
In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need? - techrede
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/virtual-reality-body.html
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mncharity
VR/AR is still in its "our users are completely untrained" skeuomorphic UI
phase. There's been a tunnel-vision focus on gaming, Virtual _Reality_ , and
immersion.

The design space for HMD and body tracking UIs is much larger than
skeuomorphic VR. I've liked attaching eyeballs to my hand, to explore graphs
without gymnastics or manipulation. Using aphysical kind-of-planar workspaces,
to permit subpixel resolution on integrated graphics. Remapping motion, to
permit fast ergonomic input from resting hands.

Non-skeuomorphic UIs aren't getting much attention yet. And even awareness of
that is not yet widespread. But there's a lot of fun incoming.

~~~
ss248
Attaching eyeballs to your hands sounds really fun actually, but we are
already walking a pretty thin line just trying to not make people sick. Not
sure experiments like this would be comfortable for most people, so this is
why i think everyone usually sticks to skeuomorphic UIs.

But i agree that, VR-design wise, we are very primitive right now.

~~~
mncharity
> walking a pretty thin line just trying to not make people sick

Yes and no. There seems a lot of confusion about that. About which design
constraints are coming from which goals. Yes, for the common style of
immersive gaming. But when I'm working, I'm usually down around 30 fps with
high variance, running on integrated graphics.

What constitutes a "horrible" "immersion-breaking" "visual artifact"? And how
much will you pay to avoid it?

I'm looking at a laptop's desktop. It's obviously a display panel. And not my
wooden desk. And that's fine. When looking at my HMD "desktop", it's also
obviously a panel. And not my office. And that's also fine. Using emacs isn't
fighting slimey zombies. Usually.

Paper novels can be immersive. Even if you sometimes notice turning a page.

The design goal "avoid reminding the user they're wearing an HMD" is a _very_
challenging one. It prunes the design space, discouraging many things. Camera
passthrough AR. Lag. Different objects having different lag. Visible
boundaries in display space. And so on.

For example. If you mostly care about text, then you want to see unblurred
pixels, which means only the center half of the lens-blurred display is
useful. Passthrough AR can provide balance even at low fps. So it can be shown
beyond the center. Which creates a visible boundary in display space. And
that's fine. And if when you turn your head, some graphical elements slowly
chase others across the screen, that's fine too. So now you can run on old
Intel integrated graphics. It's a different point in design space from
fighting zombies in a warehouse. And it has different design constraints.

So when people say "VR requires X", that's worth translating as "SteamVR games
require X". And it can be fun to consider other things you can do with a
tracked head mounted display.

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ss248
>The design goal "avoid reminding the user they're wearing an HMD"

There is a difference between design decisions based on "striving to achieve
presence" and design decisions based on "not make people vomit". And high fps
with good tracking is closer to "not make people vomit" group.

I agree that it's okay to break presence to do something (i would trade
presence for fun for example) and let user push the limit if he can handle it,
but you have to understand that VR is already a niche market, so devs usually
are just playing it safe.

~~~
mncharity
> There is a difference between design decisions based on "striving to achieve
> presence" and design decisions based on "not make people vomit". And high
> fps with good tracking is closer to "not make people vomit" group.

A goal of avoiding visible lag, requires a mechanism of predictive tracking,
which has an undesired side-effect of judder, which can be far more sickening
than the original lag, which motivates a mitigation of higher fps and lower
variance, which requires a stronger GPU.

A goal of wide fov (absence of tunnel-vision "comfort mode"), increases user
sensitivity, especially during rapid head and spatial motion, increasing
needed performance and user discomfort risk.

A goal of avoiding visual artifacts, discourages introducing visual artifacts
which increase user comfort. A goal of visual seamlessness, discourages
segmenting the display to permit separately optimizing for task and comfort,
compromising both, motivating mitigation.

With current hardware, "presence" and comfort are conflicting objectives.
Optimizing for presence, is _why_ we're pushing the envelope on comfort. But
there's been a lack of community awareness of just what tradeoffs are being
made, and why, and of alternatives and opportunities. In part because of the
niche economics you mentioned - if SteamVR doesn't support it, why think about
it? But happily, improving hardware will make the issue mostly go away.

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zawerf
From a couple decades of gaming experience, you don't need much more than
eyeballs, fingers and a little bit of forearm.

I am convinced people who talk about immersion in VR have never been addicted
to any game. It doesn't take that much to lose yourself inside of one. After
the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent
with the controls.

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madeofpalk
> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same

Again proving the point that VR has no actual use case.

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tzakrajs
Sorry to break it to you but many games (like first person shooters) currently
have no depth perception and would be greatly enhanced by it. Literally every
3D game you play today can and will be enhanced in VR because of this reason.

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vinceguidry
In deep trance states, the body progressively fades away and you perceive what
would ordinarily feel like body sensations as other things, as the mind loses
its frame of reference to cause and effect. All experience thus gets created
by mind.

I imagine with practice anything is possible regarding VR. The mind can make
anything believable if you just relax and let it happen.

