Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

About 99.9% of my work is with audio (or with data that contains and controls audio), so my exposure to the video world is mostly incidental. The broadcast guys all use SDI because it's easily transportable over long distances with a single piece of coax, and the data structure makes it extremely simple to de-embed and re-embed the audio, which is important when you're in a TV station with routers, switchers, DVE boxes, separate mixing consoles for audio and video, etc.

And like I said- for the few occasions when TV guys care about wireless point-to-point in a field application, it's usually important that the transmitter be small and light, while the receiver can be big & heavy.


Ever see how much the Rockband 2 or Guitar Hero 3 packages cost? The basic kit is about $300, plus another $50 to $100 for a second guitar controller. "High-end" guitar controllers and drum kits are $200 - $500 and up, each.

Driving games? Plenty of controllers and seat / controller combos out there costing $300 and up.

Heck, I just saw that you can pay $300-$400 for a little simulated golf boll (sitting on a little simulated green) that you can whack with a club, and you have to provide your own club.


That's where the market is. It's not a large one compared to the total number of people who own a copy of Wii Sports, but I absolutely guarantee that if you put together a working package of 3d HMD / motion-tracker / handheld controller that sold for $500 a pop (plus another $100 for an HDMI splitter to enable multiplayer operation), made it available for both the PS3 and Xbox 360, and got some developer support behind it to a create some software optimized for that environment, the same folks who pour tons of cash into the aforementioned will line up to buy it.





It's the same for us- I actually got a call from a guy once who was ringing out his new router and was disturbed that the dynamic range for any audio stream that happened to pass through the 32'nd channel of any one of the logic embedder cards was only about 118 dB as opposed to 122 dB for all the rest of the channels. No human could ever have possibly have detected that, and we never noticed it ourselves. But we dug into the gate array design, and sure as hell, we were accidentally dropping the LSB of that channel and locking it at zero all the time.

Granted, dealing with consumers has its own set of problems (tech support, warranty issues, competition from Asia, etc) but as long as you wrap the product in some slick marketing literature, write some technobabble to describe how awesome it is, apply a bit of simulated carbon fiber to the exterior, and (optionally) make it do something cool and useful, people will buy it. Just look at how many kits FFS sells.

sjmarcy

Some of the Augmented Reality apps available for higher end phones are pretty cool.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It sure looks to me like the calibration of the eyepieces on that system is less precise than two pixels.

http://www.saphotonics.com/vision-sy...-night-vision/

They're running at 1280x1024, with 82.5° total horizontal FOV and 27.5° overlap. So granted, it's less critical than a full-overlap configuration, but that mounting apparatus looks like it's a few orders of magnitude less stable than anything we've talked about so far.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

maybe they dont give a ****

we've invested a lot of money in very accurate stepper motors to perform alignments because even the human factor can muck it up and vary a lot from person-to-person (though I'd like to think I'm dead nuts accurate). You almost have to be part Gecko so you can view both displays independently.

Which reminds me:
I had a lengthy conversation with the president of the company about consumer level VR HMDs and gaming.

a few key points:

* would you use it sitting down? and if so, why is it better than monitors?
* there's no real point to "3D" stereoscopic display. after the initial "wow" factor, it just becomes a distraction. have you seen avatar and harry potter? did the 3D make the movie better?
* how would the tracking and HMD allow you to move? are you going to be using it for aiming or looking and if just looking, when you end up with your head facing a heading of 200 degrees and your arms at the keyboard or controls at 0 degrees, will it be stupid?
* will you want to have free range of movement within a confined space? even the military walks into walls sometimes.

also some tidbits:

Virtuality went bankrupt and sold off all their wares, some on ebay for a few grand. A company called CyberMind bought up the injection mold tooling for the HMD and produced a new product out of it. This is essentially the same as buying the tooling for a 1995 Ford Escort and installing the latest electronics, drivetrain, and suspension in it and selling it as a new product year after year.

and a bit on dollars:

development of a consumer product like this would require maybe a few hundred grand of R&D (optics, ID, ergo, whatnot) and in order to get payback in a year, we'd have to make that plus mfg cost back. so lets say we managed to get part cost and labor down low enough that we could sell this thing for $1000. we'd have to sell a few thousand of these to make it worth the trouble. If you can find those customers, then we have a product. Maybe something like Kickstarter?

