11 ms·

The Problem with Reality

128 points by runesoerensen 10y ago

ohitsdom 10y ago
The podium/teleport concept seems very intuitive, at least it definitely was in my mind before the article explained it. Lots of interesting gameplay mechanics still need to be solved for VR, interesting times ahead.
- excalibur 10y ago
  Personally I think the best solution will involve some sort of hardware that can keep the player stationary while giving them the feeling of walking around freely. I'm not sure exactly what this will look like, it's generally not a good idea to walk on your treadmill while blindfolded.
  - roblabla 10y ago
    I agree. There's actually already something in development called Virtuix Omni[0] that does what you think. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuix_Omni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuix_Omni
  - zevyoura 10y ago
    Prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    The Virtuix Omni is a device like what you have in mind. Essentially you run in a shallow bowl shape with slippery foot pads and it holds you still at the waist. http://www.virtuix.com/ http://www.virtuix.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/49nbih/a_full_month_with_the_virtuix_omni_my_review/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/49nbih/a_full_month...
    - infogulch 10y ago
      The problem with this type of solution is that you still don't feel the acceleration, you're just flailing your limbs around in a single spot without actually moving. It's the missing acceleration that makes you sick, not that you can't move your limbs.
      - Nadya 10y ago
        Not having used it - I would think of it like an omni-directional treadmill. Treadmills don't make me feel sick, why would this? Legitimate question.
        infogulch 10y ago
        The sickness comes from the disconnect between what you see and what you feel. When you're running on a treadmill you see that you're standing (relatively) still, just moving your limbs. Your inner ear corroborates this when it doesn't feel any horizontal acceleration. Everything agrees; no sickness. In VR, you see that you were stopped and then the gun went off and you started running. But your inner ear disagrees: you're not accelerating at all, you're still standing still. Disconnect, sickness.
        wlesieutre 10y ago
        Just stick some electrodes on your head to poke at your vestibular system so that it matches up with what you're seeing http://www.fastcompany.com/3058414/mayo-clinic-technology-said-to-alleviate-nausea-from-vr http://www.fastcompany.com/3058414/mayo-clinic-technology-sa... If their system actually works hopefully we'll see consumer implementations in the next couple of years.
    - excalibur 10y ago
      I like it, it's even compatible with my little GearVR. Of course, if I had $700+ to spend on peripherals, I probably wouldn't be using the budget headset in the first place.
phkahler 10y ago
I'm really not a fan of the external camera. IMHO the ultimate solution is for a camera (or two) on the headset running SLAM to create a virtual world that overlays the real world. Then the experience has to be designed to map onto a large variety of real world environments. You're still free to change the textures and lighting of course. While this is not a generally applicable concept, it would make the virtual experience vary depending on your real-world location. Imagine going to a friends house to play Doom because his house is actually more fun.
- excalibur 10y ago
  You're referring to Mixed Reality, which is the concept that Magic Leap is working on (rather fantastically). It may ultimately prove more enjoyable than VR in a variety of ways, but it has a different set of challenges. The goal there is to bring virtual objects to your world, while the goal of VR is to transport you to another one.
  - baby 10y ago
    Augmented Reality or AR is a better word.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Imagine going to a friends house to play Doom because his house is actually more fun. That reminds me of the days when kids could make maps of their friends' houses and schools in various 3D games without being labeled as a psycho killer.
  - Retr0spectrum 10y ago
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrike_map_texasschool/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrik...
  - lijason 10y ago
    Or playing with nerf guns in a friend's house?
0xfeba 10y ago
I'm glad that racing sims and flight sims don't have to solve these problems, because VR flight sims are exhilarating. Only thing that's needed is G-force.
adwf 10y ago
Not to be too much of a downer, but I still think the main problem with VR isn't the technicality, but the practicality. We had the exact same problems with motion controls. They might momentarily enjoy the novelty of a motion game, but it's just a gimmick. When you get down to it, a lot of people enjoy just sitting on the couch twiddling their thumbs to get the character to do all the work. They play games to relax, not get a workout. If you force them to stand up and move, you've already failed. Where I do see VR having some interesting applications is in the workplace. Replacing all your monitors and work environment with a virtual space of unlimited scope. Imagine remote working - where one moment you could be typing away on a sunny beach, the next you're in a scheduled meeting room with all your colleagues, without having to move an inch.
- supernintendo 10y ago
  Agreed. I would invite VR developers to consider whether or not home is the best setting for VR gaming. The developers of Killer Queen [1] were smart in developing their game for arcades; had it merely been a Steam release, it may have been looked at as just another quirky indie game with pixel art. Come to think of it, VR in arcades could actually take off. Think of a physical enclosure designed to contribute to the presence of the VR experience. Arcade rail shooters have been accomplishing this for years through the use of a chassis that moves based on events within the game. [1] http://killerqueenarcade.com/ http://killerqueenarcade.com/
  - chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
    I've come to the same conclusion: VR belongs in an arcade. The tough part is coming up with a game worthy of a VR arcade... Batman Beyond-style.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      If you want to do arcade VR you'll need to solve the Pink Eye problem before I get anywhere near it.
Houshalter 10y ago
What if you rotate the camera slightly while you move? By the time you reach the end of the physical room, the camera is facing the opposite direction in virtual room and you have to turn around.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- texuf 10y ago
  It would be worth a try. My bet is that the user vomits or falls down.
  - mlvljr 10y ago
    Or both, in a fast sequence :/
- jonas21 10y ago
  They've done similar things along with other tricks, like changing the layout of the room when your back is turned to simulate large spaces in small rooms. http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-lineand-thats-great-vr/ http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-lineand-that...
- aab0 10y ago
