At least for those who can afford it. We'll see how this works out over time. But I really look forward to it. Especially together with some "real" SciFi-Style Cyberspace.
I however don't see me running around with that in my room. Maybe I'm too old for that but it's not what I have in my mind when I think about VR devices. What I think of is Cyberpunk. Gibson. Guys starving in their chair having such a device on my head. I still have a Wii flying around somewhere in the dust...
Agreed - Even now we're talking a about spending a ballpark $200-$500 for a VR headset, plus $1500 on a computer to run the software (that a lot of us already have). That's not a trivial amount of money, but it's hardly outside the reach of anyone in the developed world.
Consider that computers, microwaves and maybe even TV's started at tens of thousands of dollars - and that's before adjusting for inflation - and it's hard not to say it's already stupidly good value for money for an entirely new medium.
I have the Gear VR and the DK2. I think mobile VR is going to take off just as fast as a category than desktop VR. I personally find it being wireless/portable to be worth the loss of positional tracking. I'm sure they'll get mobile positional tracking working in no time and then it will just blow hardline VR out of the water (caveat, minus having less fancy graphics), and it will definitely get cheap fast. It's already only $250 for the VR holder plus a Galaxy Note 4. Once they fuse these things together into one project and also streamline the hardware even more it will only get cheaper and lighter.
I agree, I love my Gear VR but I think the mobile solution needs to be an all-in-one device. I could see mobile and desktop VR using the same headset. With USB-C they could charge the headset battery while allowing you to power the display via your desktop computer, then when you disconnect it will switch to the on-board mobile hardware capabilities.
It will, for sure, improve some human-computer interactions in a few domains where it is easily deployable (mainly entertainment and industrial manipulations).
Other than that, I don't see it used that much. It is still cumbersome to wear, doesn't seem to be usable in mobility, and won't solve common problems in a business environment.
I think that real time data visualization is the killer app for VR in business. That and building business processes in Minecraft with redstone. srsly. There is a generation of kids that it will be like a second tongue to.
I'd pay several thousands of dollars for a headset which was high enough resolution to code on (in normal font sizes). Just drop the monitors altogether and have a virtual environment for it.
Lighthouse is really exciting in that way because being able to get peripherals into virtual space accurately would be a boon.
I had my questions too. That was until I tried VirtualDesktop.
It literally makes your desktop into a big screen display floating right in front of you. For a background you can have a space scene with a planet similar to Saturn and asteroids floating around you. Immediately I fired up and watched 2001 A Space Odyssey on my new virtual big screen display. I could also work on code in any editor.
It's just your desktop in virtual space. But this gives me some neat ideas, especially business applications. Startups that exist only online are not that uncommon. Imagine a virtual office application where employees across the world can work together in a virtual space. It could be a office setting or on the bridge of the Enterprise. Each employee has a workstation with displays that you could check out in real time. For example, say you're having an issue with a database, you could get up and move over to the work station of your admin and help resolve it and see what he does on his screen. You could have meetings on the moon. And all while working from home, thousands of miles apart. Combined with voice group chat, it could be a killer app.
As someone working on an indie studio in Texas, with my partner based in New Jersey, the idea of doing that makes me very excited.
I can see how collaborating together on problems is effective (much like a shared whiteboard currently available) but virtually getting up and virtually walking over to another person to see them and help them does not appear to be a problem that needs to be solved! In all reality, this moving around is just a waste of time. Travelling and motion is always a waste of time, which is why the ability to video conference is sometimes (always?) preferred to flying across the world to have a 15 minute meeting.
I feel that zeal occasionally, but smart phones and having a portable computer on you at all times probably deserves that award. But why do we have to play favorites?! I love all tech children equally. Especially when they combine into Mobile VR!! :)
I'm hoping it brings some fun, education uses. For example, VR cooking with Gordon Ramsey, where you're in a virtual kitchen, cooking along with a professional chef. Or VR public speaking. Most people are scared of speaking in public, so you can practice in front of a VR crowd. You could have DLC for classroom speaking, weddings, boardrooms, etc. I figure you could setup a 3D 360 camera in front of a group of volunteers, and then just use that video for the VR experience. It would also be great for training. Ever run a backhoe? A typical setup is two sticks for moving the bucket, so you could make an easy simulator with the Valve VR controllers to give people practice in a variety of situations. Or driving simulators for new drivers, where they can practice their parking.
