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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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
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!