Perez and y8s nerd up and discuss Virtual Reality
 

Build the ultimate stereoscopic head-mounted display. Counterbalance the CRTs with lead bricks, and mount it to a HANS device. Take it to Maker Faire and challenge people to wear it.

Where the hell do you come up with these fucking brilliant ideas?!?!?! :bowrofl:

What the hell else would you do with a pair of surplus 20" CRT monitors?

Actually, fuck the lead bricks. Counterbalance the CRTs with a pair of Amiga 2000 computers, and challenge people to play one round of Dactyl Nightmare while wearing it. That'll separate the Men from the Miata Owners.



Sidebar: What ever happened to virtual reality, anyway? It was supposed to change the world. I mean, this was back in 1991, before some of you folks were born, and we were playing fully immersive videogames with 3D HMDs while standing in the middle of a spatial tracking rig! You crouch, and your character crouches. You look up, your character looks up. You turn right, and your character turns right. You move your arm, and your character moves its arm.

Call of Duty XVI is watered-down weaksauce by comparison.



Sidebar II: For those of you who clicked the link above, the Wikipedia article is wrong. Virtuality upgraded the CS1000 system to use a single A3000 per platform about halfway through the production run, but the original setup used three A2000HDs (stripped down to the bare motherboard) in the base of each platform. One per eye, and the third to run the game logic and interface to the server. I got to see them and chat with the technician when they had one of the platforms opened up for service at the installation in the Sarasota Square Mall.

Virtual Reality pays my mortgage!

Not to steal away Rob's thread... but most of the virtual reality worth using is too expensive for consumers and is purchased by the military for training and simulation.

Believe it or not, DisneyQuest in Orlando used dual-CRT virtual reality setups for the Aladdin Magic Carpet Ride. Several years ago they decided it was time for an upgrade and we rebuilt them with LCoS based mini projection setups running at 1280x1024 resolution into which they pumped the original 640x480 video.

The new hotness now is SXGA OLEDs but they're not as bright as the LED illuminated LCoS so there are some limitations.

And to speak directly to Joe's concerns, we have a demo unit over at Sony.

Ford is also using VR for simulating car interior environment. it's all over youtube. they even showed our shit in one of their commercials once. I put a shitty copy of it on youtue.

That's exactly my point!

Today, VR exists only as something that we see on TV commercials, in military documentaries, or (gods help you) if you happen to own a copy of The Lawnmower Man on VHS.

But 20 years ago, VR was real. Any fool could walk in off the street, pay $2, and actually experience it for themselves.

What the hell happened? Technology is supposed to get cheaper and more easily accessible over time. My phone is a thousand times more powerful than the computers which powered the Virtuality platform. It can pinpoint its exact location anywhere on earth to an accuracy of just a few feet, and it can communicate with a hundred million computers scattered all around the planet at speeds that weren't even achievable over a distance of two meters by hard-wired connection twenty years ago. And yet the coolest game that I can play today involves flinging a spherical bird at a green pig with a slingshot?!

Something is wrong.

what about portal? bitches love portal.

go buy a shitty vuzix out of a skymall?

the problem with conventional VR is that it's as specific almost as a pair of glasses. aligning two displays is not easy for the average human and the error can make it less fun than 2D (and potentially require cleaning of vomit stains).

It's all about microdisplays. There's no volume in that market so there's little drive to improve or decrease costs. And you can't use phone-sized displays at 2 inch focal distance and achieve a result.

Every time we get some massive, deep pockets type in our office that wants to consumerize our stuff, we kindly shake their hand, show them a demo, and then explain to them why it'll never happen.

sidenote: you have no idea how unsatisfying it feels to be at a tradeshow and have a DARPA guy come up and say he wants virtual reality in a package like a pair of sunglasses in 3 years if you had "DARPA amounts of money" and you have to turn him away.

Whoa! You mean I can sit in a chair and push a plastic box around a flat surface with one hand and press keys on a keyboard with the other, while having to keep my head and eyes pointed straight ahead at all times so that I can look at a stationary rectangle sitting on the table in front of me?

I haven't heard of anything that revolutionary since King's Quest IV was released in 1988!



