
The Road to Virtual Reality - dieulot
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2014/02/the-road-to-vr.html
======
higherpurpose
Someone made a rough resolution simulator for the Oculus Rift (make sure you
check low persistence, which has been available with the latest prototypes):

[http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/](http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/)

You can see there's a pretty huge difference between the 800p one and the
1440p one (~4x more pixels), which will probably be what the consumer version
will have. With 1440p you will still notice the screen door, especially in the
distance (the sky), and it looks like we'll only solve this with the 4k
resolution, when the resolution seems to become "normal", and without easily
noticeable pixel lines, but it will probably be at 8k when we'll have
"retina"-like quality.

All of that being said, I think 95+ percent of consumers buying the 1440p
version won't even notice the small pixel lines in the distance, because
they'll be so "present" in those VR worlds. Most "normal" people trying it out
quickly forget about the screen door even with the 800p developer kit, because
they've never experienced something in VR before, and to them it feels very
real already. Personally, I do hope they can use the 4k resolution in the
second consumer version as soon as possible, but I think the 1440p one will do
just fine with all the early adopters.

~~~
mkeblx
Yes, while the current dev kit would have a hard time being a consumer success
for easy to point out reasons, knowing that the consumer version will be
qualitatively 10x-100x better (~4x resolution, content availability & quality,
better form factor, positional tracking, low persistence, and the real key:
'presence'-inducing) lets you understand how many of the potential things that
would stop VR from going big very soon will basically be non-factors.

I'm hopeful 1440p will be fairly text friendly and prove good-enough for
programming, etc. but even if not quite there, that merely means that
threshold will be broken a year or two down the line.

------
mark_l_watson
I helped found the VR lab at SAIC many years ago. We did 3D sound (via head
related transfer functions), full on motion platforms, haptic feedback (e.g.,
a race car goes off the track a little, and you feel the chatter in the
steering wheel), and SGI Reality Engine 3D graphics.

The problem? It was cost. We had a tentative agreement to put VR racing pods
in a Las Vegas hotel, but after the prototypes where developed (and they were
great fun!), we did better cost analysis and cancelled the project because the
"ride" would have been way too expensive for end users. The custom motion
platform was especially expensive, but added so much to the experience.

Later at a different company, I was lead programmer for a VR demo system for
Disney. The demo was great, but when they deployed to production in Disney
World they had to cut corners on the motion platform, etc.

edit: my point is that there is a lot more to VR than just 3D graphics - if
you want to achieve what is called "suspension of disbelief."

~~~
dbarlett
Was that the Aladdin's carpet ride? I was one of the beta testers at Epcot as
a child. I remember being terrible at flying the carpet around but not caring
because it was so unique.

~~~
mark_l_watson
No, it was a river raft ride with lots of dinosaurs. In the demo/prototype
system, the dinosaurs behaved differently depending on user actions. I never
got to try the deployed system.

------
mentos
Oculus Rift owner here. I think the biggest things to look for in the upcoming
consumer version is how effective the new head tracking is at reducing the
mismatch between your real-world head and virtual-head. Among all of the
factors that contributed to nausea in the first development kit, latency,
motion blur, pupillary distance, I believe a lack of head tracking has been
the biggest as they did not have an effective solution and instead modeled it
in software with a simulated 'neck crane'. Little variations in your head
position that normally create a wealth of information for your eyes were not
being picked up and were understandably creating discomfort or the user.

Based on the reviews I've seen of the Crystal Cove prototype, it looks like
this new 1:1 head tracking, coupled with reduced motion blur, has eliminated a
majority of the nausea from the experience (1).

So if Oculus holds up their end of the bargain, the next breakthrough is on
the game developers. Who is going to create that 'killer app'? My bet is on
Valve with something like Half Life 3 / LFD2 (2).

1 - [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/new-oculus-
prototype-f...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/new-oculus-prototype-
features-positional-tracking-reduced-motion-blur/) 2 -
[http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131719-Leaked-
Sour...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131719-Leaked-Source-
Engine-2-Screenshot-Hints-At-Left-4-Dead-3)

~~~
adventured
I actually think Portal would be a better killer VR app than HL or LFD. It
would appeal to a much larger base, including more casual game players.

If we're talking mainstream breakthrough.... If EA weren't so backwards, and
assuming the hardware were ready, The Sims VR would cause an earthquake.

