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?"
What Ever Happened to Virtual Reality? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What Ever Happened to Virtual Reality? (Score:5, Funny)
SHHHH! don't tell him (Score:3, Funny)
Virtual reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Virtual reality... (Score:3, Insightful)
(-1 troll is a pretty weak reason)
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:Virtual reality... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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
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.
Quak
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 t
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 suppos
Easy Answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy Answer (Score:4, Funny)
I agree. I don't know why anyone would want to hook into a first person sci-fi snoozer where you play Keanu Reeves.
come on.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:come on.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:come on.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:come on.. (Score:3, Funny)
Have you LOOKED at 98% of the posts here?
What do you mean? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What do you mean? (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, it just got cancelled [imdb.com]
Do not question Virtual Reality. (Score:2)
Now get back in your pod and shut up.
Too risky? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Actually (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, the irony. I love my job.
- The ArchitectRe:Actually (Score:2)
Ah, the irony. I love my job.
Irony! dude, read an MSM [1] newspaper!,
These days it's nanotechnology thats ironic. "Cyberspace" "information superhighway" and VR were all ironic ten years ago :-)
[1] MSM = Main stream media... not a blog
RIP (Score:4, Funny)
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: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
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...
What do you mean? (Score:5, Funny)
Buh-doom-boom-Sis.
Re:What do you mean? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What do you mean? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What do you mean? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not hyped much (Score:2, Funny)
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 prob
Re:Not hyped much (Score:2)
Also, treatment of burn victims, for whom painkillers are not enough; they spend some time in an immersive 3D environment and it helps distract them from the pain in a soothing way.
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 al
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.
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."
Re:Pursuit (Score:2)
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. I
Re: Whatever happened? (Score:2)
There is NO THING such as Virtual Reality, Mr. Anderson.
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.
Re:One major bottleneck: (Score:2)
Hav
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: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: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 ey
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:2)
It would be kind of obvious to me that if you're going to play with a headset that completely obscures your vision you should do that in some place where there's no danger.
Although I suppose that there's the inconvenience of that not everybody can clear enough space to use a thing like that, unless it can be used sitting on a chair or lying on a bed.
Virtual Reality (Score:4, Funny)
ahead of its time (Score:3, Insightful)
With the advances in 3d Graphics and so forth
Dude (Score:2)
all this is virtual? (Score:2)
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
Sony (Score:2, Interesting)
No consumer porn applications (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No consumer porn applications (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No consumer porn applications (Score:3, Funny)
That's true. Have you seen what $30 hookers look like in New Jersey?
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.
It's everywhere (Score:2, Insightful)
Well.... (Score:2)
Nobody ever cared (Score:2)
"Virtual Reality" was a grossly inaccurate prediction of the future of entertainment. As it turns out it is completely impractical, and more then that people are generally happy with plain old boring 2d entertainment in the first place.
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-
We don't need it (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:It's a UNIX system! (Score:2)
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html [sgi.com]
See Slashdot... (Score:2)
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/30
Progress in VR is happening all the time (Score:3, Interesting)
It has no real purpose yet... (Score:3, Informative)
what about vrml? (Score:2)
that's what i've been wondering! (Score:2)
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 purc
Re:Limitations to VR (Score:3)
Compressed air (or pumped water, if you're immersed) vents on the suit. "Ball" hits hand, suit palm stiffens in the appropriate curve, fingers lose the ability to close through the region where the "ball" is supposed to be, and compressed air blows out of the palm, hard. You have to use your muscles to push back or your arm is driven ba
obviously (Score:2)
Porn drives innovation in ways that Bill Gates can only dream about. Bring on the 3D titties now, and in a few years 'legitimate' uses will be commonplace.
Economics (Score:2)
All this stuff can use USB2 or firewire to interface with the computer. Then all you need to do is write
Why I don't worry (Score:2)
Tin Hats on! (Score:5, Funny)
To keep suspicions at bay, advances in VR were removed from this new reality.
It's hard on the US people, but that was the only way the world could keep their growing nuclear arsenal at bay. On the bright side, GWB is just a bad dream (one they will never wake up from).
This post will not be posted on the VR version of slashdot.
Re:Tin Hats on! (Score:3, Funny)
Initially they tried to make it a utopia, but after Al Gore won the election, no one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.
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.
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,
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.
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?
Well there is.. (Score:2)
Allows you to use your headmovement instead of a hatstick to change your view direction in the game!
Eleven Reasons Why Virtual Reality Stalled (Score:5, Informative)
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. Mos
LCD resolution seems to be limiting factor (Score:2)
There are now VR glasses which are lightweight and even aesthetically discreet, but the resolution remains atrocious. I'm not an engineer, so I don't know why that is, but my guess is that anything commerically viable has to use off-the-shelf LCDs that are physically small, which basically means low resolution.
Hopefully, DLP micromirro
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: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
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
My guess? They realized control systems are behind (Score:2, Insightful)
VR old and busted. New hotness: Augmented Reality (Score:2)
Back in the days of VR being a buzzword, I, like many others, was most interested in the game potential. The problem of the VR world not being very touchable lead me (like others I assume) to imagine games where the VR word corresponds to real-world walls, but the VR supplies the fantastical element. Eg, Like how a game of laser-tag is played in a building, but key your headset so that a circular wall becomes the base of a kilometre-high tree or something, or other
Hiro Protagonist (Score:4, 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: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.
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
Re:Oddly Enough... (Score:2)
VR Caves [uic.edu] are still on the high-end of the market.
Consumer stereo glasses have come down in price to $200 and less.
Re:The human mind/body isn't ready for this (Score:2, Informative)
Otherwise, nobody's likely to take you seriously.
Re:The human mind/body isn't ready for this (Score:4, Informative)