My favorite project ever in undergraduate was getting these glasses to work with a PC. We got the specs (pun intended) from online resources and a how-to VR book published at the time (mid-90s). My partner designed / assembled the circuit board to interface the glasses to the PC's serial port, and I wrote a display driver that would switch video pages and simultaneously trigger the glasses to flip shutters. The result was 3D on a PC screen.
The demo program was a robotic arm simulator that my partner already had on hand, since it could easily render wireframes. The updated simulator rendered two wireframes of Optimus Prime, so with the driver in place, he floated in front of the screen.
And, of course, you could rotate him in space, and then hit the space bar to transform him in 3D.
I want to know more :) and my googling skills are failling me. But I didn't even realize you could do 240p/60hz on a CRT. To be honest I even assumed that CRT more or less means interlaced for some reason...
Edit: ok, I should've clicked the links in the article! This page pretty much completely answers my questions!
Man, you used to be able to write X modelines to get CRTs to do just about anything you wanted as long as they were physically capable of it. I think it was an ancient version of this guide that I followed many a time to get a new CRT up to . . . let's call it peak performance: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOW...
For anyone else curious the TLDR is that 240p is really 480i with tweaked timings so that the lines from the two interlaced frames strike the screen in the same place.
This is also why a lot of old 240p consoles (NES/Master System through to PS1/N64/Saturn ) look even worse on modern TVs than you would expect them to - the TV tries to deinterlace the signal, but it's not really interlaced. With a 240p aware linedoubler converting your signal to 480p HDMI you can get much better results, and much lower latency.
I don't remember who produced them, but I had a pair of active shutter 3D glasses back in something like 2000, maybe? I think they were Elsa Revelators.
All I remember of them was that when they worked they were brilliant, albeit a little dim. Mostly all they did, though, was expose all the shortcuts developers took, particularly with UI elements. Everything in the scene would be wonderful 3D, but the UI elements would be all over the place, distorted, etc. etc.
So this is how the active Nvidia Gforce glasses work. Most references are scrubbed from their site now, I had a pair and the monitor and they were actually pretty great.
I also posted a plea in the thread the other day about dumb tvs [2]. There are passive 3d stuff with bad viewing angles. But I do love my 3d content and dont mind glasses.
Regarding the LCD problem: Don't you simply have to align the signal sent to the glasses with the LCD frames? You don't need the full delay, as the switching is rhythmic, so you only need up to 1 frame, or 1/30th of a second. I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to build an analogue device with a knob to control the delay, after which you just turn it to whatever position shows the appropriate image for each eye.
I think you'd need up to 2 frames. Up to 1 frame lets you line up to the vblank more or less, and the 2nd frame lets you pick which eye. Might be able to do it with an adjustment for the delay and a switch to toggle the eyes.
Edit: if you happen to have a 3d tv still, it might be possible to tell it you've got frame sequential 3d content and then use its glasses. Possibly.
Did you ever try plying them without the glasses? Now that’s a headache!
I had a Master System as a kid and was disappointed when I purchased Maze Hunter 3D and brought it home only to find I could not play it without the glasses. No wonder they were discounted.
However, I did read in a book that Space Harrier 3D had an Easter egg that allowed you to disable the 3D feature, but you had to get on the high score screen to execute the code. I ended up buying that at a discount. I got quite good at getting through the first level of the game without the 3D glasses.
I had a Master System as well, but my glasses broke early on in my ownership, so I played Maze Hunter, Blade Eagle, and Missile Defnce without them. Eventually, I got accustomed to the odd look of everything being slightly doubled. When I finally got a new pair of glasses that worked, the 3D gameplay felt so odd that I preferred playing without them.
will 3D/VR ever really become mainstream? i recently bought a PSVR2, the tech seemed amazing but i had to return it due to horrible motion sickness. we're at almost 30 years of the tech still not being ready for prime time.
Not until they overcome the need for the viewer to do something.
