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.

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

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

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 ;)