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?"
come on.. (Score:5, Interesting)
One major bottleneck: (Score:5, Interesting)
At one stage he was working on a virtual reality headseat (Similar to the VirtualBoy style visor) except you wore it on your head and controlled it with two handheld sensors / input pads.
It was phenomenal, until during a demonstration with an investor, the user got tricked into thinking it was real and actually stepped backwords and fell over the couch he was standing in front of and twisted his ankle. The product did not sell.
So yes, the bottleneck is definable in one word: Liability.
Sony (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a UNIX system! (Score:2, Interesting)
The concept of VR has amused me for a very long time. It's what makes watching movies like "Lawnmower Man" so amazingly funny in this day and age.
I've been taking a 3D modeling class, and it has about three paragraphs dedicated to VR. The content is pretty worthless - but the picture of a dolphin leaping out of a monitor towards a man who is leaning back to avoid it is completely priceless.
In all seriousness, there was a short blurb about full-room "holodeck" like simulations being used for engineering work - but it didn't go into any details. Anyone know anything more about that?
Progress in VR is happening all the time (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the hardware... (Score:4, Interesting)
So while we can trick the eyes and the ears, we've still got some senses that are firmly grounded in this reality that keeps it from being totally effective. VR does have some practical applications in the medical and manufcaturing fields, but as it was envisioned for entertainment, it's not quite there.
If we can ever manage to figure out a way to connect a computer to all human sensory input, it won't really get much further. That could mean using some sort of body suit that can fake the sensations of movement, etc, or perhaps a direct interface into the brain.
Tech Limitations (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some real problems with latency. Modern operating systems have a really hard time with the idea that there are hard deadlines that must be met on a sub-100ms basis. Even some graphics programmers hold onto the myth that 30fps has anything to do with how fast the human eye can detect motion. The reality is that we detect different faults at different rates, but anything that's tied to our own sense of motion has to be accurate at somewhere around the frame rate of touch.
The frame rate of our haptic senses is something on the order of 3000 frames per second.
That doesn't mean you need to update a display at 3000fps (though ironically enough, that's approximately the frequency of the fluorescent backplane on an LCD), but it does mean that if you're trying to show someone something at the same time a touch simulator is telling them they are, frames need to interrupt-updated at a speed that even the core operating system has trouble handling.
What do I mean by touch simulators? Nothing so complex as this per-finger force feedback weirdness that pulled back on each finger as I touched a virtual cockpit back at SIGGRAPH. No, anything involving a head-mounted display and a position detector is a touch simulator; the "feel" comes from within your head and neck and the reaction is to be visually accompanied by a display of motion.
But the display is always, always, always late! Look at the monitor. Now move your head and eyes, look at whatever's 90 degrees off to the right. For a noticable sub-second interval, you went blind, so that your brain would not need to contend with this blurry streaky mess. To be immersive, VR systems need to detect your motion, synthesize the appropriate blur-frames, and (hardest of all) have a convenient stable frame in front of you as you're escaping motion-blindness.
Everything head-mounted fails this just brutally.
There are vague successes in VR, of course. Driving simulations work fantastically, but it's not like driving is a massively natural feat for our brains to have adapted to in the first place. Screens on every window clean up the above quite neatly. And the phobia work functions because the fears operate on such a low level that your brain isn't able to employ resources such as "heh, that spider's moving wrong". These are useful and impressive successes, but in terms of general purpose "you are elsewhere" mechanisms -- until latency is dealt with appropriately, this will continue to be broken tech.
--Dan
Re:Too risky? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was under the impression Direct 3d is geared towards allowing this kind of configuration, and games using it can automatically benefit.
The only part I see lacking is the gloves and complete immersion kits (Yes I know there are gloves, but I haven't seen them pushed anywhere apart from zzz.com.ru).
VR is with us already, its just not looking like Tron.
Re:Pursuit (Score:4, Interesting)
VR, like a lot of early 'cyberspace' mythology, was built on an unrealistic rejection of the body, and a fantasy of "pure mind."
Hiro Protagonist (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's the hardware... (Score:2, Interesting)
But what if you mix VR with a physical setting? Imagine mapping the physical parameters of your house in a Doom3 map, then texturing it up like the Mars research facility descended into hell. If your VR headset is portable and can track location accurately you'd have a physical VR simulation! You could then spawn some monsters and play co-op or deathmatch with your fellow housemates. Could even be extended to a commercial scale, imagine renting a cluttered warehouse and doing the same thing for a LAN party.
Precisely (Score:4, Interesting)
Porn moved DVDs
Porn is holding up the BluRay / HD-DVD release
Porn moved BBSs
Porn moved the internet.
I'm not advocating it. I am saying that there are a lot of people that don't notice these things until they find a new way to get porn.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. That's like saying Enterprise killed the lauching of Titans in Cape Canaveral.
Here's a few questions for you all:
1.) How many of you actaully played anything based on Virtual Reality? (If no, did you ever even have an OPPORTUNITY to play VR?)
2.) Of those of you that have, did you actually have any fun?
3.) Did any of you enjoy paying $5 for a minute of entertainment?
