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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?"
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.
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.
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
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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?
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
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
That's not true at all. You're only crosseyed if your eyes are focusing on a close common point. If each eye is looking at a different screen, how close that point is is up to the software.
The whole point of 3D displays is to allow you to forget that your viewing surface is less than three feet away. If each screen held an identical image, and was aligned properly, then that image would appear to the user to be at an infinite distance.
The only part of your eye that's focusing on a near surface is are the muscles controlling the lens. If you want to test for strain there, try taking two identical wallet photos, taping or gluing them to a piece of paper at a center-to-center distance equal to that of your eyes, and put that close to your face. Then try aiming your eyes to converge at infinity.
Your lens is perfectly capable of focusing independently of the aim of your eyes; I do it all the time, and suffer no ill effects.
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You're right. Okay, here's one I found after some googling.
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"
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
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