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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?"
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.
Ah, the irony. I love my job.
- The ArchitectWith 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
This all seems so very real. You didn't even notice the transition did you?
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?
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.
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
As Dennis Miller is reported to have said, "When some unemployed punk in Trenton, New Jersey can buy a plug-in for $29.95 that allows him to make love to Cindy Crawford, Virtual Reality is going to make crack look like Sanka."
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
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:
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
"Derp de derp."
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