axis joystick.. raise your middle finger to walk backwards, raise your index finger to turn left.. you get the idea. The software.. well. It was slow, old design, boasted "features" only because the rendering system (OpenGL, DirectX) had them, and the developers didn't actually have to add any features to THEIR code. Then you had to pay the myriad of licences... then again when the next version came out. Now, these were all sold to the guy after consulting with some "recognised professionals" about customising to his needs.
So, in summary, the technology might well have gotten better, but in some areas it's still lacking, and the companies that jumped on the VR bandwagon have no real idea of what VR is, other then something they can sell using pretty PowerPoint slides.
To people who don't know better, it's still all pretty impressive I guess, and the presentation is going to go well I reckon, but to the people who had to work with the stuff, it could have been so better.
There's quite a few people living in Virutal Reality.
Didn't that sony patent mention that they are working on the technology to stimulate smell and taste in the brain due to some sort of pulse? If that comes about, we can kiss goodbye the current thought of how Virtual Reality should be. We could get in one of the VR balls, jack in our heads matrix style, and kiss reality goodbye as we shrivle into nothingness(Well, at least those into the latest MMORPG games).
Also, the Vision Sciences Society conference in Saratosa this May has a satellite session about virtual reality in vision research.
So quite a bit is still going on in VR. Just because it's not the buzzword du jour doesn't mean VR has gone away.
As far as VR communities go, there are still a number that exist today. One of the best close knit community style ones is Traveler, which you can find here: http://digitalspace.com/traveler/index.html which has been around since early 1996. Although the ownership has changed hands a number of years ago. It is still actively visited by regulars like myself and many others. It's definitely a unique environment and has a friendly community.
You can read the permanent version of this response here.
I know only a little about this field, but I do know that current available computing power can only scratch the surface of what is possible with Virtual Reality. I took a class on the subject a couple years ago, in which we were introduced to some currently available technologies. Most of these I found fairly impressive, though not the fully submersive environment that I had envisioned as a child.
As is most technology innovation these days, the impetus behind many of these devices was largely for military purposes. One such device that sticks out in my mind was a set of goggles that performed a matching algorithm on a subjects face to determine if they were anyone that the soldier should remember. The example the guest speaker used was to suppose a soldier got a glimpse of Saddam Hussein. The goggles projected a small screen in the top corner of the lense that could be used for a variety of things including a conformation of a suspect and another example they gave of an MPEG video display. The screen was pretty tiny, but near the eye it had a pretty neat effect.
Another device introduced was the Phantom from MIT's touch lab. This haptic feedback device provides touch feedback to simulate real world situations. The example in the article I linked to cites the feel of Tiger Woods' grip as and example.
There was some talk of submersive three dimensional environments ala star trek, but we didn't go into much depth. There are all sorts of complications regarding various projection systems and with the helmets there are still serious simulator sickness problems in many subjects.
These aren't the only limits however. Others include a lack of computing power to create a realistic 3D environment that can really fool the brain and problems creating haptic and other sensory feedback. After all of this, perhaps a bigger problem is an overall lack of interest. Outside special circumstances such as military training (flight simulators etc), there is no great need. There is also no great want. The public is largely satisfied (read saturated) with smaller, "low" cost devices such as iPods, PDAs, cameras, cellphones, gaming systems camera phones and laptops. All of these barriers will have to be overcome before we see Virtual Reality anywhere near the forefront of technology.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
These researchers at Caltech have built a fully immersive flight simulation chamber with displays updating at 200Hz. The entire chamber is mounted on a 3 axis gimbal to provide pitch, roll, and yaw. This gimbal can rotate at over 300rpm with angular accelerations of 20000deg/sec. Despite the impressive hardware, it fits in the corner of a small room. Unfortunately, in order to train on this equipment you must be a fly.
VR is alive and kicking - it's just that the people who build it and the people who use it don't *call* it "virtual reality".
Flight simulation (complete with helmet-mounted display, head trackers, hand trackers, fancy graphics, etc) *is* virtual reality. The company I work for (L3 Simulation) sells full up systems to the US government by the truckload (literally: http://www.link.com./ Other companies make simulators for a variety of other vehicles using similar techniques.
Where VR has failed is for people who are just walking around in the virtual world - mostly because of the extreme difficulty of coming up with treadmills or whatever that adequately allow you to walk around. (although there have been some brave efforts). So - VR is currently restricted to simulating people flying planes, driving cars or whatever.
www.sjbaker.org
Haven't we got past this by now? Surely it should now be What Ever Happened to "What Eever Happened to Virtual Reality?"?
Do you see what I did there?
apparently he does not know this is all a virtual world. Don't ruin it for him.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Eh, all the overpriced, overhyped hardware that went under the moniker of "virtual reality" had little or nothing to do with what really generates an immersive experience.
Hell, a text-based MUD is more involving than $60,000 hardware (oh, sorry, it's marked down to $10,000 now) used to shoot six-polygon pterodactyls. Very little is needed to lose oneself in the game. People are a lot better at suspending disbelief than one would imagine.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In general.
We don't have VR for the same reason that websites aren't authored in Shockwave--it's massive overkill for the vast majority of things it might be applied to. The useful applications of VR are very specific, niche apps, and the rest it could be used for can't possible afford the equipment to make it work well.
Given that, there's little demand to work out the technical wrinkles that make it practical and cost effective. Do you really want to jack in just to check your mail?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Virtual Reality is pretty much dead in the public world. There are still companies/organizations using it (e.g. NASA, Boeing) for special applications, but the idea of going to your local Best Buy and picking up the Lawnmower Man 3000 headgear/gloves/suit unit is far off.
I've been asking this question myself for a while, WHY is VR dead and why hasn't anyone given it a second go. Back in the 90's people were really looking forward to it, but it crashed pretty hard with such failures as (again) the movie Lawnmower Man and the horrible Nintendo Virtual Boy head unit that caused neck stress and had a pathetic monochrome display (red and black).
I think back then, there were a lot of deficiencies in technology working against "common" VR.
So we weren't really "ready" for VR then, but I think we're a lot closer nowadays. But as to what company is going to be the "3dfx of VR"? I haven't a clue. I haven't heard of any companies pushing out a revolutionary head unit or glove/suit combo. And I haven't heard of anyone coding a DirectX extension for head tracking in first person shooter games yet, although I'm sure it's doable.
This is somewhat a chicken and the egg problem: no one has really tried to do this, and there won't be any real push for it until someone thinks it's worth trying! A company would literally have to create a great solution to the problem and by word of mouth, good reviews, and a bunch of game updates, create the demand for it as well.
Is that company out there? I certainly hope so. I would love to play World of Warcraft but the idea of hacking someone to pieces with a mouse just doesn't appeal to me anymore. I'd rather hold some hand tracking and actually make the gesticulations mimicking a slashing move, and mayb use my left hand tracker as a shield against the oncoming hoards. And what about 3D viewing with a helmet? How awesome would it be to "watch your back" by actually turning your head?
