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."

Comments

Very Pukey.

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Very Pukey.

[DigiShaman]

That feeling you got was from the low optical refresh rate for each eye. Similar to the sick building syndrome where you have faulty fluorescent lighting ballasts. The Nintendo Virtual Boy suffered the same problem with its low oscillating mirror rate.

Oculus Rift - 'low' budget HMD - soon@KickStarter

[QuasiSteve]

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. )

Another Interview Here

[Scorpinox]

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.

Re:Sony HMZ-T1 available now

[Anonymous Coward]

He specifically tried the HMZ-T1, but he found it lacking.
http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen/419167#419167

Re:John Carmack

[equex]

I don't know about the rest of Carmack's codebase, but I successfully compiled Doom 3 and disabled the serial key checker in the source. The code was well organized and I had most of the structure figured out within minutes. Great work. It's all there. Physics, lights, you name it. (except the reverse Carmack, it's replaced by a modified patch by him.)