Also, a next generation incarnation of Minecraft would be a prime candidate. A
world you can 'live' in, that is easy to randomize and wouldn't take five
years for devs to build first (ala Skyrim).

~~~
chadwickthebold
Is Portal considered more mainstream than a straight-up shooter? I would think
that most run-of-the-mill COD or Battlefield players would stay away from the
quirky, puzzle-y nature of Portal.

~~~
pekk
Depends on what you mean by mainstream; women and children in the family room
may be more likely to pick up Portal than COD

------
sixQuarks
I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so
obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way.

Many of you are caught up in the small technical details. Forget about that
and look at the big picture. We are finally going to replicate experiences and
our brains will really think we're there.

This will have repercussions on things that may not be so obvious right now.
Things such as traveling for meetings or entertainment. Why go through the
hassle of getting ready, driving through traffic, looking for parking, etc
when you can just put on VR equipment and experience the same thing instantly?

I can't say for sure that VR will be as big as I think it will be, but I'm
pretty confident that it's an either/or thing. Either it's going to be the
most impactful technology since the internet (perhaps greater), or it's going
to be a flop. I don't think there will be a middle ground.

~~~
slurry
_I 'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so
obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way._

That seemed really obvious to me in the early 90s, too. I don't mean that to
sound dismissive or get-off-my-lawn-ish, just to point out that there's a
history of VR overhype which makes skepticism understandable.

~~~
sixQuarks
I disagree. Back then, the hype was was just random people making those
claims. Today, we have some of the most respected voices in the industry
verifying that we've hit the magic threshold where you really feel you're in a
virtual world.

------
rwmj
I recommend watching this video of an Oculus converted into an AR (augmented
reality) headset:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA)

~~~
sevia
I think that this idea of programs and files existing in AR space is going to
cause another fundamental shift in the way we interact with computers. The
idea's been explored before - but once HMD resolution hits that critical
point, all previous implementations will be what PDAs were to the iPhone.

------
eludwig
Boy, it is really early days with this stuff.

Over the holidays, my brother-in-law brought over a set of the current Oculus.
The 720p ones.

The experience reminded me a lot of the early days of 3D, i.e. the difficulty
alone of setting up a 3D daughter card properly. You needed the right version
of this driver, the right version of that app. The Oculus took about 45
minutes to set up properly - and I am a gamer with a gamer PC. We needed a
particular game from Steam that had a development feature that you could turn
on, etc. We had to fool around with the Windows video settings. You name it.
This will obviously get better when they release a real version, but it was
pretty bad.

Then I actually tried them. All of Jeff's observations are spot on. The
current resolution sucks. The problem is that your eyes are so, so close to
the screen. I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading
glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. I have no idea why, but I
didn't need them, so that was good.

The other big issue is maybe health related. These things can make you (or at
least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure
if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain
yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+
million years. It was really bad. Of course, the game we were playing, which
was some sort of flight simulator, didn't help. I did not try another game. I
didn't feel like I was going to be able to walk after 10 minutes of VR.

One other thing. These goggles invite new gameplay experiences that probably
haven't been invented yet. And by that, I mean that just strapping these
things on does not suddenly make current mediocre games great. Mediocre games
still suck. In fact, they are worse, because you can see every flaw, due to
the closeness of the screen. So there will need to be games that are made just
for this device. Which, I guess means that you should not buy these hoping
that your current set of games will now become "walk thru" or whatever.

It is going to take a compelling combination of hardware and software in order
to make this device really shine.

I wish them the best. I am really on the fence as to whether or not this is a
revolution at all. Time will tell. I hope it is and that they can overcome all
of the hurdles, many of which seem kinda big.

~~~
lhl
Hmm, on Mac, my dev kit is plug and play. While DK1 has very low pixel
density, these numbers increase fast as resolution scales. CV1 will be at
least 1080p, and more likely 1440p, which increases PPI from ~14 w/ DK1 to 19
or 26, respectively. Samsung is scheduled to release 4K mobile panels in 2015
(and hence directly portable to the Oculus devices), which will gets you to
regular monitor PPI. At that point, you can basically have infinite virtual
screens, which is very interesting for developers.

Here's a little resolution/density chart I made that might be useful:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AgAh7-k-pFfVdFZ...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AgAh7-k-pFfVdFZHbXNiNmRrdElxdnhhdXRNcjdQQ2c&output=html)

Farsightedness is fine - the Rift focuses at infinity. It's probably a lot
healthier than staring at close screens in terms of eye stress/focusing.

Simulator sickness is mostly caused by excess latency and confusion of the
vestibular system. The latest word is that these are taken care of with 1)
accurate positional tracking (DK1 only has rotational tracking), 2) sub-20ms
motion-to-photon display, and 3) low persistence.