This is one point of confusion for me.

I understand that Nintendo had a lot of problems with user fatigue on the VirtualBoy, but I had thought that was more to do with the mechanical ergonomics (the unit had to sit on a table, rather than be worn on the head) and the fact that the displays were scanned-line-arrays (a single row of tiny LEDs and a set of spinning mirrors) rather than flat-panel displays.

By comparison, I don't recall any such problems with the Virtuality system. Granted, the HMD was a bit on the heavy side, and you also had to wear a backpack which seems curiously absent from all of the promotional photos, but this was an arcade game, designed to be operated by unskilled personnel and rapidly switched from one user to the next. I honestly don't recall the specifics of how the display was adjusted (it's been almost 20 years since I played one) but that's probably because it wasn't a major undertaking, just a single knob or slider or something to that effect.

Think back to the days of VHS camcorders, before flip-out LCD screens were commonplace. The viewfinders in those consisted of a tiny, high-resolution B&W CRT mounted perpendicular to the eye, with an angled mirror and a simple lens array. Adjustment usually consisted of a single thumbwheel. Professional cameras still use this technology. Now, I'm nearsighted as hell (-4.5), and I can easily pick up a camera, take off my glasses, and adjust the eyepiece in about two seconds. I can then hand the camera to a shooter with perfect eyesight and he can re-calibrate it for his eye in about two seconds as well. Ok, so with two viewfinders you'd also need an adjustment for pupil distance, but how big of a deal is that?

I understand that this is your business, and I don't question that there are clearly obstacles. My point is that what I'm describing has already been done, and it worked. All else being equal, any given technology is supposed to get cheaper, simpler, lighter, faster, and more easily accessible over time. Most do.

Attachment 240735

I wish I had the chance to play with the virtuality stuff but I never ran across them up in the bay area. The closest we got was battletech with the little pods you sat in and played networked.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi.../30podbay.jpeg http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k1...d_interior.jpg

I suspect virtuality just wasn't making money on those setups. DisneyQuest has lots of spare units so they have minimal downtime. And those get beat up a lot.

OK so when I say "alignment" for the two eyes, it's not just interpupillary distance, it's yaw pitch and roll for each display. you can tolerate about 1/4 of a degree of rotational misalignment or vertical misalignment (it works out to 2 pixels on a 1280x1024 display with 60 degree field of view). you can tolerate about a 1/4 of a diopter accomodation for focus and convergence (if the focus is set to 5 meters, you wont get much eye strain if the convergence is about 2.2 meters to infinity).

Virtuality may have snuck by these issues by simply not letting any one person play for longer than a few minutes. And some people are more susceptible to the quality of the alignment. For the military applications or some Universities, they wear these things for 30 minutes or an hour and if the alignment is off, they'll have all sorts of nausea and headaches.

It gets even worse with partial overlap systems (middle FOV is stereo, periphery is not, but your field of view increases by 33%).

I just saw the specs on the Virtuality displays. 276x372 CRTs. Some of the later ones were 640x480.
this should be a fun browse for you:
http://www.cybermind.nl/Our%20Produc...20systems.html
oh wait, more rabbit hole!
http://www.cybermind.nl/Info/Visette_Pro_Tech_Specs.pdf

That's a pretty impressive field of view if you dont mind seeing giant pixels.

Our customers are shooting virtual Al Qaeda from helicopters or spotting planes while holding a rocket launcher. They need resolution.

By the way Joe... you are in the business of transmitting signals over the air. One thing we are ALWAYS after is a way to send low-latency video wirelessly. Can you get on that? ground soldiers dont like to be tied down.

Oh and if you're ever in the DC Metro area, we're finishing up our demo lounge so you can come play some video games.

I still want to know where my flying fucking car is???? By the year 2000 we were supposed to have that shit...

I got to play the system at two locations, both in Florida. One was a dedicated installation in Sarasota, the other was inside an arcade in Gainesville. It was cool stuff.

So far as I can recall, the games were all multiplayer. Both of the installations I visited had two pods, but I've seen pictures of a four-pod setup. Always some combination of deathmatch / capture the flag, usually with an NPC enemy element as well. I may be wrong, but I think Virtuality probably invented the very idea of a multiplayer FPS - this was before Doom, before Wolfenstein 3D, even. If only they'd patented the concept, they might still be around today.