You need real world training for all of the above, but I'd be curious to see how the VR training could help people get started. I wouldn't buy a VR headset for any of these things alone, but combine it with games, entertainment, virtual workspaces (you could be sitting in a 10x10 basement, but feel like you're sitting at a desk in a penthouse overlooking New York), and I think they could be quite versatile, and a worthwhile purchase.
I can imagine big business in creating alternate reality assets, such as virtual homes. I wonder if you could combine the real world and the virtual world as well. For example, I'm building a new home, so I make a 20x20 room, dividing a 5x20 and 15x20 section with a sliding door. I put a bed in the 15x20 area, and a railing in the 5x20 section. There's nothing passed the railing, it's just a railing 2ft from a blank wall. However, I create a virtual world that matches the geometry. I put on the headset, and I can sit down on my virtual bed, or walk across the room and slide the door to the balcony. With the headset, the balcony looks like it's on the 20th floor, overlooking the ocean. I can lean on the railing and look down at the world below, while in the real world, I'm just wearing a headset staring at the wall in front of me. I could put a fan in the 5x20 room, so in VR, it feels like there's a breeze on the balcony.
It sounds a little crazy, but is it? You can turn an unfinished space, such as a basement, into a billion dollar VR dream home. There could be a VR home generator, where you enter the floor plan of your basement, and it generates a VR home with rooms and doors that match that space. I'm curious to see where things go, it'll be an interesting decade.
Great ideas, I can see public speaking becoming a large attraction. VR-based conferences may gain popularity where you can watch presentations and do a live Q&A at the end. Imagine a programming conference where you get a digital goody-bag of software and/or source code.
VR simulcast conferences - real attendees are on the floor, the VR audience is represented as floating above them, the presenter uses something like Google glass to interact for questions.
i like the idea of integrating the real and virtual worlds.. michael abrash has said that what gets him really excited isn't so much pure virtual reality but rather augmented reality - which is sort of what you're talking about, in terms of having the tactile feedback of actual objects etc. in your room..
Yeah, it does surprise me when technical people still show skepticism towards VR. I could see how a person could assume it's going to take another 5 years of iteration to be worthy of mass adoption but after the recent MWC and GDC conferences it seems clear to me that VR is here to stay and will only improve over time. The enthusiasm alone is driving innovation in this market at an insane pace and the consumer devices haven't even launched yet.
Ah. He just tried a VR headset in an environment where you can move around. If you haven't seen that before, it's impressive.
You need a lot of floor space to get the real effect of movement. You also need reliable motion tracking and a display image solidly aligned with the real world, or users will fall down, or, in a non-flat environment, fall off things.
That's a good idea. People can't tell very accurately through what angle they turned. People are good at walking straight without visual cues, though. They have to force the users to make a lot of turns to keep them in the workspace.
This probably requires a gym-sized space to work well. You could have multiple people in it, if the game kept them bunched up and on the same illusory axes, so their relative positions matched in the real world and VR.
This could bring back something like LAN parties. You need a big empty space, and everybody brings their headgear.
Doesn't that require a very large empty space to begin with? I'd day it's more of a "space amplifier", it seems you can't get away from problems with open spaces and straight lines.
It is funny seeing this concept beginning to gain legs. A buddy and I were working on a concept for VR/AR laser-tag style locations for a college entrepreneurship class about 5 years ago. However, every entrepreneur they brought in to critique our ideas flat out told us this was a moronic idea that could never work and that nobody would ever be interested in. We were told we had to change to a new idea or we'd fail the class. Oh, academics...
Also, THEY WERE RIGHT!!. 5 years ago you'd have failed miserably in the market with this.
The OLED screens alone had required billions of dollars in investment. Same with the inertial sensors, or small digital cameras and SSDs. All this tech has improved thanks to the smartphone boom in the last 5 years.
Obviously some day we will have flying cars, when we dominate all the anti gravity and the rest of the anti particles, and antimatter.
But if you try to make a business out of flying cars today, you will most likely fail because you got too early.
