11 ms·

The Road to Virtual Reality

133 points by dieulot 13y ago

vonnik 13y ago
This just out: Convergence: What happens when virtual realities take over? http://pando.com/2014/02/16/convergence-what-happens-when-virtual-realities-take-over/ http://pando.com/2014/02/16/convergence-what-happens-when-vi...
tmikaeld 13y ago
I personally think the CastAR glasses will be a much better solution, and above all - a very social one.
- rschmitty 13y ago
  It's definitely different from Oculus/Valve but I think most people want to be immersed in a world rather than have a very sophisticated and gorgeous board game/D&D experience. There is fighting a dragon with your D&D friends on a couch eating chips and what not, then there is fighting a dragon with your hands and body. I'm not saying there isnt a place or this won't be popular, but I'd rather be in the OASIS somewhere with an immersion rig :)
  - XorNot 13y ago
    I don't know - 3D TV has broken the ice of getting everyone together wearing glasses to view content. I think the CastAR at the right price point could be a next logical step there - especially if they take the QR code alignment concept and add a bit of social logic to it (i.e. look at this target and say, your phone downloads prompts to download the relevant game and connect (or hunts for the right wi-fi video stream). There's a lot of potential there.
    - lotsofmangos 13y ago
      3D TV has broken the ice of getting everyone together wearing glasses to view content. That was also true in the 1950s, 3d films were a success for a while back then.
    - rschmitty 13y ago
      I'm not saying there isnt potential _there_ just that most people/gamers I talk to are looking for VR, not AR. Google glass and CastAR will bring a lot of nifty stuff to the table but that will be a different audience. Like the blog post said, VR people are after Snow Crash/Ready Player One. I'm sure LARP'rs will want AR
  - exDM69 13y ago
    > It's definitely different from Oculus/Valve but I think most people want to be immersed in a world rather than have a very sophisticated and gorgeous board game/D&D experience. This is by no means the only thing CastAR will be able to do - it's just what they have concentrated on in their demos. Perhaps because unlike Oculus, they can create an experience where many viewers can share the same scene (or a completely different scene) on the same physical surface. I am particularly interested about CastAR for (flight, etc) simulation. The problem with Oculus is that it completely blocks your view to the real world. When playing flight simulators and other games with lots of controls, you need to see where your fingers are. E.g. playing flight sims with the Oculus, most of the time your hands will be on throttle and stick and everything is fine but when it's time to engage the landing gear, you'll have to peer under the goggles to find the button for the landing gear. Perhaps the CastAR technology is more suited to things that pop out of the surface (like a board game button) than things that go deep into the surface (like a window). This might make it less suitable for simulation purposes. On the other hand, the playing with the Oculus will inevitably be a solitary gaming experience where the CastAR may be able to preserve the social element in gaming. Of course, solitary and social games are targeted at different audiences. But the best thing about CastAR vs. Oculus is the competition of two different technologies, which will inevitably drive the competition forwards.
- notjosh 13y ago
  I've been very (very!) impressed by how natural CastAR feels to use. But I fear they'll go the way of the Wii - great tech, but no one really takes it seriously enough to build out on the platform. My fingers are crossed for them though :)
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  I don't. There's no way AR can be make you feel "present" in a whole other world the way VR does - at least not as fast as VR can do it. Whether it can do it 20 years later, that's different. But it seems much easier to do that with VR now.
  - grandmaster789 13y ago
    This is exactly the difference between VR and AR. With VR you yourself become convinced that you are present in a virtual reality, while AR convinces you that the virtual has a presence in reality.
rwmj 13y ago
I recommend watching this video of an Oculus converted into an AR (augmented reality) headset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA
- sevia 13y ago
  I think that this idea of programs and files existing in AR space is going to cause another fundamental shift in the way we interact with computers. The idea's been explored before - but once HMD resolution hits that critical point, all previous implementations will be what PDAs were to the iPhone.
fidotron 13y ago
It amazes, and bothers me, just how little discussion of the potential health impact of VR there is in the new hype cycle. My understanding from 10+ years ago was people would have invested in getting over the latency problems if they hadn't discovered it's actually really bad for you, not in the sense of being heavy, but messing with your depth perception when back in reality. The technology has clearly improved, not least that a decent phone now has more graphics power than an SGI Onyx of the era of the experiments, but nothing has magically changed about the people.
- ehsanu1 13y ago
  Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings. Then it won't matter that it's VR, given high-fidelity, accurate input. Current VR systems like the Oculus are "just" a stepping stone to something much greater. That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?
  - msutherl 13y ago
    > Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings. This will not work. The visual system is not an "information processing" system like a computer. In order to wire an "accurate input" into your brain, you would need to duplicate all of the nonlinear optical, electrical, and chemical transformations performed by the eye, in which case you might as well just use your eye. In other words, we don't just see what comes out of the screen, so wiring that data into your brain will be gibberish at worst and a somewhat compromised new sense organ at best.