Jeff links to Abrash's talks, which are well worth the time to go through if
you have an interest.

I also have been keeping a doc that's a good resource and includes a fair
amount of more technical references: [https://randomfoo.hackpad.com/Virtual-
Reality-7LTycEgSyp9](https://randomfoo.hackpad.com/Virtual-
Reality-7LTycEgSyp9)

I think to some degree, the most interesting thing about DK1 isn't how "rough"
it is, but more as a data point showing just how far things will have come in
such a short period of time.

~~~
kryptiskt
> such a short period of time.

I bought Howard Rheingold's "Virtual Reality" 22 years ago! :-P

~~~
lhl
Yes, compare the absolute stagnation of HMD development over the past 20 years
to the leaps and bounds from the Carmack demo at E3 2012, DK1 in Q1 2013,
Crystal Cove at CES 2014 and DK2/CV1 in Q4 2014. IMO, we're in for a wild
ride.

------
fidotron
It amazes, and bothers me, just how little discussion of the potential health
impact of VR there is in the new hype cycle. My understanding from 10+ years
ago was people would have invested in getting over the latency problems if
they hadn't discovered it's actually really bad for you, not in the sense of
being heavy, but messing with your depth perception when back in reality.

The technology has clearly improved, not least that a decent phone now has
more graphics power than an SGI Onyx of the era of the experiments, but
nothing has magically changed about the people.

~~~
ehsanu1
Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead
of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings. Then it won't matter
that it's VR, given high-fidelity, accurate input. Current VR systems like the
Oculus are "just" a stepping stone to something much greater.

That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our
current VR technology, and the reason they happen?

~~~
glimcat
> Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex

This comes somewhere on the tech tree after "practical flying cars" and
"solving world hunger." But eventually, sure, why not.

> That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our
> current VR technology, and the reason they happen?

The most common and superficial health issue with VR (and AR) would be
simulator sickness. The visual cues don't match what the brain expects via
other sense data, so you get sick. It happens to some people much more easily
than others.

More direct hazards:

Safety issues, e.g. tripping on stuff you can't see while operating a VR
headset, or being distracted due to virtual stimuli.

Vision impairment, primarily in children younger than 6-10 years, but
potentially also in older users with compromised vision systems.

Temporary visual impairment, typically after sessions longer than 20 minutes.
Pronounced eyestrain due to unnatural focal behavior, object tracking, display
quality, and optical alignment.

Nice papers to read:

Costello, "Health and Safety Issues associated with Virtual Reality - A Review
of Current Literature"
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.3...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.3025&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Viire, "Health and safety issues for VR". It gets cited around lots even
though it's over 10 years old now, but I couldn't find a free copy. Look it up
on ACM if you have access. You can preview the first page at the following
URL. [http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-
machine...](http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-
machinery/health-and-safety-issues-for-vr-wOI06QQ7aE)

Stanney, "Realizing the full potential of virtual reality: human factors
issues that could stand in the way." Starts on page 39 of the following PDF.
[http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232654060_Pen-
based_...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232654060_Pen-
based_force_display_for_precision_manipulation_in_virtual_environments/file/72e7e51f1b1991a916.pdf#page=39)

You'll note that these are all late 90s. VR research was much better funded
then. You can find more recent stuff though, at least with appropriate
database access. More work did get done, but shoehorned under different
keywords since "virtual reality" stopped being trendy.

> You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech.
> (from sibling's child)

Nope. The main difference between 10 year old VR headsets and the ones you can
buy today is that the use of bulky CRT eyepieces vs. LED-based eyepieces. The
middle ground being LEDs with gradually improving dot pitch.

The human issues remain more or less the same, seeing as nobody has re-
engineered the human body in the last 10 years.

My grad advisor had been involved in VR & AR research going back - I forget,
20 or 30 years. So I did a fair amount of reading on the topic. You can make
slightly better headsets today, particularly if money is no object - but the
core limitations are really the human factors, and the timing constraints
necessary to accommodate human senses and rate of motion.

~~~
samizdatum
Unfortunately, the teams at Valve and Oculus seemed unaware that solving the
problems you cited would require "re-engineering the human body", and naively
set about solving these problems with more conventional engineering
methodologies. Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator
sickness, taking advantage of the near-zero pixel switching time of OLED
displays, as well as accurate, low-latency, 6DOF head tracking.

Current state-of-the-art VR tech is a huge advancement from late 90s VR tech,
here's a few examples that run contrary to your curious assertion that the
only significant VR tech advance of the last decade was the transition from
CRT to LED displays:

-The usual inexorable orders-of-magnitude march toward greater processing power

-Commodification of smartphone hardware, which happens to be ideal for VR

-The ability to correct for distortion and chromatic aberration in software, rather than with bulky and complex optics

-Advancements in "sensor fusion", where multiple, complementary tracking sensor technologies are used in tandem, to compensate for deficiencies in any single tracking tech

-Low persistence technology that eliminates notoriously sim-sickness-inducing pixel smearing

You've clearly done your reading on this, but the VR landscape really has
changed more in the last few months than the five years pre-Oculus.

