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?"
Virtual reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:3, Insightful)
(-1 troll is a pretty weak reason)
ahead of its time (Score:3, Insightful)
With the advances in 3d Graphics and so forth
Virtual and Augmented Reality (Score:1, Insightful)
No consumer porn applications (Score:2, Insightful)
It's everywhere (Score:2, Insightful)
Limitations to VR (Score:2, Insightful)
For example, how do you address the gravity problem? How can you virtually simulate something that has physical weight, like throwing a virtual ball and catching it?
And if we have public access to VR devices (assuming it's still economically unfeasible for mass market personal purchasing), how do you cope with the "icky" factor? Would you want to use some VR helmet or gloves after some greasy, unkempt guy just used it?
Perhaps true VR may not be possible unless it was purely a sensory experience (like in The Matrix) or using artificially created matter (like holodecks), and the best we're going to get are fancy 3D displays with some amount of immersion.
My guess? They realized control systems are behind (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What do you mean? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in 1995-1996, VR was all the big thing, SGI and others were promoting VRML and virtual reality (on teh web!) was supposed to be just around the corner.
At about that some, some game called Quake was getting a lot of attention in the real world. When you compared the experience of playing quake to the experience of "VR", quake was infinitely more engrossing. All the VR stuff then ran at about 5 frames per second, with less detailed scenes than quake was spitting out at 30+ fps. Quake was a successful virtual reality in that it pulled you in and you could forget it was a game (in a sense). None of the VR stuff had anywhere near the same success at making the user forget what was going on.
The gap between the best of what people did with VR and the best of what people did with games was big enough that it became apparent that VR was not relatively successful. VR researchers were too focused on fancy hardware--data gloves, 3D headsets, stuff like that--and not enough focused on the graphics part. (IMHO).
Look at games like Half Life 2 today. Or the MMORPGs that many people are addicted to. The reason people spend so much time with them is that they are successful examples of VR. The academic approach to it just didn't pan out.
-matt
Re:Tech Limitations (Score:1, Insightful)
While this may be true of OS like windoze, certainly this does not hold for real time OSes. Such Oses (like vxWorks, OSE, Lynx etc) are used in several application everyday.
And these are latencies at the software levels above the OS. Commercial systems also use DSPs that can service interrupts at severl kHz.
To me, it would seem that lack of computing power is not the reason holding back VR. Something else - perhaps the inherent complexity of applications - and the vast volumes of data involved - coupled with the lack of a 'good' way to represent that data. After all that is what MIT's touted Media Labs have been trying to do for several years.
Re:Eleven Reasons Why Jaron Lanier stalled (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that there's no real hardware obstacle to gloves-and-goggles VR, it's clear that the basic concept is flawed. There are two fundamental problems. First, eye-hand coordination in empty space sucks as an input method. And second, full-surround visual motion without physical motion makes you feel funny.
Various "haptic interfaces" have been tried, and some of them actually work. Most of them are for small motions, as in sculpting or surgery. For those applications, it's often easier to use an ordinary screen than goggles.
Working in VR? Imagine riding a rollercoaster as a job. Eight hours a day. While trying to do real work.
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
But imagine it with OLED glasses, which actually do feel and fit like sunglasses. And maybe with 3D positional chips, instead of those cumbersome gyros. All you need is a halfway decent, intuitive interface (like the mouse for 2d screens) and you have an immersive VR experience which computers could graphically generate right now.
But will the money which has already been bitten the first time round be made available again?
Re:RIP (Score:3, Insightful)
I was so thrilled by VR I bought a headset. Magic Carpet 2 was great (although the controls were not real VR-friendly). And that's where it ended, still siting in a box in a closet - because nothing else supported it.
The problem - the ONLY problem as far as I could see - was that practically no real game would support it. Even current FPS games, with full 3D 360-degree motion range stereoscopic-supporting perfectly suited for VR, won't bother to include even minimal head-tracking support. Aside from Magic Carpet 2, only lame demos took VR seriously.