I think the biggest technological problem is the head tracking unit. It needs to be light enough that you don't notice it, but immersive as well, with great sound and visuals. And the screen can't give you a headache after 15 minutes or force you to throw up due to the motion sickness. So if someone can solve that problem, and produce a lightweight hardware solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, they might just have a shot. Maybe if there existed a head unit with gloves (all spatially tracked, perhaps using bluetooth for the gloves), with decent sound, all for under $300, you might have a strong market not only in PCs but also consoles.
So onward, O Entrepreneurs! Bring us into virtual reality!
Dude, if people checked out more news like this, VR is slowly applied but defintely being applied and has applications much more than military and gaming.
He doesn't know anything. He's just a talking head.
He showed a complete lack of foresight when interviewed about this crap back in 1990 or so. When asked about the possibility of people become hooked on VR because they could have sex with Cindy Crawford in it, he said "VR will never become so realistic that it replaces reality" or something like that.
Yet we have (and have had for years) people who would rather play EverQuest than go outside.
He was in the right place at the right time. He was a guru of Amiga VR. Ignore him.
What makes you think VR isn't being used every day?
I guess it's not the sort of thing you can buy at Fry's, but neither are lots of cool computer toys. (Does Fry's sell rackmount servers? No? Does that mean they're "not here yet"?)
I know people who use VR all the time. When I was in college a couple years ago, I knew biologists who loved the VR systems because they could walk around in large molecules. They were orders-of-magnitude more productive in VR.
I guess that's kind of dull compared to the stuff you see in bad sci-fi movies, but most uses of computers are. Note how they can't even show a normal Windows/Mac/Linux screen: it has to have huge red pulsing "DNA sample does not match!" across the whole screen, to keep it "exciting".
So just because you can't buy a VR setup at Fry's like they have in the movies, doesn't mean VR isn't used in actual applications every day.
See, for instance, Jerome Groopman's article about patient simulators for surgeons in this week's New Yorker. "Virtual reality" is mentioned only once (in the parenthetical aside in which Jaron Lanier makes a brief appearance). There aren't any head-mounted 3D displays. A fair amount of what shapes the virtual reality is other people talking (e.g. the "patient's" voice is actually that of the doctor running the simulation). But the article makes it crystal clear that the surgeons (and surgeons in training) who are using these simulators find them pretty freaking "immersive."
Equals FUN! Seriously I always wanted to try this ever since I saw the omnidirectional treadmill and realized that it would be perfect as the floor of a cave system. The person's distance from each wall would be very accuratly monitored and when you start to walk or run in a direction, the treadmill starts to move in the exact opposite direction to keep you in place while the scenery moves around you would be an awsome simulation. Add in a fake rifle and handgun and you have the perfect FPS environemnt. (The omnidirectional treadmill I'm referring to is a very clever design with two belts at 90 degrees to each other. The bottom one is a normal belt but the top one is actually composed of small rollers that roll in the same orientation as the lower belt. Thus the top belt can be moving in on direction and the rollers in another and its a simple vector addition to get any direction needed. Very clever design.)
Didn't they discover that wearing VR helmets made people sick. http://davidcrow.ca/publications/kin416/
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
The guys at eMagin are about to release this headgear... http://www.emagin.com/3dvisor/ They should be out in a month or so. I'm psyched.
They also talked about other simulators they were working on for helicopter crew and other occupations which basically used blue-screen (magenta, in their case) technology to replace elements of video from cameras mounted on the front of the VR goggles.
One of the interesting points (I thought) was that they could use an aircraft down for maintenance as a training site so that the equipment your tax dollars paid for is always serving some use, even when its broke.
That you need a seriously high framerate in order to prevent headaches etc when using it.
Microsoft had a virtual reality chat at one time. It lasted untill they pulled the pulg about 5 years ago. Seems smiley faces were more popular.
The hosts were called Angels because thier avatar was one of a number of angels.
Some who loved it tried to keep it alive, we even found the tools to make the virtual "worlds" the names of the chat rooms themselves. I still have it all on disk.
I miss the people and one room that was a meditation place. I can still hear the music when I close my eyes.
V-Chat may you live again some day
Kilz
VR porn is sorta, kinda here - I expect in another few years we will see true, 6DOF versions. What I mean by this is that there is a sub-genre of anime/hentai/cartoon porn in which the pictures are created in Poser and other modeling programs. There seems to be a whole set of artists and techniques to this entire thing - ie, how to model, in 3D, good porn. It is only a matter of time before these models are made into videos (likely already done), then the meshes introduced into true 6DOF engines, so that any viewing angle by the -ahem- user is allowed...
Yeah, like walking, ducking, rolling, etc, into the walls of your parents' basement!
Yeah, because once you figure out how to install your... erm... "package" package, you... uh... y'know, won't want to go outside, is all I'm saying.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
The only thing that held VR back was the 3d Head Mounted Display units. At the time, they would only offer 320x240 resolution and it cost about $1,000. Most of them didnt offer tracking systems, and it was pretty far from giving you a full immersion effect. It was basically an fancy movie viewer.
2 1/r-98-21.pdf
Then came Retina Displays, the ability to beam video signal via lasers directly into your retina. Many military and medical applications, but its still far from being a consumer product. Its the only technology that has the best chance at offering something close to full immersion.
The University of Washington is one school thats paving the way for commercial VRD development.
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/publications/r-98-
Once this technology is perfected, it should be no different than a SVGA Monitor, just plug it into your VGA port and launch whatever game you want.
It was an IBM 486 DX100 w/16 megs of RAM. But what made it an Elysium, were the 2 graphics cards (2 motorola 601e processors on each card w/8 megs of tex ram on each card too), the HMD, and the 2/6DOF magnetic tracking devices from polhemus (i.e. Fastrack) one on the HMD the other on the "pointing device", a handheld input device with 4 grip sensors that would read in pressure from finger grips in values of 1-255. You could use it to simulate a hand opening or closing.
And now my point...The school I attended/worked at used to give tours and show off this new VR tech by showing them the Elysium. Remeber the stock city model that came with 3DS Studio for DOS? My buddy put that in VR and we would show that to the "tourists". It didn't happen often put I distictly remember a few of the people getting Vertigo when they "flew" to one of the top of the buildings and looked down. They would fall right on their asses in the middle of the room, while wearing the HMD. VR is kinda dangerous in that respect.
I always thought that was the most interesting part of donning an HMD, the disorientation you felt after wearing it made it intimidating for the average Joe. And it came with warnings telling you to not wear it for more than 15 mins at a time. I took me a few hours of use, to get over the initial disorientation an HMD causes to your senses.
That is what killed VR. HMD technology is not for average computer users. Plus you can get epileptic seizures. It's the same thing that killed the Captin Power TV show.
I guess the Canadians are very proud of their VR room in York.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
You know, I hear this quite often from people who have played the orignal (Virtuality 1000) "Dactyl Nightmare" - that the point of the game was no fun. Often, when I played it when all four pods were filled, I could see the other players (well, their "avatars") kinda looking around, but not doing anything. It was like they didn't have a clue what the game was about.
I will give you a clue - the pterodactyl was a small (though important) portion of the game.
