
John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset - otibom
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/john-carmack-is-making-a-virtual-reality-headset-500-kits-available-soon-video-interview-inside/
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drzaiusapelord
There's something very pleasing to know that guys like Carmack aren't just
punching out tomorrow's FPS engines, but doing out of the box stuff like this.
I wonder if we're entering some kind of tech golden age. The post-PC stuff,
SpaceX/Tesla, Kindle/Nook, Win8, Smartphones, etc things have gotten weird
quickly.

I'm still waiting to wake up one day and see a $999 home robot that can do
everything from clean the bathroom to walk the dog. If this happened tomorrow
I wouldn't be that surprised.

~~~
newobj
Sounds like you may not be familiar with Armadillo Aerospace yet...

~~~
hexagonal
Yeah, Carmack has a rocket company: <http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/>

~~~
grannyg00se
And it looks like he used some tech from Armadillo in this unit. The software
for the gyro sensors come straight out of the Armadillo rocket tech. Awesome.
(see the youtube video mentioned in another comment)

~~~
hexagonal
Well, the software. IIRC, the Armadillo flight electronics use a Crossbow IMU,
(which must be very accurate, endure a whole lot of vibration, and drift very
little) which is $100k.

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dmarcos
This is the forum thread where Carmack and others have been discussing the
project for a couple of months. Interesting read:

[http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14777&...](http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14777&sid=a8d3e6cc4e8d94c6d6d0d0e907cdbeb9&start=195)

~~~
loboman
Wow, how did you find that?

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dmarcos
Lots of procrastination :)

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nrp
No, John Carmack is developing software for the Oculus RIFT being developed by
Palmer Luckey. <http://oculusvr.com/?page_id=2>

It is a pretty amazing piece of hardware though. Over 90 degree field of view
for $500, rather than the $10000+ it still costs from anywhere else.

~~~
ctdonath
It's been, what, 17+ years since I bought my Virtual I/O iGlasses? Amazing how
long it takes some technologies to catch on, if ever. The RIFT is certainly an
improvement (1280×800 vs 640x480); we'll see if the "visual acuity" twist and
improved tracking gives VR the push it needs. Hopefully Carmack (and if anyone
can, it's him) can solve whatever the limiting nuance is.

Then again, the Newton came out around the same time, and took just as long to
be reborn in a viable "killer app" form (iPad). Between Carmack, RIFT, and
Google Glass - with "smartphone" power making the needed CPU cycles portable -
maybe we'll finally see VR happen.

~~~
ctdonath
ETA: "wireless" is very important. Even if the host CPU is just a few feet
away, either it must be wireless or on the user. Getting tangled in wiring is
_really_ annoying. Trust me.

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Arjuna
Nice interview with John demoing and discussing his work:

 _"So the way this has gone, is, I decided to treat myself after Rage on
there, I bought a, you know, a head mount for $1,500 or so. It's a little
cottage industry, there's a few places that do these things with integration,
and... it sucked. It was really bad. It was everything that I expected it to
be, that it, it didn't look like there had been any progress in 20 years,
since... or 15 years since I had looked at these things last.

But, when I got that, then, I started taking it apart, both literally and
figuratively, to go ahead and see what are all of the aspects on here, on the
sensing side, where, when I wrote my own test software for this, using their
library to go ahead and get the head-tracking, it had 100ms of latency, and
this just didn't make any sense to me. Why is it so bad, did they need to have
so much filtering?

And, I wound up, I took the software that I wrote for Armadillo Aerospace for
our rocket control with fiber-optic gyros, I took that gyro integration
software and took raw values from the micro-machine sensors on there, and all
the sudden it got way better. You know I can only guess that they may have
filtering from 10 years ago when they had really noisy sensors, and they're a
lot better now."_

[...]

 _Resolution is gonna get better. We're gonna get to 120Hz displays, I'm
haranguing all the display vendors about this. [...] Removing the latency, one
of the cases that I've been making that shows the ridiculousness of it all,
where, I can measure 50ms of delay on this, and I do that by, I have a program
that switches colors when I hit a button, and you put a high-speed camera
here, you mash it, and you wait, you count frames until it switches, and it's
50ms for that over a very fast display. That's more time than it takes to send
a packet from America to England, you know. That's just ridiculous! But it's
because router people and switch people care about latency, they know it's
important so they don't pile it up. Display people don't know yet, but I'm
trying to educate all of them about that."_

[...]

 _"And this field of view (90 degree horizontal field of view, 110 degree
vertical field of view), you couldn't get in a $10,000 head-mount display;
actually, you still can't today, it's that much higher."_

[...]

 _"The head mount display stuff is, it makes even this 8 year old game a
fundamentally different experience. It really is like nothing you've ever
played liked that... 10 times more graphics power doesn't give you that level
of intensity."_

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg>

~~~
jonmrodriguez
I've visited the Stanford Virtual Reality Lab and tried their $50k HMD and
high-precision trackers. I agree with John that latency is currently the #1
problem for VR / AR.