    - comex 13y ago
      Yes, but once you solve those issues, you don't need a super high resolution, light field based (or otherwise adjustable focus) display that's very small and has very high battery life, to achieve the same portability. Your face doesn't need to have a weird-looking and -feeling object on it, and if you can hook into the original eye signal, you get a free dual camera for AR. Oh, and on a less geeky note, it gives sight to the blind. The resolution and the focus will certainly be solved long before an implant could give remotely similar performance, but an implant would sure be neat for the other reasons.
eludwig 13y ago
Boy, it is really early days with this stuff. Over the holidays, my brother-in-law brought over a set of the current Oculus. The 720p ones. The experience reminded me a lot of the early days of 3D, i.e. the difficulty alone of setting up a 3D daughter card properly. You needed the right version of this driver, the right version of that app. The Oculus took about 45 minutes to set up properly - and I am a gamer with a gamer PC. We needed a particular game from Steam that had a development feature that you could turn on, etc. We had to fool around with the Windows video settings. You name it. This will obviously get better when they release a real version, but it was pretty bad. Then I actually tried them. All of Jeff's observations are spot on. The current resolution sucks. The problem is that your eyes are so, so close to the screen. I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. I have no idea why, but I didn't need them, so that was good. The other big issue is maybe health related. These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. Of course, the game we were playing, which was some sort of flight simulator, didn't help. I did not try another game. I didn't feel like I was going to be able to walk after 10 minutes of VR. One other thing. These goggles invite new gameplay experiences that probably haven't been invented yet. And by that, I mean that just strapping these things on does not suddenly make current mediocre games great. Mediocre games still suck. In fact, they are worse, because you can see every flaw, due to the closeness of the screen. So there will need to be games that are made just for this device. Which, I guess means that you should not buy these hoping that your current set of games will now become "walk thru" or whatever. It is going to take a compelling combination of hardware and software in order to make this device really shine. I wish them the best. I am really on the fence as to whether or not this is a revolution at all. Time will tell. I hope it is and that they can overcome all of the hurdles, many of which seem kinda big.
- glimcat 13y ago
  > These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. It's primarily a matching failure between what you see and what your inner ear, proprioception, and sense of pressure are telling you is happening, as well as any other visual input if it's a mixed-vision system. Mostly inner ear, and vision if present. Also it's mostly rotational motion that triggers it - but you'll easily hit that with just the small motions of your head and the looseness of the headset. Which is ridiculously hard to compensate for since you have to get extremely precise, low-noise motion & environmental pose tracking, with extremely tight time limits - and then it has to be fed into the rendering engine, which has to react in time to fool the operator. But the evolutionary rationale is also right. Your brain evolved to freak out in the event of persistent sensory mis-match because it's a pro-survival feature. The naturally occurring causes are things like severe food poisoning. > I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. IIRC, the reason is that VR stimuli are "focused at infinity." It also helps that you're trying to take in the image, not the pixels or other fine details. Trying to read small text at a distance of ~ 20 cm requires relatively precise focus. A picture of a cat that's taking up your entire field of view does not.
higherpurpose 13y ago
Someone made a rough resolution simulator for the Oculus Rift (make sure you check low persistence, which has been available with the latest prototypes): http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/ http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/ You can see there's a pretty huge difference between the 800p one and the 1440p one (~4x more pixels), which will probably be what the consumer version will have. With 1440p you will still notice the screen door, especially in the distance (the sky), and it looks like we'll only solve this with the 4k resolution, when the resolution seems to become "normal", and without easily noticeable pixel lines, but it will probably be at 8k when we'll have "retina"-like quality. All of that being said, I think 95+ percent of consumers buying the 1440p version won't even notice the small pixel lines in the distance, because they'll be so "present" in those VR worlds. Most "normal" people trying it out quickly forget about the screen door even with the 800p developer kit, because they've never experienced something in VR before, and to them it feels very real already. Personally, I do hope they can use the 4k resolution in the second consumer version as soon as possible, but I think the 1440p one will do just fine with all the early adopters.
- mkeblx 13y ago
  Yes, while the current dev kit would have a hard time being a consumer success for easy to point out reasons, knowing that the consumer version will be qualitatively 10x-100x better (~4x resolution, content availability & quality, better form factor, positional tracking, low persistence, and the real key: 'presence'-inducing) lets you understand how many of the potential things that would stop VR from going big very soon will basically be non-factors. I'm hopeful 1440p will be fairly text friendly and prove good-enough for programming, etc. but even if not quite there, that merely means that threshold will be broken a year or two down the line.
- runewell 13y ago
  Thanks for the link, this is awesome.
Tenoke 13y ago