The whole point of the game was "virtual paintball" - or what is today called a "fragfest" (albeit with much better graphics, sound, etc and many more players). The idea was to run around on the platforms, down the stairs (to the center platform), and using the "levitator disks" (or whatever they were) to manuever between the upper platforms - running around and shooting the other players. All the while, the 'dactyl was circling - and if you heard "he's coming!" in your headset, that was a clue to get under some cover somewhere (like under one of the arches or something), look up and around and try to shoot the bastard from the sky before he picked you up and dropped you to your doom!
I found the game to be very fun, but only when I was playing with people who knew what the hell the game was about. Yes, the equipment was very heavy and cumbersome. Yes, the resolution sucked (but at least it the field of view was large enough to immerse you - ie, 60 degrees horizontal). Yes, the tracking was laggy (and in cases, nausea producing. But the game...
More than once I played it and in five minutes had a great workout - DDR is probably the only current game today that could match it...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Now that there's no real hardware obstacle to gloves-and-goggles VR, it's clear that the basic concept is flawed. There are two fundamental problems. First, eye-hand coordination in empty space sucks as an input method. And second, full-surround visual motion without physical motion makes you feel funny.
Various "haptic interfaces" have been tried, and some of them actually work. Most of them are for small motions, as in sculpting or surgery. For those applications, it's often easier to use an ordinary screen than goggles.
Working in VR? Imagine riding a rollercoaster as a job. Eight hours a day. While trying to do real work.
a controlled dose of an NMDA-antagonist could help here... as it cuts off sensory input from your body, you stop thinking about your body, and use the information you have to hand to figure out what you are and what you have etc. So instead of thinking you're a person flying a spaceship around the environment, you could *be* the spaceship (or the spaceship's 'AI') flying around the environment, with no knowledge of the human body you're physically attached to. THAT's escaping reality!
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
No - we aren't enjoying our VR with full headtracked HMDs and fully tracked gloved interfaces, etc...
We are, however, experiencing VR in other forms - every time you fire up Doom 3 or some other FPS - you are using VR. Your interface is pretty desk-bound (what was at one time termed "desktop-VR") - but VR it is. Fully interactive, multi-player, fast 3D simulation - it is all there. What isn't is the interface.
Today, it is possible to still get HMD's, but you must be prepared to spend a lot - a good quality HMD will set you back a few grand, top level ones can go stratospheric in price. Most of the price issue has to do with it being a very tight niche market (mainly catering to the oil industry, medical industry, military, and auto industry as the main users) with few buyers. But there are enough players that you can get a decent 800x600 HMD for under $2000.00. If you are adventurous, you could also easily build your own HMD like we used to do it in the old days, using newer LCD display technologies (back then, we used low-res LCD TVs - today, you could easily do it with higher resolution PS2 LCD monitors).
Tracking is still a big issue - very few players in the market, and their systems are prohibitively expensive - a few grand to track two sensors in 6DOF (enough for head and hand tracking) - Polhemus and Ascension being the two main players which use pulsed magnetic systems (one does AC, the other DC) - all other players tend to using inbound or outbound camera or IR-sensor based systems.
There is also the issue of software - today, the big thing (besides simulation - such as in DARPA's Dismounted Soldier training project) is entertainment. Today's FPS games seem like a perfect fit, but because the interfaces don't exist, I don't expect many players to experience today's or even yesterday's FPS games on anything more than a monitor.
Finally, the main issue you don't see much of anything, tends to also be stagnation of the market due to IP and patent issues. Back in the early nineties, when VR was getting hot, many companies were latching onto the technology and patenting everything under the sun. VPL's patent portfolio was pretty huge - one of the main reasons glove interfaces never became big was because they held so many patents on the technology, especially for lightweight gloves, that nothing else was very commercially viable. They got lucky and invented a glove system that was lightweight and tracked fairly accurately (it had its own problems, though). Other companies did the same with tracking technology (ie, Polhemus and Ascension seem to be the only companies with magnetic tracking systems because they both patented the crap out of them - and rightfully so - such tracking systems are very difficult to construct and calibrate, both in hardware and software - one of the companies uses AC, the other pulsed DC - the only way around each other's patents - other companies went ultrasonic and IR based with inbound or outbound systems).
Then - the internet started taking off. Consumers and other users weren't seeing the "Lawnmower Man"-esque worlds promised (there is only so much a 386 or 486 can do), and the internet was gaining popularity - so were computers for that matter. All of that, plus the lack of hardware - caused VR to be eclipsed as a technology path, at least for the time being.
Those early VR companies? They either folded or became other things. VPL, IIRC, was sold to Thompson Electronics, and the patents got flung far and wide - but someone still owns them. The other companies, especially for tracking, managed to survive mainly because as the nineties continued and 3D gaming took off, there was a need for tracking systems for 3D input (modeling) as w
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
in the matrix are developing, which result in breaks in the illusion such as above. Don't worry, Editor Smith's have been dispatched.
In the late 80's/early 90's, I was all about VR. I devoured "The Media Lab" by Stuart Brand, about MIT's media lab, etc. Then I was a psych major at Cornell who focused on perception. I was going to post largely the same information that you just did. So instead I will add an interesting anecdote.
;)
;)
Yes, latency is the main bitch here, but there are a few extra bits of interesting info. One is that your nervous system already has its own latency "lag", and you are already adapted to it. The upshot is that it is possible to adapt to a bit more latency incurred by extra hardware. This has been shown in military virtual cockpit simulators that attempt to present a lot of information to a fighter pilot with a 3D display inside a helmet, as if he can "see through" the hull of the aircraft. The negative is that once you leave that environment, adjusting to the "normal" real-life latency leads you to get nauseous sometimes
Another interesting phenomenon of perception is that if you are walking in a curve with a large enough radius, you will not be able to tell (if blindfolded... or wearing a 3D VR HUD) whether you are walking in a straight line or not. So in theory you can have a fully-navigable VR system inside, say, a hangar, that tricks you into thinking you are walking forever in a straight line (i.e., in any direction in the world) when in actuality you might be walking in large figure 8's on the hangar floor. This of course conjured images in my head of real-life Holodecks and whatnot, but it's interesting nevertheless
There are some comments about how leaping, ducking and rolling would test any VR system's limits. When was the last time anyone lept, ducked or rolled ? You don't want to ACTUALLY do it do you ? If you do, go outside and have a game of "actual reality"
Haptic interfaces are difficult to create and expensive to manufacture. If you think about cost-benefit, increasing the the resolution of haptics should be the last priority. i.e., You may want to feel Cindy Crawford's nipple between your thumb and forefinger, but your boss just wants you to drive the clunky VR-Exoskeleton to move blocks of data around.
A thoroughly immersive visual interface, combined with basic haptics is a better starting point.
Raster graphics probably won't cut it for VR. The visual rendering system might be all vector graphics. Say, hardware-accelerated SVG. Of course, the rendering hardware will have to be analog.
A very good application for VR is Integrated Development Environments for software development. A monitor provides a very narrow bandwidth between coder and code. The quality of software developed should improve significantly as this bottleneck is removed. More generally, as broadband becomes commodified, and wireless net access ubiquitous, the monitor becomes the next bottleneck. Monitors have got to go!