Interestingly, the #2 problem is something you don't realize is a problem
until you try: "vergence-accommodation conflicts", meaning that the display
fails to render optical depth. The solution is "Fixed-Viewpoint Volumetric
3D": <http://quora.com/Volumetric-3D> , which is what I'm creating as my
academic career and my startup Vergence Labs.

~~~
Arjuna
Thanks for the info. You will definitely be interested in this part of John's
interview, where he discusses depth and how he approached the problem. It
starts at around 9:20 and ends at around 11:25:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg#t=9m20s>

~~~
jonmrodriguez
Oh wait John does talk about focus!
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg#t=7m32s>

He seems to have not heard of the latest Volumetric 3D display technology:
"time-multiplexing":
[http://bankslab.berkeley.edu/projects/projectlinks/fastswitc...](http://bankslab.berkeley.edu/projects/projectlinks/fastswitchlens.html)
(the bottommost diagram, labeled "Switchable lens volumetric display.", made
practical in 2008. The diagram labeled "Illustration of 3 mirrors display" is
a bulkier 2004 technology.)

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scott_s
Oh! That explains why he lamented that a transatlantic ping is faster than
pushing a pixel to screen: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3914638>

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bryanlarsen
Here's another interview by kotaku with more detail on the hacking process
Carmack went through:

[http://kotaku.com/5916210/carmack-being-carmack-a-dozen-
minu...](http://kotaku.com/5916210/carmack-being-carmack-a-dozen-minutes-with-
one-of-video-games-smartest-people)

~~~
jcfrei
thanks, this actually shows the helmet in action. I think I'm gonna buy this
kit.

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StavrosK
Wow, Carmack looks like a passionate, geeky 16 year old. It's very endearing
for such a legend.

~~~
jiggy2011
I love how scientific he is when he talks and evidently when he does his work.
He said something along the lines of "if you can't decide which way to do
something, do it both ways and see which is better".

Refreshing to hear a talk like that amongst discussions around language,
platform wars.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I don't think it's the author's job to tell the reader he can't understand
what Carmack's saying.

~~~
peterhajas
No kidding - this guy doesn't understand refresh rates and resolutions?

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keeran
The hardware kit hes talking about - Oculus RIFT. Kickstarter coming this
month!

<http://oculusvr.com/?page_id=2>

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tchock23
Here's to hoping someone with a name in the industry can finally push through
decent consumer VR, and that this will get some attention at E3...

I bought the Sony HMZ-T1 earlier this month hoping that it would be what I was
always looking for in terms of home VR (despite the lack of headtracking,
which I was going to add with trackIR). However, it was horribly uncomfortable
to wear and just didn't give the immersive feel I was looking for.

In looking at the Oculus site it mentions that there is a Kickstarter
campaign, but then when I click through to a forum post on it the date he
mentioned that was back in 2009. I'd be first to contribute to a decent HMD
Kickstarter campaign...

~~~
Todd
Carmack's been pushing companies like this for nearly two decades. In
particular, he has been a significant force in the evolution of the video card
industry. The hardware companies know and respect him. If anyone can do it, he
can.

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hwillis
VALVe is also working on something similar:
[http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-
here-w...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-
its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/)

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blt
Can someone filter out the low-frequency noise in these videos?

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JabavuAdams
So, imagine you've got acceptable VR HMDs? What software would you write for
them? Why not start today?

I want an IDE that's like the Bubbles from _Signal to Noise_

I want seamless telepresence for driving mechs

I'm learning faster now because I can have multiple physics and math books
along with note-taking software on my iPad. What do good HMDs do for
education?

...

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exDM69
Oh man, the memories. I remember playing the original Doom game with a virtual
reality helmet at a gaming convention back in 1994 or so when I was a little
kid. It was a tiny convention at a small Finnish town, but I remember seeing
same kind of helmets in photographs from CeBITs and E3's in computer
magazines.

Does anyone remember a consumer VR helmet circa 1993? It had a helmet with
displays of roughly "mode 13h" resolution and a hand held hockey puck with a
few buttons? The helmet and the puck had accelerometers and/or inclinometers
and/or gyroscopes or something to detect movement.

Head turning affected in-game camera turn and tilting the puck was movement.
Puck buttons were fire, change weapon, etc. Proper FPS aiming would have been
difficult but Doom's projectile collision detection is 2d anyway :)

~~~
gouranga
I had one years ago that came from an IT auction for the princely sum of £40.
That included basically everything but the PC including the big nest thing you
had to stand in. I set it up to work with AlphaWorld on a windows 95 machine.
It required a bit of work to get it to accept straight VGA signals and it
wasn't the stereoscopic variant. It sat in my living room for a year and
mainly collected junk.

The experience both rocked and sucked. The setup was dialled into UUNet at
14.4k and you could count the pixels but it was still slightly cool. It made
your eyes and neck hurt badly though.

Ended up on eBay in '00 and sold for £1 because "buyer collects".

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nl
So now Carmack is working on headsets, and Valve is working on wearable
computing[1].

That's some pretty interesting support.

[1] [http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-
here-w...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-
its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/)

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mey
If you follow Carmack's twitter feed, you'll see him mentioning his
frustration over the last year at some of the display tech under the hood as
he was exploring the space.

<http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack>

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marknutter
Virtual Reality is really the only thing I've been looking forward to in
gaming. Once this becomes a reality, I will be genuinely excited about it
again.

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gavanwoolery
For those of you who follow his Twitter account, this is nothing new, but
still cool that its getting some official coverage. :)

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jpeg_hero
why does this flash player peg my cpu at 100% ??

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cheatercheater
Like the VFX1 I have?

I have been wondering for quite some time how much better the thing would be
if I just swapped out the puny 640xwhatever lcd for something that's 1080p, or
better yet had 1080p per eye. I think the focusing adjustments seem to be the
coolest part of carmack's stuff that older projects didn't have. I just hope
someone quickly comes up with a gyro based control scheme, and a new Descent.

