Half-Life 2 Writer on VR Games: We're At Pong Level, Only Scratching the Surface

An anonymous reader writes: Valve's Chet Faliszek has been in the video game industry for a long time, and his writing has been instrumental for games like Half-life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Valve is now developing a virtual reality headset, and Faliszek was on hand at a VR-centric conference where he spoke about how the technology is coming along. He said, "None of us know what the hell we are doing. We're still just scratching the surface of VR. We still haven't found out what VR is, and that's fine. We've been making movies in pretty much the same way for 100 years, TV for 60 years and videogames for 40. VR has only really been [in development] for about a year, so we're at Pong level." One of the obstacles holding VR devices back right now is getting the hardware up to snuff. Faliszek says, "There's one thing you can't do and that's make people sick. It has to run at 90 frames per second. Any lower and people feel sick. Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."

Comments

Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense, we've had VR junk around since at least Wolfenstien and some of the crazy Nintendo VR stuff. That stuff was AWFUL and more worthy of being called Pong. See http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wolfenstein/wolfenstein6.htm, that's 1994 so 21 years ago. The VR Boy was 20 years ago. Hell we even had a TV show called VR.5 in 1995

The stuff that is coming out now is barely worthy of being called VR since it doesn't make good on what was promised 20 years ago, nor impoves upon it in any tangible way. Much in the same way "3D" TV's flop and most 3D films at the theater are garbage. We're trying to solve the wrong problem with VR. What value do we get with VR that we don't get with regular TV or monitors?

1. Privacy, which is fine if you just want your own private 2D screen, and these things have existed forever.
2. Stereoscopic 3D, which the Nintendo 3DS does and is barely any better than 3D glasses.

The real problem is how to wear a VR headset and be immersed in a video game. We're still seeing goofy VR head tracking with no gloves or way of suspending the body above the floor that you could run in place. The ultimate solution would be to actually read the brain waves non-invasively for "I want to go in this direction". They've done this with monkeys already (invasively), and there has also been an experiment in one person controlling another person's movements through a direct brain connection.) So there is some possibility of doing this.

Re:Nonsense

[Anubis IV]

You do realize that your argument suggesting the current stuff isn't worthy of being called VR and that the old stuff was plain "AWFUL" is just proving his thesis that VR is still in its infancy and that we still don't know what the hell we're doing with it, right?

Re:Nonsense

[jordanjay29]

This is just like going to the "talkies" and realizing your favorite silent movie actor has a squeaky voice and completely ruins the picture. We're just trying to plaster 2D video games into 3D systems and hoping it works out alright, instead of building games from the ground up for VR.

Re:Nonsense

[kuzb]

>What value do we get with VR that we don't get with regular TV or monitors?

Immersion. This is not the same as privacy, and anyone who has tried recent VR will tell you there's a big difference.

Re: Nonsense

[BlueTrin]

No it is not proving anything, proving is not done by jumping loops. It could be that VR is simply a bad concept.

Re: Nonsense

[Anubis IV]

So? Pong wasn't the first video game either. Pong didn't make it into homes until 1975, but by then home gaming consoles had been around for nearly a decade. See: the brown box.

The point is, prior to now, we've had stuff called "VR" that we'll look back on decades from now and will refer to as a "precursor to VR". We're one year into what history will consider true VR. Likewise, Pong may not have been the first, but it ushered in the modern era of video gaming, in much the same way that Oculus ushered in the modern era of VR. Pong was just the start though, and where things end up, none of us know.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about.

Nonsense, we've had VR junk around since at least Wolfenstien and some of the crazy Nintendo VR stuff. That stuff was AWFUL and more worthy of being called Pong. See http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wolfenstein/wolfenstein6.htm, that's 1994 so 21 years ago. The VR Boy was 20 years ago. Hell we even had a TV show called VR.5 in 1995

By Wolfenstein I assume you mean Wolfenstein 3D, which came out in 1992, isn't VR. It's not even running a 3D engine. Virtual Boy wasn't VR either, it was a very low quality stereoscopic eyepiece on a stand. I owned both Wolf3D and a Virtual Boy when they were first released and they are nothing like the VR stuff we're getting now.