So based on this it does seem like using OR for your desktop (browsing, work, etc.) will not be viable. This is kind of sad as I was hoping that it will be a decent alternative to using multiple monitors.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  Browsing is inherently a 2D experience. Maybe VR will finally make it possible to try out stuff like clothes before you buy them online, though. Create an avatar that has your dimensions and looks, and then "wear" the clothes and watch yourself in a 3d mirror. Obviously, the graphics will have to look pretty realistic.
- deletes 13y ago
  You will, once the resolution gets high enough( this will take years though ). I predict that the first users of such setups will be ones currently sporting 4+ monitors.( stock brokers come to mind ). When OR becomes cheaper than the equivalent set of displays you will probably use it.
z3phyr 13y ago
I have three questions (maybe not on-topic) - 1) How much harder and stranger will it be to do VR graphics programming? 2) Can we predict when we will be able to replicate real world in a graphics application? 3) AI has a end goal of achieving singularity. What is the ultimate goal of a graphics programmer? And how much closer are we to the goal?
- grandmaster789 13y ago
  Graphics programming for VR is only slightly more difficult than normal. Some screenspace techniques don't work as well, and everything is done in a stereo pipeline. The Oculus also requires some distortion and calibration of the distance between the eyes is very much preferred. Basically that's it. Replicating the real world is still very far off, but there is an estimate where the resolution offered by the screen matches the average density of receptors in the eye. I don't recall exact numbers, but I seem to remember Michael Abrash having said something about it. Probably somewhere in the range of 8k displays per eye.
  - runewell 13y ago
    8k may not be high enough for true "reality like" vision in an HMD. A good article on the matter can be found at http://bit.ly/1bCyIcj http://bit.ly/1bCyIcj . What's cool is that mobile manufacturers have already committed to creating screens capable of much higher-density screens than current technology. The VR space was a bit nervous regarding display technology due to the diminishing returns of higher-resolution screens but recent announcement makes hi-resolution VR not only possible but likely regardless of the success of individual VR companies.
  - hatu 13y ago
    Game engines are pretty well encapsulated so it might be as easy as popping another camera into the scene and configuring them to feel right.
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I helped found the VR lab at SAIC many years ago. We did 3D sound (via head related transfer functions), full on motion platforms, haptic feedback (e.g., a race car goes off the track a little, and you feel the chatter in the steering wheel), and SGI Reality Engine 3D graphics. The problem? It was cost. We had a tentative agreement to put VR racing pods in a Las Vegas hotel, but after the prototypes where developed (and they were great fun!), we did better cost analysis and cancelled the project because the "ride" would have been way too expensive for end users. The custom motion platform was especially expensive, but added so much to the experience. Later at a different company, I was lead programmer for a VR demo system for Disney. The demo was great, but when they deployed to production in Disney World they had to cut corners on the motion platform, etc. edit: my point is that there is a lot more to VR than just 3D graphics - if you want to achieve what is called "suspension of disbelief."
- dbarlett 13y ago
  Was that the Aladdin's carpet ride? I was one of the beta testers at Epcot as a child. I remember being terrible at flying the carpet around but not caring because it was so unique.
  - mark_l_watson 13y ago
    No, it was a river raft ride with lots of dinosaurs. In the demo/prototype system, the dinosaurs behaved differently depending on user actions. I never got to try the deployed system.
- BadassFractal 13y ago
  Proper 3d sound is such a great idea, I hope that's something people will focus on a lot more now that VR is getting main-stream.
  - CmonDev 13y ago
    Good headphones give you that though? Especially on binaural records.
mentos 13y ago
Oculus Rift owner here. I think the biggest things to look for in the upcoming consumer version is how effective the new head tracking is at reducing the mismatch between your real-world head and virtual-head. Among all of the factors that contributed to nausea in the first development kit, latency, motion blur, pupillary distance, I believe a lack of head tracking has been the biggest as they did not have an effective solution and instead modeled it in software with a simulated 'neck crane'. Little variations in your head position that normally create a wealth of information for your eyes were not being picked up and were understandably creating discomfort or the user. Based on the reviews I've seen of the Crystal Cove prototype, it looks like this new 1:1 head tracking, coupled with reduced motion blur, has eliminated a majority of the nausea from the experience (1). So if Oculus holds up their end of the bargain, the next breakthrough is on the game developers. Who is going to create that 'killer app'? My bet is on Valve with something like Half Life 3 / LFD2 (2). 1 - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/new-oculus-prototype-features-positional-tracking-reduced-motion-blur/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/new-oculus-prototype-f... 2 - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131719-Leaked-Source-Engine-2-Screenshot-Hints-At-Left-4-Dead-3 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131719-Leaked-Sour...
- adventured 13y ago
  I actually think Portal would be a better killer VR app than HL or LFD. It would appeal to a much larger base, including more casual game players. If we're talking mainstream breakthrough.... If EA weren't so backwards, and assuming the hardware were ready, The Sims VR would cause an earthquake. Also, a next generation incarnation of Minecraft would be a prime candidate. A world you can 'live' in, that is easy to randomize and wouldn't take five years for devs to build first (ala Skyrim).
