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John Carmack Is Building a Virtual Reality Headset
An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, is using his spare time to develop a modern virtual reality headset. After purchasing such a device last year, Carmack became frustrated with how slowly the technology has progressed over the past twenty years. So, he decided to push it forward himself. PCGamer reports that he's been showing off his prototype behind closed doors at E3 this year, and has an interview with him about the problems with VR and the technical challenges he needs to overcome. They even get a look at the prototype itself, which is currently held together with duct tape."
Years ago I bought a VFX-1 to play Descent2, Flight Unlimited, ATF-NATO and an old Helicopter game who's name escapes me..
From that I gained the insight that VR helmets are less pukey if you have a good solid controller in your hands. Heli games are better applications as down generally remains more or less down.
Until someone solves the puking problem VR helmets aren't much use. The problem was never a lack of pixels. It's lack of coordination between inner ear and visual as well as lack of coordination between parallax distance and focus distance.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'd like to urge Mr. Carmack to consider releasing games that aren't crap, with bits of the map locked via code distributed with the disc to a single purchase.
I'd also like to commend him for releasing his previous engines under the GPL and being an all round cool dude otherwise. id's attitude with RAGE was such a contrast.
Seriously, every time I hear what Carmack is up to Im never disappointed. I hope to emulate his productivity one day. Also with respect to VR, I wish him luck. VR has always been a bitch and I doubt it'll be easy. Though he could potentially push id toward devqeloping VR for the military and thus keeping id above water.
Eat sleep die
Perhaps worthy of a mention - since John Carmack mentions it in several videos as well - is the tentatively named Oculus Rift. It's aiming to be a 'low' budget HMD, and a KickStarter project is set to be launched June 14th.
For more information, see:
http://oculusvr.com/
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14777
( There are more interviews with John Carmack linked to from that thread, and he participates there directly as well. )
He's an amazing programmer that has done more than his fare share of contributing to the world of computer graphics. In a world where everyone is fighting tooth and nail trying to enforce copyrights and patents, he simply released the full source codes to the programs he wrote. That is altruism at its best and for that he is on the very top of my list of awesome programmers.
It's about time. This should have been done 10 years ago, and was but never made it past the novelty stage.
Instead 3D card makers and game makers kept stressing capabilities, making things as pretty as possible at 30fps, whatever that level of complexity was.
Screw that! I want 3D for a game I spend hours "inside" every day.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I also have something to sell, please buy it.
I thought that the point of kickstarter was to help people without endless stacks of cash at their disposal, not fancy, fancy rich folk (regardless of how badass Mr. Carmack is/is not).
There's another video interview with John Carmack about the headset over at giantbomb.com, and doesn't have some of the terrible background noise: http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-john-carmack-interview/17-6164/
He really goes into detail about why he was disappointed with previous headsets, and how he went about making his own and optimizing refresh rates and such.
Next release: Commander Keen: Aliens ate my Nintendo Virtual Boy
Building the headset is the easy part. It's creating something useful to do with it that's hard.
I tried all the first generation gloves-and-goggles systems, including Jaron Lanier's original one. They sucked. Lag between position sensing and graphics generation was huge; you turned your head and waited for the low-pass filters in the position measurement system to settle and the graphics system to catch up. That's no problem to fix today. You really need a frame rate somewhere in the 60-100 range, and, more important, you need low frame latency. A graphics card that's pipelining two frame behind won't do it.
The advantage of goggles is that, with the proper optics, you get an image focused at infinity and a wide screen.
The problem with gloves-and-goggles VR is that manipulation in free space without force feedback sucks. But Carmack is just using this to play Doom, for which it should work fine. (Basic problem with VR without force feedback: you can shoot stuff and drive, but not much else works. Fortunately, shooting stuff and driving covers most of video gaming.) More physically-oriented games, like some of the Kinect stuff, ought to be better. But you absolutely have to have the motion compensation good enough to provide a reliable visual horizon, or your users will fall down.
(The video is embedded in some cheezy ad container with three ad sources, and is considered hostile code by Firefox 12: "[Exception... "'DNTP Redirect Blocked' when calling method: [nsIChannelEventSink::asyncOnChannelRedirect]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "" data: no]". Lame.)
But you get a fancy Live Strong bracelet and a laminated bookmark at the $15 level! It's win-win!
You go first.
I really don't want to get retinal burn-in of something like this! (not goatse, much worse.)
Kudos to whatever troll replaced Jaron Lanier's wikipedia profile picture with that of a Psychlo from the movie Battlefield Earth!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...getting a "Lawnmower Man" vibe out of this?
Hey, thanks for the link.
Interesting project, and I specially like crowdfounded stuff like this.
Thanks again.
-- Counting backwards since 1984!
I'll have my $500 dollars and the cursed Teach Yourself Vrml 2 in 21 Days book in hand waiting to fulfill a young kid's dream! I don't think you'll disappoint Mr. Carmack!