Cool stuff.

I expect you're right about the financial aspect vis-a-vis Virtuality. Those things had to cost a bloody fortunate to manufacture, another bloody fortunate to maintain, and they only built a couple hundred of them in total. And I'd expect that reliability / ruggedness might also have been an issue.

And frankly, the Amiga wasn't a good platform choice for that application. They were, without question, the best machines available for 2d bitmappped graphics (they had onboard bit blitters, which was unheard of at the time), but the Virtuality games were all polygon-based, and the Amiga was no better than a PC/AT at doing that. And, as a former Amiga owner myself, I will admit that the quality of the hardware, quite frankly, was pretty poor. Commodore cut a lot of corners on those boxes.


But I'm using the arcade machines only to illustrate a point. Obviously the arcade concept itself is more or less dead outside of certain special venues.

This technology belongs in the home.

Why not? All three of the major players in the home console market presently support some combination of "VR-like" position tracking using a combination of optical tracking and accelerometer-based sensing. They've already designed the input technology, so (and I ask this honestly) how hard would it be to apply that technology to a vuzix-like device? Microsoft has sold about a tetrazillion Kinects, Sony isn't far behind with the Eye / Move, and every single Wii comes standard with a motion-tracking controller. (The Wii design would probably be the best option for HMD use- put a couple of low-rez IR cameras on the user and sense the relative position of the base, rather than the other way around.)

Ok, so there's a liability concern with people walking into walls and whatnot. How many Wiimotes got tossed through flat-screens in the early days? They managed to get through that little problem. Just establish a virtual "cage" that the user must remain within, and pause the game when they step out of it.





Assuming that the HMD uses a pair of flat-panel display devices, and that both of those devices are rigidly mounted to a common surface, wouldn't that eliminate any possibility of axial misalignment or improper convergence?





How low is low? And what's the power budget?

For latency, it's unlikely that you will ever beat a composite analog modulator. There isn't enough bandwidth in the universe to transmit uncompressed digital video with anything resembling quality, so that inherently means coding latency. The higher-quality the codec, the higher the latency.

There's a growing hobbyist community centered around doing first-person-perspective telemetry for RC aircraft, and some of them are even using position-tracking HMDs and pan/tilt cameras. You might find some off-the-shelf hardware that's adaptable for your needs.

http://fpvpilot.com/default.aspx

http://eagletreesystems.com/osd/osd-pro.htm

http://www.hobby-lobby.com/rc_video_cameras_363_ctg.htm

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...idCategory=316



At the professional level, wireless camera links are starting to become common both for ENG and for sporting events, although they tend to focus on making the transmitter small and light while the receiver is big and heavy.

http://broadcastengineering.com/news...ngefp_cameras/


These guys also have a lot of cool stuff, and their tactical / law-enforcement products may actually be what you're looking for: http://www.vislinklaw.com/




Now that would be cool.

We actually just got done with the final phase of the WTOP build (they're in Georgetown), and that was the only project that we've done in that area recently. We did VOA, but that was about 12 years ago.

Did somebody say... "Virtual?"

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...xMXQBlfpCF9UHw

I keep pestering our EE to figure out how to extract stereoscopic information out of a single HDMI connector... I'll let you know.

You wish. Microdisplay manufacturers can't even maintain adequate tolerance on their panels. Remember, you're dealing with a few pixels worth of misalignment and the whole panel is a little bigger than your thumbnail. Tolerance in the panel, optics, and mechanical mounting add up. Pixels are like a few ten-thou per triad.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-G...2/IMAG0788.jpg

I confess, there are people who permanently mount the displays after aligning and just eschew the idea of adjustment. It's smart and maybe the way it should be. Good enough for 90% of people and Fair for 97%.

one frame at 60 Hz. Realistically, we could probably stand to have two frames. If you can't get below 50ms though, it's not worth a discussion.

Power for transmit is whatever the grid can handle. Receive is limited by battery power. As you know from your hipster trolling, your only limit there is weight. figure no more than a couple pounds of battery for 2 hours of time.

