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Making Great VR: Lessons Learned from “I Expect You to Die”

53 points by sagargv 11y ago

moron4hire 11y ago
The criticisms of tracked hand motion are spot on, at least with regards to the Leap Motion device. But even if the controller were to work well, having no feedback makes actually interacting with the environment extremely difficult. So I hacked together a haptic glove out of an Arduino, a few vibrating motors, and a WebSocket-to-Serial-Port bridging program in a weekend. Took it to National Maker Faire and demoed it to a few hundred people. There were only a handful of skeptics, and of them, only two of them walked away unconvinced. Even basic haptics has a huge impact on the believability of the motion interaction.
- ylem 11y ago
  Hi! I saw you guys there! A friend suggested that adjustable tension in the glove rather than haptics might be a good way to deal with interaction.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    Hey there! So I imagine based on your "you guys" comment you're actually thinking of NullspaceVR [0]. They are a team out of Rochester University that is developing a slew of haptic devices. I got to talk to them some and they are a very good group of people that hopefully we can do some work together in the near future. I was there with DCVR [1]. We're a social meetup group for entrepreneurs and hobbyists in the Washington DC area centered around virtual reality. We decided to organize and put a booth together to help promote our individual projects, while also trying to grow our local community for our meetups. But otherwise, in regards to my projects, I was there myself. Since you sound like you're in the area, please come to our next DCVR meetup. They are a lot of fun and it's probably one of the best ways to get involved with VR from scratch right now. [0] https://twitter.com/nullspacevr https://twitter.com/nullspacevr [1] http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/ http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/
hyperpallium 11y ago
I liked "Fail Fast, and Follow the Fun" and emphasis on immersion. But this article, like Carmack's pro-VR article, convinced me that VR isn't ready. Before it was unacceptable latency for some motions; now it's motion sickness. But these are clever guys. One day it will be ready.
- dshankar 11y ago
  You should try a current-generation VR system, or even last year's tech like the DK2. You would be surprised. Motion sickness is now mostly an issue of badly designed software, not hardware. Developers porting content designed for 2D screens don't realize that their camera movements make people sick. As someone who writes VR software, I think VR hardware unfairly gets blamed for bad VR software.
  - amelius 11y ago
    My biggest problem with VR, and 3D goggles in general, is that eye-accomodation is not necessary in the virtual world, with current technology. This means that the eye will get lazy if goggles are used too often.
    - Raphmedia 11y ago
      From what I've heard, keep in mind I have a bad memory and am not an expert, your eyes are supposed to work just as much if not more than while using a regular screen. You will focus your eyes all over, while on a 2d screen, you keep your eyes on the same position (center of screen, 20 inch away) for the duration of your gameplay.
      - amelius 11y ago
        You are talking about a different kind of eye-movement/muscle-group. I'm talking about accomodation (the mechanism the eye uses to focus near and distant images with equal sharpness on the retina). That mechanism (not the muscles, but the part of the brain responsible) will get lazy.
Lancey 11y ago
Was I the only one disappointed to hear that the knife couldn't be used as a screwdriver? I would think that a game designer would be excited to allow the pocket knife to be used as a separate, emergent solution to the puzzle. Don't give the player a tool and then tell them it doesn't work. That's not immersion, it's a tease.

53 points by sagargv 11y ago

The criticisms of tracked hand motion are spot on, at least with regards to the Leap Motion device. But even if the controller were to work well, having no feedback makes actually interacting with the environment extremely difficult. So I hacked together a haptic glove out of an Arduino, a few vibrating motors, and a WebSocket-to-Serial-Port bridging program in a weekend. Took it to National Maker Faire and demoed it to a few hundred people. There were only a handful of skeptics, and of them, only two of them walked away unconvinced. Even basic haptics has a huge impact on the believability of the motion interaction.

ylem 11y ago
Hi! I saw you guys there! A friend suggested that adjustable tension in the glove rather than haptics might be a good way to deal with interaction.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Hey there! So I imagine based on your "you guys" comment you're actually thinking of NullspaceVR [0]. They are a team out of Rochester University that is developing a slew of haptic devices. I got to talk to them some and they are a very good group of people that hopefully we can do some work together in the near future. I was there with DCVR [1]. We're a social meetup group for entrepreneurs and hobbyists in the Washington DC area centered around virtual reality. We decided to organize and put a booth together to help promote our individual projects, while also trying to grow our local community for our meetups. But otherwise, in regards to my projects, I was there myself. Since you sound like you're in the area, please come to our next DCVR meetup. They are a lot of fun and it's probably one of the best ways to get involved with VR from scratch right now. [0] https://twitter.com/nullspacevr https://twitter.com/nullspacevr [1] http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/ http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/

hyperpallium 11y ago

I liked "Fail Fast, and Follow the Fun" and emphasis on immersion. But this article, like Carmack's pro-VR article, convinced me that VR isn't ready. Before it was unacceptable latency for some motions; now it's motion sickness. But these are clever guys. One day it will be ready.

dshankar 11y ago
You should try a current-generation VR system, or even last year's tech like the DK2. You would be surprised. Motion sickness is now mostly an issue of badly designed software, not hardware. Developers porting content designed for 2D screens don't realize that their camera movements make people sick. As someone who writes VR software, I think VR hardware unfairly gets blamed for bad VR software.
- amelius 11y ago
  My biggest problem with VR, and 3D goggles in general, is that eye-accomodation is not necessary in the virtual world, with current technology. This means that the eye will get lazy if goggles are used too often.
  - Raphmedia 11y ago
    From what I've heard, keep in mind I have a bad memory and am not an expert, your eyes are supposed to work just as much if not more than while using a regular screen. You will focus your eyes all over, while on a 2d screen, you keep your eyes on the same position (center of screen, 20 inch away) for the duration of your gameplay.
    - amelius 11y ago
      You are talking about a different kind of eye-movement/muscle-group. I'm talking about accomodation (the mechanism the eye uses to focus near and distant images with equal sharpness on the retina). That mechanism (not the muscles, but the part of the brain responsible) will get lazy.

Lancey 11y ago

Was I the only one disappointed to hear that the knife couldn't be used as a screwdriver? I would think that a game designer would be excited to allow the pocket knife to be used as a separate, emergent solution to the puzzle. Don't give the player a tool and then tell them it doesn't work. That's not immersion, it's a tease.