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?"

Comments

come on..

[peculiarmethod]

We've been through this.. the most impressive VR advancements are going on at general motors, outside of the military training programs. read more

One major bottleneck:

[sniepre]

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.

Re:One major bottleneck:

[sbaker]

> Basically, with a visor, you're staring at a screen a few inches
> from your nose for a protacted period of time. Focusing on that is
> not fun;

I work in flight simulation - we have VERY good VR helmets. The light fed into your eyes is 'collimated' - meaning that the light rays from the video display are stuffed through some optics so that they emerge as PARALLEL rays of light rather than rays eminating radially outwards from each point on the screen.

Collimating the light is the key to avoiding the problem you describe - and it works perfectly. We also employ big curved display screens that wrap all around your face - so it's not like looking at two tiny squares in front of your face - you can swivel your eyeballs and look to either side, up and down.

You can see our VR helmet at http://www.link.com/ - you can even buy one if you can afford the price of a pretty decent Ferrari.

The only problem with collimated displays it that when something *IS* close to you in the virtual world, it seems that it's too far away - however, because we project a slightly different image into each eye, your brain does a pretty good job of recognising when things are close by noting how much your eyes have to cross to fuse the two images into one.

There was one very small remaining problem - you couldn't see your own nose! You'd be amazed at just how weird that is (unless of course you happen to have lost your nose in some kind of tragic accident!). A small piece of plastic built into the display at a strategic point fixed that nicely.

The display is crisp and bright and each display can be driven by either one PC or an entire render farm to get realtime realism that can be almost arbitarily good.

The helmet can easily incorporate one of any number of head tracker technologies depending on whether or not a magnetically neutral or acoustically reasonable environment is available to allow different kinds of tracker to work accurately.

So - the helmet problem is completely, 100% solved...except for the price.

Tech Limitations

[Effugas]

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

Hiro Protagonist

[antifret]

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.

Re:RIP

[NanoGator]

"Nintendo killed it when they released the Virtual Boy."

Bullshit. That's like saying Enterprise killed the lauching of Titans in Cape Canaveral.

Here's a few questions for you all:

1.) How many of you actaully played anything based on Virtual Reality? (If no, did you ever even have an OPPORTUNITY to play VR?)

2.) Of those of you that have, did you actually have any fun?

3.) Did any of you enjoy paying $5 for a minute of entertainment?

4.) Did VR bring you an interesting gaming experience that you couldn't have enjoyed better?

5.) Was it anything like Hollywood?

Here, I'll answer my own questions:

1.) Yes, I have. They set up a VR arcade at a mall near where I lived.

2.) No. I had to wait in line, put on this bulky ass equipment and visor that detected my motion. Despite being weighed down so much, not a lot more was offered than I could have gotten on my PC. I could turn my head and look any direction. Unfortunately, the tracking on it was primitive. (I could have dismissed that, though, because technology always gets better.) Sadly, I had cables running down the back of my head that made me feel like Dave Lister. Whenever I turned my head I was AWARE of the cables and it limited my movement. The display used color LCD and it was in stereo. Let me tell you something, the Virtual Boy was definitely not to everybody's taste, but at least it produced a clear stereo image. LCDs have a quirk that a row of single color LEDs dont: It takes 3 sub-pixels to make one color. An all red screen with an LCD looks a little like a checkerboard. When you magnify it, then put one over each eye, it looks like you're looking through a screen door. The VB may have been headache inducing for a lot of people, but color would NOT have solved that. It would have made it worse. Increasing the DPI of LCDs would help significantly, but they also have to be really small to work. In short, it was hard to see what you were looking at. Believe it or not, it would have been a LOT easier to see if they DIDN'T have that stereo component.

There was a belt around my waist that detected which way my body was facing. Pivot your body, and you're turning left and right. However, that stupid cable problem was there... again. (Not to mention that it was heavy.) Try turning 720 degrees and then trying to step over the cable you can't see because you have Laforge's 2 decade old visor over your head. On top of that, there was a safety railing around the play area that was easy to bump into. Ugh. Imagine playing Q3 with that setup.

There was a handheld unit for firing. Basically, you held your hand out like a gun, that's how you aimed. That's also how you walked. So despite being in "Virtual Reality!!!", you had to turn your body, then use your thumb to run. I mentioned primitive tracking before...

Did I have fun? No. Even if I were more athletic, it was still hard to play. When I saw Lawnmower Man, I thought I'd get in this rig and have a new exciting game experience. Nopers. Not even close.

3.) Fuck no. Truth be told, if this thing were in my house where I could play it all I wanted, I doubt it would have lasted more than a few days before being sold or stored. Even the geek in me couldn't love this thing.

4.) I'm hard pressed to think of a game that would have benefitted from this. Even with perfect tracking, no wires, and gloves, there's still the limit of having to stand in a particular area. Even a room to walk around in would have been problematic.

5.) No. Even today, I can't imagine somebody could build a VR unit that was as exciting as what we've seen in Hollywood.

My opinion on Virtual Reality was soured BEFORE the VB actually came out. Frankly, the Virtual Boy was a lot better experience. It had a good stereoscopic display, *and* the games could still be fun because they used tried-and-true controls we all loved. The

huh?

[cr0sh]

The game wasn't much fun (shooting a pterodactyl)

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...

Re:Tech Limitations, & some interesting phenom

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

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 ;)