4.) Did VR bring you an interesting gaming experience that you couldn't have enjoyed better?
5.) Was it anything like Hollywood?
Here, I'll answer my own questions:
My opinion on Virtual Reality was soured BEFORE the VB actually came out. Frankly, the Virtual Boy was a lot better experience. It had a good stereoscopic display, *and* the games could still be fun because they used tried-and-true controls we all loved. The
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no real benefit to VR... (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't have VR for the same reason that websites aren't authored in Shockwave--it's massive overkill for the vast majority of things it might be applied to. The useful applications of VR are very specific, niche apps, and the rest it could be used for can't possible afford the equipment to make it work well.
Given that, there's little demand to work out the technical wrinkles that make it practical and cost effective. Do you really want to jack in just to check your mail?
Re:One major bottleneck: (Score:5, Interesting)
> from your nose for a protacted period of time. Focusing on that is
> not fun;
I work in flight simulation - we have VERY good VR helmets. The light fed into your eyes is 'collimated' - meaning that the light rays from the video display are stuffed through some optics so that they emerge as PARALLEL rays of light rather than rays eminating radially outwards from each point on the screen.
Collimating the light is the key to avoiding the problem you describe - and it works perfectly. We also employ big curved display screens that wrap all around your face - so it's not like looking at two tiny squares in front of your face - you can swivel your eyeballs and look to either side, up and down.
You can see our VR helmet at http://www.link.com/ [link.com] - you can even buy one if you can afford the price of a pretty decent Ferrari.
The only problem with collimated displays it that when something *IS* close to you in the virtual world, it seems that it's too far away - however, because we project a slightly different image into each eye, your brain does a pretty good job of recognising when things are close by noting how much your eyes have to cross to fuse the two images into one.
There was one very small remaining problem - you couldn't see your own nose! You'd be amazed at just how weird that is (unless of course you happen to have lost your nose in some kind of tragic accident!). A small piece of plastic built into the display at a strategic point fixed that nicely.
The display is crisp and bright and each display can be driven by either one PC or an entire render farm to get realtime realism that can be almost arbitarily good.
The helmet can easily incorporate one of any number of head tracker technologies depending on whether or not a magnetically neutral or acoustically reasonable environment is available to allow different kinds of tracker to work accurately.
So - the helmet problem is completely, 100% solved...except for the price.
Re:One major bottleneck: (Score:4, Interesting)
Whilst your eyes *can* do what you say - they don't like it. It definitely causes eye strain. I talked to one of the Shuttle astronauts who went on the Hubble repair mission. They did a LOT of hours in VR simulation using helmets that didn't employ collimated optics - and they got blinding headaches and other weird visual problems because of it.
Fortunately, we now have collimated optics which completely solve that problem.
Re:Virtuality Elysium anyone? nostalgia.... (Score:1, Interesting)
It was an IBM 486 DX100 w/16 megs of RAM. But what made it an Elysium, were the 2 graphics cards (2 motorola 601e processors on each card w/8 megs of tex ram on each card too), the HMD, and the 2/6DOF magnetic tracking devices from polhemus (i.e. Fastrack) one on the HMD the other on the "pointing device", a handheld input device with 4 grip sensors that would read in pressure from finger grips in values of 1-255. You could use it to simulate a hand opening or closing.
And now my point...The school I attended/worked at used to give tours and show off this new VR tech by showing them the Elysium. Remeber the stock city model that came with 3DS Studio for DOS? My buddy put that in VR and we would show that to the "tourists". It didn't happen often put I distictly remember a few of the people getting Vertigo when they "flew" to one of the top of the buildings and looked down. They would fall right on their asses in the middle of the room, while wearing the HMD. VR is kinda dangerous in that respect.
I always thought that was the most interesting part of donning an HMD, the disorientation you felt after wearing it made it intimidating for the average Joe. And it came with warnings telling you to not wear it for more than 15 mins at a time. I took me a few hours of use, to get over the initial disorientation an HMD causes to your senses.
That is what killed VR. HMD technology is not for average computer users. Plus you can get epileptic seizures. It's the same thing that killed the Captin Power TV show.
huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I hear this quite often from people who have played the orignal (Virtuality 1000) "Dactyl Nightmare" - that the point of the game was no fun. Often, when I played it when all four pods were filled, I could see the other players (well, their "avatars") kinda looking around, but not doing anything. It was like they didn't have a clue what the game was about.
I will give you a clue - the pterodactyl was a small (though important) portion of the game.
The whole point of the game was "virtual paintball" - or what is today called a "fragfest" (albeit with much better graphics, sound, etc and many more players). The idea was to run around on the platforms, down the stairs (to the center platform), and using the "levitator disks" (or whatever they were) to manuever between the upper platforms - running around and shooting the other players. All the while, the 'dactyl was circling - and if you heard "he's coming!" in your headset, that was a clue to get under some cover somewhere (like under one of the arches or something), look up and around and try to shoot the bastard from the sky before he picked you up and dropped you to your doom!
I found the game to be very fun, but only when I was playing with people who knew what the hell the game was about. Yes, the equipment was very heavy and cumbersome. Yes, the resolution sucked (but at least it the field of view was large enough to immerse you - ie, 60 degrees horizontal). Yes, the tracking was laggy (and in cases, nausea producing. But the game...
