What Ever Happened to Virtual Reality? 431
bergeron76 writes "It seems like it's been ages since I heard of any advances in "Virtual Reality" technology. Was Virtual Reality just hype? Are there any new or existing projects that have made any significant inroads (aside from the first-person shooter games)?
Is total virtual immersion a worthless persuit / dead industry? If not, what are the bottlenecks that are delaying it?"
Too risky? (Score:4, Informative)
Not hyped much (Score:5, Informative)
One area in which Virtual Reality has been generating very positive effects is, unexpectedly (?), therapy against phobias and traumas. An example is fear of heights where people can confront their fears in a simulated (and thus controlled) environment and gradually let go of them.
So yes, I'd say that Virtual Reality does improve people's lives in at least one way that doesn't involve shooting at things.
Pursuit (Score:5, Informative)
And AR (Augmented Reality) seems to have taken the place of VR lately, lots of progress has been made in that end.
More importantly, VR equipment and tracking is usually prohibitively expensive, which I'd guess is partly responsible for the lack of any apparent progress.
Also, the suspension of disbelief in VR is quite important - not so in AR, since it only attempts at adding more information to the existing reality.
Oh its still on the way. (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect the questioner is actually looking for a holodeck though, we're still quite a ways from that
IVY (Immersive Virtual Environment at York) (Score:5, Informative)
York's virtual reality room turns perception on its head
Home to Canada's only fully-immersive environment
TORONTO, March 31, 2005 -- Jumping into the virtual world of a
videogame is helping York University researchers understand how humans orient themselves on solid ground and in outer space.
Professor Michael Jenkin and his team at York's Centre for Vision Research have developed a 'virtual reality room' called IVY (Immersive Virtual Environment at York) in order to study our perception of gravity and motion, and how we orient ourselves spatially.
"We're displaying an environment from [the popular videogame] Doom right now, but of course that's just an example of one simulation," Jenkin says.
The room is the only six-sided immersive environment in Canada, and one of a mere handful internationally. Its walls, ceiling and floor are comprised of pixel maps generated by a cluster of computers running Linux. The entire structure is made of the same glass used in the CN Tower's observation deck. The floor alone took two years to complete.
Researchers are able to manipulate the environment within IVY, changing the scenery and its orientation, in order to understand how people become disoriented and how their internal perception of 'up' and 'down' is informed.
"Some people become incredibly confused. I've actually seen people fall over in there," Jenkin says.
The research is being used by the Canadian Space Agency and National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) to find ways to help strengthen astronauts' sense of 'up' and 'down' in zero gravity environments.
Jenkin's team also hopes to find methods of counteracting the gradual loss of spatial orientation that occurs as we age.
One of the most challenging aspects of IVY's design was to create a system that allowed subjects to experience both the look and feel of moving through the virtual space.
A graduate student developed a wireless 'head-tracking' device that follows subjects' movements and alters the displays accordingly. Users wear stereo shutter glasses which give a 3-D effect.
"The computer compensates when you move around so it looks correct. It knows where you've moved, where your eyes are," says Jenkin.
As the country's only truly immersive environment, IVY is also in demand from private industry for a myriad of projects.
"If someone brings us their data set, we can render it and they can walk through and interact with it," says Jenkin.
"We're constantly pushing the boundaries and learning how better to do VR."
-30-
It has no real purpose yet... (Score:3, Informative)
Eleven Reasons Why Virtual Reality Stalled (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The human mind/body isn't ready for this (Score:2, Informative)
Otherwise, nobody's likely to take you seriously.
Jaron Lanier's answer (Score:3, Informative)
Not all hype (Score:2, Informative)
It's being used by architects to inspect their yet to be buildings.
It's also used in the medical industry as well, apparently it's particulary useful as a mean of viewing strings of DNA in.
When VR first emerged it was thought by many to be the next big thing for gaming, but not a lot of people thought about it being used in the industry.
I guess these days it's the other way round.
I think it's matured enough to be useable by now. People just need to find out how.
Re:One major bottleneck: (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point of 3D displays is to allow you to forget that your viewing surface is less than three feet away. If each screen held an identical image, and was aligned properly, then that image would appear to the user to be at an infinite distance.
The only part of your eye that's focusing on a near surface is are the muscles controlling the lens. If you want to test for strain there, try taking two identical wallet photos, taping or gluing them to a piece of paper at a center-to-center distance equal to that of your eyes, and put that close to your face. Then try aiming your eyes to converge at infinity.
