3 ms·

I hope this isn't the way it goes. For purely selfish reasons. As a wheelchair user, VR has the potential to provide sets of experiences that are difficult for

by sago 12y ago

I hope this isn't the way it goes. For purely selfish reasons. As a wheelchair user, VR has the potential to provide sets of experiences that are difficult for me to find elsewhere, like running, jumping, exploring spaces with verticality. But not if I have to wheel myself slowly around a 15' area doing n-point turns with my controllers on my knees. Ah, I can't blame them, but it will be sad not to be able to access these experiences. And, even for able bodied folks, isn't part of the fun of games being able to do virtually things you're not able to do in real life? Limiting games to walking around a small room - might give you immersion, but is that really going to be fun in the long run?

cma 12y ago
You should support OSVR, people would be able to modify the SDK to support moving the head around with a joystick regardless of whether an individual game supports it or not. Multiplayer cheat detection might have a problem with it though :/ Oculus is open enough that you could do this on PC, especially once they start working with DLLs instead of static linking for their SDK. But the future with them is grim, you can't touch anything at that level in GearVR, or even sideload an app without a Facebook key signature. The last license change to the PC SDK added a copyright assignment clause; this could either be so that they can close everything in the future, or so that they can open it--with Facebook I'm guessing it's the former, but I hope not.
gnarbarian 12y ago
I bet we will see MORE ways to interact with simulations rather than less. That will mean there are new input methods you will not be able to take advantage of, but you will also have more choices for input. The xbox controller came out a long time ago but competitively the controller can't come close to the keyboard and mouse.
nhaehnle 12y ago
I'm torn about whether to agree with you. On the one hand, I absolutely see your point. On the other hand, having played around with two iterations of Oculus' VR headset, I absolutely understand where this direction is coming from: VR can be absolutely disorienting if there is in-VR motion that is unrelated to your physical motion. I've tried playing TF2, for example, and I couldn't stand it for very long. I imagine that I could get accustomed to a slower, single-player FPS eventually, but it would take some time. The people who are currently most visibly developing and pushing VR are careful about it because they don't want VR to get bad press from people getting sick, and I totally respect that. I do believe that there is hope that if/when VR becomes more widespread and socially accepted, developers will start pushing the boundaries over time, and we'll get the kind of VR that you're wishing for.
- Lewton 12y ago
  Did you play Ocean Rift (a game where you're moving around as if you're swimming)? Any mech games (sitting in a chair in game really alleviates the problem)? Uncharted Territory (you move around, while being inside a space suit)? These experiences completely solved motion sickness for me. And I seem to be very prone to it in the rift. It's a shame so many developers seem to ignore the fact that their games make people sick
rprospero 12y ago
The bit that's funny about this is I remember an HCI researcher back in the 90's who argued in the opposite direction: the wheelchair is the perfect way to interact with a VR environment. Two large discs on independent rotation encoders make for an incredibly cheap and portable interface. Moving around the environment is intuitive and user actions have an obvious physical meaning in the environment. You get a rudimentary form of haptic feedback for free, as feeling the angular momentum of the spinning wheels gives the user information about their momentum in the virtual space. If you really felt like getting fancy, you could add a stepper motor to each shaft for the price of even the cheapest position tracking system. With the motor, you can provide the counter torque to simulate going up a hill or spin the wheels up as you go down a ramp. A system that lets a standing user instantly grasp the terrain under their feet would cost an astronomical amount, but it's trivial in a chair. Just the simple immersion of needing to give a little extra force to get a wheel over a door jam would make a huge difference.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
rnernento 12y ago
I think there is a lot of potential here for wheelchair users if this IS the direction VR goes. What you're describing is just another problem that needs to be tackled, if it can be done successfully VR should be an even more transformative experience for you. I could imagine a way to synch a motorized wheelchair to the headset so you would feel and see the movement but wouldn't have to do the wheeling.
soylentcola 12y ago
There are loads of uses for high-quality VR platforms. Even if first person gaming (or gaming at all) is the primary focus of early development due to easier integration with existing game engines, I imagine that in the long run, it will offer something more akin to the development of high-end mobile devices. Sure, those allowed for some unique gaming applications but there are also things that weren't necessarily the initial focus but are now common uses of those platforms. I'm thinking of things like immersive 3d "movies" that put you right in the action as an observer while actually seated in your chair. The other massive application that is seeing a lot of promise is 3d telepresence. Instead of doing a video Hangout or a Skype call on a flat screen, you could use depth cameras to record 3d video maps of each endpoint and stream that info to the other participants. You won't just be looking through a little (or big) window into another location, you'll see things as if you were actually sitting there. I still think the whole idea of treadmills or even Valve's thing to be a sort of attempt to shoehorn the conventions that were successful on 2D screens into VR. I'm glad to see any development and experimentation but I don't personally think the platform will ultimately evolve toward a more immersive extension of the current first person gaming paradigm. Just from my ~8 months of working with a Rift dev unit I've found first person, non-seated experiences to be some of the more limiting or difficult things to pull off well or for extended periods. I'm sure being able to walk around and get 1:1 representation will go a long way but you're still limited unless you focus on more of an AR solution. Still, it reminds me of a brainstorm/daydream I had a decade or two ago when first reading about modern attemts at virtual and augmented reality. I thought the simplest implementation of a FPS would be along the lines of laser tag. Since laser tag puts you in a predefined environment, you could set something up where the computing was either done on a backpack/wearable platform (or now, I guess on servers that communicate with headsets) and overlay everything on the actual pre-built structure around you. That way you'd get the tactile response of whatever walls and floors and obstacles are around you but the AR/VR stuff would texture things to look like a space station or catacombs or whatever you want. The Valve device seems like an early version of this and I'm interested in how Microsoft's HoloLens will compare in real world usage.
MaulingMonkey 12y ago
Right now everyone's developing against the Oculus Rift, which has a short enough tether that it's most definitely not a "walk around the room" experience. Some devs might be playing around with extension cables, but I think most of them aren't going to assume the end user is going to do the same (it's "not supported" and not without problems.) I'm pretty sure I've read Oculus docs outright discouraging standing experiences - safety concerns and the like, saying they're not currently interested in accepting them, at least insisting on a reasonable sitting experience. Even if Oculus Rift weren't the early mover here, I think a lot of games will be targeting the "lowest common denominator". They might support physically standing up and walking around in a room, or using 3d controllers, but they'll also support sitting down with a traditional keyboard+mouse setup. Eventually, we'll see games that assume a standing experience - like the existing games based on the Kinect, Wii balance pad, etc. - but I don't see them being the majority anytime soon (and a number of those can probably be sanely adapted not to require it as well.)