The stuff that is coming out now is barely worthy of being called VR since it doesn't make good on what was promised 20 years ago, nor impoves upon it in any tangible way. Much in the same way "3D" TV's flop and most 3D films at the theater are garbage. We're trying to solve the wrong problem with VR. What value do we get with VR that we don't get with regular TV or monitors?

Immersion. VR offers a new canvas with which to experience environments. It could be a virtual tour of a real life place, or a movie or a game or even a UI, where you have a stereoscopic view, but also freedom to look around. One thing I've gotten into with my Oculus Thrift are some of the Cardboard apps on Google Play which are nothing more than 3D environments with cameras on predetermined paths as a way to lean back and relax. I have also played through Half-Life 2 with it and it was so good I don't think I could go back to playing it the "normal" way.

1. Privacy, which is fine if you just want your own private 2D screen, and these things have existed forever.

Privacy, portability and as large of a desktop as you want.

2. Stereoscopic 3D, which the Nintendo 3DS does and is barely any better than 3D glasses.

The stereoscopic effect on the 3DS is crap, combined with the fact that the screen is extremely small, low resolution and doesn't put the player into the game world the way a headset does.

We're still seeing goofy VR head tracking with no gloves or way of suspending the body above the floor that you could run in place.

You mean like the Kinect, Razer Hydra, Virtuix Omni, Cyberith Virtualizer, the 3rd Space Vest and the piles of accelerometers, gyros and other motion sensors in modern day electronics? VR gloves are so passe.

Re:Nonsense

[lgw]

"Immersion" is about script and character and (literary) world building, not technology. The most immersive games I've played were all old enough to have terrible graphics, but they had lots of interesting detail in the world to get lost in.

Re: Nonsense

[Culture20]

The point is, prior to now, we've had stuff called "VR" that we'll look back on decades from now and will refer to as a "precursor to VR". We're one year into what history will consider true VR.

the "pong level" VR out now has only two improvements over the "pong level" VR from twenty years ago: resolution and faster computers. I remember playing a shooter game in a VR headset at an arcade that was quite immersive. They put you in a waist-high ring that prevented you from walking around, which is what a lot of people naturally tried to do when they saw the virtual 3D game. So Valve is right: they're at pong level. But they're also wrong: VR has been at pong level for decades, and might never improve much without Holodeck style tech.

Re: Nonsense

[MenThal]

What was the first video game then? Wasn't the first version of pong played on an oscilloscope? (and part of some litigation with Atari)

Re: Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

There is more to it being pong level than the hardware (and I think you are oversimplifying that). There is also the raw gamedesign aspect of it. The big difference between the hardware running pong and the hardware we use now is speed and optimization. The game design, partially enabled by the hardware improvements, improved drastically, though. We had to learn how to make video games, what design elements sucked, what was fun, etc. Early video games, by and large, were awful, because we didn't know what we were doing.
The thing that will move VR past pong is not better hardware (though that is useful), but better game design. We have to figure out how the user should interact with the virtual world, figure out the norms (it took us a while to figure out FPSes worked best with mouse+keyboard, rather than just keyboard, for instance, but once we figured it out, the WASD control scheme became a norm) , figure out what genres work well and which do not, etc. VR moving into the home creates a testbed to figure out the details in a way that could never happen with a few scattered VR games at arcades. Many types of games for VR are simply a badfit for a stand at the mall.
We don't need holodeck style tech to improve VR. We need to figure out how to utilize the VR we can do.

Re: Nonsense

[Immerman]

Also larger screens - FOV is key in getting (most people's) eyes to override their inner ears for motion input. I tried several of the "higher end" consumer VR headsets years ago - not one of those sets of postage-stamp goggles gave a true sense of immersion.

And faster computers are *vital* to reducing lag below subconscious perceptual levels - you may as well say the only difference between a pedal-cart and an Formula-1 race car is a faster engine and better seat belts.