Bonus points for two way communication of tracking and comms.

WTOP. Traffic and Weather together on the 8s.

?

Full-rate stereoscopic video on a single cable became standard with the release of the HDMI 1.4 spec.

There are several different methods described in the specification. For gaming, the "frame-packing" method is recommended, where the left and right images are stacked top-to-bottom (at full resolution) in a double-height frame:

Attachment 240733

There are a couple of interleaved methods in the spec as well, which deliver left and right information sequentially, alternating either every other line, every other field, or every other frame.

You can download the 3d portion of the HDMI 1.4 spec for free by filling out this form: http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/specification.aspx (or you could check your PMs)




That's kind of what I mean. Align the device once at the time of manufacture, and then lock it in place with a few dabs of potting compound. I would imagine that the process could be automated fairly easily, using the same basic technique that's used to align BGA parts during the pick-n-place operation.




Hmm...

I honestly can't think of any products within the broadcast market that would satisfy the demand for 1-2 frame latency while operating at a sufficiently low datarate and being able to be received and recovered with a non-directional antenna. As a point of reference, the technique we use for OTA modulation has a transcoding latency of several seconds, and requires about 6Mhz worth of bandwidth. The systems used for wireless cameras at football games are a lot faster, but they typically require that a grip follow behind the camera operator holding a directional antenna on a stick and pointing it directly at the receive station at all times.

Check out the link I gave you to VisLink, though- they seem to be geared to exactly this sort of application.



Fun fact: WTOP is owned by Bonneville International, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mormon church.

A directional antenna could probably fairly easily follow a tracked user with a motorized pan-tilt, could it not?

Check out this bargain:
http://www.brite-view.com/air_synchd.php

We're not HDMI, we're DVI over HDMI. But receiving and parsing a different resolution may not be impossible. The spec probably doesn't require HDCP or anything crazy, right?

You know, that's damned cool. I had no idea that wireless HDMI extenders existed. I was thinking more along the lines of industrial SDI. (We don't use HDMI at all within the broadcast industry.)

I'm honestly no HDMI guru, so apart from knowing that the basic formatting of DVI and single-link HDMI are essentially compatible, that's about it.

I do know that enforcement of HDCP is entirely up to the player. If the source device requests HDCP authentication, then the sink device must respond. If the source does not make an HDCP request, then the sink doesn't even have to know what HDCP is. Nothing about the HDMI spec requires that any device be HDCP-compliant; it's a completely separate set of standards, and is not even specific to HDMI. (HDCP can be implemented on DVI, DisplayPort, or even over an IP interface.)


So, when can I expect a stereoscopic motion-tracking HMD peripheral for my Xbox360?

Why won't something like this work well enough until we get coolass HMD so we can actually turn around and such?

You know about as much as I do about consumer video signals. Everything seems to carry DVI but that's the extent of my knowledge. I would think nobody cares about watching movies on a $16,000 HMD so HDCP is probably very irrelevant. Just upscale from 480p and deal with it.

We looked at SDI and while it was impressive, it was still too expensive to develop for wireless and never managed to reach our latency goals in the implementation we were shown. Plus it was huge.

Our take on consumer VR displays is (informally/unofficially) this: people wont pay more than they paid for a console for a peripheral that does more-or-less what a TV they already have does. And people will also not pay for a peripheral that excludes other people when the direction of gaming in the home has gone decidedly "Wii are a family".

But it could happen. There might be enough Joe Perezez with enough single-income-no-kids cash to spend a grand or two on something really nichey and awesome.

The nice thing about consumers is they are fairly tolerant of all the stuff the military and universities and industry is not.

Distortion is shitty? What's distortion?
Brightness is only 10 fL? What's a foot lambert?
800x600? that's better than progressive scan. and there's two!
50ms latency? my LCD input is 300!
and so on.

I find it disturbing that I remember that this guy's name is Lance Boyle.

I saw that video a year or so ago, and I'll admit that for something the guy rigged up at home it's extremely cool.

For a game which simulates a fairly stationary activity (being a helicopter gunner in Vietnam, for instance) that technology would probably work just fine. But I can't see it enhancing the experience of a game in which you control movement through the environment. All it's doing is substituting one form of input (the analog stick on the controller) for another. It does not add an immersive element.