We celebrate with beer when some deep pocket entity orders 50 of something in a year. of course that's a much bigger gross profit but we are not a high volume shop.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

No, I wouldn't think so. I envision this setup as being functionally similar to using an Xbox Kinect, a Sony Eye / Move, or any of the many Wii titles that involve standing up and moving around (bowling, tennis, golf etc.) The difference would be that each player would have a unique FPP display.)

Honestly, the Virtuality example is my only personal experience, but it worked quite well. Controls in that game consisted of the HMD and a hand-held "gun", both of which were tracked by the rig. The "gun" included controls both to shoot and to walk. If I recall correctly, the character always walked in the direction you were looking, however this was completely independent of where you were aiming the gun.

In most FPS games, the "target" is always in the center of the screen, and there are separate thumb controls for aiming (in two axis) vs movement (in two axis).

Personally, I've never been able to master that technique. I find it cumbersome and counterintuative, even compared to the ole' Mouse-and-WASD setup.

This is a rather different paradigm. It translates natural and instinctive body movement into both the "look" and "aim" controls, rather then relying the user to translate these into movements of the thumb.


I think you're being too analytic here. Personally, I didn't care (although it did make Tron slightly cooler.) But how many people do you know who ranted and raved about Avatar

And of course, the stereoscopic presentation isn't really the key issue for me- the big deal is moving away from the complex controller for input and towards a more immersive and natural control scheme.



No keyboard.

You put a "tophat" on top of the "gun" controller. Forward, backward, and side-to-side movement are always relative to the user's body.


It should not be necessary to move (relative to the room) to play the game. In the Virtuality system, they kept you inside a small, closed ring and you simply rotated and moved up and down within in.



I grant you, consumer products suck in a lot of ways. And maybe this isn't something your company should do. (Harris would never consider building any sort of consumer product- we stick to pro gear exclusively.)

But if someone can do it at an affordable price ($1k/ ea is probably too much) and get some good software support behind it, this will be a paradigm-changer.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

those were not my observations but rather the boss's commentary FYI.

also, there's another big issue he brought up that i left out: nothing supports this peripheral right now.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I understand. And I'm not saying that your company needs to do this, but someone does.

I think I mentioned app support a couple of times. Typically, hot new peripherals like this are built either by the OEM (eg: Kinect, move / eye, Wiimote) or by the the same folks doing the app development (Guitar Hero, Rockband, etc).

Partnership would be key. To have any chance of success, you'd need to hook up with one or more existing companies that have expertise in FPS development. If it's somebody that already has a history of successful franchises, all the better.

Just out of curiosity, I'm going to ask my friend Mark what the logistics of such an operation might be. He happens to be a lead developer at Rockstar- did the Midnight Club franchise as well as Red Dead.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

you saw where I mentioned that the president of my co was childhood gamer friends with the head of game development at sony?

they may or may not have a demo HMD. I forget.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Interesting that this was today's XKCD:



I really want to try that!

curly

iTrader: (25)

Dammit! I was going to post that when I saw it, immediately thought of this thread.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

curly

iTrader: (25)

Awesome, kept thinking he'd fall over, but still awesome. And creepy.

Am I even allowed to post in this thread?

MD323

surprised this wasnt posted yet

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Well, it's official. The coolest thing that can ever possibly be built has been built. It's all downhill from here. (Unless someone can figure out how to build a fully immersive Portal simulator. Though I expect that would result in severe bodily injury or death. You know what? I don't care. I'd play it anyway.)

Bassmachine

Idk IMO true virtual reality would be something along the lines of high jacking your spinal cord and networking your brain to a computer, or a more user friendly way which ever you prefer. What you guys seem to be talking about would feel to confined because you know your in a room, granted either way you know your in a room but this method feels like it would do a better job of tricking your brain...literally. But if what i have just said is in fact not virtual reality but instead goes by another name i would be more than happy for someone to correct my mistake.

Btw i am also half way through a 6 pack(light weight), so this could just be me rambling.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Bassmachine

:( I don't get the reference.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

the lawnmower man. probably the only movie based on a book where the only similarity is that someones body parts ended up in a birdbath (or something like that).

anyway, the simulator is cool but from what I know of omnidirectional treadmills... they suck BAWLS.

meanwhile we've got a full wireless tracked HMD in our office ready to demo the end of the month.

range is maybe a 75 foot radius under good conditions. no latency.

all you need is a joystick or something.

MD323

but but its Swedish built, how can it suck?


I think its a great concept especially done by a British TV show, I hope real design teams make it a point to one up them.

Reverant

iTrader: (10)

Cyberchrist? Long time no see.