Re:Nonsense

[Immerman]

No, that's "substance". A.k.a. cognitive immersion. A completely orthogonal attribute to sensory immersion.

Re:Nonsense

[Holi]

It also means we have been developing it for far longer then a year.

Re: Nonsense

[Holi]

See: the brown box.

or you could call it by it's more recognizable name, The Odyssey.

Re:Nonsense

[Holi]

So you are redefining VR so this comment is valid. Nope doesn't work.

Re:Nonsense

[Holi]

Quit confusing HMD's with VR. VR had been around a long time. Most does not use a HMD. Think of commercial flight simulators. By any real definition of VR they meet the definition (immersive computer simulation)

Re:Nonsense

[lgw]

Right, it's the kind of immersion that matters. Now if we could only get movies where the characters weren't 2-dimensional. "The goggles, they do nothing!"

I don't need peripheral vision to feel part of a game world, as long as I can look around the world from a first-person or over-the-shoulder view (it would help a lot in racing games, since there your too busy with other controls to also look around with your hands). It's been ambient noise, clever soundtrack, and attention to detail (so that you can guess what the place smells like, and are happy not to much of the time) that provide immersion of any sort- I'm not just my eyes.

Re: Nonsense

[Anubis IV]

No, Odyssey was a different device that came later. I'm talking about The Brown Box.

Re: Nonsense

[Anubis IV]

Self-correction: turns out you're right. Having read through my own link now, I hadn't realized that they licensed the brown box to Magnavox and that it later got turned into the Odyssey. Learn something new every day.

Re: Nonsense

[Anubis IV]

See my self-correction. Turns out you were more correct than I gave you credit for initially. My apologies.

Re:Nonsense

[Immerman]

Having used head tracking in a number of racing and flight simulators I can tell you it aids the immersion and situational awareness *immensely*, even more than you would imagine. I haven't actually had an opportunity to try an Oculus or its competitors, but I would suspect that adding a screen that stays in front of your eyes, offers "perfect" 1-to-1 motion tracking, and stereoscopy, would be another massive step forward. Consider that in the real world you're moving your head constantly, and your brain is stitching that information together into a coherent picture of the world - you don't get that in modern games. Even TrackIR-style head-tracking, impressive as it is, barely scratches the surface.

I'd absolutely prefer that resources be spent to improve the substance of modern games and movies, but for now at least it seems that the market is chasing "Dreck 3, now with 1.5-D characters and 70% more explosions!". Meanwhile for gaming, basic VR promises to come almost for free for the developers - just add trivial head tracking and make sure you don't have framerate or lag issues. The hard/expensive part - generating content and gameplay that people will pay for, is largely unchanged.

As a food metaphor: I'd love fillet mignon, but if hot dogs are all that's available I'm going to welcome the gourmet fixings.

Meanwhile, think of how impressive the occasional good game will be with the addition of VR immersion.

Re:Nonsense

[dkman]

Improving motion tracking, and stereoscopy: those are technical problems that we can deal with.

Improve the substance of modern games and movies: that's a more complicated problem.

I'd be happy with fullhd per eye + 60fps

[gl4ss]

yeah, it would be enough, really. I've used the rift(ks). half life 2 worked fine with it. surprisingly it was better to play with just a HACK than with the official tf2 shit! why? they fucked up the control options for the official(like 5 choices and none of them traditional kb+mouse! all had to try to stuff in head control for up / down and separate aiming from head movement or other weird things)

also what many of these journos forget is that some people will get sick from just looking someone else play doom.

the vr is already more on the doom level than pong. resolution sucks. also comparably to doom, plenty of researchers are trying to invent new controllers, walking around the room and shit. in reality, the vr headset games are best played with just a xbox controller or kb+mouse. also they're the least taxing. you don't want to be waving your hands around for 8 hours+ anyways - all their alternative control schemes are for _casual_ gaming! and who the fuck who is into casual gaming is going to invest into a vr headset for home? nobody. you want something you can play with all night long.

also due to this researcher obsession with control/head movement schemes and them getting it wrong time after time, the games that work best right now are simulator games with steering wheels or joysticks - and it's WAY beyond pong.