What might a VR IDE for programmers look like? Let's compromise depth perception so we can run conventional applications in a VR Window Manager, with custom hardware. Imagine yourself sitting in a swivel chair. The chair is surrounded by a circular desk. The desk is surrounded by a cylindrical display. So effectively, you're sitting inside a hollow tube. It's as if you wrapped a huge monitor around yourself in a tall 360degree tube. The desk is the equivalent of KDE/GNOME's panel, and also contains a virtual keyboard. All applications that are running are always visible on the tube. You can move to any application by swivelling on the chair, or scrolling up or down in the tube. Zoom up the tube, to your emacs ( or vim ) window. Not quite VR, but close enough to a coder's reality. :-)
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
People seem to be whining about the same problems that set back VR back in 1996 rather than as it pertains to today. Noone liked waiting in line to pay several dollar for a few minutes of gaming time. This would be just as true with any other form of 3D gaming. I believe the goal of VR was to make its magic work in the home rather than mainstreet at the mall. The real setback actually was the VirtualBoy.
VirtualBoy, before the project was dumped into the gameboy development labs (Which took the blame for net losses), was actually meant to be a full color virtual extension for what came to be the N64. The major limiting factor is the same factor that will continue to plague virtual reality hardware for the forseable future. Playing for a few minutes in the mall is fine, but spending hours with VR gear weighing on your head leads to the development of bruises (mostly the bridge of the nose). This is considered a small sacrofice for those who do research in the field, but no parent is going to stand for it. This is why the VirtualBoy needed that little stand (and the stand is why the project was dumped).
The failure of the VirtualBoy discouraged similar developments. While there actually have been major leaps in development in VR hardware, none of it has had any commercial success. You could argue the shutter glasses had some success, but they only truely work at extremely high refresh rates which aren't supported on most desktop monitors. (60hz, 30 hurts).
As to the issue of frames per second, a good eye has trouble discerning movement or flicking at around 80fps. Anything above 200fps would be considered smooth.
Virtual Reality was stolen by Crack Babies and sold to Killer Bees.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
"- The Architect"
How many people saw all three movies and still don't get it?
...The Michael Vick Experience debuted...
...or if you stop and think, it is INFORMATIVE, while also being OFFTOPIC. Calling GP a dumb git qualifies as FLAMEBAIT, but overall the post is INTERESTING.
:(
Now i am soooooo confused
By the way also there is a sorry excuse for VR at Six Flags over mid america. You have no control over it at all. You're just told to scream at certain times. your controls have no bearing on the outcome of the experience. You're just watching it basicly. I was disapointed that I payed money for it.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Well done man
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
UIC has had a total immersion VR system for a long time now. They are used heavily in industry as well as academia. Check it out at: http://www.evl.uic.edu/pape/CAVE/
too bad the VR craze died.
As long as you've got something to knock into it works great. In fact, it's a necessary component of every input method.
Cheers.
I see where you're going here, but it's not really true.
I was fortunate enough to use the CAVE at UIUC in early '97, just after Quake was first released. 4-walled VR environment where the user only needed to wear "polarized" glasses to see the 3D image. I assure you it was MUCH faster than 5 fps. And I can assure you that it was much more immersive than Quake.
But there were no texturemaps. Every object pretty much had a single color. Why? Because there was no reason for it to be more than that.
Quake looks good and VR looks bad because there are millions of PCs and handfuls of things like the CAVE. Developing a souped-up-graphics environment like you see in FPSs isn't HARD, it's just TIME CONSUMING.
The only thing that made FPSs look better than VR is that there was millions of dollars to be made selling video games and nothing to be made making texturemapped VR for the handful of CAVEs on the planet.
It seems silly to evaluate the success of an academic approach on commercial terms. At the end of the day, FPS's are more commercially successful because computers with monitors are cheap (widely available) and 3D displays are not. You can't sell a VR program to millions of people who don't have VR equipment.
paintball
Virtual Reality is all they use at the Bush White House. They've got the Weapons of Mass Destruction module, the Iraqis-will-welcome-us-as-liberators module,...
remember the playstation 9 commercial's?
Obviously never has seen a CAVE installation. There are two of them in my city, one being publicly accessible in a museum of modern technology.
That thing is the closest thing to a holodeck we nowadays can get, and all done with nowadays sort of affordable technology (a few years ago though that stuff was hilariously expensive, needing a big SGI and good beamers also were not run of the mill things), nowadays that stuff is driven by a handful of PCs and beamers you can get at every electronics supermarket.
Just thought I would share a company I trade, Kopin Corp. They are the only nanotech company building high resolution microdisplays. The size of a grain of rice, used in the USA military (sniper rifels), and recently talked about virtual Reality in gaming. www.kopin.com
There is no virtual reality.
-- Cheers!
I played it.
Many years ago a local videogame shop rented a "Dactyl Nightmare"-machine and let everybody who wanted to try it. A long que, and most sucked at playing. As "cr0sh" said, they didn't understand what to do.
I watched and understood. The room they had put the machine in had a to low cealing, and I was to tall, so I had to stand on my knees wich did not help the experience or the movability at all, I can tell you.
Still, I set the highscore that day, I had nothing but computer oponents, but I did not get hit untill the last oponent (the "Boss") hit me from behind. I could not turn around fast enough, standing on my knees.
The guy who worked the machinery was very impressed, and thought I had played it many times before. But that was the only time ever (and as you can tell, I am still proud about it).
I enjoyed it, despite all the quirks.
Somehow I suspect that there are some people who can take to VR, and most can't (without training). It is a special way of thinking. Perhaps many VR-applikations have fallen since people simply do not understand the consept?
I've learned all I know about politics from
Namely, by Hollywood.
Back in the day, it didn't matter about the fact that we had stupid stereoscopic goggles, they kept trying to make it into a Gibsonesque cyberpunk fantasy, that strapping on a pair of goggles was equivilent to actually having a living, breathing, and dying if you got shot variety experience.
The problem is, even today the general media STILL promotes this image.
But back to the point, the reason V.R. fails, is due to the reality compared to the fantasy. People (eg; the consumer market) expects the Hollywood definition. People aren't going to throw their money into what they view as an entertainment product, when said entertainment product doesn't even approach 5% of what they expect.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Look up "As we may think", written in 1946 by Vannevar Bush, then come back here to me:
I think the only successful way to induce a suspension of disbelieve is to signal the brain directly, perhaps as described by Vannevar Bush. Many advances have been made in this area, but only a few have been brave enough to actually try this on themselves, usually because a physical disability.
Solipsis is a infinitely scalable virtual world, p2pnet and smartmobs have stories on Solipsis..
NB : The name 'Solipsis' comes from Solipsism, a philosophical doctrine that claims that reality only exists in one's mind.
There's of course a lot more to it than just that, but that is the basic problem. I've seen all sorts of programs that people would find interesting to run at home, but not vital to run at home. It currently isn't worth the cost for most people (anywhere from $5k for bargain basement stereo vision with poor tracking, to $1 million+ for a cave + haptic/robotic interfaces). People won't use VR until it is (a) unobtrusive, (b) cheap, and (c) intuitive.
