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The Road To VR
An anonymous reader writes "Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood has posted about how much progress we've made toward commercially viable virtual reality gaming — and how far we have to go. The Oculus Rift headset is technologically brilliant compared to anything we'd have before, but Atwood says there are still a number of problems to solve. Quoting: 'It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience. ... Demos are great, but there aren't many games in the Steam Store that support VR today, and the ones that do support VR can feel like artificially tacked on novelty experiences. I did try Surgeon Simulator 2013 which was satisfyingly hilarious. ... VR is a surprisingly anti-social hobby, even by gamer standards, which are, uh low. Let me tell you, nothing is quite as boring as watching another person sit down, strap on a headset, and have an extended VR "experience". I'm stifling a yawn just thinking about it. ... Wearing a good VR headset makes you suddenly realize how many other systems you need to add to the mix to get a truly great VR experience: headphones and awesome positional audio, some way of tracking your hand positions, perhaps an omnidirectional treadmill, and as we see with the Crystal Cove prototype, an external Kinect style camera to track your head position at absolute minimum.' Atwood also links to Michael Abrash's VR blog, which is satisfyingly technical for those interested in the hardware and software problems of VR."
What would you consider virtual reality? A direct neural interface that simulates all senses like in the Matrix, or just putting some headset that shows a high-res screen before each eye, plus headphones?
The articles were filled with very optimistic visions of a VR future that was "coming soon"
I worked for Disney Imagineering R&D at the time, so money was available to buy some stuff and play with it
We bought the "state of the art" system, and hooked it up..it was not super impressive
When we showed it to the President of WDI, he said "don't show this to anybody else, it makes us look bad"
Years, and many millions of dollars later, we managed to create our own VR headmount display and opened "Imagineering VR Lab" at Epcot
It was better, but still nowhere near lived up to the hype
They have accelerators in the headset. It doesn't do much good when at times the head can move at constant velocity. For sensing gravity and rotational movement, it works well, but translation movement is impossible to do reliably with accelerators lacking any sort of frame of reference.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Exactly, I believe Oculus's crystal cove prototype from this year's CES used a combination of accelerometers and the tracking camera to keep the accelerometers synchronized with their true position. In the final version they said the camera probably won't even be necessary anymore, but just this prototype version still requires it.
It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC
Granted, but then again, a lot of particular prominent, even more special purpose successes require a pretty big commitment. Rock band did well and no one is going to claim it's trivial to whip out the guitars and drumset. Granted their success did not endure, but primarily because the experience lacked sufficient variety, it did show people were committed to go through some hoops. Similarly, *really* sitting down to enjoy a feature length movie requires some commitment (doing so without commitment is possible, but much less enjoyable.
there aren't many games in the Steam Store that support VR today
And there weren't many games that supported accelerated 3D graphics when 3dfx voodoo came out. Being too discouraged by that leads to a chicken and egg situation. It's probably also off putting that the set of available titles are at best adaptations of existing games or very basic things. The reason being that the quality games take longer and as such are still in progress (Star Citizen is one I'm really looking forward to). Crystal Cove demonstrates they will have capabilities the dev kits aren't even equipped to help publishers prepare for yet. Oculus is doing the only thing that might have a chance, building up a lot of excitement and coming in at an approachable price point to try to break the chicken and egg situation.
Having your eyes so close to the screens means the display is effectively very low resolution.
This is one area that has me pretty worried and waiting (that and the availability of good positional sensing). I'm really hoping they will be able to use at least a 2560x1440 OLED display (thanks to the mobile resolution pissing contest, Samsung looks ready to announce a shipping product with 2560x1440 at 5.2", 560 ppi seems very promising to construct a display out of, even if magnified).
VR is a surprisingly anti-social hobby, even by gamer standards
Very, very rarely is gaming remotely entertaining to mere observers. A lot of very popular things are *always* equally anti-social (texting, reading books, listening to music on headphones, pretty much doing *anything* on a smartphone or even tablet, laptop, or computer).