Re:I'd be happy with fullhd per eye + 60fps

[ArsonSmith]

VR is not going to be just a hard core gaming medium. I thought the same thing at first as well. That was until I picked up a GearVR for my note 4. That was when I realized that there was a lot more than just games. And there isn't even any real content yet. Just lots of 5-10 minute demo level items that I find myself watching over and over.

Re:I'd be happy with fullhd per eye + 60fps

[ArsonSmith]

Currently we have 1/2 HD per eye at 75fps or 1/2 1440p per eye at 60fps. The next gen will likely be 1/2 4k per eye at 75fps.

With VR it is less the amount of motion and more the consistent fps greater than 60fps, 75fps is good 120fps would be near perfect. This makes porting games to VR difficult due to them not considering this a requirement during original development.

only a year?

[Gravis Zero]

VR has only really been [in development] for about a year

wikipedia lied to me!

Re:only a year?

[aliquis]

Yeah, isn't this the pong level?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Though we may still be about there but with better graphics.

Then again maybe that could be said about the gaming industry in general beyond MMOs :D

Re:only a year?

[janoc]

Unfortunately many people think that VR didn't exist before Oculus Rift. Which is, of course, BS. There was good quality VR available before as well but unless you have worked for a large university, the military, NASA or some large aerospace/car company, you were unlikely to encounter it due to the costs of the equipment involved. Industry-grade HMDs still cost $15000, they used to start at $40k but I guess after the cheap Oculus became available, that price point became untenable. `CAVEs and large projection setups that are commonly used for both research and training work can cost millions.

The worse part is that also quite a few people from these companies - Oculus, Valve and others that are jumping on the VR bandwagon now - tend to ignore the decades of existing research. Most people there are businessmen and (briliant) engineers, not researchers (with a few exceptions). They tend to massively reinvent the wheel and to rediscover things known for many years, because they don't know where to look for them. If they didn't, they would know that increasing framerate and decreasing input latencies is not going to fix the motion sickness. Sure, laggy, smeared image in the HMD will make people sick. However, you can and will get sick even at 120fps - it depends much more on what you are rendering than at how you are rendering it. A virtual rollercoaster will make people throw up even at 4k resolution rendered at 250fps with perfect head tracking. It would look awesome, though ...

The problem is mainly the content, not the technology - the content must work with the technology idiosyncrasies (I won't call them limitations - that implies they could be overcome, but sometimes it would require changing the laws of physics or it would cost so much that it just isn't practical), not ignore the specificities of the medium ("let's play COD with an Oculus Rift, that will be awesome!" *BARF*) or expect that the "technology will improve" and motion sickness won't be an issue, no matter what wild camera gyrations, cool fly-throughs and slow motion cut scenes the game designer has put in. It is the same thing as the film directors having to learn how to shoot in 3D - the "film language" (how you convey your message through camera work, lighting, etc) changes quite significantly when you are in 3D and not every film director was/is comfortable with going there. Even the visually stunning Avatar had some issues with stereoscopy here and there. That is why the worst 3D movies were the ones converted from the regular 2D, where the media specificities were ignored.

This is very much where we are still at the begining - virtual reality as an entertainment and story telling medium. It is not a question of technology anymore, it is more about finding sensible ways to do things in VR so that the experience is fun, pleasant and something people will actually like to return to. With careful design work and working with the medium and not against it you can render even at 30fps and nobody will get sick.

In my 15 years of working with VR (involving both large projection setups and HMDs) I have never encountered anyone getting sick because of the frame rate. It was pretty much always because of poorly made content not suitable for the technology being used, poorly implemented navigation that didn't respect the specificities of the medium ("teleporting" camera, forced/constrained camera movement, head bobbing, poorly synchronized/unsynchronized treadmills ...), poor camera work/tracking ("mouselook" in FPS really is wrong for VR - you don't have head bolted rigidly to your shoulders!) and similar issues. Then you have issues like people feeling discomfort/headaches because of eye strain due to poor focus, moire, poorly set up stereo rendering, etc. It often gets incorrectly attributed to "cyber"/motion sickness, but that has nothing to do with it at all. Finally, there are people who will get sick and dizzy even from looking at a static image

Re:only a year?