On the 3D display end, VR needs to move from large space filling displays like caves to small setups like a small pair of glasses (current top end devices from manufacturers such as MicroOptical and Microvision give a glimpse at possible avenues forward). Ideally, these glasses should still let you see the real world (referred to as augmented reality, rather than virtual reality). This is far less disorienting for many people. There are also technical problems with HMDs (head mounted displays) aside from size and weight. The best HMD resolutions today are generally about 1280x1024, and the field of view often isn't stellar. For many people, these displays can cause headaches. The closer a display is to the eyes, the higher res it needs to be in order to avoid ill physiological effects. Then, the VR applications themselves need to run fast enough to have very little lag (ideally less than 12 ms between a user's action, and the application visually responding). If the lag gets too large, many people begin to get motion sickness (this is potentially a huge barrier for many people w/ VR). One alternative to VR glasses is projected displays, but without some additional engineering & mass production, these displays are not likely to be very cheap in the near future (and these displays still require some type of glasses, either shuttered glasses, or polarized glasses). The final visual alternative (ignoring fancy and expensive volumetric displays) are auto-stereoscopic displays, which work w/o special glasses. These displays have the downside though of requiring the user to sit/stand in a precise location in order to get the 3D effect.
Motion tracking also needs to get significantly better. Current motion tracking techniques (for gesture recognition, head tracking, etc.) are generally quite bulky and expensive. Some image processing techniques using video cameras show promise for cheap compact systems. Large scale motion tracking and registration (i.e. matching your position and orientation precisely with a map and models) is a much bigger problem for outdoor situations. GPS is one of the better ways right now, and that is abysmal (GPS gives positional accuracy to within a few meters, and no clues about orientation. VR apps require position to within a few centimeters usually, and orientation to within a degree or two). There is a fair amount of research into improving this, but it will likely be several years before any non-miliary applications emerge.
Finally, once VR is cheap enough (less than $2K USD for 3D vision and tracking), and small enough (i.e. a small/light pair of glasses, and at most a few stationary webcam sized cameras, or a single 3D projector), then average people can start to think about using VR. Even then, people won't use it until there are compelling applications. The first big applications will of course be games, but outside of 3D modeling, medical data, scientific data, psychology and geology there have been few compelling uses shown. Clearly there are a lot of compelling applications just waiting to be developed, but until VR becomes cheaper, smaller and more intuitive, these will most likely not be developed.
Impossible = A fun challenge
Another interesting phenomenon of perception is that if you are walking in a curve with a large enough radius, you will not be able to tell (if blindfolded... or wearing a 3D VR HUD) whether you are walking in a straight line or not. So in theory you can have a fully-navigable VR system inside, say, a hangar, that tricks you into thinking you are walking forever in a straight line (i.e., in any direction in the world) when in actuality you might be walking in large figure 8's on the hangar floor. This of course conjured images in my head of real-life Holodecks and whatnot, but it's interesting nevertheless ;)
Sure this is ok if you are the only one using it but throw a few people in there and all of a sudden you have more points of reference to show you where you are. -- Robert
Bet this
VR, like AI and other depreciated overhyped fads - is not ready for the field. A fair amount has entered the public field - but there's still barriers to cross and work to be done. I'll post someday if I get something to show. Ta!
Didn't the big players worry about people wearing goggles getting permanent headaches and other ailments they could then cash in on ?
Nothing happened, it functions perfectly. Just look around.
Ive read a great deal of everyones posts here, and those of you slating and putting down VR seem to know nothing of what you're talking about, and those of you backing it up, dont 'appear' to have enough insight into this technology to form a solid argument.
;)
Im just finishing a BSc (hons) Degree in Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds, with many modules on 3D world constuction, immersion, sound etc - including the use of some of the latest VR headsets.
I can tell you some of the major downsides right now - the fact that the majority of these headsets work with VRML... and aweful, outdated and pretty much useless language! And those that work with other languages (or even games) only support res's of around 800x600, some of the headsets dont have stereo-scopic vision (both screens show the same image, rather than slightly different like your eyex), some of them _are_ cumbersome, and heavy, but the vast majority (especially the ones ive played with) weigh so little, that you get used to them.
As for trackers, they are one of the other major aspects that let the whole technology down. Short of spending another £1000 on a decent tracker (in my lab we have 3 headsets, and 2 trackers, one of the headsets is over £1000 and one of the trackers is over £1000 in cost, so ive gotten to use the best and the worst!) they might as well not even be there! The decent tracking sytems, however, work with a good range, and accuracy, so your movements, in full 3D with 6 DOF (Degrees of Freedom) are relayed with a 1mm accuracy to the PC, so the image is returned to the headset with the correct yaw/pitch/roll and X,Y,Z co-ordinates needed.
I agree with some earlier posts about the cables, and if you are paying money to use this equipment, thats the last thing you want to ruin your gaming experience. Ive been lucky enough to play on 4 or 5 different types of VR systems (the one in the pod's, where you stamp your feet, the big "sit-down" unit where you drive a tank or race car, and several *ahem* home style units). So i dont think VR's dead, i just think that its moved on. Lets see:
It IS used in military, for battle field simulation.
It IS used in the Motor industry, for assisting engineers with locations and construction of certain parts in the vehicles.
It IS used in biomedical sciences, to view protein strands and DNA
So VR in its rawest form is still used, but not very useful... so i'll ramble on about its nearest cousing AR or Augmented Reality.
This uses the same technology as VR but contains a semi-transparent view on the headsets, so you see real life items, with digital items over-layed. Check out AR-Quake by some students at a Uni in Australia, or see if you can find the UK militaries interest in it, when they tested a large GPS assisted unit at DERA (Defence Evaluation Research Agency).
I dont think ive missed anything, and im fully prepared to be flamed for the things that ive said
Because once we have a holodeck like on Startrek, we'll see a new economy based on "holominutes" to be spent there.
Of course, if the holodeck is sorta free (as in free beer) like in Startrek, civilization as we know it will end, since no-one will ever leave it.
Although, we might want to get some of the bugs out, since the holodeck did not appear to be a safe place.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
This is the current state of VR
Okay, I'll bite...
The obvious question that derives from this conversation is "Why doesn't someone take the Doom3 engine (or Quake engine)" and build a damned VRML browser with it?
It would probably be pretty fun bouncing between VRML nodes and interacting via the multiplayer module with other users at the custom nodes at 78fps with a BFG (err.. you get the idea)...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
I was gonna post more or less the same myself, so reading your post made my day.
Basically, yes, while cute 3D graphics are cool to look at, it's gameplay and (where applicable) a good story that really get suspension of disbelief going. Even for the best looking games nowadays (Doom 3, HL2, whatever), if gameplay sucked, suspension of disbelief would go right out the window.
Which makes the whole VR gizmos not really needed.
I would add, though, that VR also brings other problems to the table:
1. Controls. The mouse and keyboard (or gamepad, if the game is suited for that) are tried and tested and work so well, that you can just forget that you're using them. We've had decades (and thousands of "Nintendo sucks vs Sony blows" flame wars centred on controls) to refine controls to something easy and effective to use. Plus, by now you already know how to use them, so you don't go through the whole learning curve again.