Please note that the Oculus Rift (tentative name - I think actually they're just going for 'Rift' right now) is not John Carmack's project. He's simply showing a keen interest. I guess you could potentially argue that John Carmack could just throw money at them as an expression of that interest, but right now the people behind it aren't asking him to do so.
That said, I agree with your general sentiment - but I'd it's inevitable that companies with oodles of cash will use CrowdFunding or, more likely, CrowdSourcing platforms to do some dirty work for them.
Some people have likened KickStarter to essentially being presales, after all - so a behemoth like EA might use it to gauge interest in 3 different games and then assign funds and personnel accordingly, knowing that there's people who are willing to put forth money and not just random forum posts.
But that's speculation.
... I don't know why someone hasn't taken a small device like a gameboy advance and developed an transparent glasses/display for such things. I've often wanted such a device myself and since the gameboy has gotten so small over the years and display tech pretty advanced
The Sony HMZ-T1 is a little more expensive than this proposed project, it is available now, and with a few tweaks and mods (try this AVS forum) it is a fantastic VR headset. With mods it is very comfortable to wear for long periods of time and the OLED displays are high quality.
I think i read a book about this
According to an engineer who worked on the Sega VR project, there's a very serious problem with this sort of device:
There is a danger with HMDs: the IPD (inter-pupilar distance) must be properly set. IO Glasses gets around this by having a really big aperture. Sega had a thumbwheel to adjust the IPD. Here is the danger: if the IPD for the LCDs are wider than the user IPD, you force the user’s eyes to look outward. This is the opposite of cross-eyed. This can really stress the weak muscles around the eyes, and can cause permanent damage in less than 30 minutes. What I heard was the Sega lawyers brought up the liability issue on the eye damage. That is the reason I heard the project was canceled. Take it with whatever block of salt you want.
Circumcision is child abuse.
he mentions “maybe hidden in some NASA lab there’s something cooler than this, but I haven’t seen it.” That's interesting since I work in a NASA lab that is working on a VR helmet that is considerably better specification wise than this helmet. We won't quite meet his $500 price point, but we are hoping to make it extremely cheap compared to systems of similar capability.
Good to know Carmack didn't disappear with his riches to some virtual island he created by writing 3 lines of code.
:)
On the serious side, if anyone should be at the helm in changing the way gaming is done, its Carmack. Unless he was on some crazy drugs when he thought up how to do real 3D with quake.. then we might need to all chip in and get him some new "inspiration."
Carmack is without doubt an intelligent guy, but I can't help being constantly distracted from what he is saying by his constant, out-of-context use of "on there" and "on here". A nervous tic perhaps? Not one I've noticed in other interviews I seen of him.
Courtesy of the Museum of Horrifying Technology, 666 Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, IL.
"And this example right here is the SEGA VR headset from 1992, we like to call it "the Ringu" because any time someone uses it, a little Japanese girl shows up and kills them in an ironic and disturbing manner. We don't know why? Apparently they thought it was an important feature. Now over here, we have the VR headset that makes you go blind and bleed from your nose."
Good luck John. You're going to need it.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
I'm surprised, well only a bit surprised he would bother with this. Even with a good VR headset, you still need an actual application made specifically for it. You will NOT be playing all the latest FPS games with it, that is for sure. You could, but does the term "keyboard warrior" ring any bells??? VR is a fucking gimmick as far as the head tracking part of it goes. The product "TrackIR" is probably as good as it's going to get. When he starts talking about holodecks, then I'll be interested. But then he has always been pretty disconnected with gamers. That's what everyone else at iD was for....
Is he going to use any of his previous games like Wolf3D, DOOM, etc.? ;)
I tried one of those dedicated VR headsets in college. Ugh, they were heavy and annoying. It was a shooter game. I don't remember its name.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFZCgNBxkcM
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I've always wondered: does VR not work with just one screen for both eyes? I know there is important depth queues from both eyes, but I've wondered if there's some reason why a cheaper version couldn't be made with just one view point in front of both eyes, or even just cover one eye. Seems to me like it would still be immersive as long as the latency and tracking issues are addressed , like mentioned in the interview...
or would that cause eye strain and/or nausea ?
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Awesome private trip into space without any of that getting blown to bits problem!
Lot cheaper too..
So I guess he DID learn something from DOOM 3? - rimshot
Red Green would be proud!
Replace the gyros & accelerometers with a 3d camera system (like the kinect) mounted to the goggles. Use the change in view and distances to "static objects" to figure out the position and orientation of the head. gyros are only going to give you good data for orientation, a stereoscopic camera systems will let you move your head up or down or side to side to see around objects and will add to the realness.
After all mounting a stereoscopic camera systems is going to be a next step for augmented reality use anyway so why not use it to track head position and kill 2 birds with one piece of hardware.
The question is can it be tracked with low enough latency and accurately enough, I suspect it can.
(When i say "static objects" I mean any point that appears to not be moving aka ignore objects going by a car window for example. yup Head tracking via stereoscopic view should work in moving vehicles unlike a gyro/accelerometers based system.)