

Virtual Reality Fails Its Way to Success - boh
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/virtual-reality-fails-its-way-to-success.html?ref=magazine

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andywood
I think most of us have known "real" VR is inevitable ever since the idea
clicked, round about 1990 or so. So far it's lacked the urgency that could
have made it a "moon landing"\- level quest. Maybe it lacks a killer app.

I think what Palmer has done is organize a vote, where the verdict was, "Yeah,
we want it now. Let us find our own killer apps." Whatever, we now have
Carmack, Patron Saint of end-to-end Latency, and Samsung, kind of working
together-ish in as concerted an effort as there's ever been to make VR work.

Oculus is bound to seem stone-aged even 15 years out, but it's a strong start.

From the article: one thing that stood out that I haven't thought much about
is the potential to use VR to achieve altered states (other than the standard
immersion and nausea).

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sillysaurus3
I'm starting to think Oculus is becoming a gimmick. It needs success in order
to be successful. That's tautology to an extent, but it's really that simple:
If it hasn't had any success, it's not successful, and success is nowhere on
the horizon.

It's a cool experience, to be sure. And maybe someday it will be mainstream
enough where everyone has an Oculus. But that day seems very far in the
future.

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marknutter
How can it be a gimmick if it hasn't even launched a consumer version yet?

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duaneb
You misunderstand, it's a gimmick UNTIL there's a version consumers will buy.

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zackmorris
I was surprised that I was immediately nauseous within seconds of putting on
an Oculus, because I don't feel disorientation watching 3D movies or riding
amusement park rides. It was something more deep seated than that, akin to
motion sickness or ocean sickness, and I hadn’t felt such an immediate onset
since I was young.

So I’m thinking that the component that’s missing is not so much better
hardware, but a sense of control, because right now we are along for the ride
but we want to be driving. The big off-putting things for me were:

* Screen door mesh appearance of seeing the mask area around pixels (which arguably shouldn’t be present on an OLED)

* Difficulty getting the focal point and field of view right (because really this is just a cell phone and some reading glasses, see Google Cardboard)

* Incorrect or missing association between gravitational up and simulation up (inner ear confusion)

* Not seeing my own body in the scene (needs integration with Xbox Kinect)

* Possible lag because the Rift may not be using movement prediction/dead reckoning (though I didn’t notice any, so maybe it is)

Really these are quite minor and easy to fix compared to what’s been
accomplished so far. The only real expense is eventually going to be an
affordable 4x HD display, because webcams for the optical tracking, gyros,
tracking software and 3D drivers are all trivial or open source. Someday the
controller will be a $5 chip like USB and work with any HDMI display.

Also the fact that the split screen projection works with ordinary video is
causing all of this to go viral.

I’m trying to wrap my head around how stereoscopic panoramic video recording
will work, because that’s the last thing stopping VR (not hardware).

I’m thinking the best way to solve that will be to scan a moving 3D panoramic
scene into a computer and use the difference between frames to infer distance
to each pixel. I’m having trouble finding a link, the closest thing I could
find was the 2005 ShoWest where they talked about remastering a 2D movie like
Star Wars episode IV into 3D at 48 fps:

[http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/directors-
cameron...](http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/directors-cameron/)

[http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-
content/uploads/3d_dire...](http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-
content/uploads/3d_directors-400.jpg)

Some other ideas might be to also use a laser rangefinder or ultrasound, light
fields or split the image coming through the sphere with a partially
reflective mirror onto two or more CCDs and have the computer infer the
distance to each pixel by the correlation between the images. Anyone know any
research/projects that explore recording panoramic 3D video?

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marknutter
VR didn't take off until now because the right convergence of other
technologies hadn't been reached yet. The smart phone explosion lead to cheap,
high resolution displays, much like the popularity of the Wii brought the
price of gyroscopic sensors down. Graphics hardware also became powerful
enough to render scenes twice and reverse the fisheye effect of the cheap
lenses used in the Oculus, which in my opinion was the real light bulb moment
for the project. The value and application of VR has been obvious for decades,
but the previous attempts were hampered by some serious technological
limitations.

