Awhile ago I made this image http://i.imgur.com/yaIpP2r.jpg describing an arena where virtual combat could take place with Oculus Rifts. I used some hand-wavy idea of tracking user position via wifi (dumb idea), but with Oculus positional tracking, I wonder if this arena concept becomes closer to reality?
People run into each other all the time with laser tag and people can actually see each other in that case.
I would be concerned about people running into each other and into physical objects because of their lack of visual feedback on their reality.
Say for example, two people facing each other with a virtual wall between them. If both accidentally try to walk "though" the wall they would simply collide with each other, potentially causing injury or damage to equipment.
Not to be a buzzkill, I'd love a system that actually could support this, in theory a large room with many freedom of movement devices (like what Virtuix Omni is working on) would allow this idea in a much smaller space and no risk of players colliding.
I saw the Omni when it was announced, but I was never convinced of it's potential. A few things about it bother me:
1) Strafing is extremely unnatural. It involves standing still in the center, lifting one leg to the edge, and "swiping" it down towards the center. It's a very impractical move for any type of game where strafing is strategic.
2) Backwards motion is extremely difficult. Try to find a video of someone doing it effectively. It's rarely shown because it's not easy to do. This removes this movement as well from any game where backwards movement is strategic.
3) http://i.imgur.com/tsccO4H.jpg Not trying to be mean, but the visual of an adult using the Omni looks very much like a baby using a walker. I believe this limits the Omni to a product you'll only want to use by yourself, when nobody is around, because it looks silly.
4) The current version looks flimsy. Maybe they've beefed up the structure of the thing, but any video that I've watched has shown serious strain on the upright portions of the Omni itself.
5) The fact that you have to wear special shoes, and perform a procedure to get the Omni within reaching distance of a keyboard/mouse, and lock yourself in to the mechanism... seems like quite a bit of overhead to play a game essentially handicapped in terms of movement.
My prediction is that some people are going to be excited about Omni, buy it, try it a few times, and realize how limiting it is in actual gameplay, how limited they are in using their computer, the fact that they look silly to others, and the overhead involved in getting dressed and locked, and realize it isn't worth it. They'll push it to the side to collect dust, or try to sell it on craigslist.
(1) The way you strafe is to run in one direction but turn your torso (and the gun and the Oculus) to look to the side. You may have to tweak the game's control schemes to accomodate this, but it seems doable.
(2) I don't disagree, but it's basically going to be awkward to handle any in-game motion that isn't realistic, whether it's backwards motion or unlimited running and six-foot jumps. I suspect that you'll need to specifically design your game for the Omni in order for it to work well.
There's some guys in Seattle doing this using motion-capture cameras for the positioning:
I answer that I'm terrified of running into something in the real world while my
vision is obscured, but they insist I'll be fine. It turns out the game space's
virtual walls correspond to the real ones in the admittedly small office I occupy
in meatspace.
I've tried to do position triangulation with RFID signal strength and had pretty terrible results. I suspect wifi would be just as bad. An infrared system would probably work well I think. (I know you addressed this)
That being said, sign me up. I have a friend with an oculus dev kit and it has blown me away time and time again. I can see this kind of thing becoming reality. Just stick foam padding all over the place and you're golden.
This has existed for a while in the military training space, although I'm sure the economics are only starting to make sense for consumers now (it might still be too early, no idea). I worked in a slightly related field over five years ago, and saw several such systems on display at conferences (and got to play with them, etc--very cool tech). Here's the first Youtube video I could find[0] demonstrating the concept.
I think walking through walls would be very unlikely.
I spoke with someone who used VR goggles many years ago. The tech demo he was show was simply being in a room with a bottomless pit in the middle. He said even though you knew that in reality there was a carpeted floor, it was impossible virtually impossible to make yourself walk over the pit. You just had way too many mental blocks that stopped you from doing it.
I imagine something similar would happen with a wall. It would feel very eery and uncomfortable to walk through the wall.
You could say the same about paintball where it clearly isn't true so I don't think it's an issue. Besides, it's easy to just flag them as soon as they walk into a wall and force them to go back where they entered in order to unflag.
The most promising tech for real-time location sensing right now us Ultra-Wide-Band based tech. You need sensing times in the picoseconds, but apparently that's actually doable.
Is there actually an advantage to having all the players in the same room? I guess you'll be able to hear your friends IRL?
I think omnidirectional treadmills and more immersive audio will be good enough. I imagine eventually the floor of the treadmill will even be able to tilt when you're walking uphill.
If the VR is good enough to make your brain fall for the illusion, paintball and laser tag are just a few of the many things you could implement. Imagine paintball, with rocket launchers and zombies and fire and bottomless pits with no risk of injury. I would definitely pay to do that with my friends in a laser-tag type setting.
Not to mention the global reach of such technologies. Imagine XBox Live with laser tag/VR FPS and people from all over the world could play. There could be massive tournaments and competitions.