Notice how quickly we get into geez-this-is-a-lot-of-equipment territory.
The same can be true of racing or flying games, but that doesn't stop the vast majority of people making do with simpler controls. Just because you *can* take things very far at a very high price, doesn't mean you have to. The external tracking of the head is going to be baked into the headset cost (and not that expensive, as Kinect has shown) Headphones are straightforward as is positional audio in the headphone situation. Beyond eyewear and headphones, things get optional pretty fast. Wiimote-grade tracking for hands I certainly see as a big value add, but things start falling off real fast beyond that (the treadmill I'm skeptical would do anything to pull me that much more in as I think it would still feel very very off, but would wear me out greatly).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...or something like that. Even if VR isn't quite up to spec yet, this would be a great way to get people in front of the Oculus &c. that aren't willing to shell out cash on pre-release hardware and software. That's how a lot of my friends and I got into games when we were kids - we'd go try them out at LAN cafes in town. With an investment into all of the stuff the article mentions - the omni-directional treadmill, the advanced sound system, and the headset of course - you could probably set up an hourly rate that makes the investment back pretty quickly just out of curious people.
Then when it gets really good - higher resolution, or maybe even Caprica level - upgrade to that and you'll be busy forever.
Relying entirely on accelerometers and gyroscopes works for a very brief amount of time, before suffering from massive drift.
What Oculus is doing is relying on the onboard tracker for low-latency real-time data, and using the external camera to correct for drift.
I got my rift a few weeks ago, and haven't had too much time to play with it yet, but these are my findings. The experience is truly quite new and incomparable to any non-stereo 3D tech, it is much more immersive, yet also very intense! Many game genres, like flightsims, space-fighters, etc, will no longer be relaxing, or even enjoyable the way they are on 2D screens, simply because it is now almost a real simulator. You will get sick, and you will need hours/days/months of training to be able to cope with the new level of realism. The stereo 3D images, combined with head-tracking, are now feeding much more info to your brain than just a visual scene, it's telling your brain you should be feeling G-forces (that the inner ear obviously doesn't register), and it can give you a very bad disembodied feeling when you don't see your arms or body when looking down. With the current oculus rift dev kit, you also still feel like you're looking at the world through a gas mask or hazmat suit or the likes, resolution is quite low, and you clearly see pixels. Even though it doesn't weigh too much, you will feel its weight on your cheekbones after a while too. I had no problem with the cables. For playing existing games, without native rift support, there are currently two "drivers" (read directx wrappers), that double render the scene in stereo and map and distort it for viewing on the rift, and also adjust the view transform in accordance with the head-tracking. (Vorpx (commercial), and Vireio (free oss)). Of course this doesn't work well for all games and genres, but it is very nice to be able to check out your favorite games this way. The most disturbing and nauseating things are the silliest things, like when the games loads and the scene freezes, or a cut-scene comes up with limited camera freedom, a HUD that requires you to refocus on a different plane, etc.. Of course it does have advantages too, like you can now turn off the guidance-lines in racing games that tell you when to brake etc, because now you'll FEEL you can't possibly take that turn at those speeds. First-person games are a lot more immersive than third-person games, which feel a bit weird when controlling a single character and viewing it from behind. Half-Life 2 (with buggy native support) did give the best experience for me so far, when Alyx first appears, it really feels like she is standing right in front of you. Quite amazing indeed. Overall you really feel like you're in the HL world, only thing killing it atm is the low resolution. Anyway, imho, VR-tech should be around, but it will always exist side-by-side with watching a traditional screen, it will not replace it, at least not in its current state.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...
"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that âoeruns on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.â Fiction â" with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions â" offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other peopleâ(TM)s thoughts and feelings. The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters."
Also: http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/you...
I'm not saying choose one or the other. I'm just asking, overall, at its best, and perhaps after the novelty has worn off, how does the level of engagement compare between immerse VR and a good "page turner" novel? Which do you feel better about afterwards?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.