Your lens is perfectly capable of focusing independently of the aim of your eyes; I do it all the time, and suffer no ill effects.
Re:The human mind/body isn't ready for this (Score:4, Informative)
VR-PSYCH mailing list plus - Re:Not hyped much (Score:3, Informative)
vrpsych... [tudelft.nl]
but there is a mailing list:
vrpsych-l [tile.net]
And risking mailing list Etiquette (and I'm chicken sh!t for annon posting) there is perhaps a call for help in this field from the open source community (note the following has been edited and links are not made directly clickable):
How about some temporary mirrors of some of the stuff below (anti-slashdotting effect) out of respect for these VR medical researchers?
In a recent email regarding an award this person recently received
"Dear all,
thank you for your warm congratulations. I'm really happy for this Award because it shows that virtual reality in health care is not a toy, but a real therapeutic tool that may have a deep societal impact.
By chance, in the last issue of Nature neuroscience Review there is an interesting paper by Maria V. Sanchez-Vives entitled FROM PRESENCE TO CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH VIRTUAL REALITY who underlines the critical role that VR may have in neuroscience and clinical practice
www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nrn/j
(subscription required)
It follows the review (for a list of the last papers and books related to this field, please have a Look at my web site: www.cybertherapy.info) published in the Journal of American Medical Association "JAMA" who underlines the same concept:
www.nida.nih.gov/pdf/toads/FakeWorlds.pdf
However, the effective impact of this field in the real world clinical practice is still limited: to use a virtual environment you have to buy it or to develop it...
And this, obviously, requires a lot of money. So, we need grants - that usually force you to a huge admnistrative work - and when they finish, the research ends with it.
This is really a WASTE of time and energy. Especially when you see that most resources are spent to develop four different supermarkets, five different rooms full of spiders, nine elevators, etc.
So, a suggestion I have for this community is to share, if possible, the tools developed.
On my side, you can download and use for free the different environments we have developed for the treatment of panic disorders with agoraphobia:
www.vrtherapy.net
You can download for free many books (they usually cost about 100 US$) related to virtual reality here:
www.emergingcommunication.com
Also, Prof. Stéphane Bouchard is giving for free the different environments he developed using game engines to treat spider phobia and acrophobia:
w3.uqah.uquebec.ca/cyberpsy/index-en.html
Finally, in Laval, Prof. José Gutiérrez-Maldonado allowed to share with this community his excellent body image scale. You can download it for free from this web site
www.ub.es/personal/rv/ecic.htm
At this point, if you have resources and no commercial limitations please share them!!
I hope to meet most of you in June at the CyberTherapy conference in Basel:
www.e-therapy.info
Ciao
Giuseppe"
Re:It's the hardware... (Score:3, Informative)
That's pretty much the assumption in the Shadowrun [shadowrunrpg.com] RPG's "Matrix" system. When you jack in, a system called ASIST feeds all the sensory information to your brain, while something called an "RAS override" prevents you from flopping about or getting up to walk away (though a person can intentionally fight those systems, in case they need to move from their current spot a bit).
Virtual Reality is still alive (Score:2, Informative)
eMagin - Z800 Visor == (Fast and Sexy) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not hyped much (Score:3, Informative)
As the GP said, a fear of heights is adaptive. Acrophobia is not -- I've known acrophobes who couldn't cross bridges, or sit in meetings within ten feet of a window (except in ground-floor meeting rooms). I stood beside one as he tried to approach a window in a tenth-floor office -- he literally turned grey and almost fainted, despite the fact that the glass in the window was so thick that he probably couldn't have broken it without taking a chair to it. Oh, and the fact he knew how thick that glass was.
"But that's crazy!", you say? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, it is -- that's why phobias are listed as mental illnesses.
Re:It's the hardware... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, that has a lot to do with it. Research is currently showing that the whole purpose of sleep is to process and sort information gained during the day. Without sleep we wouldn't be able to learn things.
VR is dead? (Score:3, Informative)
No - we aren't enjoying our VR with full headtracked HMDs and fully tracked gloved interfaces, etc...
We are, however, experiencing VR in other forms - every time you fire up Doom 3 or some other FPS - you are using VR. Your interface is pretty desk-bound (what was at one time termed "desktop-VR") - but VR it is. Fully interactive, multi-player, fast 3D simulation - it is all there. What isn't is the interface.