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davesque
That seems like a weird statement by Cameron if it's true. When did he say
that? I would expect that someone like him would still have nice things to say
even if the technology was still a little off-the-mark (whether or not the
Rift is or isn't off-the-mark).

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neals
A friend told me the other day that only "static" scenes really work, where
you stay in one place. And when the player starts to "move around" the lag
causes nauseousness. Is this true?

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soylentcola
I won't speak for anyone else but I've had a Rift dev kit for the past several
months and what I've found tends to confirm a lot of my expectations: in
applications where your viewpoint matches your physical viewpoint (seated in a
chair or walking around a small area that stays in one place while also
walking in real life) nausea is pretty much not an issue when there aren't
other issues with performance (like if you hardware can't keep up with what
you're asking it to render, it will "stutter" as the framerate drops but
that's more headache-inducing).

Software like Elite: Dangerous or the tech demo "Sightline: The Chair" work
great because your "avatar" is in the same seated position as you are. Once
you try to shoehorn VR into a more traditional first-person video game style
setup, it gets dodgier. Since you don't have the range necessary to actually
walk around that far, people tend to use things like gamepads or the
traditional WASD/mouse controls to move around. This can really throw you off
because in a game, the mouse or analog stick controls your facing direction
but in VR, so does your head. At the same time, in real life, you can face
your body in one way and still move your head independently. In VR, it can
take some practice to be able to "get" that without feeling nausea. Any time
your actual head's motions aren't 1:1 with the view on screen it can get
questionable. The closest thing I can think of is the feeling of "the spins"
if you've ever had too much to drink and try to lay down. The seeming
disconnect between head motion and viewpoint motion throws your balance for a
loop.

Then there's the whole forward-backward-left-right thing. If you're sitting in
a chair but your on-screen body is running around or jumping or falling your
inner ear is telling your brain a different story than your eyes are.

Honestly, this is why I have my issues with some projects and users that feel
a traditional FPS-game experience is the holy grail of VR. I can see how it
would seem that way at first glance because how much more first person can you
get? Still, experiences like Elite or The Chair or even a game like Couch
Knights where you're looking around at a virtual "game board" while your
surroundings stay in place really do create an amazing sense of immersion and
presence.

I think that while gaming will be the early focus due to the existing graphics
engines and the fact that many gamers are used to buying high end computers
and pricey peripherals, the real innovations will come with the projects that
are just now getting started. Stuff like using depth cameras to recreate a 3d
"movie" you can look around in or transmitting similar information over
networks for 3d telepresence is going to be a much more mainstream and
transformative development than playing the vidya games in VR.

The article touched on a point that I'm always reminded of. Those old devices
like the Apple Newton or even the more popular successors like the Treos and
the PocketPCs were awesome and promising but the smartphone market didn't
really take off for several more years because the hardware and software
needed to make them polished, fast, and ergonomic didn't exist yet. The Rift
is like my old Treo but someday the tech will exist to deliver something more
akin to a modern smartphone at equally (relatively) affordable prices for
average people.

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drobertduke
The "Elite: Dangerous" example is interesting. What's the difference between
flying around in space and flying around a typical FPS game? I don't have
personal experience with the Rift but here are some thoughts:

\- The "context" of the cockpit is helpful in some way, it's an environment
which "agrees" with your inner-ear sense. If the cockpit were removed from
Elite, would "presence" be lost? If a cockpit of some kind were added to a
typical FPS game, would that decrease the dissociated-motion effect?

\- Movement is different in Elite. The environment that disagrees with your
inner-ear (space and the things in it) is far away, moves more smoothly than a
typical FPS, and is sparse. This probably makes it easier to accept than the
fast, jerky movement inside small, constrained environments of a typical FPS.

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waterlesscloud
Hey, at least the article mentions Artaud. His work has always seemed like the
secret weapon for good VR work to me.