[Anonymous Coward]

His point is that slow framerates tend to cause sync problems, especially for keeping the graphics and head movement completely synced. If what you are seeing is behind what your senses are telling you, even people who don't get motion sick will start to feel ill.

It's not a silver bullet, but it is a big problem.

Re:only a year?

[Twinbee]

Even if you are right about latency and framerate not causing sickness, you're forgetting these are qualities we should be having anyway.

120fps looks FAR better than 60fps. And low latency games feel a lot snappier than high latency games. If that ALSO helps sickness to any extent, then that's just icing on the cake.

Re:only a year?

[ArsonSmith]

I call BS on a large part of this. I have had slight movements at low frame rate that has made me almost hurl immediately, yet a game like Windlands which is like a spiderman simulater with swinging from tree to tree I was able to play with large sooping motions for hours without getting sick.

Anecdotes aside, this seems to be echoed pretty heavily in the Oculus share forums and VR related sub-reddits.

Re:only a year?

[ShakaUVM]

My memory must be lying, too.

Not only was I worked on VR for the military and entertainment 20 years ago, but I corresponded a bit with Valve's own Michael Abrash several years ago on reducing latency in VR headsets.

Re:only a year?

[dkman]

The idea of VR is still iffy for me personally. I play mostly FPS games right now. For me I can see VR being used as a monitor (which might give privacy, but not much else). I would still need a mouse to "look around". I can't use my head to look around because I'd loose the keyboard if I turned around. And I'd choke out if I turned right a few times (if you follow where I'm going with that).

So I think it might be alright for a rollercoaster sim, where looking at it on a monitor vs looking at it with VR goggles isn't totally different. Though I do understand that you can have each eye independent so it might actually "feel" different - and that's where "it needs to be applied correctly" comes into play.

I think virtual desk kind of applications are interesting.

Driving games are where head tracking might be awesome. Because the keyboard and mouse are gas/break and steering, so you are totally free to look around and give the evil eye to that guy passing you.

Surfac

[Anonymous Coward]

Surfac

Re:Surfac

[Anonymous Coward]

pong level

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[jordanjay29]

I'm sure it wasn't also the sticky floors, the screaming children or the guy in the seat ahead of your turning on his phone so he could check his text messages and destroy your low-light vision, right?

How to reduce or completely remove nausea?

[Gaygirlie]

Just add a virtual nose: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/r...

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[ArmoredDragon]

Pretty much the only moviegoing experience I actually enjoy is Studio Movie Grill. When people do those kinds of things there, it doesn't really bother, and I think the reason why is because there has to be plenty of room between seats so that the wait staff can do their jobs, so when people are being obnoxious they're so far removed from you that you don't notice, and the wait staff are really good at not interrupting your movie. That and when you need something you don't have to go out to the lobby (except to take a piss) and the food prices are about the same as any other restaurant.

I suspect the only thing better (besides being at home) would be a drive-in theater, but I've never been to one.

Really?

[SJ]

Stop screwing around with VR and finish Half-Life 3 already!

Re:Really?

[Neil Boekend]

If they want to get HL3 working with next gen systems they must figure out what that looks like. They assume it'll be VR.

Re:Really?

[Culture20]

They're still genetically engineering the head crabs for the HL3 release day. Don't rush them.

Re:Really?

[HideyoshiJP]

I'd wondered the same thing. What's this HL writer doing out of his cage?

Re:Really?

[tingentleman]

Stop screwing around with VR and finish Half-Life 3 already!

Seconded. Can we start a "refocus Valve" petition?

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[WarJolt]

Am I the only one who thinks the frame rate isn't whats getting everyone sick?

Resolution and convergence are my big issues. I think the holy grail is a high resolution light field display, but this will require significantly denser pixels if you use microlenses for head worn VR. Maybe once you tackle that you can go for the high frame rate.