~~~
stratagerm
> Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness…

Not true. While Abrash seems to makes this claim several times early in the
PDF [1], near the end there's this:

> _In addition to the question of how games will interact with input, rules
> about how players can move around a virtual space without getting motion
> sick or losing presence have yet to be figured out. We’ve found that
> traditional FPS movement is far from optimal and tends to cause motion
> sickness, so VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close
> interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games
> around that._

Abrash admits that "traditional FPS movement" still makes people sick despite
all the technical improvements touted earlier in the paper. His solution
doesn't work for FPSs but instead proposes new types of games instead of the
ones that people want to play. Flying fighter jets, the type of simulation
that gives simulation sickness its name [2], does not involve the "slow
movement and a lot of up-close interaction" that Abrash says is needed to
prevent sickness.

Like you I was excited that Valve had solved the simulation sickness problem,
but on closer reading found that it's just not true. Many people have the
desire to use VR tech in virtual worlds doing things that involve normal-speed
head movements without getting sick, but Valve has _not_ solved this problem.

[1]
[http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...](http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness#Simulation_sick...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness#Simulation_sickness)

~~~
lhl
Simulator sickness is different from motion sickness. That is, there may be
low simulator sickness, but it turns out that pulling 9G turns or rocket
jumping while running backwards at 40MPH, while not a problem on regular
computer screens will get most people motion sick in real life, and hence in
VR.

From personal experience and in watching a number of people in my office try
out the DK1, I can definitely confirm that there are a number of things that
are quite different when strapping on the Rift - relative scale of objects
becomes much more important, world detail (books in bookshelves etc) takes on
a much more interesting quality, and movement speed is definitely something
that seems to scale down - feeling comfortable moving at walking/realistic
speeds vs getting sick at traditional video game character speeds.

------
tmikaeld
I personally think the CastAR glasses will be a much better solution, and
above all - a very social one.

~~~
rschmitty
It's definitely different from Oculus/Valve but I think most people want to be
immersed in a world rather than have a very sophisticated and gorgeous board
game/D&D experience.

There is fighting a dragon with your D&D friends on a couch eating chips and
what not, then there is fighting a dragon with your hands and body.

I'm not saying there isnt a place or this won't be popular, but I'd rather be
in the OASIS somewhere with an immersion rig :)

~~~
XorNot
I don't know - 3D TV has broken the ice of getting everyone together wearing
glasses to view content. I think the CastAR at the right price point could be
a next logical step there - especially if they take the QR code alignment
concept and add a bit of social logic to it (i.e. look at this target and say,
your phone downloads prompts to download the relevant game and connect (or
hunts for the right wi-fi video stream).

There's a lot of potential there.

~~~
rschmitty
I'm not saying there isnt potential _there_ just that most people/gamers I
talk to are looking for VR, not AR. Google glass and CastAR will bring a lot
of nifty stuff to the table but that will be a different audience.

Like the blog post said, VR people are after Snow Crash/Ready Player One.

I'm sure LARP'rs will want AR

------
z3phyr
I have three questions (maybe not on-topic) -

1) How much harder and stranger will it be to do VR graphics programming?

2) Can we predict when we will be able to replicate real world in a graphics
application?

3) AI has a end goal of achieving singularity. What is the ultimate goal of a
graphics programmer? And how much closer are we to the goal?

~~~
grandmaster789
Graphics programming for VR is only slightly more difficult than normal. Some
screenspace techniques don't work as well, and everything is done in a stereo
pipeline. The Oculus also requires some distortion and calibration of the
distance between the eyes is very much preferred. Basically that's it.

Replicating the real world is still very far off, but there is an estimate
where the resolution offered by the screen matches the average density of
receptors in the eye. I don't recall exact numbers, but I seem to remember
Michael Abrash having said something about it. Probably somewhere in the range
of 8k displays per eye.