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.

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

http://fashionablygeek.com/wp-conten...ght-vision.jpg

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.

maybe they dont give a shit :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting that this was today's XKCD:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/depth_perception.png

I really want to try that!

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

Attachment 240334

Attachment 240335

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

Am I even allowed to post in this thread?

surprised this wasnt posted yet

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.)

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.

http://cinedork.com/wp-content/uploa.../jefffahey.gif http://www.videodetective.com/photos/040/001687_19.jpg

:( I don't get the reference.

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.

but but its Swedish built, how can it suck? :p


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.

Cyberchrist? Long time no see.

Hey JOE

http://store.sony.com/wcsstore/SonyS...x407/HMZT1.png

http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/sto...specifications

http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/sto...sonal_3DViewer

We just got one of these at work. Needless to say an 800 dollar HMD bothers me a little.

Any of you guys be at I/ITSEC, we should get together....

Hmm.

I predict that we'll be seeing something interesting involving this device popping up on hackaday.com shortly.

You've got that right, it's a very difficult problem. We've come a long way, but there's still nothing natural enough to train with it.

"All but war is simulation."

Booth 3123 all week. Usually busy after hours but you never know. Ask for Matt. I'm always up for a roam around the show to find free beer and crappy swag.

I'm supporting a demo for some work we did for the army so I'm there all week as well. I'll drop by at some point

Arise from the Grave, o' Thread!

https://www.miataturbo.net/gaming-91...12/#post991025

Doom 3 BFG removed from Oculus Rift launch package, Team Fortress 2 adds support instead - Neoseeker

Valve's Joe Ludwig on the uncertain future of virtual reality and partnering with Oculus

Oh, yes.

https://www.oculusvr.com/wp-content/...lmer_heavy.png




Valve's Joe Ludwig on the uncertain future of virtual reality and partnering with Oculus HD
By Ben Gilbert posted Mar 18th, 2013 at 1:45 PM

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1363662041

It's a beautiful late winter day in Bellevue, Wash. Instead of enjoying the outdoors, I'm sitting in a rectangular white room with three programmers, surrounded by three walls covered in augmented reality markers. Not that I'm complaining: Valve Software's Joe Ludwig, the programmer in the room who most resembles a member of Anthrax, is walking me through his company's latest work in the world of virtual reality. It's the first anyone outside of Valve will see of the company's VR efforts thus far.

As it turns out, the software company is working with Oculus VR to port the tremendously popular free-to-play first-person shooter, Team Fortress 2, to the upcoming Rift development kit. The free update, dubbed "VR Mode," is the latest benchmark in Valve's ongoing hardware initiative. "We think that both augmented and virtual reality are going to be a huge deal over the next several years," Ludwig tells us.

Resultantly, Valve's jumping in head first as evidenced by its partnership with Oculus VR -- perhaps the most interesting of Oculus' collaborations. The nascent VR company is working with Hawken developer Adhesive Games, as well as Doom studio id Software, neither of which has the capital nor the manpower of Valve. More importantly, Valve has a team dedicated to working on just VR -- a level of investment in VR tech that is unmatched outside of Oculus itself. The partnership thus far is fairly cursory.

"We're friends. They help us out with hardware and we help them out with software," Ludwig says.

No money changed hands; Oculus provided development kits, and Valve's providing Team Fortress 2's VR Mode. The casual nature of that relationship is reflected in Valve's attitude about releasing the new mode -- Team Fortress 2's VR-enabling update in the coming weeks is essentially a giant beta test in which Valve will measure and analyze the way TF2 players interact with virtual reality hardware.

"Team Fortress was sort of the obvious choice for this," Ludwig tells us. "The Team Fortress community is large and healthy. There are millions of people playing TF every week, but they're also used to us shipping a lot of updates."

Indeed, updates for TF2 ship nearly weekly, if not multiple times per week. Beyond that, though, the community is used to being a test bed for Valve's projects; TF2 was where Valve first introduced free-to-play, as well as microtransactions with its hat system (among many other initiatives).


https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1363662041


Though Valve's hired a team just for hardware purposes (20 to 30 people, including new hires and Valve vets, comprise said team), the company doesn't have anything to show for its efforts just yet (at least on the VR front).