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[jordanjay29]

I wish I could find a luxury theater like that around here. The closest I can find will serve you at the bar, and then shoo you into your movie at the appointed time. They won't blink if you carry your alcoholic beverage into the auditorium, but they certainly won't refill it for you inside.

Re:Pong was bigger in its day

[pslytely psycho]

A friend of mine who worked on a tavern cleaning crew called me and told me to come to work with him one night. When we got to the tavern, he showed me this big box with a TV screen and two large knobs. Pong was completely unlike anything anyone had seen before. During business hours there would be a continuous line waiting to play it.

It may seem quaint now, but at the time it was truly revolutionary, as was Space Invaders and Asteroids which soon followed. To us, they were much cooler than the pin-ball machines we played at the time, after all they were something completely new.

Yes I was born in B.C. (Before Cellphones) and my kids were born in A.D. (After Direct TV).

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[drinkypoo]

The resolution is fairly secondary to lag. If there is perceptible lag then VR sickness tends to follow.

Car analogy

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."

Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea. If people can't just get behind a steering wheel and drive to Manhattan then automotive technology is an epic fail. Technology should be as simple as a baby's foot.

Re:Car analogy

[Jeremi]

Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea.

The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment. People already know how to physically exist in a location. If the VR system requires special training to interact with, then the V isn't doing a very good approximation of the R.

Re:Car analogy

[Chas]

Learning to drive doesn't make people nauseous, give them cold sweats, give them vertigo, trigger headaches (traffic does that, learning doesn't).

Back when 3D cards first became available for general consumption, I bought one and conditioned myself to 3D by the simple expedient of playing Descent until I horked. Then playing till I horked again. Rinse mouth out and repeat.

Yeah. I was young and stupid.

Now, 20-ish years on? If you told me I had to do that all over again, I wouldn't bother.

Re:Car analogy

[SuricouRaven]

It's also a bad choice of phrase, as currently 'VR legs' only work if you have either a lot of space or a very elaborate omnidirectional treadmill. Bit of a difficult problem that.

Though I suppose it might bring back the arcade? If you need a suspended harness or a sizeable warehouse for full-immersion runarounds, it's going to mean people traveling to places. Pressing a 'walk forward' button isn't going to be the same.

Re:Car analogy

[ledow]

There's just a slight difference and you've not chosen an analogous situation.

It's more like telling users that they'll just have to get used to feeling ill every time they look through your new holographic windscreen, no matter how much it makes them hurl. "You'll get used to it", as they have to pull over and shut their eyes for ten minutes before they can resume driving,

There's only one game on the planet that makes me feel ill when I play it (Duke Nukem 3D), something to do with the way the perspective moves as you rotate. So I don't "suffer" with anything like this at all.

Learning to drive, however, is an entirely different matter. If a VR headset makes you feel ill and you have to "battle through it" to enjoy it, the market will collapse overnight because everyone will buy one, stop using it, then tell all their friends not to bother.

Re:Car analogy

[Dog-Cow]

I remember Descent and Terminal Velocity, etc. I can't even imagine getting sick just playing them.

Re:Car analogy

[Chas]

I remember Descent and Terminal Velocity, etc. I can't even imagine getting sick just playing them.

I know, right?

Hell, I didn't even completely "cure" myself.

I'm fine when I'm playing. But I *still* cannot watch someone else play.

Re: Car analogy

[MenThal]

Never had much trouble with motion sickness in Descent, but I grew up with very long car drives in the summer vacation as a kid.

Descent did disoriented me quite a bit. I think I spent nearly an hour on a level, not recognizing any location... Until I rolled 180 and noticed I was staring at the entrance. I'd flown the whole way back upside down...

As for watching others play anything 3D; how can you not get sick? If not by motion, then by frustration that they are DOING IT ALL WRONG! But more seriously, watching others, your brain has no compensation due to expectations on visual input based on your action, which I think an important and critical component to consider in the design. But we might just be in the VR version of Uncanny Valley here.

Re:Car analogy

[ultranova]

The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment.

Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?

Re:Car analogy

[drinkypoo]

Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?