~~~
runewell
8k may not be high enough for true "reality like" vision in an HMD. A good
article on the matter can be found at
[http://bit.ly/1bCyIcj](http://bit.ly/1bCyIcj) .

What's cool is that mobile manufacturers have already committed to creating
screens capable of much higher-density screens than current technology. The VR
space was a bit nervous regarding display technology due to the diminishing
returns of higher-resolution screens but recent announcement makes hi-
resolution VR not only possible but likely regardless of the success of
individual VR companies.

------
smacktoward
I'm as hopeful for Oculus as I would assume most HN readers are, but one
hurdle Jeff mentions is I think a bigger deal than most people assume. Namely:

 _> It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+
cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience._

This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV -- the "everyone has
to put their special pair of glasses on now for this to work" problem. It
turned out that most people just weren't willing to go that extra step of
putting special glasses on to watch TV. And 3D glasses don't even have to be
strapped to your head! They're feather-light and super-simple compared to
something like the Rift. But they were still too much to win over a broad
general audience.

(It could be argued that this is less of a problem for VR than it was for 3D,
because TV content is more frequently consumed socially than computer/game
console content is. But even if that's true, it seems like it puts an
unnecessary cap on VR's ambitions; why _wouldn 't_ VR want to expand into the
niche TV fills today?)

This is a big chasm for VR hardware, even very good VR hardware -- the more
ceremony that is required to get from "hm, I'd like to have a VR experience
now" to _actually having the VR experience_ , the less likely it is that it
will ever make the leap from early adopters to the general public. "Casually"
is a good way to describe the way people interact with most media -- and
that's only becoming more true as things like smartphones and tablets become
prevalent. So anything that pushes back and tries to make that casual
experience more formal is swimming against the tide.

~~~
samizdatum
While it's incidentally true that "you don't just casually fire up a VR
experience", it glosses over the more salient fact that you don't have casual
VR experiences, full stop. VR is, definitionally, an immersive, exclusionary
activity that places you in a virtual world and prevents you from interacting
with your surroundings. Criticizing an activity like that for not being casual
enough to "fire up" is like speculating air travel won't catch on because
airplane doors are too narrow.

~~~
hatu
The 3D movies and TV technology is a pointless gimmick anyway. What it does
most of the time is give you a couple of planes or layers of "depth" in the
picture.

Games are actually made out of 3D geometry that you can freely walk around in
and look anywhere so the 3D effect is on a ridiculously different level.

------
vonnik
This just out:

Convergence: What happens when virtual realities take over?
[http://pando.com/2014/02/16/convergence-what-happens-when-
vi...](http://pando.com/2014/02/16/convergence-what-happens-when-virtual-
realities-take-over/)

------
mwcampbell
I find it odd that he described Ready Player One as "excellent", yet is
excited about VR. Maybe he wasn't paying attention, but Ready Player One is in
part a critique of VR. Notice that the real world has decayed quite a bit
because of neglect; most everyone avoids the real world and escapes to the
OASIS (the VR). And the book ends with the protagonist being happy enough that
for the first time in as long as he can remember, he has no desire to log back
into the VR.

~~~
runewell
I had a different perspective on the book. To me the dystopian future had less
to do with VR and more to do with oligarchy, the energy crisis, and our lack
of planning for the future. In the book VR became the main character's only
way to escape his harsh realities, a place where he actually had a best
friend, and a place where he enjoyed experiences with his mother and was able
to benefit from the automated education. The end of the book did not give me
the impression that VR was bad, only that reality could be good even in a bad
unforgiving world.

I know the author went to the Oculus Rift headquarters last year as they are
big fans of his book.

[http://bit.ly/1gR4hfX](http://bit.ly/1gR4hfX)

------
supercoder
lol, from the comments - "locking yourself away from vision and sound in an
apartment or house makes you ripe for burglary and rape."

Why do people jump to this worst case scenario for new tech ?

~~~
CmonDev
Just add a small cam to stream into corner of your vision on demand.

------
Tenoke
So based on this it does seem like using OR for your desktop (browsing, work,
etc.) will not be viable. This is kind of sad as I was hoping that it will be
a decent alternative to using multiple monitors.

~~~
higherpurpose
Browsing is inherently a 2D experience. Maybe VR will finally make it possible
to try out stuff like clothes before you buy them online, though. Create an
avatar that has your dimensions and looks, and then "wear" the clothes and
watch yourself in a 3d mirror. Obviously, the graphics will have to look
pretty realistic.