by sago 12y ago

cma 12y ago

You should support OSVR, people would be able to modify the SDK to support moving the head around with a joystick regardless of whether an individual game supports it or not. Multiplayer cheat detection might have a problem with it though :/ Oculus is open enough that you could do this on PC, especially once they start working with DLLs instead of static linking for their SDK. But the future with them is grim, you can't touch anything at that level in GearVR, or even sideload an app without a Facebook key signature. The last license change to the PC SDK added a copyright assignment clause; this could either be so that they can close everything in the future, or so that they can open it--with Facebook I'm guessing it's the former, but I hope not.

gnarbarian 12y ago

I bet we will see MORE ways to interact with simulations rather than less. That will mean there are new input methods you will not be able to take advantage of, but you will also have more choices for input. The xbox controller came out a long time ago but competitively the controller can't come close to the keyboard and mouse.

nhaehnle 12y ago

I'm torn about whether to agree with you. On the one hand, I absolutely see your point. On the other hand, having played around with two iterations of Oculus' VR headset, I absolutely understand where this direction is coming from: VR can be absolutely disorienting if there is in-VR motion that is unrelated to your physical motion. I've tried playing TF2, for example, and I couldn't stand it for very long. I imagine that I could get accustomed to a slower, single-player FPS eventually, but it would take some time. The people who are currently most visibly developing and pushing VR are careful about it because they don't want VR to get bad press from people getting sick, and I totally respect that. I do believe that there is hope that if/when VR becomes more widespread and socially accepted, developers will start pushing the boundaries over time, and we'll get the kind of VR that you're wishing for.