I'm most curious how you intend the most basic part of the user interface to work: how do players aim? That's the biggest problem right now with first person shooters and the Rift. Do you have a crosshair that's always exactly in the center of the field of view? Do you motion track the dummy rifle and use that you position a crosshair that can move around in the field of view?
I guess you'd also need a larger battery if you were to both compute graphisms and deal with the synchronization with other peoples over the Wifi. Plus it'd be lighter and in case of any collision there would be much less hardware that could be damaged, so I think sending rendered images over Wifi is actually a pretty cool idea
Tested have an interview/hands-on where they discuss why Oculus have used an optical approach with the external camera to track head movements. They note that it was superior to various other methods they tried. Wonder if eventually it could work with typical laptop web cams?
Also worth watching that video to hear about the switch to an OLED screen and the latency advantage there. Employees at that company must have so much fun trying all the alternatives to build the best product.
(My dev kit in Australia is for sale if anyone is interested. Email in profile. It's amazing, but I'm curious more than I am a software developer so it might be more useful to someone else.)
A similar approach could be used with a typical webcam. In their case it's probably a camera with a filter so they can isolate their IR LEDs. That's kind of a nice to have but it's not absolutely necessary. It's neat how they can get by with a single camera. Note the pattern of LEDs, as you move around they can use the pattern to locate you in 3d space.
IMO the downside of using a camera is that you automatically get some latency as part of the deal. A full frame has to be read out, digitized and the 3d position derived. Some other systems could have better real time characteristics. The cost of this system is presumably a factor.
You can use sensor fusion to combine it with acceleromters, which have terrible drift double integrating from acceleration to position, but can actually manage it in the few-milliseconds time scale between frames/signaling/processing of the camera.
Is it likely that they'll have to drastically change their methods to handle standing use? The interviewer noted that leaning forward a lot or turning around would hamper tracking.
I had hoped for a wireless unit by the time of the consumer release but I guess driving the screen might chew through battery? Not to mention that a battery would add complexity and size to the unit.
Presumably if they have a wide enough angle and a high enough resolution they can cover a much larger space. It's symmetric situation, you need just as much resolution at the distance as the minimum amount you want something in the VR world the same distance from you to respond to. A well designed system can even resolve sub-pixel motion of those LEDs in the field of view of the camera.
With an embedded camera system you could be transmitting just the positional data to be fed into the computer after doing most/all of the work in hardware, no?
If the image you get out of the sensor is processing friendly (such as just the image of the IR leds) then you can do this pretty quickly in software. Some preprocessing on the camera can help but the source of most of the latency is going to be the image sensor readout. I've actually worked on a real time tracking system like this about 20 years ago.
I've been following the Oculus CES coverage somewhat and by far the most in-depth interview/coverage has been by the Tested folks. Here's their video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNQHNkJY1g
The most in-depth discussions probably happen on the Oculus Developer Forums and the Oculus Subreddit. RoadtoVR is good for general coverage on HMDs and peripherals.
That was quite informative, but I have to say that the guy who did the interview really disoriented me. He kept jumping on everyone's words and it felt like he was way over caffeinated. I watched it almost 10 minutes ago and I still feel kind of jittery.
Awesome. The golden age of VR may finally be upon us. It's been talked about for probably 20 years but now all the technology to support this at a reasonable cost seems to be converging. I think in 10 years we'll look back at this in a similar way to how we look at Wolfenstein 3d, when everything changed.
He definitely says it. I think the prototype is maybe simulating gaze detection at the moment based on the position of the reticle position set by the thumbstick and possibly current head position + previous position + guess work on what a players focus is likely to be.
I certainly get the impression from the way he says it that this is something they are looking at the moment in a more advanced way and is a common conversation point in their software/hardware dev teams at the moment. VERY exciting.
I haven't seen that anywhere else, so he probably misspoke. Eye-tracking seems like it would be an obvious future enhancement. In the EVE spaceship demo, it seemed a little odd that you locked missiles based on where your head was pointing and not where your eyes were looking.
Unfortunately, eye tracking is only possible in broad strokes, not fine detail, and certainly not for tracking fast-moving small targets across the screen in a realtime action game. There's pretty much no such thing as a smooth eye movement; your brain tricks you into thinking your eyes are moving smoothly when they're not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
I wanted to use my eyes to create 3D models via eye tracking. Looked into it for about a week before concluding it was probably impossible, or at least way less accurate than good old-fashioned hand movements.
Dunno what the Oculus guys are doing with gaze detection, but I doubt they're doing fine-grained detection such as being able to pick out a particular target with your eyes. (I would love to be wrong about this! That'd be an awesome feature. I just doubt whether it's technically possible.)
The Oculus doesn't have gaze detection built in right now, but there are actually at least two consumer eye tracking products coming out (focused on gamers). One is the Tobii EyeX http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-experience/ and the other is the Eye Tribe Tracker: https://theeyetribe.com/
Both are about $100 and have dev kits/SDKs, although I haven't looked closely at either.
Thanks for the pointer to Eye Tribe. I ordered an EyeX but hadn't heard about them. Eye Tribe seems more developer friendly, with tech specs front and center.
