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John Carmack's Oculus Connect Keynote Probably Had Samsung Cringing
An anonymous reader writes John Carmack, famed keystone developer of 3D networked gaming, has now been working with virtual reality company Oculus for over a year. Much of that time has been spent collaborating with Samsung on the forthcoming Gear VR headset. At his keynote presentation during Oculus Connect, Carmack took to the stage with 90 unscripted minutes of no holds barred discussion of the last 12 months in VR. 'I believe pretty strongly in being very frank and open about flaws and limitations so this is kind of where I go off message a little bit from the standard PR plan and talk very frankly about things,' he said to applause from the audience.
He kept scraping the chalkboard with his Samsung Galaxy S5.
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It means tracking translation. The Gear VR tracks your head's rotation but not translation which triggers a reflex in your brain that causes nausea.
Basically the brain knows that your head moved a certain way and what your eyes see doesn't match that. In turn, your brain decides that the only explanation is that you've been poisoned and makes you want to hurl as a defense mechanism.
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When was the last time you fingered him?
Samsung cringing? Because Carmack referenced hardware limitations of the current display technology that anyone who could follow his speech either already knows or could have gleened from reviewing the basic specs? And the display technology is still is (or is equal too) the best available in industrial quantities?
It's not like he said "Company X's displays are so much better, it's stupid we didn't go with them." That might have induced some cringes. The actual speech? Not so much. It was interesting enough for the technical material, don't try to spoil it with melodramatics.
Oculus's software uses a ball-stick model of the head, so that turning also produces a translation. Don't knock it till you've tried it (I'm assuming here you haven't tried it), they've almost completely solved the nausea problem, even for sensitive people.
You track translation with an accelerometer (like rotation with a gyro). But neither is perfectly repeatable - they don't return exactly to zero. So, without some absolute reference for both, things get off. A compass can provide an absolute reference for horizontal rotation, the accelerometer provides an absolute reference for vertical (tilt - a compass might be able to do both, really), but an absolute reference for translation is more difficult - how do you move across the room and then return to exactly the same place? Apart from external sensors, one might make do with ultrasonic sonar (or infrared lidar?), if willing to live with constraints on the room layout.
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That isn't actually true. You *will* get sick even with positional tracking, as many people found out when the DK2 Rift was released. Just look in this thread, for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculu... Positional tracking enhances immersion and potentially presence, but it is not really a fix for motion sickness. Unfortunately many people don't understand this.
The problem is deeper - you are correct that the sensory mismatch between what you see and what your sense of balance (inner ear) and proprioception (nerve endings in your muscles relaying the position of your limbs) are telling you is what causes the problem. However, that is not really tied to the positional tracking. It is fairly easy to demonstrate - many people get sick even with full 6DOF tracking using a very expensive big bucks tracking system, walking around in a CAVE, not using an HMD at all (CAVEs are usually far less motion sickness inducing than HMDs).
Most of the nausea problems are caused by poor application design - sudden accelerations are bad, because you don't expect them (it is akin to someone pulling the rug from under you!), motions not initiated by the user are bad (again, unexpected movement!), inappropriate navigation schemes - strafing, head bobbing, "aiming with your head" (not being able to look and change direction of movement independently - as in all FPS games that use mouselook), etc. All these things cause motion sickness. No amount of tracking wizardry is going to help you there unless the design of the application is fixed - and these problems are unfortunately in almost every single demo that was released for the Rift so far, despite there being 30+ years of published research on VR available.
Then there are problems that are often ascribed to motion sickness, but are not really - headaches, dizziness, eye strain. Those are often caused by a poorly adjusted HMD. This is where Rift suffers a lot, because unless you have perfect vision and your eyes are spaced exactly the same as the Rift lenses, you will get eye strain and headache after a while due to a blurry, out of focus image. This is why commercial HMDs have both dioptric adjustment (the two pairs of replaceable lenses really aren't a solution) and interpupillar distance adjustment (the lenses or even displays themselves can be moved closer or farther apart). Another issue with the Rift-like HMDs is with scenes where the textures and jaggy, not antialiased lines cause visible "beating" (moire) against the raster of the relatively low-res display, provoking a lot of visual discomfort - this was really bad in the DK1, DK2 reduced it a bit thanks to the higher resolution and pentile display. That's why dark scenes work best with Rift, because the dark pixel raster is not that visible.
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With the money Mr. Carmack earned from the sale of Oculus, do you think he cares? He has suggested that he wouldn't mind simply going back to running his spaceship company, so can Samsung give him a good reason to do that?
This definitely sounds like somebody who doesn't give a damn.
But I'm not in the business of writing novels on slashdot.
No, because that's Bennett Haselton's job.
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