  - chadwickthebold 13y ago
    Is Portal considered more mainstream than a straight-up shooter? I would think that most run-of-the-mill COD or Battlefield players would stay away from the quirky, puzzle-y nature of Portal.
mwcampbell 13y ago
I find it odd that he described Ready Player One as "excellent", yet is excited about VR. Maybe he wasn't paying attention, but Ready Player One is in part a critique of VR. Notice that the real world has decayed quite a bit because of neglect; most everyone avoids the real world and escapes to the OASIS (the VR). And the book ends with the protagonist being happy enough that for the first time in as long as he can remember, he has no desire to log back into the VR.
- runewell 13y ago
  I had a different perspective on the book. To me the dystopian future had less to do with VR and more to do with oligarchy, the energy crisis, and our lack of planning for the future. In the book VR became the main character's only way to escape his harsh realities, a place where he actually had a best friend, and a place where he enjoyed experiences with his mother and was able to benefit from the automated education. The end of the book did not give me the impression that VR was bad, only that reality could be good even in a bad unforgiving world. I know the author went to the Oculus Rift headquarters last year as they are big fans of his book. http://bit.ly/1gR4hfX http://bit.ly/1gR4hfX
sixQuarks 13y ago
I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way. Many of you are caught up in the small technical details. Forget about that and look at the big picture. We are finally going to replicate experiences and our brains will really think we're there. This will have repercussions on things that may not be so obvious right now. Things such as traveling for meetings or entertainment. Why go through the hassle of getting ready, driving through traffic, looking for parking, etc when you can just put on VR equipment and experience the same thing instantly? I can't say for sure that VR will be as big as I think it will be, but I'm pretty confident that it's an either/or thing. Either it's going to be the most impactful technology since the internet (perhaps greater), or it's going to be a flop. I don't think there will be a middle ground.
- slurry 13y ago
  I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way. That seemed really obvious to me in the early 90s, too. I don't mean that to sound dismissive or get-off-my-lawn-ish, just to point out that there's a history of VR overhype which makes skepticism understandable.
  - runewell 13y ago
    That's true. This is also a good opportunity for those of us that remember the early days of the Internet. If you believe, as I do, that VR will have a significant impact then today is the equivalent of the pre-Mosaic days of the Internet. The calm before the storm. Anyone creating a business in this space has the opportunity to be the next Jeff Bezos or Marc Andreessen within 10 years. It could all be a nerd's pipe dream, of course that's what they said about the Internet and before that computers in general.
  - hatu 13y ago
    At least the graphics performance and cheap hardware is there now.
  - sixQuarks 13y ago
smacktoward 13y ago
I'm as hopeful for Oculus as I would assume most HN readers are, but one hurdle Jeff mentions is I think a bigger deal than most people assume. Namely: > It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience. This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV -- the "everyone has to put their special pair of glasses on now for this to work" problem. It turned out that most people just weren't willing to go that extra step of putting special glasses on to watch TV. And 3D glasses don't even have to be strapped to your head! They're feather-light and super-simple compared to something like the Rift. But they were still too much to win over a broad general audience. (It could be argued that this is less of a problem for VR than it was for 3D, because TV content is more frequently consumed socially than computer/game console content is. But even if that's true, it seems like it puts an unnecessary cap on VR's ambitions; why wouldn't VR want to expand into the niche TV fills today?) This is a big chasm for VR hardware, even very good VR hardware -- the more ceremony that is required to get from "hm, I'd like to have a VR experience now" to actually having the VR experience, the less likely it is that it will ever make the leap from early adopters to the general public. "Casually" is a good way to describe the way people interact with most media -- and that's only becoming more true as things like smartphones and tablets become prevalent. So anything that pushes back and tries to make that casual experience more formal is swimming against the tide.
- tsm 13y ago
  As a child I was more than happy to spend ~10 minutes waiting for my ancient computer to boot up and load a game, and even now all the League of Legends players cope with absurd startup time. In contrast, it'll take less than a minute to put on some VR goggles. The comparison with 3D TVs isn't so valid. In contrast to gaming, TVs are both casual and multi-user. Making sure everyone has the right glasses to watch 20 minutes of the Olympics (while conversing or eating or whatever) is much different than sitting down by yourself to do some proper gaming.
- radiorental 13y ago
  "This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV" I beg to differ. "3D" failed in cinemas and there's no amount of commitment already given to that ensuring maximum enjoyment; travel, ticket prices, $10 popcorn, etc. I see the lack of compelling content, or at least a good enough reason to make said content 3D. The same is not true of VR. Entirely new experiences are possible. I agree that it's an anti social technology but I see the solitary gamer or single individual getting a lot of value from this.
supercoder 13y ago
lol, from the comments - "locking yourself away from vision and sound in an apartment or house makes you ripe for burglary and rape." Why do people jump to this worst case scenario for new tech ?
- CmonDev 13y ago
  Just add a small cam to stream into corner of your vision on demand.