I developed a mild fascination with omnidirectional treadmills a while back. It's such an interesting engineering challenge. Anyways, the large size and hefty cost of these treadmills seems almost unavoidable, and therefore makes them unappealing to a large consumer market. It also seems like this technology is the obvious next step for VR.
So, that leads me to the conclusion that perhaps there might be some future resurgence of the arcade. Except they'll have VR headsets and omnidirectional treadmills instead of Pacman.
Wait, maybe there will be Pacman, but you'll be running.
I think natural walking is more likely to take off. Why abstract it when you can just walk. Sure there will be issues with running out of real world space. But that can probably be solved via some sort of body based gesture.
I say this, after going through the original Crescent Bay demo at Oculus Connect, where being able to walk around even within a 4x4 foot cube of space it was amazing having real world movement match your characters.
I think it's running that opens up a lot of possibilities. That's really not possible in the vast majority of spaces, especially with a headset.
Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of physical effort people are willing to take for video games, but there's some precedent with Dance Dance Revolution for example.
No, I think you are right. You can't play Counter Strike or Team Fortress and casually walk around the map. If you're making a dash for the flag you need to run.
Not sure how we're going to mimic that without force-feedback bodysuits or wiring directly to perception through our brains. e.g., make me convinced that I am walking or falling or climbing a wall.
It's already established that traditional FPS games don't translate well to VR (it's even mentioned in the article). VR is a relatively unexplored medium and it comes with new constraints as well as new possibilities. Long range locomotion is one restriction that doesn't seem easily solvable.
yeah the problem is you want to somehow augment physical actions. no game is going to take off if all you do is move around at walking speed..
as palmer luckey has said a guy playing COD is not actually capable of doing all the stuff a real marine does, so then the question is how far do you take it?? like if i'm playing an nba game it seems fairly plausible that my 1 foot vertical could become a 3 foot vertical, or that my poor mechanics shooting a basketball where in real life i only sink the 3 pointer 10% of the time, when i'm playing as stephen curry the game interprets as 50% of the time..
i think one of the problems is that what makes video games so compelling and addictive is that they are an order of magnitude easier to get really good at then real life... e.g. sword fighting in a game versus sword fighting in real life.. if games become too realistic in their mechanics e.g. i actually have to master good footwork and how to swing a sword properly the game because too difficult
Self-adjustable difficulty. You might get some slack, that slowly fades away and you get closer and closer to the real thing. I believe it is doable with certain aspects.
I would love to play such a 1:1 movement rendering game.
I am not going to swordfight people in real life (well, I don't think I will) but I would love to play to a simulation of such a fight. Force feedback is a tremendous challenge for such a thing though.
Other activities I would love to have VR for : wingsuits, photorealistic freefall from space, parkour, gun fights, reckless driving ...
Yes, I would get destroyed at many of these activities when playing against professionals but I am not a professional player able to play dozen of hours each day so I don't see that argument as that much of a problem. Furthermore, most people seem to favor offline play where the difficulty is up to the developer. It can even be tuned in real time (cf Max Payne) but I don't think it is a great idea.
I replayed to Half-Life 1&2 recently, I have got the feeling that this game would be 10 times more fun with a VR experience : crawl through vent and glimpse across a corner gun first, slalom with the airboat.. The technology is far from being there, but I am already sold.
The list is pretty much endless.
well i guess it's a question of how you make the game easier... either you make it easier in the virtual world (i.e. in a boxing game the punches come slower than a real life boxer would face), or you make it easier in the real world where your actions are enhanced somehow (force of the punch would be an obvious example)
yeah force feedback would be really cool but it's unclear how you manufacture those, it's like 4d cinema,, hasn't really caught on right... developers seem to talk a lot about trying to avoid breaking immersion, and maybe that mean no 'force feedback' is better than bad force feedback. but i don't know. makes me think that it might be an all or nothing problem.
With sensor lights picking up the foot movements.
I bet the engineering challenge of giving sensory feedback to the foot is easier than making the treadmills work.
These things were all explored over the last 30 years in the VR space. Body suits, hanging rigs, chairs, caves - you name it someone experimented with it.