And built and even partially assembled by robot, and assembled with the aid of robots (such as all the head bolts getting torqued at once, hopefully correctly but I wouldn't bet on it, hand-built is still the best.)

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[SuricouRaven]

It causes illness for good reason. A mismatch between visual field angle and vestibular angle doesn't occur very often in a natural environment - the only place you'll find it is on a boat and when wearing head-mounted displays. Before those, it always indicated something impairing the vestibular system, which likely implied a poison. There's evolved response based on this: 'Visual/vestibular mismatch, probable poison detected, initiate purge of stomach contents before any more is absorbed and make a note not to eat the green berries.'

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[gl4ss]

resolution is my only issue with oculus rift 1st gen sdk. even the head tracking worked well enough(and most of the time I don't want it, i just want a good 90degree+ head mounted stereo display.

the fps etc. some researchers are focusing purely on that and bringing it up as a big deal because it's the only thing they can help with. -- because making higher resolution displays is not something they can try to get credit and press for.

and really, you would think that a friggin VR expert supadev would rather compare "pong" of vr to be the vrfx helmet stuff from TWO DECADES AGO.

Greystone Industries

[Ash-Fox]

I heard the holoband being developed by Greystone Industries looks promising.

BS

[SuperDre]

VR was at a pong level about 30 years ago.. Because those suckers don't know what VR is or how to use it doesn't mean it only started a year ago.. Yeah, maybe HE started a year ago, but VR was already on the market in 1995 for consumers, and to just dismiss consumer helmets like the Forte VFX-1 is really ignorant/snobbisch (and those were even further along than 'Pong-level')..
Let's not forget VR has been in use in the industry for a long time already, the only difference now is, you can do it on the cheap..
So I really think he's just an a**hole for dismissing all the work that has laid the ground for valve to actually be able to start doing VR.. Because they came late to the party doesn't mean the party only started when they arrived...

VFX was the pong

[DrYak]

I had a full vr helmet in the late 90s to play doom, decent, and so on. I can't remember the name of the helmet but it came with a mouse that looked like a hockey puck.

I would venture that this was the VFX family of helmet (VFX-1, VFX-3D)
It was one of the first 3D helmet, with extensive support in games.
Resolution was shitty (~260 vertical column per eye) in fact so shitty, that manufacturer did give separate count of R, G and B pixels (call it "790" horizontal resolution !).
Field of view was also awfully small (think looking into a small windows in front of you, as if you looked a laptop screen, instead of today's occulus rift's "surrounded by the picture everywhere").
Image was blurry (LCD. All this was happening long before the advent of OLED and other fast refresh devices).

But still, even if it was in its infancy, it was one of the first big thing to arrive on mainstream market.
I've never had one my self, luckily the local computer shop had one and I hacked around a bit.

A bit later, the "I-glasses" family of device started to get popular. Much lighter, slighty higher resolution, and used a mirror system that made possible to overlay picture over the actual sight ("augmented" reality).

Personnally, much later, I managed to land an eMagine 3D Visor (was working in medical research, had more money than when I was a kid).
Slightly better angle of view (45 one of the best pre-occulus), OLED display (so no blur, high resolution, etc.)
(though support for non-nVidia hardware required ordering a new firmware on a swappable ROM chip)

Nowadday Occulus Rift and the like have advanced a lot:
- replaced the complex optics and simple display, with simple optics and shaders to compensate distortion.
- actual real full field of view. you don't look through a small windows, you actually have a picture completely surrounding you.
- high resolution (thanks to all the "Apple Retina" and "Cram a FullHD 1080p resolution on a smartwarch" craze, we have small high resolution displays)
- really fast / low latency tracking (thanks to cheap high speed cameras, which supplements the electronic accelerometer/gyroscopes of old time)

We've reached the point where the technical short-comings are more or less being solved.

Thus we aren't as much in the Pong-era, as in the late 8bits / early 16bits console era:
technical problems are being solved, hardware gets available and affordable, now we need to learn to harness the medium and develop nice stuff.
Artists need to learn what can be done with this.
We are at the dawn of tons of new things coming out for VR 3D.