Moving from mono sound to stereo doesn't require anything of the listener. Going from black and white to colour doesn't require you wear special equipment.
But 3D? You have to put on special glasses which you also have to remember to charge. Oh, and you can't look at other things while you're using them.
There were some passive 3D displays (the Nintendo 3DS and a few early Android phones) but they required the user to stay in exactly the right position, or the illusion was destroyed. So you couldn't easily share the experience with a friend.
Until we have TVs which can shoot lasers directly into our eyeballs, I think the barrier to entry is too high.
Note there are several active participants in the equipment-free 3D display space: usually by building head tracking (so the display is "single player" - can only accommodate one viewer at a time) and clever separated left eye / right eye projection.
The New 3DS has eye tracking and doesn't require you to stay in one spot. It's still single-user, but it is significantly more stable than the original 3DS.
The other thing about mono->stereo and monochrome->color is that they were backwards compatible. And even when creators adopted the new style, they didn't fundamentally change what they were doing.
With VR, the majority of popular games can't be ported 1:1 to VR. It either adds nothing so it's not worth it, or motion sickness requires removing or reinventing movement. It's almost like starting game design over from scratch.
yeah on the VR side apparently im supposed to undertake a training regimen to be able to tolerate it without feeling sick. this is on top of the already massive commitment of wearing a giant helmet on my head. of course none of this is mentioned on the product page. (to be fair sony has a very generous return policy on these, probably for that reason)
it's unfortunate because VR GT7 was really cool until i started feeling horrible, but the sickness was very strong like from riding on a spinning carnival ride. i had to lie down the rest of the evening each time it happened.
> But 3D? You have to put on special glasses which you also have to remember to charge. Oh, and you can't look at other things while you're using them.
Passive 3-D glasses exist, and you can very much look at whatever you want while wearing them.
> There were some passive 3D displays (the Nintendo 3DS and a few early Android phones) but they required the user to stay in exactly the right position, or the illusion was destroyed. So you couldn't easily share the experience with a friend.
I had an HTC EVO 3D, and would kill to get that technology back. If friends and I can only look at stuff in 2-D at the same time, fine, nothing lost over the current status quo. But looking back at your pictures and videos in actual 3-D immerses you in the moment again in a way that's hard to describe.
The cable is long enough that your room will run out before you run out of cable, so no need to be tethered to your seat.
Generally to pass through the real world you'd do something like simulatenously press two easily accessible buttons on your tracked controller. It is really very easy and I use it often.
I think people usually realize how pointless and uncomfortable it is every time they try it.
"When you look at a 2-D movie, it's already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned. When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, 'Look how slowly he grows against the horizon'? Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing."
I think something that also plays into this is the fact that 3D content producers, in their efforts to "show off" 3D capabilities, insist on breaking the 3:d wall by putting stuff into the viewers room, where they don't belong(mentally). I think this is why, to me, 3D movies look less "realistic" than 2D movies.
It would be interesting to know if the "less realistic" effect was also something experienced by viewers at the time of the shift between monochrome and color movies. And if it was overcome by technology improvement, or by viewers simply getting used to the new media.
I think the bigger issue is that most of what's presented as "3-D" in modern times is fake. Most people have seen exactly one movie that was shot and rendered in true 3-D: Avatar (well, that's two movies now).
Other than that, they may have seen a Pixar movie or Hugo in true 3-D. Or the Transformers one where they rampage through Chicago.
Otherwise, it has all been post-processed fake-3-D crap that unsurprisingly turned audiences off.
Also there's a misconception that 3-D is only good for spectacular movies. Hugo showed otherwise, and anyone who has experience taking 3-D pictures knows that the best ones are often indoor scenes of dinner tables or rooms or normal objects, or water.
The PSVR2 has persistence problems due to the pancake lenses taking up too much light. Basically the strobing can't be short enough (to not induce smear) because that would dim the picture too much. It makes everyone sick.