Lewton 12y ago
Did you play Ocean Rift (a game where you're moving around as if you're swimming)? Any mech games (sitting in a chair in game really alleviates the problem)? Uncharted Territory (you move around, while being inside a space suit)? These experiences completely solved motion sickness for me. And I seem to be very prone to it in the rift. It's a shame so many developers seem to ignore the fact that their games make people sick

rprospero 12y ago

The bit that's funny about this is I remember an HCI researcher back in the 90's who argued in the opposite direction: the wheelchair is the perfect way to interact with a VR environment. Two large discs on independent rotation encoders make for an incredibly cheap and portable interface. Moving around the environment is intuitive and user actions have an obvious physical meaning in the environment. You get a rudimentary form of haptic feedback for free, as feeling the angular momentum of the spinning wheels gives the user information about their momentum in the virtual space. If you really felt like getting fancy, you could add a stepper motor to each shaft for the price of even the cheapest position tracking system. With the motor, you can provide the counter torque to simulate going up a hill or spin the wheels up as you go down a ramp. A system that lets a standing user instantly grasp the terrain under their feet would cost an astronomical amount, but it's trivial in a chair. Just the simple immersion of needing to give a little extra force to get a wheel over a door jam would make a huge difference.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

rnernento 12y ago

I think there is a lot of potential here for wheelchair users if this IS the direction VR goes. What you're describing is just another problem that needs to be tackled, if it can be done successfully VR should be an even more transformative experience for you. I could imagine a way to synch a motorized wheelchair to the headset so you would feel and see the movement but wouldn't have to do the wheeling.

soylentcola 12y ago

There are loads of uses for high-quality VR platforms. Even if first person gaming (or gaming at all) is the primary focus of early development due to easier integration with existing game engines, I imagine that in the long run, it will offer something more akin to the development of high-end mobile devices. Sure, those allowed for some unique gaming applications but there are also things that weren't necessarily the initial focus but are now common uses of those platforms. I'm thinking of things like immersive 3d "movies" that put you right in the action as an observer while actually seated in your chair. The other massive application that is seeing a lot of promise is 3d telepresence. Instead of doing a video Hangout or a Skype call on a flat screen, you could use depth cameras to record 3d video maps of each endpoint and stream that info to the other participants. You won't just be looking through a little (or big) window into another location, you'll see things as if you were actually sitting there. I still think the whole idea of treadmills or even Valve's thing to be a sort of attempt to shoehorn the conventions that were successful on 2D screens into VR. I'm glad to see any development and experimentation but I don't personally think the platform will ultimately evolve toward a more immersive extension of the current first person gaming paradigm. Just from my ~8 months of working with a Rift dev unit I've found first person, non-seated experiences to be some of the more limiting or difficult things to pull off well or for extended periods. I'm sure being able to walk around and get 1:1 representation will go a long way but you're still limited unless you focus on more of an AR solution. Still, it reminds me of a brainstorm/daydream I had a decade or two ago when first reading about modern attemts at virtual and augmented reality. I thought the simplest implementation of a FPS would be along the lines of laser tag. Since laser tag puts you in a predefined environment, you could set something up where the computing was either done on a backpack/wearable platform (or now, I guess on servers that communicate with headsets) and overlay everything on the actual pre-built structure around you. That way you'd get the tactile response of whatever walls and floors and obstacles are around you but the AR/VR stuff would texture things to look like a space station or catacombs or whatever you want. The Valve device seems like an early version of this and I'm interested in how Microsoft's HoloLens will compare in real world usage.

MaulingMonkey 12y ago

Right now everyone's developing against the Oculus Rift, which has a short enough tether that it's most definitely not a "walk around the room" experience. Some devs might be playing around with extension cables, but I think most of them aren't going to assume the end user is going to do the same (it's "not supported" and not without problems.) I'm pretty sure I've read Oculus docs outright discouraging standing experiences - safety concerns and the like, saying they're not currently interested in accepting them, at least insisting on a reasonable sitting experience. Even if Oculus Rift weren't the early mover here, I think a lot of games will be targeting the "lowest common denominator". They might support physically standing up and walking around in a room, or using 3d controllers, but they'll also support sitting down with a traditional keyboard+mouse setup. Eventually, we'll see games that assume a standing experience - like the existing games based on the Kinect, Wii balance pad, etc. - but I don't see them being the majority anytime soon (and a number of those can probably be sanely adapted not to require it as well.)