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How Virtual Reality Became Reality
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has an in-depth report on the development of the Oculus Rift, telling the story of the tech and its creators from conception to present. Quoting: 'That's because Oculus has found a way to make a headset that does more than just hang a big screen in front of your face. By combining stereoscopic 3-D, 360-degree visuals, and a wide field of view—along with a supersize dose of engineering and software magic—it hacks your visual cortex. As far as your brain is concerned, there's no difference between experiencing something on the Rift and experiencing it in the real world. "This is the first time that we've succeeded in stimulating parts of the human visual system directly," says Abrash, the Valve engineer. "I don't get vertigo when I watch a video of the Grand Canyon on TV, but I do when I stand on a ledge in VR." ... The hardware problems have been solved, the production lines are almost open, and the Rift will be here soon. After that it's anybody's guess. "I've written 2 million lines of code over the past 20 years, and now I'm starting from a blank page," Carmack says. "But the sense that I'm helping build the future right now is palpable."'"
Here's how it happened:
2 decades passed since the last time they tried this shit and failed. Now they're trying this shit again, and they'll fail again. People don't want to wear headgear for their media consumption. "VR" (stereoscopic 3D on a head-mounted display) will be a massive flop in the mass consumer market, as always.
VR will continue to be marginally useful for specific uses such as 3D imaging for medical, military, or industrial applications, as it always has been. It will continue to get marginally better, extremely expensive upgrades that take it from HUDs to glasses to headgear to actual VR. It will do this outside of the 20 year abortion cycle that the mass consumer market sees.
The Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus are abortions in progress.
Since the Oculus Ruft now has a certain backer, I'm looking at alternatives:
http://www.roadtovr.com/castar...
I was the same way about Windows 8, but since it was only a $20 upgrade from Windows 7 I took the plunge. Now it is only mild nausea and a case of the douche chills when I have to use the terms "Charms Bar".
Valve has no plans to produce their own hardware. And Michael Abrash, who was at the core of Valves VR research, is now working for Oculus.
2000000/(365.25*20) = 273.785 lines per day; 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year.
If we assume a very heavy work schedule of 3000 hours per year, approx 60 hours per week, that's 66.667 lines per hour of fully debugged working code. Seems a bit of an over-estimate to me. (Exaggerate? I don't know the meaning of the word!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Total bullshit.
Total bullshit.
You could have said exactly the same things about the upgrade from movies to 3D movies, or from pictures to movies, and they would be just exactly as true as they are here.
Have you worn an Oculus? No, you haven't. Which is why you think it is an 'abortion'. I have spent the better part of a year with an early development kit and I can tell you it's already a highly entertaining experience that will only get better over time.
> People don't want to wear headgear for their media consumption.
People don't want to watch a wall-mounted rectangle for their media consumption. Both are asinine statements. Anyway, VR isn't so much about consuming media. It's about being part of an interactive experience that can't be replicated any other way.
> 2 decades passed since the last time they tried this shit and failed.
Yes, it was super expensive back then, there was next to no content and the overall experience was absolutely horrible by anyone's standards.
So what's different this time? Technology has improved immensely. Field of view is much larger, latency is way down, resolution is way up, and weight is a small fraction of the early headsets. Oh, also most households already have the computers necessary to drive a decent VR experience. And content? It's coming. There are thousands of 3d games that can benefit from VR with only a few months of additional development effort and hundreds of new titles already being built. Furthermore, VR headsets will be in the same price range as a typical game console or high end video card. It is now right in the cross-hairs of the mainstream digital consumer.
I can think of one difference right off the bat. In the real world your eyes converge on the distant object and each eye's lens has to focus to the distance that object is from you. In any 3D tv or headset, the eyes will do the converging part, but nobody has figured out a way to trick the eyeball into focusing at the correct depth yet. In a TV or screen, your eye will focus at that surface. In a head mounted display the focus depth may be out a bit from where the actual screen is due to the way the lenses in the head mount change the focal depth of the apparent display, but your eyes focus there and not on the 3D object you are looking at.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
The basic problem with VR is that your eyes (and your ears and any other senses the VR kit is acting on) are telling you you are moving in a certain way yet your balance organs are telling you something completly different.
Thats why it will give you motion sickness and cause other problems. And why, unless Occulus have come up with some brand new trick to tweak your balance organs (which I doubt they have), it will never really be able to work.