It's good that indie dev are currently thriving.

VR isn't the only thing we're on Pong level at

[loonycyborg]

Also AI design, GUI design, plot writing, game ruleset design.. Everything except graphics.

Re:VR isn't the only thing we're on Pong level at

[GuB-42]

You won't believe how advanced these fields are.
It's easy to dismiss modern game design as "just better graphics" until you learn why things are the way they are. You may not like some design choices, especially if such choices are driven more by profit than player enjoyment, but there is often a lot of things going behind it.
So sure, there is room for improvement, same for graphics, but AI, GUI, plot and mechanics are mature fields, with a significant history.

Re:VR isn't the only thing we're on Pong level at

[loonycyborg]

There always is room for improvement, but in this case that improvement is done in one step forward two steps backwards sort of way. Indeed a lot of history exists but people who actually make games mostly ignore it. I feel that areas I named have in some ways even regressed since 1990s and something needs to be done about that. Maybe good intentions are involved here, but as saying goes road to hell is paved with good intentions..

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're basicly throwing an error, which hopefully will be catched in a suitable container?

Three deadly issues for VR

[DoctorBonzo]

1) Glasses. If you don't wear them, you don't care, but if you do, you pretty much can't deal with head-mounted VR wear. I've tried a lot of VR devices over the decades and *none* of them are glasses-friendly, including Oculus.

2) Field of view. Ninety degrees isn't enough for immersion. True enough, you can move your head for depth 'feel', but you're still looking through a window.

3) Lag. There's been enough said about this. It will improve over time, though, if there's enough of an audience.

Re:Video Games are for Children

[tmosley]

All work and no play make Jack a dull troll.

VR has been development for MANY years

[DrXym]

VR isn't new tech by any stretch. I remember VR headsets powered by Commodore Amigas.

Re: Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[MenThal]

"You should be off pudding!"

Re: Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[MenThal]

Yeah, we're at least at the Arkanoid stage in VR. Looks awesome, much fun, but quickly becomes frustrating due to controller limitations.

Re:Video Games are for Children

[kilfarsnar]

Who are self righteousness for?

Chet full of Shit

[g0bshiTe]

He's full of shit about VR only being developed for a year anyone remember Sega VR? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... from the 90's?

And let's not forget that horrid sci-fi show from the 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

I'm sure that was inspired from somewhere. Although I also remember doing wireframe VR sims of hang gliding in the early 90's.

A year my A$$

[Holi]

What kind of stupid comment is that. VR has only been in development for a year????
I think Chet Faliszek needs to do some research into his own field. It gave you headaches, was limited to only 2 colors, and it tanked, but to say that it wasn't VR is byond dumb.

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[ArmoredDragon]

I don't think it's much of a luxury theater. Feels more like a restaurant that also happens to be a theater. Tickets are usually $9.50, which is more than most theaters, but they have groupon deals like all the time where the tickets are $5, which is a lot less than most theaters.

The main problem is focus for me

[beastofburdon]

I find it interesting that nobody has mentioned focus as a major problem. I do not mean the optics of the device necessarily, but that is a likely source. What I'm talking about is usually from the content itself. When focus blur is used, or induced by the way a video is shot, it causes your eyes to attempt to fix the blur by focusing on the blurred area. When this inevitably fails your eyes will continue to try causing eye strain which leads to a headache.
This is the only issue I get from VR, but then again, I do not get motion sickness at all.

Re:Pong was bigger in its day

[pslytely psycho]

Ah yes, I have heard of, but never seen one. I do recall around that time playing one called Space Wars or similar, but it vanished quickly and never saw another.

Pong showed up in about half the taverns in town at about the same time, as well as malls, pinball arcades, and bowling alleys. They were everywhere for a short time, and then came Space Invaders, and Pong vanished almost overnight until it was resurrected in the early gaming systems.

  I had a Tabletop Tennis (Pong clone that only did pong variations ) system that could play about 10 different 'courts' in glorious black and white. And the early Intellivision and Colicovision systems all had Pong clones as well.