~~~
hosh
> I imagine with practice anything is possible regarding VR. The mind can make
> anything believable if you just relax and let it happen.

That's generally good advice for journeying of any kind, whether we're talking
about VR, psychedelics, drumming, meditation, lucid dreaming, or reading a
really good book.

~~~
TomMarius
It's also exceptionally good advice for nights with your partner.

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nickthegreek
I think its more important for the body parts that are there to move correctly
than to have them visible and not match. I remember trying a vive game that
had arms but sometimes they would contort into impossible poses and it was
extremely jarring.

Having spent many hours in both vive and rift, while I prefer vive in general,
the visible hands on the touch controllers on rift is just fantastic.

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Sohcahtoa82
I'm a little confused by your post.

> I remember trying a vive game that had arms but sometimes they would contort
> into impossible poses and it was extremely jarring [.....] the visible hands
> on the touch controllers on rift is just fantastic.

Neither of the things mentioned here are specific to Vive or Rift.

A Rift game can give you arms that contort into impossible poses, just like a
Vive game can give you visible hands. It's just software and whatever the
author of whatever game you're playing decided to do.

Did you play a game worked in both Vive and Rift, and the versions were
different or something?

~~~
hexane360
You're correct about the arms, but I believe the Rift has additional sensors
on its touch controllers [1], allowing it to record your thumb position and
update the hand model accordingly.

1:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Oculus-R...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Oculus-
Rift-Touch-Controllers-Pair.jpg)

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tokyodude
100% IMO

First thing I did when I played a demo of Dark Secret, it shows your character
in a mirror as a way to show you what your character looks like (there's the
mask mirror from the Oculus Dreamdeck as well). Of course I see the
character's head tilt to my head movement but most people when looking at a
mirror make an expression (smile etc...) and the fact that it didn't show my
actual facial expression reflect in the mirror was off putting.

Second experience was Job Simulator. I picked up something, dropped it on the
floor. Tried to kick it away with my feet but of course no sensors on feet so
that failed. Also tried to hip close drawers and file cabinets but of course
no hip sensor.

If I was in a VR meetup I'd want to be able to express with my hands meaning I
need all 5 fingers so I can point, give the middle finger, make the OK
gesture, pick up a glass and stick my small finger out, make the shaka sign,
etc.

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sbhn
You only need pseudo hands [https://sean-
bradley.github.io/GrabVR/](https://sean-bradley.github.io/GrabVR/)

And a teleporter [https://sean-bradley.github.io/TeleportVR/](https://sean-
bradley.github.io/TeleportVR/)

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empath75
You really only need hands so you can see what you’re interacting with and how
you’re interacting with them.

I think if we had some other way of controlling your avatar/viewpoint, such as
some kind of direct mind interface I think you could put people into nearly
any kind of body at all and they would adapt.

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8bitsrule
I guess that all depends on -what you look forward to doing- in that virtual
reality. And how many (and what kind of stimulating) sensor options are
available.

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Maxoveriririf
None.

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Maxoveriririf
none