  For 'redirected walking', you need a lot of room because you can only bend a little. The Void has done it and researchers have, but they usually have warehouse-like spaces. It won't work in a normal 3m^2 sort of residential room, which is why you need gimmicks like teleporting or omni-treadmills.
- 746F7475 10y ago
  if it's small enough that user won't notice, you'd still need a big open space. Otherwise it's obvious and obnoxious. There was some games where once you got close to a wall, you could spin in place and the world would keep up with you, but this means you can't have any kind of fight or escape scenes in your game.
Razengan 10y ago
I was just musing with my girlfriend about the logical progression of immersion technology, especially as it applies to games. Right now, we're still trying to perfect the visual part of VR. In 5 to 10 years we may get to the point where graphics are no longer indistinguishable from reality as we know it. Research into providing the sensation of touch has begun already and in, say 25 years as a safe estimate, we may be able to perfect that as well. Games where you can comprehend the texture and weight of every object, wince from every blow you receive, and even feel a cool wind or gusts of heat all over your skin. In about 50 years we will have the senses of smell and taste covered as well, and by 100 years from now VR may become impossible to tell apart from reality. But.. people will still KNOW that it's fake, because they will remember being out here in reality. So what's the next step for achieving maximum immersion? Voluntarily wiping out your memory of the real world before you log into that next-gen VRMMORPG. Eventually you have people being born into a world without a clue and having to be cared for by and learn from others until they can orient themselves, and all sorts of theories about what happens when they "die."
- bognition 10y ago
  > In 5 to 10 years we may get to the point where graphics are no longer indistinguishable from reality as we know it I feel like I've been hearing this statement for decades now. The human brain is remarkably good at pattern separation, and given enough time and exposure to a stimulus it will work out what is real and what isn't. Until we have a simulated reality that is as information rich as reality we'll always be able to tell the two apart
  - Razengan 10y ago
    Multiply the placeholder times with the estimates of your choice, of course :)
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    This. Does your game have a river? If so, humans observing the river will veeery easily be able to spot it's a fake. Because an actual realistic simulation of turbulent river flow is way beyond the largest supercomputers today, and Moore's law has run out of the steam that has made todays consoles have the computing power of your fathers supercomputer. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that even twenty years from now, by far the cheapest way of creating a completely photorealistic VR river scene is to build the actual river and record video of it. Then you "only" run into the problem of storing and distributing the petabytes of data you record.
Animats 10y ago
That's just how you get started. Then what? How do you move? You usually can't move very far in the real world. Although it would be fun to have VR events on big open spaces, so you could. The U.S. Army has tried VR big spaces.[1] It works. Their people wear knee pads and helmets, so falls aren't too serious. The Army also accepts that getting banged up a little in training is a normal part of life. This isn't going to translate to the living room. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V34gCw4fyLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V34gCw4fyLs
- agildehaus 10y ago
  There are plenty of locomotion solutions in VR. Simple teleportation works the best. The best implementation of teleportation that I've seen is in the game Budget Cuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtEw2ggPnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtEw2ggPnA
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Wow, genius! Though I wonder, why most of the VR games I see now keep showing tools you handle "floating in the air"? It's a pretty immersion-breaking element, I think.
    - agildehaus 10y ago
      You mean how there are no hands and arms attached to the guns? While it looks funny on a video like this, it doesn't bother you a bit while you're in there. My best explanation is your brain doesn't really care about your limbs while you're holding something. Your attention is on the object. Rendering fake arms and hands would be a bit off-putting, I think. VR isn't tracking the position of your elbows or fingers, so it would have to guess their positions, and pretty much anything that's doesn't match reality gets noticed by your brain. Rendering nothing instead of the wrong thing is more immersive.
      - cwilkes 10y ago
        It bothers me. I was playing with the Vive and the controllers with the smooth trackpad and it was a really odd experience. First I couldn't tell what I was doing as the pad was frictionless. Then I saw a little red light to indicate I was touching the pad and it would move around in a circle. Okay that was helpful. Except when looking down and it I was weirded out by knowing by hands are there in real life but I couldn't see them. What the heck was going on? Shouldn't I be seeing myself there but I'm not? It was sort of like looking into a mirror and not seeing a reflection and wondering if you're a vampire or something. Yes that sounds crazy but it was quite odd.
DigitalJack 10y ago
The problem with all current VR (that I'm aware of at least), is that it models vision as if our eyes were permanently stuck forward and that all of our looking around was done by turning our head. It's not remotely correct, and I personally think it's what makes people sick. Our eyes are the viewpoint control, the head is a very coarse grained pivot, but it just controls the boundaries of the viewport. The view is always centered on whatever our eyes are looking at regardless of head position. You can read a sentence while shaking your and twisting your head. Try that with an oculus (or any other headset). In fact it's actually very hard to simuluate with your body the kind of sliding view that headsets give. You can do it, but it's hard. I personally have to totally defocus my eyes to stop them from locking on to something as I turn my head. The minecraft hack that snapped view changes to 15 degree increments is actually much closer to how things work biologically.
- neogenix 10y ago
  This, and the fact that you cannot focus into the distance. In real life most of your view is blurred except the part you are focussing on. In VR it still just looks flat, because if you focus on something in the distance, nothing happens.
  - amelius 10y ago
    I wonder what happens if one uses VR goggles for too long. Will one lose the ability to focus?
    - hellomoto998 10y ago
      If you wear prisms that invert the world, your brain will eventually see the world inverted when you remove the prisms, and this effect will auto-correct after some duration.
      - bduerst 10y ago
        It also gives you one hell of a migraine.