Just have a developer spend an extra day adding basic head-tracking to a game like Quake 3 or Half-Life 2 and I'm sure VR will start to return.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
I was fortunate enough to use the CAVE at UIUC in early '97, just after Quake was first released. 4-walled VR environment where the user only needed to wear "polarized" glasses to see the 3D image. I assure you it was MUCH faster than 5 fps. And I can assure you that it was much more immersive than Quake.
But there were no texturemaps. Every object pretty much had a single color. Why? Because there was no reason for it to be more than that.
Quake looks good and VR looks bad because there are millions of PCs and handfuls of things like the CAVE. Developing a souped-up-graphics environment like you see in FPSs isn't HARD, it's just TIME CONSUMING.
The only thing that made FPSs look better than VR is that there was millions of dollars to be made selling video games and nothing to be made making texturemapped VR for the handful of CAVEs on the planet.
It seems silly to evaluate the success of an academic approach on commercial terms. At the end of the day, FPS's are more commercially successful because computers with monitors are cheap (widely available) and 3D displays are not. You can't sell a VR program to millions of people who don't have VR equipment.
VR in the Industry and Universities... (Score:2, Insightful)
Im just finishing a BSc (hons) Degree in Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds, with many modules on 3D world constuction, immersion, sound etc - including the use of some of the latest VR headsets.
I can tell you some of the major downsides right now - the fact that the majority of these headsets work with VRML... and aweful, outdated and pretty much useless language! And those that work with other languages (or even games) only support res's of around 800x600, some of the headsets dont have stereo-scopic vision (both screens show the same image, rather than slightly different like your eyex), some of them _are_ cumbersome, and heavy, but the vast majority (especially the ones ive played with) weigh so little, that you get used to them.
As for trackers, they are one of the other major aspects that let the whole technology down. Short of spending another £1000 on a decent tracker (in my lab we have 3 headsets, and 2 trackers, one of the headsets is over £1000 and one of the trackers is over £1000 in cost, so ive gotten to use the best and the worst!) they might as well not even be there! The decent tracking sytems, however, work with a good range, and accuracy, so your movements, in full 3D with 6 DOF (Degrees of Freedom) are relayed with a 1mm accuracy to the PC, so the image is returned to the headset with the correct yaw/pitch/roll and X,Y,Z co-ordinates needed.
I agree with some earlier posts about the cables, and if you are paying money to use this equipment, thats the last thing you want to ruin your gaming experience. Ive been lucky enough to play on 4 or 5 different types of VR systems (the one in the pod's, where you stamp your feet, the big "sit-down" unit where you drive a tank or race car, and several *ahem* home style units). So i dont think VR's dead, i just think that its moved on. Lets see:
It IS used in military, for battle field simulation.
It IS used in the Motor industry, for assisting engineers with locations and construction of certain parts in the vehicles.
It IS used in biomedical sciences, to view protein strands and DNA
So VR in its rawest form is still used, but not very useful... so i'll ramble on about its nearest cousing AR or Augmented Reality.
This uses the same technology as VR but contains a semi-transparent view on the headsets, so you see real life items, with digital items over-layed. Check out AR-Quake by some students at a Uni in Australia, or see if you can find the UK militaries interest in it, when they tested a large GPS assisted unit at DERA (Defence Evaluation Research Agency).
I dont think ive missed anything, and im fully prepared to be flamed for the things that ive said
Re:Bingo. That's what I was thinking too (Score:2, Insightful)
What is killing Virtual Reality (Score:2, Insightful)
VR developers' goals need to be very close to those of 3-D game designers, i.e.: simple, easy, fun.
Back in the late 1990's I remember downloading and running an "interactive VRML viewer", the thought of which really excited me. The particular package I tried out was the worst implementation of 3-D world I have ever seen. Sure, it was painfully slow (very low FPS), that's not the part that bothered me. What really irked me was how the system handled camera-wall collisions. When "you", the viewer, encountered a wall, your movement stopped dead - even if you were pushing into the wall at an angle!
Every 3-D game ever made does better than that. You should slide along the wall, parallel with the wall! This is simple physics. Nobody would ever buy a game where you had to "move back when you hit a wall, and don't touch any more walls or you'll get stuck!"
Observe the world around you. What happens to your body when you lean against a wall at an angle? Don't you slide along the wall? I mean, come on. Won't someone please put the Reality back into Virtual Reality.