The top of the line is still Quest 2, the display (120Hz) and fresnel lenses are better than most more expensive alternatives.
And with DAS FrankenQuest you have comfort.
Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!
I do not expect the Quest 3 to deliver much benefit over the 2. Maybe the Quest 3 lite they are talking about.
Surprisingly the Quest 2 is still DDR4 and has the same GFLOP as a 1030.
I can attest to quest2 not being motion sickness inducing, although I don't have any comparative experience.
There is also the issue of subjective motion sickness sensitivity that seems to conflate comparisons, some seem to get sick in any VR with certain games or environments, and everyone gets sick in some specific VR headsets. If you don't get motion sick easily, quest2 is pretty comfortable, and once you find some decent games it's unique and re-playable, more than a mere novelty.
Lots of folks on HN seem to have tried one thing once at some point in time - either got motion sick or got confused why the onboard graphics sucked, and then just relegated the whole category to "still broken". VR works if you can be bothered to do as little research as you do for your next PC.
> Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!
I don't get what you mean by native though, there are loads of native quest games.
I meant native as in compiled to fast/minimal native machine code, the other games are all Unity/Unreal potato VM games, all 263/266 of them... with GC = sickness. The Climbs are Cryengine which might not have GC but still is bloated to hell.
Should have said "custom", but then that could also be misunderstood.
In my experience (I made the first VR MMO: http://aeonalpha.com, with the wrong programming language!) high refresh rates in sensor reading (faked by Oculus/Valve) combined with locomotion that the brain does not immediately associate with human motion are the best solutions after hardware.
But I will make my 3D action voxel MMO 3rd person just to make sure, if your head is the camera you wont get sick as easily, specially at 120Hz.
120 FPS at low persistence is the bare minimum if you want to not get ill from any smooth movement during long sessions = Echo VR is the ONLY game that is playable on Quest 2.
Non-smooth movement games are more of a slideshow/shooting gallery; (see HL:A :S) akin to the early fixed space 3D games on cd-rom if you remember those, which funnily HL was the first (after quake that I never played) to break:
I fondly remember me and my brothers jaws dropping simultaneously when we by mistake moved the mouse during the intro, we both 100% thought it was pre-rendered.
The difference is now we have permanently peaked in hardware, so we need to solve things with software.
I haven't tried "Tea for God" yet, kinda dreading the adb install since computers can get bricked when you do real work on them these days.
Baffling that in 6 years, 1 billion humans (that could have bought a headset and built something) only managed to create 3 custom engines for VR: Source 2, Lone Echo and "Tea for God".
I think both your premise and conclusion is wrong.
You make it sound like VR motion sickness is the norm, but it’s really not. Tons of people play VR games every day with smooth locomotion, on “potato VM” game engines, at 72 or 90 Hz without issue.
Even if perf were a widespread issue, building a custom game engine for VR probably shouldn’t be your first choice when there’s so many easier ways to optimize.
You seem to be implying that it's nigh-impossible to write games that can reliably run at 90+ FPS and no dropped frames with a game engine because the game scripting logic runs in an interpreter with garbage collection
It's definitely worth being careful to avoid GC causing frame drops, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of good-performing VR games written in Unity
Unity is a over-engineered pile of &%$#. And now I'm being too nice.
And it's getting worse by the day.
The company is bankrupt, and when interest rates go up further all your invested time will go poof in a second.
Own your time, and control your future: when you use Unity you learn very little about how the GPU works, which kinda is the point, but since OpenGL 3 is the final 3D interface with VAO you only need to learn it once for eternity.
> I meant native as in compiled to fast/minimal native machine code, the other games are all Unity/Unreal potato VM games, all 263/266 of them... with GC = sickness. The Climbs are Cryengine which might not have GC but still is bloated to hell.
Fascinating info, thanks for sharing. I was aware of the two Cryengine games and the omnipresence of Epic’s engines, but I didn’t realize it was that lopsided.