128 points by runesoerensen 10y ago

The podium/teleport concept seems very intuitive, at least it definitely was in my mind before the article explained it. Lots of interesting gameplay mechanics still need to be solved for VR, interesting times ahead.

excalibur 10y ago
Personally I think the best solution will involve some sort of hardware that can keep the player stationary while giving them the feeling of walking around freely. I'm not sure exactly what this will look like, it's generally not a good idea to walk on your treadmill while blindfolded.
- roblabla 10y ago
  I agree. There's actually already something in development called Virtuix Omni[0] that does what you think. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuix_Omni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuix_Omni
- zevyoura 10y ago
  Prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  The Virtuix Omni is a device like what you have in mind. Essentially you run in a shallow bowl shape with slippery foot pads and it holds you still at the waist. http://www.virtuix.com/ http://www.virtuix.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/49nbih/a_full_month_with_the_virtuix_omni_my_review/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/49nbih/a_full_month...
  - infogulch 10y ago
    The problem with this type of solution is that you still don't feel the acceleration, you're just flailing your limbs around in a single spot without actually moving. It's the missing acceleration that makes you sick, not that you can't move your limbs.
    - Nadya 10y ago
      Not having used it - I would think of it like an omni-directional treadmill. Treadmills don't make me feel sick, why would this? Legitimate question.
      - infogulch 10y ago
        The sickness comes from the disconnect between what you see and what you feel. When you're running on a treadmill you see that you're standing (relatively) still, just moving your limbs. Your inner ear corroborates this when it doesn't feel any horizontal acceleration. Everything agrees; no sickness. In VR, you see that you were stopped and then the gun went off and you started running. But your inner ear disagrees: you're not accelerating at all, you're still standing still. Disconnect, sickness.
        wlesieutre 10y ago
        Just stick some electrodes on your head to poke at your vestibular system so that it matches up with what you're seeing http://www.fastcompany.com/3058414/mayo-clinic-technology-said-to-alleviate-nausea-from-vr http://www.fastcompany.com/3058414/mayo-clinic-technology-sa... If their system actually works hopefully we'll see consumer implementations in the next couple of years.
  - excalibur 10y ago
    I like it, it's even compatible with my little GearVR. Of course, if I had $700+ to spend on peripherals, I probably wouldn't be using the budget headset in the first place.