Today, it is possible to still get HMD's, but you must be prepared to spend a lot - a good quality HMD will set you back a few grand, top level ones can go stratospheric in price. Most of the price issue has to do with it being a very tight niche market (mainly catering to the oil industry, medical industry, military, and auto industry as the main users) with few buyers. But there are enough players that you can get a decent 800x600 HMD for under $2000.00. If you are adventurous, you could also easily build your own HMD like we used to do it in the old days, using newer LCD display technologies (back then, we used low-res LCD TVs - today, you could easily do it with higher resolution PS2 LCD monitors).
Tracking is still a big issue - very few players in the market, and their systems are prohibitively expensive - a few grand to track two sensors in 6DOF (enough for head and hand tracking) - Polhemus and Ascension being the two main players which use pulsed magnetic systems (one does AC, the other DC) - all other players tend to using inbound or outbound camera or IR-sensor based systems.
There is also the issue of software - today, the big thing (besides simulation - such as in DARPA's Dismounted Soldier training project) is entertainment. Today's FPS games seem like a perfect fit, but because the interfaces don't exist, I don't expect many players to experience today's or even yesterday's FPS games on anything more than a monitor.
Finally, the main issue you don't see much of anything, tends to also be stagnation of the market due to IP and patent issues. Back in the early nineties, when VR was getting hot, many companies were latching onto the technology and patenting everything under the sun. VPL's patent portfolio was pretty huge - one of the main reasons glove interfaces never became big was because they held so many patents on the technology, especially for lightweight gloves, that nothing else was very commercially viable. They got lucky and invented a glove system that was lightweight and tracked fairly accurately (it had its own problems, though). Other companies did the same with tracking technology (ie, Polhemus and Ascension seem to be the only companies with magnetic tracking systems because they both patented the crap out of them - and rightfully so - such tracking systems are very difficult to construct and calibrate, both in hardware and software - one of the companies uses AC, the other pulsed DC - the only way around each other's patents - other companies went ultrasonic and IR based with inbound or outbound systems).
Then - the internet started taking off. Consumers and other users weren't seeing the "Lawnmower Man"-esque worlds promised (there is only so much a 386 or 486 can do), and the internet was gaining popularity - so were computers for that matter. All of that, plus the lack of hardware - caused VR to be eclipsed as a technology path, at least for the time being.
Those early VR companies? They either folded or became other things. VPL, IIRC, was sold to Thompson Electronics, and the patents got flung far and wide - but someone still owns them. The other companies, especially for tracking, managed to survive mainly because as the nineties continued and 3D gaming took off, there was a need for tracking systems for 3D input (modeling) as w
VR Research (Score:2, Informative)
There's of course a lot more to it than just that, but that is the basic problem. I've seen all sorts of programs that people would find interesting to run at home, but not vital to run at home. It currently isn't worth the cost for most people (anywhere from $5k for bargain basement stereo vision with poor tracking, to $1 million+ for a cave + haptic/robotic interfaces). People won't use VR until it is (a) unobtrusive, (b) cheap, and (c) intuitive.
On the 3D display end, VR needs to move from large space filling displays like caves to small setups like a small pair of glasses (current top end devices from manufacturers such as MicroOptical [microopticalcorp.com] and Microvision [microvision.com] give a glimpse at possible avenues forward). Ideally, these glasses should still let you see the real world (referred to as augmented reality, rather than virtual reality). This is far less disorienting for many people. There are also technical problems with HMDs (head mounted displays) aside from size and weight. The best HMD resolutions today are generally about 1280x1024, and the field of view often isn't stellar. For many people, these displays can cause headaches. The closer a display is to the eyes, the higher res it needs to be in order to avoid ill physiological effects. Then, the VR applications themselves need to run fast enough to have very little lag (ideally less than 12 ms between a user's action, and the application visually responding). If the lag gets too large, many people begin to get motion sickness (this is potentially a huge barrier for many people w/ VR). One alternative to VR glasses is projected displays, but without some additional engineering & mass production, these displays are not likely to be very cheap in the near future (and these displays still require some type of glasses, either shuttered glasses, or polarized glasses). The final visual alternative (ignoring fancy and expensive volumetric displays) are auto-stereoscopic displays [3dcgi.com], which work w/o special glasses. These displays have the downside though of requiring the user to sit/stand in a precise location in order to get the 3D effect.
Motion tracking also needs to get significantly better. Current motion tracking techniques (for gesture recognition, head tracking, etc.) are generally quite bulky and expensive. Some image processing techniques using video cameras show promise for cheap compact systems. Large scale motion tracking and registration (i.e. matching your position and orientation precisely with a map and models) is a much bigger problem for outdoor situations. GPS is one of the better ways right now, and that is abysmal (GPS gives positional accuracy to within a few meters, and no clues about orientation. VR apps require position to within a few centimeters usually, and orientation to within a degree or two). There is a fair amount of research into improving this, but it will likely be several years before any non-miliary applications emerge.
