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Oculus' Michael Abrash Explains What It'll Take For VR To Feel Real 90

Posted by samzenpus from the in-the-future dept.
redletterdave writes: At Oculus's annual developer conference on Thursday, Oculus' chief scientist Michael Abrash took the stage to offer a few anecdotes and a ton of information about the current state of virtual reality, and where it needs to go in order to be truly great. Getting to the next level of virtual reality, Abrash said, will require coordinated advances in several different technologies. Specifically, Abrash believes the future of virtual reality will be built on three pillars: driving the human perceptual system, sensing and reconstructing reality, and interaction.
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Oculus' Michael Abrash Explains What It'll Take For VR To Feel Real More

Oculus' Michael Abrash Explains What It'll Take For VR To Feel Real

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  • Smellovision

  • It never will feel real (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    VR is a dead end. How would you create a VR environment that is real? How can you walk, climb? Your inner ear is telling you about the real world. Your eyes are showing you the virtual world. The disconnection between the two is what causes people to get motion sickness. You will never solve that problem. Augmented Reality is the future.

    • The ambition to be absolutely real, allowing a full experience is in my mind overrated. I don't want to walk or climb, I have plenty of opportunities to do that in real life (and take advantage of them). I however do thoroughly enjoy my DK2 as it is, just letting me look around. The ability to have the 'oculus touch' type of controls is appealing, but I personally do not have a lot of excitement over things like treadmills, spheres, etc. I of course would love some wind and acceleration applied to aid i

    • VR is a dead end. How would you create a VR environment that is real? How can you walk, climb? Your inner ear is telling you about the real world. Your eyes are showing you the virtual world. The disconnection between the two is what causes people to get motion sickness. You will never solve that problem.

      Are you absolutely 100% percent sure about that? [wired.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      VR is a dead end. How would you create a VR environment that is real?

      You, um, plug it directly into your brain, dude.

      The 'VR' we have today is just a low-tech precursor of what we'll have in fifty years.

    • Nonsense, didn't you read what the biggest VR CEO said? It just requires better input from the user, better output to the user and better processing in between.

  • First Requirement (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:47AM (#50596905)

    You have to release the bloody product!

  • I almost puked ar SIGGRAPH (Score:5, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:48AM (#50596917)
    In old days the delay in VR made me nauseous. However at the SIGGRAPH a couple months ago I sampled some of the newer VR setups and almost got sick because it felt so real. One Sony demo had you walk a tight rope between two skyscraper roofs. You could see the ground out of the edge of your eyes. Lots of people found it difficult to walk the rope because it felt so scary. Ditto another demo with Oculus riding a skateboard at 40 miles an hour.

    • yeah those 'movie rides' at Disney/Epcot make me deathly ill after only a minute or two. I don't have any problem skiing or doing any other balance oriented things....

  • We just need a giant metal spike that jams into the backs of our heads to feed our brains the proper electric signals a la the matrix.

  • We hate our reality so much, that we'll spend thousands of hours in make believe land. And people wonder why we are doomed.

    • When the game isn't fair, people quit playing.

    • Lighten up. It's recreation.

    • I'm sorry, but have you seen TV before? Or movies? Or video games? Or the entire internet? Or books for that matter? Or plays?

      Humans have been giving themselves diversions from pressing reality for thousands of years.

    • People have been spending thousands of hours in make believe land since we sat around the fire telling stories every night.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      My reality is awesome! I'm excited for VR because I'm looking forward to putting a 360 degree 3D camera on my helmet and bringing VR users along on wingsuit jumps.

  • Do we *need* it to feel 'real'? (Score:3)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:03AM (#50597087)

    Movies and games on TV do not look like we are looking through a window, yet it's still very nice.

    The reason I say that is that the requirements are pretty steep, and getting too much into the requirements might be 'perfect being the enemy of the good'.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PJ6 ( 1151747 )

      Movies and games on TV do not look like we are looking through a window, yet it's still very nice.

      The reason I say that is that the requirements are pretty steep, and getting too much into the requirements might be 'perfect being the enemy of the good'.

      The rather demanding VR requirements everyone's talking about are bare minimum, not perfection.

      90FPS, head tracking response in the thousandths of a second... if you care to dig deeper (or grab a friend with a DK2), you'll find that the spec is there for a reason.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        I have a DK2. I have a GTX 660 and an midrange i5 (ivy bridge). It's ok by me for the most part, though I would appreciate a bump. That said, Wii level graphics are still pretty cool to me, and that doesn't need anything beefier than a midrange setup today (not laptop GPUs mind you, but still). 75 fps is what the DK2 does and I'm probably in the population that won't even notice the bump to 90 fps, but I welcome it nonethelist.

        The thing I was talking about was Abrash's wishlist specifications for the fu

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PJ6 ( 1151747 )
          I see the point. I agree with you, what I've seen so far just on the DK2 and just demo stuff, this will be huge as-is, even before improvements. No harm in mapping out where it will go though.
  • it's going to take more time.

  • THE Michael Abrash? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dannys42 ( 61725 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:18AM (#50597275)

    Wait, does Oculus have the same Michael Abrash that worked on Doctor Dobb's Journal? And author of numerous graphics programming books? That guy's pretty awesome! I remember reading his stuff when I was just in high school. In fact it may have been one of his articles where I *really* started to understand derivatives (way back when I was in high school studying calculus).

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