phkahler 10y ago

I'm really not a fan of the external camera. IMHO the ultimate solution is for a camera (or two) on the headset running SLAM to create a virtual world that overlays the real world. Then the experience has to be designed to map onto a large variety of real world environments. You're still free to change the textures and lighting of course. While this is not a generally applicable concept, it would make the virtual experience vary depending on your real-world location. Imagine going to a friends house to play Doom because his house is actually more fun.

excalibur 10y ago
You're referring to Mixed Reality, which is the concept that Magic Leap is working on (rather fantastically). It may ultimately prove more enjoyable than VR in a variety of ways, but it has a different set of challenges. The goal there is to bring virtual objects to your world, while the goal of VR is to transport you to another one.
- baby 10y ago
  Augmented Reality or AR is a better word.
nitrogen 10y ago
Imagine going to a friends house to play Doom because his house is actually more fun. That reminds me of the days when kids could make maps of their friends' houses and schools in various 3D games without being labeled as a psycho killer.
- Retr0spectrum 10y ago
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrike_map_texasschool/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrik...
- lijason 10y ago
  Or playing with nerf guns in a friend's house?

0xfeba 10y ago

I'm glad that racing sims and flight sims don't have to solve these problems, because VR flight sims are exhilarating. Only thing that's needed is G-force.

adwf 10y ago

Not to be too much of a downer, but I still think the main problem with VR isn't the technicality, but the practicality. We had the exact same problems with motion controls. They might momentarily enjoy the novelty of a motion game, but it's just a gimmick. When you get down to it, a lot of people enjoy just sitting on the couch twiddling their thumbs to get the character to do all the work. They play games to relax, not get a workout. If you force them to stand up and move, you've already failed. Where I do see VR having some interesting applications is in the workplace. Replacing all your monitors and work environment with a virtual space of unlimited scope. Imagine remote working - where one moment you could be typing away on a sunny beach, the next you're in a scheduled meeting room with all your colleagues, without having to move an inch.

supernintendo 10y ago
Agreed. I would invite VR developers to consider whether or not home is the best setting for VR gaming. The developers of Killer Queen [1] were smart in developing their game for arcades; had it merely been a Steam release, it may have been looked at as just another quirky indie game with pixel art. Come to think of it, VR in arcades could actually take off. Think of a physical enclosure designed to contribute to the presence of the VR experience. Arcade rail shooters have been accomplishing this for years through the use of a chassis that moves based on events within the game. [1] http://killerqueenarcade.com/ http://killerqueenarcade.com/
- chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
  I've come to the same conclusion: VR belongs in an arcade. The tough part is coming up with a game worthy of a VR arcade... Batman Beyond-style.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    If you want to do arcade VR you'll need to solve the Pink Eye problem before I get anywhere near it.

Houshalter 10y ago

What if you rotate the camera slightly while you move? By the time you reach the end of the physical room, the camera is facing the opposite direction in virtual room and you have to turn around.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
texuf 10y ago
It would be worth a try. My bet is that the user vomits or falls down.
- mlvljr 10y ago
  Or both, in a fast sequence :/
jonas21 10y ago
They've done similar things along with other tricks, like changing the layout of the room when your back is turned to simulate large spaces in small rooms. http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-lineand-thats-great-vr/ http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-lineand-that...
aab0 10y ago
For 'redirected walking', you need a lot of room because you can only bend a little. The Void has done it and researchers have, but they usually have warehouse-like spaces. It won't work in a normal 3m^2 sort of residential room, which is why you need gimmicks like teleporting or omni-treadmills.
746F7475 10y ago
if it's small enough that user won't notice, you'd still need a big open space. Otherwise it's obvious and obnoxious. There was some games where once you got close to a wall, you could spin in place and the world would keep up with you, but this means you can't have any kind of fight or escape scenes in your game.