"We don't have any hardware," Ludwig says when asked about working with Oculus and why Valve didn't create its own VR headset. "We've done a bunch of experiments with various bits of hardware, but we don't have a display that we can ship. Oculus is actually out there doing this, and so we're partnering with them because they have the hardware and we have the software and we can help each other out. And we can both learn a lot in the process."

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1363661797

On the whole, VR remains "a big question mark" for Valve. Thus far, only a handful of folks internal to Valve have gone hands-on with TF2's VR Mode, and it's clear the hardware team is eager to get more feedback. Ludwig prodded me with questions following my hands-on, clearly hungry for outside feedback -- he wanted to know if I felt sick or disoriented, and my general impressions.

"We don't know how strongly people will react to VR," Ludwig says. "We don't know how popular it will be, what people wanna see. It might be that we need to learn a lot more from TF before we move on to other titles. We just don't know what's gonna happen."










Finally, it is 22 years ago at last!

And remind us what happened in 1991?

I guess if you are going to perfect VR, a fast paced arcade shooter is the way to start. If you can get people to play TF2 with that on and not lose their lunch, you can play anything on it.

I'm really excited for this. It's only $300, I've been contemplating getting one for a while now. I'm sure there will be Arma 2/3/DayZ support soon enough, as the Arma community has been using IR head tracking for a while. As long as the resolution is good enough though.

Posts # 8 and 11 of this thread. In short, a company called Virtuality built a series of total-immersion VR arcade games, with stereoscopic HMDs and position and axis tracking for the head, and hand. And I played one at a location in Sarasota, FL, and was convinced that THIS was the future of gaming.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1363708022
(That's probably pretty close to what I looked like playing one in 1991)

And then they stopped, and the promise of consumer VR seemed to completely evaporate for the next two decades.

I wore the Oculus prototype at a show in December. It's impressive. It was basically a cell phone display and some smith ski goggles with some optics and electronics doing some digital predistortion of the image.

Sure the resolution is so-so, but the immersiveness is enormous. You struggle to run out of stuff to look at by turning your eyes.

Now... will VR be a useable technology for seated gaming like we're talking about? Who knows. Control interfaces are going to have to change so that we don't all end up with our heads turned 90 degrees while we're running some random direction just to be facing "forward". In other words, your legs can't point where your head is. They need to stay put.

Yeah, it looks like they've essentially implemented the exact thing described in the XKCD comic in post 29 of this thread. A single display screen, divided optically into two halves. I know that the overlap isn't 100%, and is supposedly "similar to that of natural vision" but I can't find any specs.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1363725973


I'm not really concerned about the resolution. The display panel they're using at the moment is 1280x800, working out to something like 700x800 (rough guess) effectively considering the partial overlap. They claim that the production-level version will be using a "true 1080" panel, so I assume that they are targeting 1920x1080.

The Virtuality system that I played decades ago used a pair of 276x372 displays. And yeah, it was a little chunky. But you sure as hell tended not to notice once you realized that "holy shit, I'm in the middle of a virtual world!"

I've made this point again and again in the past. Increasing the resolution / color depth / etc., of a video game, beyond a certain point, does not enhance gameplay. So long as it's smooth and fluid, that's 90% of all that matters.


The following quote gives me hope:
source: Eyes-on with the Oculus Rift’s jaw-dropping virtual reality system | Oculus Rift Blog



I will be curious to see that myself. Judging from what little I have seen thus far, they appear to have de-coupled the "look" and "aim" functions. IOW, in a conventional FPS, moving the mouse changes the direction you are looking in, and the "aim" function of your weapon always remains perfectly centered. It seems that these are now two discrete functions, with the head controlling "look" and the mouse controlling "aim." That will take some getting used to.

As for "move," I'm not really sure how that'll be addressed. I wish I could remember exactly how that worked on the Virtuality system. I know that the "move forward" function was controlled by a button (or buttons) on the "gun" that you held in your right hand. But I can't recall whether you always just moved in the direction you were looking or what. Maybe there was a tophat switch, I honestly can't recall. It must have seemed totally natural and intuitive or I'd remember it being a problem.