133 points by dieulot 13y ago

This just out: Convergence: What happens when virtual realities take over? http://pando.com/2014/02/16/convergence-what-happens-when-virtual-realities-take-over/ http://pando.com/2014/02/16/convergence-what-happens-when-vi...

tmikaeld 13y ago

I personally think the CastAR glasses will be a much better solution, and above all - a very social one.

rschmitty 13y ago
It's definitely different from Oculus/Valve but I think most people want to be immersed in a world rather than have a very sophisticated and gorgeous board game/D&D experience. There is fighting a dragon with your D&D friends on a couch eating chips and what not, then there is fighting a dragon with your hands and body. I'm not saying there isnt a place or this won't be popular, but I'd rather be in the OASIS somewhere with an immersion rig :)
- XorNot 13y ago
  I don't know - 3D TV has broken the ice of getting everyone together wearing glasses to view content. I think the CastAR at the right price point could be a next logical step there - especially if they take the QR code alignment concept and add a bit of social logic to it (i.e. look at this target and say, your phone downloads prompts to download the relevant game and connect (or hunts for the right wi-fi video stream). There's a lot of potential there.
  - lotsofmangos 13y ago
    3D TV has broken the ice of getting everyone together wearing glasses to view content. That was also true in the 1950s, 3d films were a success for a while back then.
  - rschmitty 13y ago
    I'm not saying there isnt potential _there_ just that most people/gamers I talk to are looking for VR, not AR. Google glass and CastAR will bring a lot of nifty stuff to the table but that will be a different audience. Like the blog post said, VR people are after Snow Crash/Ready Player One. I'm sure LARP'rs will want AR
- exDM69 13y ago
  > It's definitely different from Oculus/Valve but I think most people want to be immersed in a world rather than have a very sophisticated and gorgeous board game/D&D experience. This is by no means the only thing CastAR will be able to do - it's just what they have concentrated on in their demos. Perhaps because unlike Oculus, they can create an experience where many viewers can share the same scene (or a completely different scene) on the same physical surface. I am particularly interested about CastAR for (flight, etc) simulation. The problem with Oculus is that it completely blocks your view to the real world. When playing flight simulators and other games with lots of controls, you need to see where your fingers are. E.g. playing flight sims with the Oculus, most of the time your hands will be on throttle and stick and everything is fine but when it's time to engage the landing gear, you'll have to peer under the goggles to find the button for the landing gear. Perhaps the CastAR technology is more suited to things that pop out of the surface (like a board game button) than things that go deep into the surface (like a window). This might make it less suitable for simulation purposes. On the other hand, the playing with the Oculus will inevitably be a solitary gaming experience where the CastAR may be able to preserve the social element in gaming. Of course, solitary and social games are targeted at different audiences. But the best thing about CastAR vs. Oculus is the competition of two different technologies, which will inevitably drive the competition forwards.
notjosh 13y ago
I've been very (very!) impressed by how natural CastAR feels to use. But I fear they'll go the way of the Wii - great tech, but no one really takes it seriously enough to build out on the platform. My fingers are crossed for them though :)
higherpurpose 13y ago
I don't. There's no way AR can be make you feel "present" in a whole other world the way VR does - at least not as fast as VR can do it. Whether it can do it 20 years later, that's different. But it seems much easier to do that with VR now.
- grandmaster789 13y ago
  This is exactly the difference between VR and AR. With VR you yourself become convinced that you are present in a virtual reality, while AR convinces you that the virtual has a presence in reality.

rwmj 13y ago

I recommend watching this video of an Oculus converted into an AR (augmented reality) headset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA

sevia 13y ago
I think that this idea of programs and files existing in AR space is going to cause another fundamental shift in the way we interact with computers. The idea's been explored before - but once HMD resolution hits that critical point, all previous implementations will be what PDAs were to the iPhone.

fidotron 13y ago

It amazes, and bothers me, just how little discussion of the potential health impact of VR there is in the new hype cycle. My understanding from 10+ years ago was people would have invested in getting over the latency problems if they hadn't discovered it's actually really bad for you, not in the sense of being heavy, but messing with your depth perception when back in reality. The technology has clearly improved, not least that a decent phone now has more graphics power than an SGI Onyx of the era of the experiments, but nothing has magically changed about the people.

