Virtual Reality Getting its Own Network?

loganrapp writes "We've all watched the Matrix, and regardless of how we felt about them, the concept of plugging into a virtual reality appeals greatly to us. It appears that a nonprofit group called the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies plans to build a network purely for virtual reality. Its name? Neuronet, and the first generation is planned for 2007, with "consumer applications" planned for 2009. There is some fear, however, that the whole thing is a scam."

Comments

Re:huh?

[garcia]

Well, that's why we have Internet2... It's so that the data transmission speeds are faster and better research is possible. So while it seems pointless overall, they have a decent idea.

Why do *they* need to do this? I haven't a clue. I just don't see how VR applications are important enough to the rest of the world to have a separate network just for it.

Not a chance

[slimjim8094]

Bah, I say. This is about as likely to happen in 2007 as DNF being released.

They talk about "not enough bandwidth" to transmit the necessary information.

But wait, there's more! There are so many unanswered questions. How do you connect (not by DSL or cable!)? What's the interface? Does it run on a computer, or a separate appliance?

On another note, this should not make references to the Matrix. It's nothing more than a Second Life, with lower entry requirements (for the providers, of course)

Cyberpunk much?

[deadhammer]

Neuronet eh? I think a group of researchers got a little too much into the Neal Stephenson and William Gibson novels. Wonder if it's going to be open to the public, I've got some Shadowrun hacking fantasies I've been dying to act out.

"Not enough bandwidth"

[jd]

This is a common complaint amongst Internet 2 users and is even to be heard from facilities on the European-wide gigabit network. And these are far from being as network-intensive as MMORGs would be if you had comparable screen resolution and frame rates.

So we're looking at 10 gigabits/second minimum, for the kind of really heavy-duty traffic we're talking about, for any reasonable number of servers on that network. There's plenty of dark fiber around and I believe that the record for 200+ mile distances over fiber is in the order of around 4 or 5 petabytes/second. The backbone isn't going to be a technological problem, then. It would be damn expensive to light up enough to cover even as small a region as the United States, but it isn't impossible.

But that's the backbone. How do you get that traffic into people's homes? We're barely at the point of getting people to pay for single gigabit connections, never mind ten gigabit ethernet drops. The NICs are not exactly cheap either. And it's not just any old PC that can sustain a data stream through the PCI bus at those kinds of rates. You're looking at a fairly expensive piece of machinery, and one that is to be used not just solely for games (gaming machines are always expensive) but solely for games on that network. The more you use it for anything else, the less return you get for your investment.

Do I think this is a hoax? Yes. Because it's impossible? No, it could be done. But either it won't be done well enough to be worth having a new network for it, OR it will be too expensive for gamers.

On the other hand, a high-performance VR network for the scientific community, an order or two in magnitude faster than anything currently out there, could be done tomorrow and you're damn right that DARPA, CERN and the other Really Big League users could afford to pay the connection charges. Compared to the cost of the LHA in Switzerland, a ten gig drop per office in these labs that went to a secure petabyte trans-atlantic backbone would look like chump change.

Give a give a give a give a Garmin

[tepples]

If I'm going to be using a VR-type setup, nothing is going to ruin the experience as well as typing a domain name!

Think of it as like typing a street name into your GPS receiver.

Re:Sounds bogus to me.

[networkBoy]

Re: TCI/IP over gigabit: "their efficiency is poor and in some cases really quite pathological."

Damn I've never hear a better discription of those issues and I was at the commercial R&D birth of 802.11 gig PHYs (7 years ago...)
We knew that there were packet issues and such, but just getting decent protocol analyzers and such (SMB2000 IX1600) was a PITA for about the first year and a half. Broadcom's fuck-up of the spec on their first gen parts was no help either (but hey, anything to get to market first right?)

Even bypassing TCP/IP, the 802.11 spec has a ton of latency built into it, hence the popularity of Myrinet for some apps, in spite of the absurd per-port costs.
-nB