I fully expect we'll see a massive re-exploration of all of it in the next 30 years, especially as VR becomes a $100 billion market across consumer/enterprise/govt. Eventually a few optimal approaches for the home will come out of that market process, similar to gaming today: you might have a basic controller, you might buy a driving wheel, you might install an entire flight simulator environment, all depending on how far you want to go to boost your experience.
When you make a sharp turn while running (or even when you start and stop running), your body works against inertia. It isn't simulated properly by slippery shoes, but can be on a (large, military grade) omnidirectional treadmill.
Omni treadmill shoes used over a large 12ftx12ft are or so could work. But too heavy.
One of the big differences between Oculus and Valve's philosophies is that the latter believes that there must be a 1:1 correspondence between motion in the virtual world and the real one. No doing so kills presence and causes the nausea that people talk about. Having spent a fair bit of time in an Oculus DK2 I couldn't agree more.
Unfortunately, this kiboshes treadmills and things like the Virtuix Omni. At least until we manage to fool the vestibular system as well as we can the eyes.
Serious treadmills are designed so you move around just as you would normally but a small bias is created below your perception threshold that centers you on the treadmill with time.
I remember seeing something about VR-enhanced roller coaster rides which took advantage of this, too -- the path of the virtual track and the real roller-coaster diverged considerably, and (iirc) there were places in which you were travelling "backwards" in the VR world.
> At least until we manage to fool the vestibular system as well as we can the eyes.
If we can trick the neurons on site, then might as well trick it right before it plugs in at the brain...in which case, we probably will have optics covered as well. Thence we can get rid of the headset altogether.
The simplest solution to this problem I have ever seen involved you wearing a harness to keep you in place, while standing in socks on a super slippery pad. That allowed you to walk around without an omni-directional scrollable surface underneath. Cheap as hell, and works.
I'm really looking forward to the return of game centers / arcades to experience VR. I was a bit too young in the 80ies to see the end of the arcade craze that could even lead to coin shortages in Japan. I could even see asymmetric multiplayer games to come out of this - players sitting in arcades around virtual tables are the generals having a situation overview, while players on their home consoles are the FPS foot soldiers / pilots. Imagine planetary or space battles unfolding like that...
Crystal cove is supposedly way lighter. Sony Morpheus attaches to your head in an entirely different way. Valve's is still supposed to be a bit heavy.
DK2 is pretty damn responsive, but only if you have everything set up just right and are on a beefy GPU.
Resolution is going to go up rapidly, we already have 1440p phones.
Playing half-life 2 with Razer hydras converted me even back on dk1. I expect room scale walking to be even more immersive than moving around with the joystick on the hydras, but way limited in what types of games translate well due to room size. But I think they can do some great things, a lot of what we do in the real world is room-scale.
Just hanging out in a virtual theater with friends watching content is pretty awesome already, your friends just aren't there yet.
It does separate you from your body and give you a blindfolded feeling, lots of improvement needed there. For that reason AR will probably overtake it for a lot of uses for a long time.
While I was not as plugged in to tech news back then, I'm pretty sure no one emerged from demos of 3D TVs barely able to speak because they were so impressed. And I do see that a lot in the VR press these days. I also own a DK2.
I don't know if you realized, but DK stands for "development kit". PS4 development kit is a huge metal brick which weights like 10kg and is super loud, but I wouldn't judge the retail console based on the development product. Also - the bit about the immersion - it's just your opinion.
I fear that all of this is a race to produce incompatible consumption devices for proprietary paid content channels. I do not expect to see open content for them via open channels and sincerely hope I'm wrong.
Steam is just one of the players that will give you access to their content exclusively via their channel on their device. It's all modeled on Apple. I was once very excited about VR but watching what is happening has cooled my interest considerably. It will probably be a long time before the shakeout that can make it interesting again.
Valve is going to give away their "Lighthouse" room-tracking technology:
"So we're gonna just give that away. What we want is for that to be like USB. It's not some special secret sauce. It's like everybody in the PC community will benefit if there's this useful technology out there. So if you want to build it into your mice, or build it into your monitors, or your TVs, anybody can do it."
At least Steam is available on all desktop OSes and once you buy a game for one platform, it is available for all of them.