Absolutely agree with the claim that “non-standard locomotion” is best for avoiding VR sickness - games like Gorilla Tag and Echo Arena really have a sort of “presence” factor that goes beyond 99% of VR titles.
Strongly disagree on the claim that VR sickness is a widespread issue - outside of Boomers/GenX who didn’t grow up playing video games. But I digress since I’m sure other posters will be jumping on the claim haha.
Btw, Tea for God is in the App Lab [1] so you shouldn’t need to mess around with ADB or Sidequest. If you enjoy the unique “pseudo infinite space” thing it has going on, you’d probably also enjoy “Eye of the Temple”. It’s currently on Steam[2] and in development for Quest, but it does the infinite spaces thing with an Indiana Jones style twist and is quite enjoyable experiencing the clever ways the dev came up with to trick you into thinking you’re physically exploring a huge space while actually remaining mostly still in reality.
I get "Sorry, something went wrong." on that oculus URL.
Probably a temporary thing, but still I need to upload it with adb because that is how you develop for this thing.
Android is horrible now, I remember making something for the HTC Hero back in 2009, that was nice... now you have to install many GB of junk to even get started.
The PSVR2 does not have pancake lenses nor persistence problems. It also has fresnel lenses and 120Hz refresh rate.
I think there are only a couple headsets with pancake lenses at this point in time. Supposedly the PSVR2 has more advanced fresnel lenses than prior headsets of the same kind as well but I'm not versed enough in the technology to know.
You are right, but maybe that was the reason they couldn't use pancake?
HDR is the reason for this, they need more brightness, so they sacrifice low persistence.
Also all AAA experiences on PSVR2 run at 60 FPS and re-project to 120 FPS.
So it's actually worse then my initial comment. Echo VR does 120 FPS without re-projection on a 15W device vs. 60 FPS on PS5 at 350W!!!
I have been sucking in too much VR news lately after a 7 year hiatus (not counting 3 HL:A playthroughs) so I confused all the info, thx for setting me straight!
I believe the persistence issues come up with games that use reprojection from 60fps. I don't think its an issue with the screen itself just based on the raw specs from the screen.
I don't get motion sickness from the PSVR2 like I would occasionally with the Rift CV1 but again, I'm not super knowledgeable about any of the underlying technology.
Given how things have been going, I don't think VR will hit mainstream until the resolution (PPD) of the headsets can compete with a TV/monitor. One of the main problem with VR right now is that it cuts you off from all the 2D content out there, the resolution is too low to browse the Web and watching movies in what is essentially less than 720p isn't great either. On top of that, most VR headsets just don't work as full monitor/TV replacement to begin with, due to not having a plain old HDMI input. The software side is also severely lacking, while it's possible to bring 2D content into VR on PC, it's extremely clunky and not well supported at all. Microsoft's WMR tried to build a "Windows desktop for VR", but with that dead now, it'll take years before anybody will try that again.
The lack of resolution could of course be overcome by native VR content, that is build towards the other strengths of those headset. But there just doesn't seem enough interest in the industry to actually go that route, you can still count the total amount of good AAA content for VR on one hand. That's not enough to attract gamer's in mass and in turn developers aren't all that interested either. Xbox still staying away from VR isn't helping either, as that cuts off a large chunk of the potential market too.
As for motion sickness, that's a somewhat unsolvable problem. Everything that makes the virtual body move without your real body moving will make people sick, no matter how good the headset is. One solution is to not move the virtual body (teleport locomotion), but that drastically limits what games you can do in VR and has been largely abandoned again by most games. The other alternative is to just get used to it, most people can adopt to some degree, but it can take time. I think the only real solution here is a generational shift, once every kid grew up with VR, the motion sickness issue might fade away, but that'll still take many years or even decades.
You might have hit the “age wall” there, not enough “training” with VR also usually doesn’t help.