More than once I played it and in five minutes had a great workout - DDR is probably the only current game today that could match it...
Re:Pursuit (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but surely the Super Whiz-Bang Mega-GPU Graphics Cards of 2005 can keep up?
Actually, what I recall of VR helmets from back in the day is that they gave me a headache from having the screens so close to my eyeballs. Or perhaps it was because the 3D perspective wasn't quite right and my eyes tried to compensate by refocusing, and the headache came from the resulting eyestrain. In any case, I couldn't use the 3D goggles for more than 15-20 minutes at a time.
Re:RIP (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's the hardware... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tech Limitations, & some interesting phenom (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, latency is the main bitch here, but there are a few extra bits of interesting info. One is that your nervous system already has its own latency "lag", and you are already adapted to it. The upshot is that it is possible to adapt to a bit more latency incurred by extra hardware. This has been shown in military virtual cockpit simulators that attempt to present a lot of information to a fighter pilot with a 3D display inside a helmet, as if he can "see through" the hull of the aircraft. The negative is that once you leave that environment, adjusting to the "normal" real-life latency leads you to get nauseous sometimes
Another interesting phenomenon of perception is that if you are walking in a curve with a large enough radius, you will not be able to tell (if blindfolded... or wearing a 3D VR HUD) whether you are walking in a straight line or not. So in theory you can have a fully-navigable VR system inside, say, a hangar, that tricks you into thinking you are walking forever in a straight line (i.e., in any direction in the world) when in actuality you might be walking in large figure 8's on the hangar floor. This of course conjured images in my head of real-life Holodecks and whatnot, but it's interesting nevertheless
Re:It's the hardware... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool. Might you be able to recommend a good book (or journal) on sleep for a scientifically literate non-specialist?
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:1, Interesting)
Watch LCD technology. It will reach a point where slapping together relatively inexpensive and lightweight glasses or even helmets will be very affordable.
I totally agree with the points made about the games, but let's not forget the cost. The best VR helmet back in those days available to consumers was the VFX1. I owned one. It cost me about 900 bucks. That ain't cheap by anyone's standards and if I hadn't(still am) been such a nerd, I wouldn't have forked over the money. I did get my money's worth out of it though. Endless experimentation. The only decent game for it was Descent.
I really think the cost held it back as much as the lack of games and the big heaviness of it all. Watch those LCD prices and technologies, the day is coming...
Re:One major bottleneck: (Score:3, Interesting)
The amount by which the lens of your eye has to distort to make a sharp image on the retina. That requires muscular effort in your eyes - which is physically tiring to them. (Like long periods of reading with the book three inches from your eyes and no way to look off into the distance for a while to relax them every few pages).
Worse still is the fact that using the lenses in your eyes to focus on something that appears to be very close whilst pointing your two eyes such as to fuse the two images as if the object was far away is an extremely unnatural thing - it never happens in day to day life.
When you force your visual system to do things like that, it can give you blinding headaches and make you feel very sick.
Collimated optics are the way to go - but they aren't cheap.
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There's no real benefit to VR... (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine being able to spend an hour a night talking with your spouse who lives on another continent. Climbing a just-mapped temple in the jungle. Exploring the moon. Walking through a bridge in an engineering class. Seeing how two dna bases line up, or don't.
You're catching Jaron Lanier's disease: Because we could do these things, we would.
Seriously, of that list, how much of general computery things would that activity make up? Are you going to be an Amazonian explorer every day? Are you going to hop into a VR session with your spouse every night when you're on the road, or will you sometimes just send an email?
You've proved my point for me: None of your examples are things that we do every day as a normal part of our lives. You won't use VR to make a spreadsheet, or normalize a database table. FPS games are already immersive enough to cause motion sickness. We can currently videoconference around the world, yet most business communication is still by telephone or email. Regarding your flight example, did you fly to work this morning? Me, I walk every day.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. The Quake II engine has been ported to the CAVE, so you can play Quake2 in there. It's pretty novel, but not really all that great. There is a Quake3 level viewer too, but the full game engine was never completed.
The hardware driving the cave, btw, is pretty insane. Also completely obsolete. "Cassatt" is an SGI Onyx2 "Reality Monster" with 12 CPUs and two InfiniteReality2 graphics pipes. It was truly wicked when it was first installed, but now it's getting a bit old.
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:3, Interesting)
They amounted to crappy wireframe renderings of rooms, perhaps some objects, and usually some (literal) avatars of other people. The software must have been unoptimized, because even simple 16 color wireframe models were godawful slow. The controls were hard to use, and immersion was nil. Still, it was supposed to be a "hot" thing that was going to take off. At the time the notion of a video card with 3D acceleration was just beginning to materialize. Most everybody had plain old 2D framebuffers. And pentiums. With like 32 megs of ram. ouch.
Anyway... back then it was still novel to have high speed internet connections in the dorms, and when we discovered CUSeeMe (or however it's spelled) that pretty much drew all our attention away from the crappy VRML.
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:2, Interesting)