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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!
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.
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.
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
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
What about the patent Sony has on the Matrix-esque technology?
If VR porn doesn't show up then this technology will never reach the masses.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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
A tip for posting around here...if you're going to claim that something that isn't common knowledge has been proved, you'll need to cite your source, preferably with a hyperlink.
Otherwise, nobody's likely to take you seriously.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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
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
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.
You're right. Okay, here's one I found after some googling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
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
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
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.
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.