y8s

iTrader: (8)

Hey JOE



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.

rlogan

iTrader: (21)

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

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Hmm.

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

rlogan

iTrader: (21)

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."

y8s

iTrader: (8)

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.

rlogan

iTrader: (21)

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

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.






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



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).





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."



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!

Mobius

iTrader: (2)

And remind us what happened in 1991?

thenuge26

iTrader: (2)

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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.


(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.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.




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 ****, 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.

rlogan

iTrader: (21)

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.

thenuge26

iTrader: (2)

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.

rlogan

iTrader: (21)

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.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.

thenuge26

iTrader: (2)

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

y8s

iTrader: (8)

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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.