Finally, once VR is cheap enough (less than $2K USD for 3D vision and tracking), and small enough (i.e. a small/light pair of glasses, and at most a few stationary webcam sized cameras, or a single 3D projector), then average people can start to think about using VR. Even then, people won't use it until there are compelling applications. The first big applications will of course be games, but outside of 3D modeling, medical data, scientific data, psychology and geology there have been few compelling uses shown. Clearly there are a lot of compelling applications just waiting to be developed, but until VR becomes cheaper, smaller and more intuitive, these will most likely not be developed.
Bingo. That's what I was thinking too (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, yes, while cute 3D graphics are cool to look at, it's gameplay and (where applicable) a good story that really get suspension of disbelief going. Even for the best looking games nowadays (Doom 3, HL2, whatever), if gameplay sucked, suspension of disbelief would go right out the window.
Which makes the whole VR gizmos not really needed.
I would add, though, that VR also brings other problems to the table:
1. Controls. The mouse and keyboard (or gamepad, if the game is suited for that) are tried and tested and work so well, that you can just forget that you're using them. We've had decades (and thousands of "Nintendo sucks vs Sony blows" flame wars centred on controls) to refine controls to something easy and effective to use. Plus, by now you already know how to use them, so you don't go through the whole learning curve again.
Pointing around with a glove or other untried gimmics are not only unneeded then, they can actually hurt suspension of disbelief. Especially because of the next points:
2. Comfort.
Sitting down in a comfortable chair and using a mouse and keyboard, or a gamepad, is comfortable. You can do 12 hour gaming sessions if, like me, you don't have a life, and have little if any discomfort problems.
By contrast, the whole VR hype reminds me of the touch-screen hype. Humans just aren't built to spend the whole day with a hand pointing forward. Even if the glove was a thin cotton glove weighing (next to nothing), pointing with your arm forwards all day long will result not just in fatigue, but actual _pain_.
It gets even worse for other games. If anyone thinks that swinging a sword in a VR game is something they can do for hours, they haven't actually swung a sword in their life. Even throwing a punch at the air in a martial arts game (including martial-arts themed RPGs, like Shenmue or Jade Empire) is _tiresome_ if you do it for hours. And as someone who had some army training, I'll just say it would _suck_ to have to lug a rifle around all day long to play a game.
3. Sensory expectations. Completely fooling some senses is a much more risky proposition than just getting the brain to pay them no attention.
If you were really immersed visuall in, say, a flight sim, your brain would expect _all_ senses to fit the same picture. If you take a tight curve, it expects the body to feel G forces. If it doesn't, a little bit of suspension of disbelief goes out, and a little bit of nausea kicks in.
If you were playing a fight sim, you'd expect that when you throw a punch, you feel it connect. If it feels like it's going through a ghost, again, some suspension of disbelief goes out, some nausea comes in. (And worse yet, you can damage your joints badly if your brains says you don't have to brake that punch going at thin air.)
4. IC vs OOC. Or how it's throwing the whole concept of "_escaping_ reality" out the window.
Relying on the character's physical values or knowledge _outside_ the game is meta-gaming. It can not only seriously damage suspension of disbelief, it can also seriously limit the market for the game. For starters, you're limited to those who can actually do that IRL.
E.g., if in a fighting game you actually had to be able to kick or block that fast and accurate, congrats, you've demanded that the player be an accomplish student of martial arts to play the game. E.g., if you have to actually slash with a broadsword and block with a shield, well, it would probably be fun for some of us nuts, but no fun for everyone else.
Worse yet, it severely limits what you _can_ do in a game, by tying you down to what you can do IRL. E.g., most of Nintendo's games wouldn't even be possible to have in VR, because _noone_ can run and jump for hours. Jumping is a _very_ tiresome operation for humans. We're not made to bunny-hop all day long.
Plus, being tied down to what you can physically do IRL, thr
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:2, Informative)
Hmm..
Quite a bit of the 'consumer' hardware from NVIDIA (and most likely others, but no experience with that) support stereo vision and dual screen 3d projection, and support the same type of '3d glasses' as my SGI workstation does, so that one is there.
USB has a definition for human interface devices, and other then price, there is very little reason why oen could not make and use a dataglove that way I'd think. To me it seems this is more a matter of what consumers want to pay for then anything else.