For now, I'd think that retaining the relationship of WASD to the "look" position, just as it is now, would probably work ok. Not 100% consistent with how reality works, but...



In the video at the bottom of this page, it looks like he's using the left stick for movement control, with "forward" always being relative to the position of the head. Given the analog nature of the control, that would probably work rather nicely: Oculus Rift: Step Into the Game by Oculus » Update on Oculus Technology, Shipping Details — Kickstarter

A PC-style joystick (not a gamepad) in the left hand would probably satisfy this function as well. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I wonder how much farther they will push out delivery...I've been watching for a while to see if more definitive date is announced. On an unrelated note, I am ordering some parts from

On a side note, I am ordering one of these:

http://us.fanatec.com/index.php?rout...product_id=141

for some sims we are working on. It might just find its way onto an iracing rig built out of 8020.

I would imagine movement/aiming would be handled like normal, and the Rift would just give you a free look. Here's what people are already doing with TrackIR (an infrared head tracking system) and Arma.

Yes, the TrackIR is great (especially for the price). It's a little finicky in some lighting conditions but pretty damn good when it does work. We use them for our line of construction simulators.

The brilliance of the oculus product is that it is relatively display insensitive. one of the biggest problems we run into is the "eggs in one basket" one. Not many companies make microdisplays.

But EVERYONE makes a cell phone display.

Cell phone display?

From what I have read, the Oculus design spec is based around a conventional TFT panel of the sort used by Lilliput in their compact VGA-type displays, like headrest displays in minivans and the like. The original spec called for a 5.6" panel, and that spec has since been revised to use a 7" panel of the same basic type.

The problem with cell-phone displays is that the panel manufacturers' production plans are based entirely on the whims of the major OEM customers. As soon as Appsung decides to abandon any given size / format in favor of something different, production of panels in that style ceases entirely, with no form/fit replacements. By comparison, the 7" 16:9 format has been around for quite a while, and will probably continue to be with us for as long as airlines and automakers are embeddeding small displays in the backs of seats.


Sidebar: while browsing for this information, I stumbled across a forum which is actively frequented by none other than John Carmack himself. I feel kind of awe-struck just registering on it.

Yeah I've seen a comment from him in r/games or r/programming every once in a while. It's a strange feeling.

if the optics are looking for flat display of size X", then it really could be cell phone display. Or something similar. The point is the tech is improving all the time. Galaxy S4 coming out has a 1080p 5" screen.

FWIW the prototype oculus was based on a cell phone display or similar. There are places where the average Joe Perez could buy these small displays for under a couple hundred dollars easy.

But the important part to note is that most are driven by one of two methods: LVDS or MIPI. Two rings to rule them all so-to-speak.

And that's part of the problem. It IS improving all the time, and every time it does, the previous generation product gets discontinued.

We have this same problem at Harris. We use lots of optoelectronics in our devices (ranging from 10 character 5x5 dot-matrix displays to large OLED panels) and we try to be very careful to avoid anything aimed at the consumer market. Whatever product we choose, we need it to still be available 10 years from now. So we pay a little bit more by going with products not targeted at the mobile market, but we get the security of knowing that the product won't be discontinued as soon as the one big OEM customer decides to do something different.

If you're designing something like the Oculus Rift, which is going to be in low-volume production for quite a long time, you need to choose something that's pretty much stopped evolving / improving. 7" LCD panels like those used in headrest displays have been around for years, and they will probably continue to be around for many more years.




Yeah, apparently it's a sort of semi-open-source-ish thing. Lots of DIY projects.

http://bitcortex.com/oculus-libre-op...y-oculus-rift/

http://hackaday.com/2012/09/01/diy-oculus-rift-vr/

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=15247


LVDS is no big deal. Most of the consumer-grade monitors use LVDS internally, anyway. HDMI to LVDS drivers are cheap and widely available. And LVDS is actually kind of nice, since it's probably going to remain a common standard for many more years, despite the fact that (external) computer display interfaces keep changing all the time.