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Carmack On VR Latency
An anonymous reader writes "For a while now, John Carmack has been pushing to bring virtual reality technology back to the gaming world. VR was largely abandoned over a decade ago when it became apparent that the hardware just wasn't ready to support it. In 2013, things are different; cheap displays with a high pixel density and powerful processors designed for small systems are making virtual reality a... reality. One of the last obstacles to be conquered is latency — the delay between moving your head and seeing your perspective change in the virtual world. In a lengthy and highly-technical post at #AltDevBlogADay, Carmack has outlined a number of strategies for mitigating and reducing latency. With information and experience like this being shared with the game development community at large, it shouldn't be long until VR makes a permanent place for itself in our gaming lives."
Dactyl Nightmare
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
tick-tack, 15 minutes are up
One: laser ring gyros instead of mechanical accelerometer or visual head tracking systems
two: Render a frame larger than FOV and digitally move that before the next frame is rendered.
Not hard.
You mean "Tock"?
Also, VR will make a massive comback if, as I suspect, Google Glass takes off and competitors crop up. This isn't a new idea, since Steve Mann has been wired for VR since, what? The 80's? I think its time has come.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
.... I can't help thinking this
Surely any dedicated gamer would see the value in simply injecting a thickening agent into the endolymph of the Vestibular system. With careful dose control, that should induce a matching lag in the perception of motion, thus providing a highly realistic experience!
*Ability to walk and/or perform normal ocular saccades not guaranteed, please refrain from the use of industrial silicones in medical applications.
There has been 3D movies for decades, (50s or 60s... to lazy to check) but just recently the technology allow it to became mainstream.
Maybe it's time for a VR grand comeback.
(... I'm still waiting for my holosuite...)
Stanford has an elaborate VR lab. The system is 120FPS, and the lag is low, but I'm not sure how low. There's full motion tracking of the subject in a 20 foot by 20 foot space. They have public tours every Friday. Sign up and try high-end VR.
This isn't a graphics lab. It's a psychology lab. Some of the results are scary. They've had kids go through a VR experience of swimming with sharks. A few weeks later, the kids are asked about it, and a sizable fraction of them believe they really did it, adding details that were not in the sim like what they ate while visiting the sharks.
They're always running psychology experiments, and looking for volunteers. Pays $15/hr.
How can they not talk about Carmack's chosen one? This seems to be the best hope for affordable VR for the masses.
http://www.oculusvr.com/
Oh, yeah. Michael Abrash did this two months ago.
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I remember the commercials for Disney's Epcot Innoventions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtVLev7YlL0
Those VR helmets were HEAVY as a little kid and boy did I look like a dork. Let's hope these modern VR headsets look more stylish and very light...
Fixed floating div down left takes up silly number of pixels. Why make it fixed to the screen rather than scroll with the page?
I have an eMagin OLED head mounted display with motion tracking that was fantastic with the games of the time. The problem was that it depended on support from Nvidia, which they dropped with the very next driver release to force people to use displays from their new partner, screwing everyone who paid ~$1,000 for the HMD.
I don't see spending a lot on an HMD ever again if it means I have to trust Nvidia to not screw me again.
Google Glass doesn't have anything to do with VR. You are confusing it with Augmented Reality.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I remember when everyone suddenly got excited about virtual reality in the early 1990s. Of course, back then it was more the concept and the possibilities that triggered peoples' imaginations- actual VR systems and games did exist at that time, but were never really widespread, probably due to the limitations and cost of the then-current technology and the fact it was essentially a novelty.
:-O
One commentator, however, said something that has stuck with me ever since. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of...
"Eventually the current fad for Virtual Reality will pass, and everyone will forget about it. Then one day you'll look around you and realise that it's everywhere."
(*) If you remember it too, then yes- it really *was* that long ago
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The two aren't related, but think of it from the public's perspective. Both are wearable computing devices that give you extra data - one is just see through. They are designed for different uses and different environments, but if you got a trial pair of Google Glasses with your new iNexusDroid Touch 9S, you would probably be less wary about buying Oculus Rift (or however it's spelled). And if you played with your brother's VR games, you would be less uncomfortable with wearing always-on computer glasses than if you hadn't.
A major kill point for most technology is "Do people dismiss it out of hand because they think it's too far-fetched and looks too stupid to outweigh the gain they see from it." If multiple forms of bulky, face-mounted[!] wearable computing show up at the same time, it will be a lot easier for any of them to last.
incidentally Google Glass has very little to do with AR. Its just a transparent 320x200 (or less) resolution display with camera for your phone :/
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
VR just doesn't work. It has been tried and tried and tried and tried. The problems are intractable. Put a non-balanced significant weight on the head, and people will suffer excruciating neck pain and head-aches UNLESS they have reason to keep their head still and in one position. Balance the weight of the VR screen with counter-balances around the head, and you produce a hideous unwieldy 'helmet' that will still cause neck-pain when the head is 'snapped'.
Even bulky headphones have this issue, and they have the convenience of 'input sensors' on the sides of the head. You are ONLY going to want to wear heavy headphones if you intend to have limited fast head movements.
Since most VR systems need to be 'goggle-like', you have the issue of 'claustrophobia' of the eyes, and a local atmospheric environment around the eyes that rapidly becomes VERY uncomfortable.
These are the mechanical problems, and they are horrible for the gamer. It is no coincidence that military flight simulators do NOT use VR goggles, even though they have the funds to do so.
