
Valve's SteamVR solves big problems and poses bigger questions - jsnell
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-15-valves-astounding-steamvr-solves-big-problems-and-poses-bigger-questions
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sago
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?

~~~
rprospero
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.

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bglazer
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.

~~~
akira2501
This is sort of a dumb question, but why develop omnidirectional treadmills
instead of omnidirectional footwear?

~~~
Numberwang
Or even better; I never understood why ppl were not looking into these
[http://www.thebabyloft.co.uk/images/products/door-
bouncer.jp...](http://www.thebabyloft.co.uk/images/products/door-bouncer.jpg)

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.

~~~
adventured
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.

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Animats
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.

This could bring back laser tag.

~~~
james33
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...

~~~
Htsthbjig
You say they were entrepreneurs, not 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.

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DonGateley
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.

~~~
matthew-wegner
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."_

[http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/valve-vr-
input/](http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/valve-vr-input/)

~~~
DonGateley
That is indeed a good sign if not definitive. Given your creds you've made me
much more optimistic.

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marze
Does anyone doubt this will technology will be the biggest advance in human-
computer interactions in decades?

~~~
Throwaway90283
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.

~~~
runewell
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.

~~~
XorNot
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.

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mml
Excuse me while I pen a letter to Mr Newell re: building an arcade at every
destination mall in the country. Brb.

~~~
m_mueller
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...

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legacy)

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siavosh
Does anyone have a sense yet of how the Oculus and Steam sets compare?

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jay_kyburz
All this VR stuff is just another fad like 3D TV and movies.

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.

~~~
cma
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.