The younglings I know all loved the PSVR2 experience much more so than the Quest which they were fans of before. So therefore probably more attuned, highly plastic brains to boot.
I also get motion sick sometimes. It depends on the game, cockpits usually are fine. Those are the ones I’m more interested in anyways. PSVR2 is a literal game changer IMHO.
It's very popular right now, but it's really hard to tell if it's just a fad. Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. It will be interesting to see.
With Wii Sports, it somewhat felt like you were doing the correct action for the associated sport. With every other game, and Wii Sports after the novelty wore off, it felt like a clunky input method that usually led to mindlessly waggling the remote around.
Zelda's bow mechanic was fun. Sword fighting too. The switch controls feel drab in comparison, I can't really get into Breath of the Wild the same I did Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess.
skyward sword was basically unplayable for me until the switch version with normal controls came out. i never was even able to get past the 2nd dungeon with motion controls.
i do like the games where you can use motion controls of the controller to enhance your aiming.
or is it just too physically demanding so
people literally and figuratively tired of it?
Partly that. Playing something like Zelda with motion controls gets insane pretty fast. Think about playing Zelda for an hour and how many sword slashes you do.
Also, existing control methods (gamepads, keyboards, mice) are really good. If you think about it, they are miracles of efficiency and accuracy. Compared to motion controls, you do an order or two of magnitude less work, and in return you get an order or two of magnitude more precision in many cases.
There are some genres that are fun with Wiimotes. Wii Sports is always fun for short bursts at a party. Also arcade light gun style shooting games are just phenomenal. But in general, yeecccch.
It's easy to see why the motion controllers we had failed, but it's hard to tell if a better ones would have been successful.
The original Wiimote only had an accelerometer, that worked well enough in a game like WiiSports where all your actions are predetermined and you only need to measure how 'hard' the player moved the controller. But that approach doesn't work in games where you have multiple actions at the same time.
MotionPlus added an gyro, that's better, but still not good due to lacking a magnetometer, so you had to constantly recalibrate it every couple of minutes. That gets old fast. It also still had no position sensing, so still a lot of guesswork involved in trying to figure out what the player was actually doing with the controller. The Nintendo Switch is also still stuck at this level.
Meanwhile Playstation Move had full 6DOF tracking all the way back in 2010, no need to ever recalibrate thanks to a tracking camera. Amazing in theory, but in actuality that controller was handicaped by a terrible button/stick layout, as in they didn't have any analog stick on the 6DOF controller and instead had a untracked NavController with only one stick. This rendered the Move controller impractical for most regular games. Worse yet, they never updated it and kept using it on PlaystationVR, only finally replacing it this year with PSVR2. The Move controller handicapped a whole decade of motion gaming.
Would a better controller succeeded? Hard to tell. Gyro-aim is still popular on SteamController, Switch and Playstation and is a big upgrade over stick controls, but not as widely adopted as it should be, due to Microsoft not having any motion sensing in their Xbox controller, thus making it impossible for multiplatform games to depend on it. The laser-pointer input of the Wiimote was also working really well and is essentially what most VR games use for UI navigation, but it requires having a split controller.
Going the obvious path of just taking a regular controller, splitting it in two and adding motion tracking to each half was never done by any of the big companies. Even modern VR controllers don't go that route and end up with a layout that is unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for a regular controller.
I blame Nintendo... it's rare for a next gen to perform worse than previous gen, but that's what happened to wiimote, the supposedly "HD" joycon just don't have enough fidelity when compared with Wiimote, I doubt it performs better than wiimote when tracking in air.
The wii is probably not as good as you remember. I don’t know the technical terms, but the original controller didn’t actually do 1:1 tracking. Someone smarter than me explains here:
The demo program was a robotic arm simulator that my partner already had on hand, since it could easily render wireframes. The updated simulator rendered two wireframes of Optimus Prime, so with the driver in place, he floated in front of the screen.
And, of course, you could rotate him in space, and then hit the space bar to transform him in 3D.