ehsanu1 13y ago
Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings. Then it won't matter that it's VR, given high-fidelity, accurate input. Current VR systems like the Oculus are "just" a stepping stone to something much greater. That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?
- msutherl 13y ago
  > Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings. This will not work. The visual system is not an "information processing" system like a computer. In order to wire an "accurate input" into your brain, you would need to duplicate all of the nonlinear optical, electrical, and chemical transformations performed by the eye, in which case you might as well just use your eye. In other words, we don't just see what comes out of the screen, so wiring that data into your brain will be gibberish at worst and a somewhat compromised new sense organ at best.
  - comex 13y ago
    Yes, but once you solve those issues, you don't need a super high resolution, light field based (or otherwise adjustable focus) display that's very small and has very high battery life, to achieve the same portability. Your face doesn't need to have a weird-looking and -feeling object on it, and if you can hook into the original eye signal, you get a free dual camera for AR. Oh, and on a less geeky note, it gives sight to the blind. The resolution and the focus will certainly be solved long before an implant could give remotely similar performance, but an implant would sure be neat for the other reasons.

eludwig 13y ago

Boy, it is really early days with this stuff. Over the holidays, my brother-in-law brought over a set of the current Oculus. The 720p ones. The experience reminded me a lot of the early days of 3D, i.e. the difficulty alone of setting up a 3D daughter card properly. You needed the right version of this driver, the right version of that app. The Oculus took about 45 minutes to set up properly - and I am a gamer with a gamer PC. We needed a particular game from Steam that had a development feature that you could turn on, etc. We had to fool around with the Windows video settings. You name it. This will obviously get better when they release a real version, but it was pretty bad. Then I actually tried them. All of Jeff's observations are spot on. The current resolution sucks. The problem is that your eyes are so, so close to the screen. I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. I have no idea why, but I didn't need them, so that was good. The other big issue is maybe health related. These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. Of course, the game we were playing, which was some sort of flight simulator, didn't help. I did not try another game. I didn't feel like I was going to be able to walk after 10 minutes of VR. One other thing. These goggles invite new gameplay experiences that probably haven't been invented yet. And by that, I mean that just strapping these things on does not suddenly make current mediocre games great. Mediocre games still suck. In fact, they are worse, because you can see every flaw, due to the closeness of the screen. So there will need to be games that are made just for this device. Which, I guess means that you should not buy these hoping that your current set of games will now become "walk thru" or whatever. It is going to take a compelling combination of hardware and software in order to make this device really shine. I wish them the best. I am really on the fence as to whether or not this is a revolution at all. Time will tell. I hope it is and that they can overcome all of the hurdles, many of which seem kinda big.

glimcat 13y ago
> These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. It's primarily a matching failure between what you see and what your inner ear, proprioception, and sense of pressure are telling you is happening, as well as any other visual input if it's a mixed-vision system. Mostly inner ear, and vision if present. Also it's mostly rotational motion that triggers it - but you'll easily hit that with just the small motions of your head and the looseness of the headset. Which is ridiculously hard to compensate for since you have to get extremely precise, low-noise motion & environmental pose tracking, with extremely tight time limits - and then it has to be fed into the rendering engine, which has to react in time to fool the operator. But the evolutionary rationale is also right. Your brain evolved to freak out in the event of persistent sensory mis-match because it's a pro-survival feature. The naturally occurring causes are things like severe food poisoning. > I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. IIRC, the reason is that VR stimuli are "focused at infinity." It also helps that you're trying to take in the image, not the pixels or other fine details. Trying to read small text at a distance of ~ 20 cm requires relatively precise focus. A picture of a cat that's taking up your entire field of view does not.

higherpurpose 13y ago

Someone made a rough resolution simulator for the Oculus Rift (make sure you check low persistence, which has been available with the latest prototypes): http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/ http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/ You can see there's a pretty huge difference between the 800p one and the 1440p one (~4x more pixels), which will probably be what the consumer version will have. With 1440p you will still notice the screen door, especially in the distance (the sky), and it looks like we'll only solve this with the 4k resolution, when the resolution seems to become "normal", and without easily noticeable pixel lines, but it will probably be at 8k when we'll have "retina"-like quality. All of that being said, I think 95+ percent of consumers buying the 1440p version won't even notice the small pixel lines in the distance, because they'll be so "present" in those VR worlds. Most "normal" people trying it out quickly forget about the screen door even with the 800p developer kit, because they've never experienced something in VR before, and to them it feels very real already. Personally, I do hope they can use the 4k resolution in the second consumer version as soon as possible, but I think the 1440p one will do just fine with all the early adopters.

mkeblx 13y ago
Yes, while the current dev kit would have a hard time being a consumer success for easy to point out reasons, knowing that the consumer version will be qualitatively 10x-100x better (~4x resolution, content availability & quality, better form factor, positional tracking, low persistence, and the real key: 'presence'-inducing) lets you understand how many of the potential things that would stop VR from going big very soon will basically be non-factors. I'm hopeful 1440p will be fairly text friendly and prove good-enough for programming, etc. but even if not quite there, that merely means that threshold will be broken a year or two down the line.
runewell 13y ago
Thanks for the link, this is awesome.

