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Oculus' Michael Abrash Explains What It'll Take For VR To Feel Real
redletterdave writes: At Oculus's annual developer conference on Thursday, Oculus' chief scientist Michael Abrash took the stage to offer a few anecdotes and a ton of information about the current state of virtual reality, and where it needs to go in order to be truly great. Getting to the next level of virtual reality, Abrash said, will require coordinated advances in several different technologies. Specifically, Abrash believes the future of virtual reality will be built on three pillars: driving the human perceptual system, sensing and reconstructing reality, and interaction.
You have to release the bloody product!
In old days the delay in VR made me nauseous. However at the SIGGRAPH a couple months ago I sampled some of the newer VR setups and almost got sick because it felt so real. One Sony demo had you walk a tight rope between two skyscraper roofs. You could see the ground out of the edge of your eyes. Lots of people found it difficult to walk the rope because it felt so scary. Ditto another demo with Oculus riding a skateboard at 40 miles an hour.
Movies and games on TV do not look like we are looking through a window, yet it's still very nice.
The reason I say that is that the requirements are pretty steep, and getting too much into the requirements might be 'perfect being the enemy of the good'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wait, does Oculus have the same Michael Abrash that worked on Doctor Dobb's Journal? And author of numerous graphics programming books? That guy's pretty awesome! I remember reading his stuff when I was just in high school. In fact it may have been one of his articles where I *really* started to understand derivatives (way back when I was in high school studying calculus).
The ambition to be absolutely real, allowing a full experience is in my mind overrated. I don't want to walk or climb, I have plenty of opportunities to do that in real life (and take advantage of them). I however do thoroughly enjoy my DK2 as it is, just letting me look around. The ability to have the 'oculus touch' type of controls is appealing, but I personally do not have a lot of excitement over things like treadmills, spheres, etc. I of course would love some wind and acceleration applied to aid in the experience of things like roller coasters, driving, and flying, but really don't need full locomotion on a grand scale..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The issue is 'who cares'. Just like we do gaming when we can't do photorealistic gaming today, we don't need absolute realism to have a compelling experience. The environment is immersive, even if not 'deceptively realistic', moreso than the status quo of rendering the same thing on a monitor/TV.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yup, author of the Graphics Programming Black Book amongst others.