Pointing around with a glove or other untried gimmics are not only unneeded then, they can actually hurt suspension of disbelief. Especially because of the next points:
2. Comfort.
Sitting down in a comfortable chair and using a mouse and keyboard, or a gamepad, is comfortable. You can do 12 hour gaming sessions if, like me, you don't have a life, and have little if any discomfort problems.
By contrast, the whole VR hype reminds me of the touch-screen hype. Humans just aren't built to spend the whole day with a hand pointing forward. Even if the glove was a thin cotton glove weighing (next to nothing), pointing with your arm forwards all day long will result not just in fatigue, but actual _pain_.
It gets even worse for other games. If anyone thinks that swinging a sword in a VR game is something they can do for hours, they haven't actually swung a sword in their life. Even throwing a punch at the air in a martial arts game (including martial-arts themed RPGs, like Shenmue or Jade Empire) is _tiresome_ if you do it for hours. And as someone who had some army training, I'll just say it would _suck_ to have to lug a rifle around all day long to play a game.
3. Sensory expectations. Completely fooling some senses is a much more risky proposition than just getting the brain to pay them no attention.
If you were really immersed visuall in, say, a flight sim, your brain would expect _all_ senses to fit the same picture. If you take a tight curve, it expects the body to feel G forces. If it doesn't, a little bit of suspension of disbelief goes out, and a little bit of nausea kicks in.
If you were playing a fight sim, you'd expect that when you throw a punch, you feel it connect. If it feels like it's going through a ghost, again, some suspension of disbelief goes out, some nausea comes in. (And worse yet, you can damage your joints badly if your brains says you don't have to brake that punch going at thin air.)
4. IC vs OOC. Or how it's throwing the whole concept of "_escaping_ reality" out the window.
Relying on the character's physical values or knowledge _outside_ the game is meta-gaming. It can not only seriously damage suspension of disbelief, it can also seriously limit the market for the game. For starters, you're limited to those who can actually do that IRL.
E.g., if in a fighting game you actually had to be able to kick or block that fast and accurate, congrats, you've demanded that the player be an accomplish student of martial arts to play the game. E.g., if you have to actually slash with a broadsword and block with a shield, well, it would probably be fun for some of us nuts, but no fun for everyone else.
Worse yet, it severely limits what you _can_ do in a game, by tying you down to what you can do IRL. E.g., most of Nintendo's games wouldn't even be possible to have in VR, because _noone_ can run and jump for hours. Jumping is a _very_ tiresome operation for humans. We're not made to bunny-hop all day long.
Plus, being tied down to what you can physically do IRL, thr
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's simply not ripe yet.
I had the near equivalent of a PDA in 1986. My first computer. It was a Sharp PC 1402. It's to date the longest battery time on a portable computer in existance (ca. 200 hrs). It's lying right in front of me and I still use it today. With hardcover it's still thinner than my Tungsten E lying next to it. In the early to mid nineties we had the HP 200 pocket computers with DOS 5 and Works 5 on ROM. Booted in a second. To date unmatched in versatility. Then we had the Newton. It totally ruled. But PDAs didn't take off.
Now they have found their niche. They are ideal for keeping notes, dates and contacts in sync. They run with the crappiest groupware/mailer evar (Outlook) which like 905 of the population think it's the only Groupware/Mailer. They've finally gotten a standard IR interface. The screens have usable contrast and the responsivenes off the touchscreen is good. Calendars are standardized and CPUs are fast enough to render Websites. And curiously enough, all that runs 40 hours on a single load. Still only about a 5th of the running time of my 1402.
What I'm saying is in the mean time they have become more usefull to a lot of people as an extra to their workstation at home, so they buy one. Actually an extreme niche situation.
VR will probably take of when some online-game-tv-show combo makes use of it. (Gibsons Mona Lisa Overdrive is a plausible scenario for widespread VR). After all, who would've thought that portable multimedia takes of with variant ringtones?
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I spent a year teaching myself VRML and am still pretty good at it. The current version of Engineering software I am using (Microstation v8) is a pretty robust drawing tool with a true ease-of-use factor. What's really nice is that it exports objects and animations directly into VRML. I think Microsoft has discontinued it's VRML browser because VRML is a free protocol. I heard a speech where Gates was pushing to make windows 3-d (longhorn? --doubt it) That would put vrml in direct patent competittion with Microsoft.
e r_IP3.html
That said, the VRML Repository was turned over from the San Diego Supercomputer center and is now hosted by: http://www.web3d.org/ They have made the original website for vrml 2.0 rather deep in their site, but there are some tools available.
I find floppy's VRML tutorial to be the easiest way to learn about vrml:
http://web3d.vapourtech.com/tutorials/vrml97/
and the original pimping vrml browser can be found here:
http://www.karmanaut.com/cosmo/player/
These tools with a lot of time and effort would allow you to build a quake-3 like world, or MMORPG. They have been around for awhile. Why has vrml faded. Open standards don't generate profits for gaming companies that sell their engine, and people in the open-source community have not prioritized this.
One place to look for somewhat open virtual reality standards is Wolfenstein enemy territory. Servers like shit-storm
http://users.telenet.be/tdk-clan/Serv
are constantly putting up custom new boards that are made by the community.
Good Luck!!!
Make me some dragons please...
...which was part of my Masters' DEgree.e s.pdf
For the bold readers out there:
http://www.murkes.com/thesis/america-and-videogam
One bottleneck that is on the verge of being taken on with the advent of various dual core processors is that of concurrency. Due to the nature of Virtual Reality programming, parallel processing demands are very high (just think of how many things run in parallel in the real world).
Languages such as The SHADOW System that are designed for programming Virtual Reality Environments are highly threaded and designed to take advantage of these systems. However, the concepts were ahead of their time in the case because the computing power simply did (does) not exist. In fact, the degree of parallel processing required is so high, that it will not be sufficed by the initial wave of dual core CPUs, but they will go a long way in terms of improvement of Virtual Reality systems.
Read the permananent version of this post here and more on the topic here
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
My company develops high-fidelity vehicle simulation technologies for doing human-in-the-loop testing of vehicles. As you can see on our simulators page: http://www.simcreator.com/simulators.htm, we have used CAVE environments, HMD's, stereoscopic glasses, wands, motion bases, power-walls, and plain desktops for vehicle simulation, engineering, and design.
We also make heavy use of VRML for our visualization and terrain definition. Being an open-standard it is much easier to build and obtain tools for viewing and modifying the worlds.
Virtual Reality is very much alive. However, since it's not as new, cutting edge it doesn't make all of the up-front news. It's moved, as good technologies do, into use and active development in the real world.
That sounds like Redirected Walking
the majority of the conversation was about academic uses for virtual reality; as one person has mentioned here, the treatment of phobias. I feel the VR's primary application should be from a user interface perspective - just using the interfaces to interact with data. However, I think one of the reasons why we still use keyboards is because we can't evolve beyond the typewriter; which was an evolution itself. Also; think about how we are using QWERTY instead of DVORAK which is supposed to be easier to learn and faster to use... feature sets change; control structures do not tend to except over very long periods of time. Trackballs are easier for your wrist and arm but how many people are using them? I could go on about this but I think it is much less cost and much more user acclimation.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Jason Lanier, credited with coining the phrase "Virtual Reality", addresses this question and other related ones in the May 2005 issue of "The Sun" magazine.