Tenoke 13y ago

So based on this it does seem like using OR for your desktop (browsing, work, etc.) will not be viable. This is kind of sad as I was hoping that it will be a decent alternative to using multiple monitors.

higherpurpose 13y ago
Browsing is inherently a 2D experience. Maybe VR will finally make it possible to try out stuff like clothes before you buy them online, though. Create an avatar that has your dimensions and looks, and then "wear" the clothes and watch yourself in a 3d mirror. Obviously, the graphics will have to look pretty realistic.
deletes 13y ago
You will, once the resolution gets high enough( this will take years though ). I predict that the first users of such setups will be ones currently sporting 4+ monitors.( stock brokers come to mind ). When OR becomes cheaper than the equivalent set of displays you will probably use it.

z3phyr 13y ago

I have three questions (maybe not on-topic) - 1) How much harder and stranger will it be to do VR graphics programming? 2) Can we predict when we will be able to replicate real world in a graphics application? 3) AI has a end goal of achieving singularity. What is the ultimate goal of a graphics programmer? And how much closer are we to the goal?

grandmaster789 13y ago
Graphics programming for VR is only slightly more difficult than normal. Some screenspace techniques don't work as well, and everything is done in a stereo pipeline. The Oculus also requires some distortion and calibration of the distance between the eyes is very much preferred. Basically that's it. Replicating the real world is still very far off, but there is an estimate where the resolution offered by the screen matches the average density of receptors in the eye. I don't recall exact numbers, but I seem to remember Michael Abrash having said something about it. Probably somewhere in the range of 8k displays per eye.
- runewell 13y ago
  8k may not be high enough for true "reality like" vision in an HMD. A good article on the matter can be found at http://bit.ly/1bCyIcj http://bit.ly/1bCyIcj . What's cool is that mobile manufacturers have already committed to creating screens capable of much higher-density screens than current technology. The VR space was a bit nervous regarding display technology due to the diminishing returns of higher-resolution screens but recent announcement makes hi-resolution VR not only possible but likely regardless of the success of individual VR companies.
- hatu 13y ago
  Game engines are pretty well encapsulated so it might be as easy as popping another camera into the scene and configuring them to feel right.

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I helped found the VR lab at SAIC many years ago. We did 3D sound (via head related transfer functions), full on motion platforms, haptic feedback (e.g., a race car goes off the track a little, and you feel the chatter in the steering wheel), and SGI Reality Engine 3D graphics. The problem? It was cost. We had a tentative agreement to put VR racing pods in a Las Vegas hotel, but after the prototypes where developed (and they were great fun!), we did better cost analysis and cancelled the project because the "ride" would have been way too expensive for end users. The custom motion platform was especially expensive, but added so much to the experience. Later at a different company, I was lead programmer for a VR demo system for Disney. The demo was great, but when they deployed to production in Disney World they had to cut corners on the motion platform, etc. edit: my point is that there is a lot more to VR than just 3D graphics - if you want to achieve what is called "suspension of disbelief."

dbarlett 13y ago
Was that the Aladdin's carpet ride? I was one of the beta testers at Epcot as a child. I remember being terrible at flying the carpet around but not caring because it was so unique.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago
  No, it was a river raft ride with lots of dinosaurs. In the demo/prototype system, the dinosaurs behaved differently depending on user actions. I never got to try the deployed system.
BadassFractal 13y ago
Proper 3d sound is such a great idea, I hope that's something people will focus on a lot more now that VR is getting main-stream.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  Good headphones give you that though? Especially on binaural records.

mentos 13y ago

Oculus Rift owner here. I think the biggest things to look for in the upcoming consumer version is how effective the new head tracking is at reducing the mismatch between your real-world head and virtual-head. Among all of the factors that contributed to nausea in the first development kit, latency, motion blur, pupillary distance, I believe a lack of head tracking has been the biggest as they did not have an effective solution and instead modeled it in software with a simulated 'neck crane'. Little variations in your head position that normally create a wealth of information for your eyes were not being picked up and were understandably creating discomfort or the user. Based on the reviews I've seen of the Crystal Cove prototype, it looks like this new 1:1 head tracking, coupled with reduced motion blur, has eliminated a majority of the nausea from the experience (1). So if Oculus holds up their end of the bargain, the next breakthrough is on the game developers. Who is going to create that 'killer app'? My bet is on Valve with something like Half Life 3 / LFD2 (2). 1 - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/new-oculus-prototype-features-positional-tracking-reduced-motion-blur/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/new-oculus-prototype-f... 2 - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131719-Leaked-Source-Engine-2-Screenshot-Hints-At-Left-4-Dead-3 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131719-Leaked-Sour...

adventured 13y ago
I actually think Portal would be a better killer VR app than HL or LFD. It would appeal to a much larger base, including more casual game players. If we're talking mainstream breakthrough.... If EA weren't so backwards, and assuming the hardware were ready, The Sims VR would cause an earthquake. Also, a next generation incarnation of Minecraft would be a prime candidate. A world you can 'live' in, that is easy to randomize and wouldn't take five years for devs to build first (ala Skyrim).
- chadwickthebold 13y ago
  Is Portal considered more mainstream than a straight-up shooter? I would think that most run-of-the-mill COD or Battlefield players would stay away from the quirky, puzzle-y nature of Portal.

