Oculus' Michael Abrash Explains What It'll Take For VR To Feel Real 90
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.
Smellovision (Score:2)
Smellovision
Fufme (Score:2)
Smellovision
fufme
The two together should cover most needs
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"Four, sir"
"Four - four pillars"
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Human perceptual systems
Sensing and reconstructing reality
Interaction
That's 3.
It never will feel real (Score:1)
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.
*R* in VR not really needed... (Score:3)
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
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Are you absolutely 100% percent sure about that? [wired.com]
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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.
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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.
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Shall we play a game?
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Shall we play a game?
Lets play "Global Thermonuclear War".
Re: To me, it's the same as with gaming (Score:1)
You must be real fun at parties.
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I was unaware that was a verb.
I may have to German some beers tonight.
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Any other introverted wiffs of your brain you would like to share with the class?
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So ... when people spend all that time programming, is the assumption these programs sit like museum pieces in their pristine glory to be admired?
Or do you acknowledge that at some point people will actually use the programs?
Because, you know, not planning on how people actually used all this glorious programming would pretty much scream "totally pointless endeavor".
You don't have to like VR, but it the sum total of your argument is "computers are for programming not using" ... well, welcome to your pointle
First Requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to release the bloody product!
I almost puked ar SIGGRAPH (Score:5, Interesting)
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Luckily its only a problem for a small percentage of humans, so evolution is apparently already working around your "unsolvable" problem.
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It seems like it's not a small percentage, but neither it is 'everyone'.
I do not, and never have had this issue. Never motion sick, never had simulator sickness. Have subjected to all sorts of things that make other folks feel uneasy if not outright puking, not felt a pang of discomfort.
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1 hour?! Ok, you're wrong and this is provably false. If you'd said something like 32 hours I'd have given you that I haven't personally tested for that long, but you're just either lying or completely naive.
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No I'm just flat out telling you I already have and you're wrong. If you want to make these outrageous blanket statements give yourself a bit larger margin for error.
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Who is really paying you for this? I just want to know where I can get paid to shill for stupidity. I'm sure it pays well....
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Oddly, the weirdest one for me is the sensation when you get off a treadmill, so its essentially the opposite of VR - no visual sensation of movement but physical sensation of movement. However, many people report that the sensation I experience gets less frequent and of lower duration the more often you do it, so maybe there is some truth in the idea that we'll adapt to VR if we do it a lot. I would imagine that any adaptation would result in dulling the senses associated with inner ear balance, which wo
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No, everyone has this issue if they stay in the VR environment long enough.
Challenge accepted.
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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....
Make it more real? (Score:1)
Re:duh (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue is 'who cares'. Just like we do gaming when we can't do photorealistic gaming today, we don't need absolute realism to have a compelling experience. The environment is immersive, even if not 'deceptively realistic', moreso than the status quo of rendering the same thing on a monitor/TV.
We hate our reality. (Score:2)
We hate our reality so much, that we'll spend thousands of hours in make believe land. And people wonder why we are doomed.
Life isn't fair. (Score:2)
When the game isn't fair, people quit playing.
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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.
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Do we *need* it to feel 'real'? (Score:3)
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'.
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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.
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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
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he left out time (Score:2)
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Geeze, I always pictured the Dr Dobb's guy as an crufty old curmudgeon, and that was back in the 90's.
THE Michael Abrash? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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This guys is who got me hooked on programming. Too bad he works for Facebook now.