I beleave VR is still very much everyone's dream. I see more products now inching closer to affordable VR. Like IR sensors for hats to track head movement.
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I've personaly cobbled together a kind of entry level system I use to play games like Republic Commando and Star Wars Galaxies with. It's not the greatest as resolution is far from what you get on a monitor. And text, small ones, sometime become hard to read. But I am happy with it.
Head Tracker (actualy taped to the headphones):
http://www.gyration.com/ultragt-compact.htm
Surround Sound:
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=
Head Mounted Display ($500 off eBay, although my are an older version I think)
http://www.i-glassesstore.com/iglassespc-3d.html
There are a number of improvements to the setup which could be made with some electrical engineering type skills. Which I don't have, but it's to play with none the less.
So VR isn't forgotton, I just don't think it's really gotton to the point yet where the manufacturers see enough of a profit window to come up with complete systems.
"My eyes...the goggles do nothing!"
this is used in several applications from E-Learning to 3D Communities
Same thing as what happens to all marketroid pipe dreams eventually: REALITY intervened.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Let me show you a project I've been working on now for 6 years. It is a motion system that provides "True 3D" motion to the user. I believe it is the motion system virtual reality has always needed. The "Mimicker" as I call it was designed to overcome the problems of motion sickness by providing the user's inner ear with the correct sensory info. I am currently trying to raise funds for building the prototype which is estimated to cost $150,000. To see the Mimicker in action please go to my web site at http://mimickertrue3d.com/ and take a look around, then tell me what you think. If the link doesn't work then just type "mimicker" into your search engine.
What I want is a headset that will allow me to see a panoramic view of the IG environ. If you were to couple this with a tracker type system like's available now and let's say a pistol style control for the right hand along with a device for movement on the left. What this would do is allow you to turn your head from side to side while running let's say, using your left hand you're pushing forward to run, using your head you're choosing where you are looking and where you are going. Let's say that I wanted to stop and look around then all I'd have to do is quit moving with the left hand control. The gun part, simply a small pistol or handheld unit of some kind strictly for pointing and shooting primary and seconday weapon plus selecting weapon. This is what I would call VR? Is this a good example of what other VR gamers want? I know that I can get most of what I'm talking about here, what I haven't seen is the eyeglasses, helm or whatever that allows the panoramic view as if you were actually in the game.
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
Come to think of it, I think it probably was Elle McPherson rather than Cindy Crawford, but when someone has a really good quote it sometimes gets slightly mangled in the process.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
VR developers' goals need to be very close to those of 3-D game designers, i.e.: simple, easy, fun.
Back in the late 1990's I remember downloading and running an "interactive VRML viewer", the thought of which really excited me. The particular package I tried out was the worst implementation of 3-D world I have ever seen. Sure, it was painfully slow (very low FPS), that's not the part that bothered me. What really irked me was how the system handled camera-wall collisions. When "you", the viewer, encountered a wall, your movement stopped dead - even if you were pushing into the wall at an angle!
Every 3-D game ever made does better than that. You should slide along the wall, parallel with the wall! This is simple physics. Nobody would ever buy a game where you had to "move back when you hit a wall, and don't touch any more walls or you'll get stuck!"
Observe the world around you. What happens to your body when you lean against a wall at an angle? Don't you slide along the wall? I mean, come on. Won't someone please put the Reality back into Virtual Reality.
For those who are interested in the Virtuality/Amiga link - check out this page on the original Vituality 1000CS - (as an interesting aside on the Virtuality pods - the original standup pods are named 1000CS, while the sitdown units were named the 1000SD. The monitor stands also had a unit designation, but I don't remember what. Anyhow, when the 2000 series came out, the standup version was names the 2000SU, and the sitdown was named the 2000SD - I have yet to hear what the "CS" stood for on the original version).
BTW - you make the system sound worse than it actual was, if you check the link I just gave. Remember, this was 1991 - and these boxes were running on top-of-the-line Amiga 3000's with two (2 - one for each eye) custom graphics cards, spitting out a fairly high number of polys per second for the day. Furthermore, tracking was done with some form of Polhemus tracking system (perhaps serial based). In 1991, the Amiga 3000 was the best Amiga you could buy - it wasn't until a few years later that the 4000 and the 1200 came out. When the Virtuality 2000 series came out, they used what were basically 486's with custom graphics cards.
I can pretty much say for certain that the Amiga 3000 wasn't as stressed as you make it out to be. They may have even used a custom extra processor board to boost the speed some as well, but anyone who has ever owned and played with an Amiga knows that even with the stock graphics hardware, it was capable of doing things in 1985 that weren't being matched by PC's until the early 90's at best. This isn't fanboy posturing, either - it just wasn't until the availability of the 386, good VGA cards, and Gravis sound/cheap soundblasters that PC's and DOS could start to catch up. Basically, the Amiga was a nicely designed and integrated multi-processor computer, which had custom graphics and memory processors to offload processing from the main CPU. The PC up until the early 90's still was a mostly monolithic system where the CPU had to do everything, and until the appearance of cards that some of the processing could be offloaded on to, could not match what the Amiga was capable of. I am certain that if it could have, that W Industries, Ltd would have went with a PC solution (as they did - albeit after becoming Vituality Inc - with the 2000 series).
Finally - I must agree with you on the boom mounted "FakeSpace-like" arcade system - this is a much better design for the market that the Virtuality pod was aiming for. Virtuality was trying to become a market unto themseleves, becoming a location-based entertainment venue, similar to the Battletech entertainment centers. Unfortunately for the Virtuality pods, they required much more operator handling and cleaning, etc - whereas the Vortek V3 is pretty much a "step-up and go" type system, much more inline with the original Battlezone game system, with a bit more freedom. In other words, it intergrates better with standard arcade layouts than do the Virtuality pods, and requires less operator intervention. Still, there is the hygeine issue, but this is unlikely to ever go away unless a different approach is used...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
What do you mean when you say "Virtual Reality". There are lots of related technologies that were pretty immature in the early 90s that have made a lot of progress, the biggest one being 3D graphics display hardware and software.
:) http://interreality.org/ (actually, another VOS user told me to!)
Now, I think, one of the more interesting technologies that could possibly be grouped under the otherwise vague "Virtual Reality" umbrella to work on is user-interface stuff, and desiging applications and networking software that lets people use their personal computers to share a graphical world and collaborate in it over the Internet.
There are several Free Software projects working on this, one of them I helped design so I feel obligated to plug it here
It's important that a strong Free Software project emerge in this area soon, or the field will become dominated by proprietary software and standards! Interreality and VOS are especially lacking in nice, easy to use applications for non-programmers and non-Unix-geeks, and we need artists to try creating worlds for the system and give us some direction on where it needs to go.
Regarding VRML, you may think it's lame and dead but it's not. The latest version, called X3D, fixes a bunch of problems with VRML97, and with today's graphics cards the graphical quality is far better than it was 10 years ago.
Reed
So.. commercial VR tech appears stalled, and developments are as another poster mentioned, around the price of a new ferrari. So.. what are you going to do?
:).