mwcampbell 13y ago

I find it odd that he described Ready Player One as "excellent", yet is excited about VR. Maybe he wasn't paying attention, but Ready Player One is in part a critique of VR. Notice that the real world has decayed quite a bit because of neglect; most everyone avoids the real world and escapes to the OASIS (the VR). And the book ends with the protagonist being happy enough that for the first time in as long as he can remember, he has no desire to log back into the VR.

runewell 13y ago
I had a different perspective on the book. To me the dystopian future had less to do with VR and more to do with oligarchy, the energy crisis, and our lack of planning for the future. In the book VR became the main character's only way to escape his harsh realities, a place where he actually had a best friend, and a place where he enjoyed experiences with his mother and was able to benefit from the automated education. The end of the book did not give me the impression that VR was bad, only that reality could be good even in a bad unforgiving world. I know the author went to the Oculus Rift headquarters last year as they are big fans of his book. http://bit.ly/1gR4hfX http://bit.ly/1gR4hfX

sixQuarks 13y ago

I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way. Many of you are caught up in the small technical details. Forget about that and look at the big picture. We are finally going to replicate experiences and our brains will really think we're there. This will have repercussions on things that may not be so obvious right now. Things such as traveling for meetings or entertainment. Why go through the hassle of getting ready, driving through traffic, looking for parking, etc when you can just put on VR equipment and experience the same thing instantly? I can't say for sure that VR will be as big as I think it will be, but I'm pretty confident that it's an either/or thing. Either it's going to be the most impactful technology since the internet (perhaps greater), or it's going to be a flop. I don't think there will be a middle ground.

slurry 13y ago
I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way. That seemed really obvious to me in the early 90s, too. I don't mean that to sound dismissive or get-off-my-lawn-ish, just to point out that there's a history of VR overhype which makes skepticism understandable.
- runewell 13y ago
  That's true. This is also a good opportunity for those of us that remember the early days of the Internet. If you believe, as I do, that VR will have a significant impact then today is the equivalent of the pre-Mosaic days of the Internet. The calm before the storm. Anyone creating a business in this space has the opportunity to be the next Jeff Bezos or Marc Andreessen within 10 years. It could all be a nerd's pipe dream, of course that's what they said about the Internet and before that computers in general.
- hatu 13y ago
  At least the graphics performance and cheap hardware is there now.
- sixQuarks 13y ago

smacktoward 13y ago

I'm as hopeful for Oculus as I would assume most HN readers are, but one hurdle Jeff mentions is I think a bigger deal than most people assume. Namely: > It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience. This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV -- the "everyone has to put their special pair of glasses on now for this to work" problem. It turned out that most people just weren't willing to go that extra step of putting special glasses on to watch TV. And 3D glasses don't even have to be strapped to your head! They're feather-light and super-simple compared to something like the Rift. But they were still too much to win over a broad general audience. (It could be argued that this is less of a problem for VR than it was for 3D, because TV content is more frequently consumed socially than computer/game console content is. But even if that's true, it seems like it puts an unnecessary cap on VR's ambitions; why wouldn't VR want to expand into the niche TV fills today?) This is a big chasm for VR hardware, even very good VR hardware -- the more ceremony that is required to get from "hm, I'd like to have a VR experience now" to actually having the VR experience, the less likely it is that it will ever make the leap from early adopters to the general public. "Casually" is a good way to describe the way people interact with most media -- and that's only becoming more true as things like smartphones and tablets become prevalent. So anything that pushes back and tries to make that casual experience more formal is swimming against the tide.

tsm 13y ago
As a child I was more than happy to spend ~10 minutes waiting for my ancient computer to boot up and load a game, and even now all the League of Legends players cope with absurd startup time. In contrast, it'll take less than a minute to put on some VR goggles. The comparison with 3D TVs isn't so valid. In contrast to gaming, TVs are both casual and multi-user. Making sure everyone has the right glasses to watch 20 minutes of the Olympics (while conversing or eating or whatever) is much different than sitting down by yourself to do some proper gaming.
radiorental 13y ago
"This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV" I beg to differ. "3D" failed in cinemas and there's no amount of commitment already given to that ensuring maximum enjoyment; travel, ticket prices, $10 popcorn, etc. I see the lack of compelling content, or at least a good enough reason to make said content 3D. The same is not true of VR. Entirely new experiences are possible. I agree that it's an anti social technology but I see the solitary gamer or single individual getting a lot of value from this.

supercoder 13y ago

lol, from the comments - "locking yourself away from vision and sound in an apartment or house makes you ripe for burglary and rape." Why do people jump to this worst case scenario for new tech ?

CmonDev 13y ago
Just add a small cam to stream into corner of your vision on demand.