Razengan 10y ago

I was just musing with my girlfriend about the logical progression of immersion technology, especially as it applies to games. Right now, we're still trying to perfect the visual part of VR. In 5 to 10 years we may get to the point where graphics are no longer indistinguishable from reality as we know it. Research into providing the sensation of touch has begun already and in, say 25 years as a safe estimate, we may be able to perfect that as well. Games where you can comprehend the texture and weight of every object, wince from every blow you receive, and even feel a cool wind or gusts of heat all over your skin. In about 50 years we will have the senses of smell and taste covered as well, and by 100 years from now VR may become impossible to tell apart from reality. But.. people will still KNOW that it's fake, because they will remember being out here in reality. So what's the next step for achieving maximum immersion? Voluntarily wiping out your memory of the real world before you log into that next-gen VRMMORPG. Eventually you have people being born into a world without a clue and having to be cared for by and learn from others until they can orient themselves, and all sorts of theories about what happens when they "die."

bognition 10y ago
> In 5 to 10 years we may get to the point where graphics are no longer indistinguishable from reality as we know it I feel like I've been hearing this statement for decades now. The human brain is remarkably good at pattern separation, and given enough time and exposure to a stimulus it will work out what is real and what isn't. Until we have a simulated reality that is as information rich as reality we'll always be able to tell the two apart
- Razengan 10y ago
  Multiply the placeholder times with the estimates of your choice, of course :)
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  This. Does your game have a river? If so, humans observing the river will veeery easily be able to spot it's a fake. Because an actual realistic simulation of turbulent river flow is way beyond the largest supercomputers today, and Moore's law has run out of the steam that has made todays consoles have the computing power of your fathers supercomputer. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that even twenty years from now, by far the cheapest way of creating a completely photorealistic VR river scene is to build the actual river and record video of it. Then you "only" run into the problem of storing and distributing the petabytes of data you record.

Animats 10y ago

That's just how you get started. Then what? How do you move? You usually can't move very far in the real world. Although it would be fun to have VR events on big open spaces, so you could. The U.S. Army has tried VR big spaces.[1] It works. Their people wear knee pads and helmets, so falls aren't too serious. The Army also accepts that getting banged up a little in training is a normal part of life. This isn't going to translate to the living room. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V34gCw4fyLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V34gCw4fyLs

agildehaus 10y ago
There are plenty of locomotion solutions in VR. Simple teleportation works the best. The best implementation of teleportation that I've seen is in the game Budget Cuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtEw2ggPnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtEw2ggPnA
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Wow, genius! Though I wonder, why most of the VR games I see now keep showing tools you handle "floating in the air"? It's a pretty immersion-breaking element, I think.
  - agildehaus 10y ago
    You mean how there are no hands and arms attached to the guns? While it looks funny on a video like this, it doesn't bother you a bit while you're in there. My best explanation is your brain doesn't really care about your limbs while you're holding something. Your attention is on the object. Rendering fake arms and hands would be a bit off-putting, I think. VR isn't tracking the position of your elbows or fingers, so it would have to guess their positions, and pretty much anything that's doesn't match reality gets noticed by your brain. Rendering nothing instead of the wrong thing is more immersive.
    - cwilkes 10y ago
      It bothers me. I was playing with the Vive and the controllers with the smooth trackpad and it was a really odd experience. First I couldn't tell what I was doing as the pad was frictionless. Then I saw a little red light to indicate I was touching the pad and it would move around in a circle. Okay that was helpful. Except when looking down and it I was weirded out by knowing by hands are there in real life but I couldn't see them. What the heck was going on? Shouldn't I be seeing myself there but I'm not? It was sort of like looking into a mirror and not seeing a reflection and wondering if you're a vampire or something. Yes that sounds crazy but it was quite odd.

DigitalJack 10y ago

The problem with all current VR (that I'm aware of at least), is that it models vision as if our eyes were permanently stuck forward and that all of our looking around was done by turning our head. It's not remotely correct, and I personally think it's what makes people sick. Our eyes are the viewpoint control, the head is a very coarse grained pivot, but it just controls the boundaries of the viewport. The view is always centered on whatever our eyes are looking at regardless of head position. You can read a sentence while shaking your and twisting your head. Try that with an oculus (or any other headset). In fact it's actually very hard to simuluate with your body the kind of sliding view that headsets give. You can do it, but it's hard. I personally have to totally defocus my eyes to stop them from locking on to something as I turn my head. The minecraft hack that snapped view changes to 15 degree increments is actually much closer to how things work biologically.

neogenix 10y ago
This, and the fact that you cannot focus into the distance. In real life most of your view is blurred except the part you are focussing on. In VR it still just looks flat, because if you focus on something in the distance, nothing happens.
- amelius 10y ago
  I wonder what happens if one uses VR goggles for too long. Will one lose the ability to focus?
  - hellomoto998 10y ago
    If you wear prisms that invert the world, your brain will eventually see the world inverted when you remove the prisms, and this effect will auto-correct after some duration.
    - bduerst 10y ago
      It also gives you one hell of a migraine.