I share your concern on the absence of ownership and the DRMs though.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadI however don't see me running around with that in my room. Maybe I'm too old for that but it's not what I have in my mind when I think about VR devices. What I think of is Cyberpunk. Gibson. Guys starving in their chair having such a device on my head. I still have a Wii flying around somewhere in the dust...
Consider that computers, microwaves and maybe even TV's started at tens of thousands of dollars - and that's before adjusting for inflation - and it's hard not to say it's already stupidly good value for money for an entirely new medium.
It will, for sure, improve some human-computer interactions in a few domains where it is easily deployable (mainly entertainment and industrial manipulations).
Other than that, I don't see it used that much. It is still cumbersome to wear, doesn't seem to be usable in mobility, and won't solve common problems in a business environment.
(But I'm still waiting for it, heh.)
Lighthouse is really exciting in that way because being able to get peripherals into virtual space accurately would be a boon.
It literally makes your desktop into a big screen display floating right in front of you. For a background you can have a space scene with a planet similar to Saturn and asteroids floating around you. Immediately I fired up and watched 2001 A Space Odyssey on my new virtual big screen display. I could also work on code in any editor.
It's just your desktop in virtual space. But this gives me some neat ideas, especially business applications. Startups that exist only online are not that uncommon. Imagine a virtual office application where employees across the world can work together in a virtual space. It could be a office setting or on the bridge of the Enterprise. Each employee has a workstation with displays that you could check out in real time. For example, say you're having an issue with a database, you could get up and move over to the work station of your admin and help resolve it and see what he does on his screen. You could have meetings on the moon. And all while working from home, thousands of miles apart. Combined with voice group chat, it could be a killer app.
As someone working on an indie studio in Texas, with my partner based in New Jersey, the idea of doing that makes me very excited.
You need real world training for all of the above, but I'd be curious to see how the VR training could help people get started. I wouldn't buy a VR headset for any of these things alone, but combine it with games, entertainment, virtual workspaces (you could be sitting in a 10x10 basement, but feel like you're sitting at a desk in a penthouse overlooking New York), and I think they could be quite versatile, and a worthwhile purchase.
I can imagine big business in creating alternate reality assets, such as virtual homes. I wonder if you could combine the real world and the virtual world as well. For example, I'm building a new home, so I make a 20x20 room, dividing a 5x20 and 15x20 section with a sliding door. I put a bed in the 15x20 area, and a railing in the 5x20 section. There's nothing passed the railing, it's just a railing 2ft from a blank wall. However, I create a virtual world that matches the geometry. I put on the headset, and I can sit down on my virtual bed, or walk across the room and slide the door to the balcony. With the headset, the balcony looks like it's on the 20th floor, overlooking the ocean. I can lean on the railing and look down at the world below, while in the real world, I'm just wearing a headset staring at the wall in front of me. I could put a fan in the 5x20 room, so in VR, it feels like there's a breeze on the balcony.
It sounds a little crazy, but is it? You can turn an unfinished space, such as a basement, into a billion dollar VR dream home. There could be a VR home generator, where you enter the floor plan of your basement, and it generates a VR home with rooms and doors that match that space. I'm curious to see where things go, it'll be an interesting decade.
If it is indeed immersive, the silence following the delivery of a killer joke would be excruciating.
You need a lot of floor space to get the real effect of movement. You also need reliable motion tracking and a display image solidly aligned with the real world, or users will fall down, or, in a non-flat environment, fall off things.
This could bring back laser tag.
edit: Actually, that doesn't seem to be what I was thinking of. Here are some examples of redirected walking:
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/109/1/AISAT-Redirected.pdf
http://vrguy.blogspot.com/2013/07/redirected-walking-can-sav...
http://cb.nowan.net/blog/2008/12/02/redirected-walking-playi...
This probably requires a gym-sized space to work well. You could have multiple people in it, if the game kept them bunched up and on the same illusory axes, so their relative positions matched in the real world and VR.
This could bring back something like LAN parties. You need a big empty space, and everybody brings their headgear.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...
Perhaps you can find the segment online somewhere, Discovery has the after show online but not the segment itself.
Also, THEY WERE RIGHT!!. 5 years ago you'd have failed miserably in the market with this.