However, even if the gamer is willing to sacrifice his body, and suffer through the physical pain and discomfort, there is a far bigger issue- latency. VR systems need to emulate the latency we experience in the real world, and this is impossible. The displays are far too slow and unresponsive. The games have vastly worse latency today than at the birth of 3D acceleration via 3DFX, because they need to decouple the input loop from the render system. Even id's games were dropped from professional gamer contests (replaced by 'Painkiller') because Carmack was a pioneer of 'online' FPS games, where you are lucky if you get 10 poorly synced inputs a second across a network. Online requires the game 'predicts' most of the input, and samples actual input at a far slower rate than the animation is depicted onscreen.
Only a complete MORON will now say "code the games differently for VR". Who is going to pay for that? No AAA publisher would do something so stupid. You see, modern games now render using a high-latency pipeline, with some work for future frames being calculated before the current frame is even done. It is ESSENTIAL that the input loop is low frequency compared to the render system.
Carmack works on the basis that noddy games can be knocked together that sample input at the screen refresh rate of 60Hz or whatever. This is true, but who wants VR for noddy trash? Even these improved latencies will make any VR system feel 'laggy' when you make rapid head movements. Carmack's VR proposal is a stupid toy proposed by a bored and very irrelevant industry figure. It has the same lasting value as his rubbish games for phones- high gimmicks that are forgotten a month later. Or his dreadful 'mega-texture' idea that boosts the expense and complexity of producing graphics by more than a factor of ten, without producing any noticeable quality boosts over normal asset streaming techniques and advanced texture tessellation.
Latency is only an issue if you plan on rendering from the user's perspective as the head is moved. If the entire field of vision is calibrated per user i.e the highest the person can tilt their head up, down, left and right; then all that needs to be done is for the entire environment to be constantly rendered by the software and the image being seen by the user will change by head tracking only. This will make the delay almost undetectable. You are welcome John Carmack.
Numerous studies showed that extended use of VR could cause severe problems, namely permanent lazy eye (loss of depth perception). I believe it was Nintendo that dropped a VR product because of their own studies (I'm too tired to go look for the data at the moment). Government studies also found this to be true, so working in VR in Government jobs is restricted (or was when I was there) to 8 hours per week.
More studies need to be done to determine safe levels, and most importantly people should be made aware of the potential risks to health. Currently there are no warnings that I'm aware of and most people have no knowledge of the studies.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Its like the Wii, its awesome for a little bit, but at some point your just going to want to sit down and play a game like normal. Thats kind of like the way VR is, its awesome ... then it becomes more and more of an inconvenience, then one day you clean off your desk cause the damn gear, is in your way.
If you've played Nintendo Land on the Wii U you've seen this problem basically solved: you look around by moving the Wii Pad as though it were a window, and there's no latency problems at all (unlike with the Wii, thankfully). Just shrink down the display and make it head-mountable.
I wonder if they can combine it with the unlimited detail rendering technology developed in OZ.. That would be kick-ass
Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4
"Tick", hyphen, "tack"? Your 3D printed clock sounds like junk.
But his breath is minty fresh.
we can crash someones brain with a QR code.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
incidentally Google Glass has very little to do with AR. Its just a transparent 320x200 (or less) resolution display with camera for your phone :/
Having a display at a constant spot in your field of view, and a camera perfectly aligned with your field of view, doesn't give you possibilities to quite immersively augment your perception of reality? Come again?
After playing RAGE, I'm pretty sure whatever Carmack is doing at the moment, it's about 10 years out of date.
incidentally Google Glass has very little to do with AR. Its just a transparent 320x200 (or less) resolution display with camera for your phone :/
Having a display at a constant spot in your field of view, and a camera perfectly aligned with your field of view, doesn't give you possibilities to quite immersively augment your perception of reality? Come again?
not if the display is in the corner of your eye instead of overlapping said reality
but hey, Im sure that wont stop Google from redefining AR to "reality with some subtitles in the corner"
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
You mean "Tock"?
Also, VR will make a massive comback if, as I suspect, Google Glass takes off and competitors crop up. This isn't a new idea, since Steve Mann has been wired for VR since, what? The 80's? I think its time has come.
You are confusing VR with AR. Augmented reality systems like Google Glass simply overlay information about our environment in our visual field -- it doesn't replace reality like a VR system is supposed to, it just augments it. Augmenting reality *is* trivial, and the solutions are easily within the domain of current and near-term forseeable engineering technology. Functional VR, otoh, means directly interfacing with the proprioception/kinesthesia network in human neural anatomy that tells the brain what the body is doing in relation to other objects in the mental model of the environment. Modeling those other objects is trivial, as most VR researchers, including Carmack, will assert, but VR researchers are going to also have to figure out how to intercept, decode, modulate and retransmit the electrical impulses traversing the PK network that represent your body's position relative to those objects, which is decidedly non-trivial, especially while suppressing the original signals telling your brain that you are actually motionless, and even more especially doing it in a reversible way. These solutions, IMHO, require way more knowledge of human neural anatomy than we presently have, and will require the invention of new bio-engineering technologies to exploit it once we have that knowledge. AR has a distinct market advantage right now, so I'm certain Carmack and other VR researchers will turn their ingenuity to AR and away from VR, once they realize this.
Seriously, though: as a longtime admirer, I have to say his genius would be better used in gaming if he rid himself of the albatross known as id.
Imagine what he could do in any number of R&D areas if he didn't have to ship games bogged down by boring narratives, bland level design and twenty-year old ideas of corridor-based run-and-gun.
I wish he'd turn his attention to improving AI and developing emergent gaming. The next frontier awaits, but our Einstein is bent on rendering the same old mousetrap in ever higher fidelity.
It's not like Google magically broke you jackass. Here is one page, and here is another. When reading that second one, remember what is discussed in the first. Also follow the links in the first article. The Government studies are harder to find, but do exist.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.