I have fun creating what I call "Poor Man's 3D" experiments. One was in 2600 a couple year's ago. Since then I've been evolving quite a bit. From that article, myself and a friend:
- made a stereo webcam. We took two webcams, made a base that holds them approximately the distance of two "eyes", and wrote some scripts to force them to record in stereo. We made an output script that converted the right/left images to red/blue channels and then combine them into a single video. The result was a 3D video viewable via red-blue goggles.
- we are now working on the bigger update: something better than red/blue goggles. You can buy these cheap LCD screen gizmo's that are connected to playstation controllers (we picked up 6 of them for $30 cdn/ea at FutureShop in the fall). Buy one of those really crappy "VR 3D" toys from ebay (search for "Tunnel Racer"). The crappy screens of the "Tunnel Racer" Game are the same size as the LCDs of the TVs. Two XBoxes running Linux networked and you have yourself homebrew VR
Our plan is to wire the stereo camera into the stereo headset and try to navigate experiencing USB 1.1 cheapo webcam lag/blur
It's not done yet.. when it is it'll be all tutorialized and whatnot
twitter.com/gravitronic
From hardcore research to performance art, the Envision Center at Purdue U. is a virtual reality room. It may have 3 or 4 walls (depending on the application). Users of the technology wear special goggles to pop the projections on the walls into a 3D environment.
It looks pretty cool. I keep planning to trek across campus and check it out.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Heres a site about a VR Movie Theater. I think they watched to much Simpsons though.
This reminds me of the scientists in early 1900s who said it was impossible to get a rocket out of earth's gravity well, or Bill Gates saying no-one would ever need more than 640k of RAM, or the guy who said the markt for computers in the US was 4 and hence wasn't worth pursuing.
How much would you like to bet that in 50 yrs the majority of computer interfaces wont be 3D? Take a moment to think about the fact that 50 years ago there were no computer and black and white TV was just emerging. Now try to extrapolate that rate of change into the future remember that the rate of change is increasing.
I'm sure there'll be 2D displays of all sorts. I'm also sure things like retinal laser displays mounted on unobtrusive headgear will much more common. I've used one (at HITL at U of Washington) and it was the crispest, clearest image I've every seen (and I worked for SGI for several years so I know what a decent image looks like).
I agree VR's time hasn't come yet - but saying it won't ever happen is just plain shortsighted.
I've used a augmented reality headgear that showed a CT scanner cross section superimposed over a real person so I could see inside them. AR views of ultrasound data of foeteses are *much* clearer and easier to interpret (and hence not make mistakes in diagnosis) than normal ultrasound. Seeing that ultrasound compisited into a 3D model and AR projected onto the mother is truly awesome.
I've used good HMD (not the virtual boy with plastic lenses where the spherical aberration caused people under 12 to have stereopscopic vision problems for up to 30 minutes after use - the main reason it was pulled just before going to market) with low latency (10ms) high res displays.
Yes you get disoriented if you run around too much - better to stay in a chair - like driving, you get used to it.
Yes it is a *much* better and more natural way to play Quake.
Yes is still costs a lot and yes it's much better than it was 10 years ago.
Personally in 50 years I expect mobile phones, computers, PDAs etc will all be intergrated (with whoever knows what else) and will project over my vision either as a transparent display or I can flip the glasses down to block out extraneous vision.
The only thing you'll have to get used to is if this happens in 10 or 15 year rather than 50...
pithy comment
Virtual reality is already in gear for some people. With the popularity of addicting mass multiplayer online RPG's games, the ability of ordering anything you want from your computer, and advances/availability of high technology such as headgear monitors and full body sensors, virtual reality while on life support cannot be far away. Our generation has been highly involved in the idea of a virtual reality which will make it likely that our future retirement homes will pump us full of drugs, stick us on life support, and stick us in a virtual reality where we assume the role of an able bodied hero.
VPL, IIRC, was sold to Thompson Electronics, and the patents got flung far and wide
This is incorrect, VPL and patents were sold to Sun Microsystems (!) - as referenced in this release - which I am going to reproduce here, as well:
Key Messages for VPL announcement
* Sun has acquired from Thompson CFS and Greenleaf Medical, the complete worldwide rights to the patent portfolio and technical assets of VPL Research -- the pioneer of virtual reality technology and networked 3D graphics.
* Sun will incorporate the technology protected by the VPL patents, which extends beyond virtual reality to networked 3D graphics, human body based input and 3D window systems, in its own Java 3D API and networked 3D graphics products, as well as make the technologies available to partners in the same manner that it makes available technology developed directly by Sun.
* Sun has long been an innovator in the area of virtual reality, 3D graphics, and open standards. The first paper on virtual reality was written in 1965 by current Sun Fellow Ivan Sutherland and Java 3D is rapidly becoming an industry standard. The acquisition strengthens Sun's already strong intellectual property position in 3D graphics technology.
* Virtual reality and networked 3D graphics have impact beyond entertainment (arcades, web-based network games) to areas of MCAD, medical imaging, training and simulation, product development and testing -- any instance where large databases of representative information (often involving multiple senses) are used interactively across a network.
* This acquisition is important to Sun because it involves real-time computer-generated 3D synthetic environments, which many experts believe are rapidly becoming the user interface to the Internet. As this comes to pass, this technology will likely impact most commercial and non-commercial uses of computers for interactive communications in the next decade
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Anne Little 650-786-6702
anne.little@corp.sun.com
Burson-Marsteller for Sun
Jessica Kersey 650-287-4006
jessica_kersey@bm.com
SUN ACQUIRES VIRTUAL REALITY AND NETWORKED 3D GRAPHICS PATENT PORTFOLIO FROM INDUSTRY PIONEER
As Open Standards, These Fundamental Patents will Impact Interactive Consumer and Industrial Communications and Applications
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- February X, 1998 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it has acquired the patent portfolio and other technical assets of the former VPL Research Inc., a pioneering firm in the field of virtual reality and networked 3D graphics, from Thompson CSF and Greenleaf Medical. Under the agreement, Sun has acquired the worldwide rights to more than a dozen key patents and related technologies. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The technology and patents relate to fundamental concepts of virtual reality and networked 3D graphics, including networked computer interaction, datagloves and other computer wearables, image rendering and manipulation, and standards for programming software for virtual
environments. The acquisition represents the latest development in Sun's long history of innovation in virtual reality and networked 3D
graphics. Sun Fellow Ivan Sutherland wrote the first paper on virtual reality in 1965, and Sun's Java 3D API is rapidly becoming an industry standard. In keeping with its policy of developing to and offering open industry standards, Sun intends to incorporate the VPL technologies into the Java 3D model and its other graphics products.
"The pioneering work that VPL Research and its founder Jaron Lanier did in developing virtual reality technology has a substantial carry-over benefit to the types of advanced graphics capabilities that Sun is developing, particularly in networked 3D graphics and 3D window systems, " said Michael Deering, Sun Distinguished Engineer. "As an open systems
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Apparently Virtual Reality is also now being used to treat victims and those present during 9-11, according to this recent news story: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/04/29/spark.virtual/i ndex.html
9/11 Was An Inside Job! http://www.InfoWars.com/