The OLED screens alone had required billions of dollars in investment. Same with the inertial sensors, or small digital cameras and SSDs. All this tech has improved thanks to the smartphone boom in the last 5 years.
Obviously some day we will have flying cars, when we dominate all the anti gravity and the rest of the anti particles, and antimatter.
But if you try to make a business out of flying cars today, you will most likely fail because you got too early.
So, that leads me to the conclusion that perhaps there might be some future resurgence of the arcade. Except they'll have VR headsets and omnidirectional treadmills instead of Pacman.
Wait, maybe there will be Pacman, but you'll be running.
I say this, after going through the original Crescent Bay demo at Oculus Connect, where being able to walk around even within a 4x4 foot cube of space it was amazing having real world movement match your characters.
Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of physical effort people are willing to take for video games, but there's some precedent with Dance Dance Revolution for example.
Also, walls.
as palmer luckey has said a guy playing COD is not actually capable of doing all the stuff a real marine does, so then the question is how far do you take it?? like if i'm playing an nba game it seems fairly plausible that my 1 foot vertical could become a 3 foot vertical, or that my poor mechanics shooting a basketball where in real life i only sink the 3 pointer 10% of the time, when i'm playing as stephen curry the game interprets as 50% of the time..
i think one of the problems is that what makes video games so compelling and addictive is that they are an order of magnitude easier to get really good at then real life... e.g. sword fighting in a game versus sword fighting in real life.. if games become too realistic in their mechanics e.g. i actually have to master good footwork and how to swing a sword properly the game because too difficult
yeah force feedback would be really cool but it's unclear how you manufacture those, it's like 4d cinema,, hasn't really caught on right... developers seem to talk a lot about trying to avoid breaking immersion, and maybe that mean no 'force feedback' is better than bad force feedback. but i don't know. makes me think that it might be an all or nothing problem.
With sensor lights picking up the foot movements. I bet the engineering challenge of giving sensory feedback to the foot is easier than making the treadmills work.
I fully expect we'll see a massive re-exploration of all of it in the next 30 years, especially as VR becomes a $100 billion market across consumer/enterprise/govt. Eventually a few optimal approaches for the home will come out of that market process, similar to gaming today: you might have a basic controller, you might buy a driving wheel, you might install an entire flight simulator environment, all depending on how far you want to go to boost your experience.
Omni treadmill shoes used over a large 12ftx12ft are or so could work. But too heavy.
Unfortunately, this kiboshes treadmills and things like the Virtuix Omni. At least until we manage to fool the vestibular system as well as we can the eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0Skxi4ftw
If we can trick the neurons on site, then might as well trick it right before it plugs in at the brain...in which case, we probably will have optics covered as well. Thence we can get rid of the headset altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_vestibular_stimulation
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legac...
I've tried the Oculus DK2 and the headsets are still too heavy on your face, too low res, and not responsive enough.
The problem is that "immersion" is just not important enough. It doesn't add enough to the experience to overcome the downsides.
DK2 is pretty damn responsive, but only if you have everything set up just right and are on a beefy GPU.
Resolution is going to go up rapidly, we already have 1440p phones.
Playing half-life 2 with Razer hydras converted me even back on dk1. I expect room scale walking to be even more immersive than moving around with the joystick on the hydras, but way limited in what types of games translate well due to room size. But I think they can do some great things, a lot of what we do in the real world is room-scale.
Just hanging out in a virtual theater with friends watching content is pretty awesome already, your friends just aren't there yet.
It does separate you from your body and give you a blindfolded feeling, lots of improvement needed there. For that reason AR will probably overtake it for a lot of uses for a long time.
Steam is just one of the players that will give you access to their content exclusively via their channel on their device. It's all modeled on Apple. I was once very excited about VR but watching what is happening has cooled my interest considerably. It will probably be a long time before the shakeout that can make it interesting again.
"So we're gonna just give that away. What we want is for that to be like USB. It's not some special secret sauce. It's like everybody in the PC community will benefit if there's this useful technology out there. So if you want to build it into your mice, or build it into your monitors, or your TVs, anybody can do it."
http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/valve-vr-input/
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?
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.
The xbox controller came out a long time ago but competitively the controller can't come close to the keyboard and mouse.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)