From eye tracking can you infer where the user thinks they are looking? I.e. recover the illusory smooth eye motion I perceive when tracking a moving cat.
If you are tracking a moving object, you are using 'smooth pursuit' - your eye movement actually is smooth, not illusory. If you're moving your gaze along a stationary object, that's when you get saccades, a series of short, jumpy movements.
I think it'd be impossible because when you think you move your eye, your brain is essentially just moving a bitmap image of what you're looking at around the center of your vision. E.g. look at the word "sillysaurus2" above my comment. Look at the 's', then look at the 'y' -- keep looking back and forth. Your eye likely isn't moving at all, even though your focus of vision does. It happens mentally rather than physically.
I recorded a video of myself doing this, and I certainly can't see any obvious eye movements. But if I think about the number of degrees that my eye is shifting between the 's' and the 'y', it's probably one degree at most. It's not clear to me that even if my eye was moving I would be able to register that movement in a video.
I'm assuming you've seen some peer reviewed research that fixed peoples' heads and used high resolution eye tracking to support your hypotheses, though?
The way to convince yourself your eyeball isn't moving is to touch your actual eyeball with your fingertip -- like press lightly against the left corner side of your left eyeball with your left index finger -- and then switch your gaze back and forth between the two letters. As long as your viewing distance is correct, you won't feel any movement. (You may have to back your head away from the screen. I'm viewing from a distance of arm's length.)
On the other hand, if you look back and forth between adjacent words, then you can feel physical eye movement.
One of the problems of immersive VR is that you need very high precision near the fovea ( = at the point of screen you are looking at), and you need to render very fast at the edges of vision. This means that you need to render at a very high resolution and at a very high frame rate. This is, of course, a problem.
However, while the vision at the fovea is very sharp, it is also very slow, and while the vision at the edges is very fast, it is very blurry and imprecise. With eye tracking, this is exploitable. The practice is called foveated rendering, and the idea is to only draw full precision near the position of the screen you are actually looking at, and elsewhere render at a much reduced resolution but at a higher frame rate.
In tests, this has been found to be impossible to distinguish from just drawing the full screen at full resolution and speed.
Tried it out yesterday. Really a major improvement, and they're listening to feedback. The method of producing 'low persistence' is quite interesting, and only works becuase of the move to OLED. Really smart guys there.
Carmack has been talking about OLED for VR headsets for quite some time, and I'm sure Palmer and the rest were considering it, too. But I think it wasn't very accessible to them until recently. They're a start-up so they can't exactly go an order a few thousand 1080p OLED panels. This may have been possible now due to Samsung making the Galaxy S4 with a 1080p panel last year, and perhaps other launched some, too, and it pushed the prices down for such a panel, enough to make it viable for Oculus Rift.
Does anyone know when this will be released? It says Prototype Model and then there is a developer kit. I am not a big fan of Developer Kit as they tend to be far from ready to be a consumer product. Also add the price factor. Ditto goes to Google Glass which has a developer edition for $1500 (of course only for selected/invited ones) but if it ever becomes a reality i.e. meaning a real consumer product and drops the price to $300 then I will not be happy since it cost me $1200 more and the latest model may have better h/w components.
They are likely to release a consumer product late this year or early next year, with an updated dev kit coming some time before that. Always subject to change of course since this is bleeding edge tech, but they can't delay too much or they risk Microsoft or Sony beating them to the punch.
I personally just can't imagine Microsoft or Sony beating them in this space... at least not for a very long time. One of the key advantages Oculus has is their staff, besides being made up of some of the most amazing programmers of our time (Carmack) they're also devoted gamers. Palmer literally created the oculus because he REALLY wanted it. There's a drive towards perfection that I just can't imagine a large company replicating as well.
Every time I see these guys I think they are the next game console. Basically something that doesn't connect to your TV at all except perhaps if other people want to see what you are doing.
Hrm.....I have to say that the technology is really cool, but the video makes it look like nothing more than a gimmick. Notice "makes it look".
They picked a tower defense game to demo this? Really? Who's gonna want to have full upper body motion (lean in, out, sideways, up, down) to play a tower defense game? A few people, for the novelty of it.
This type of marketing is very unfortunate. It's a technology with a lot of really cool potential and this video made it look like a gimmick.
I saw a video of some of the Verge guys trying it out at CES, and pretty much all of them were like "I don't want to take this off" at the end. It sounds like Oculus Rift will change gaming forever, and not just gaming.
There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.
I suspect the Rift will force an interesting battle between pre-rendered and realtime graphics in film. Because of parallax effects, there is no way to pre-render footage for the Rift while still maintaining the level of geometric correctness the Rift provides. I suspect we'll see some pre-rendered 3d movies for the Rift, but they'll feel pretty weird.... It will be pseudo 3d, like current 3d films, not the true binocular, immersive, persistent-world effect that Rift games provide.
With realtime rendering, however, you will get the complete, geometrically correct 3d images with head tracking. I suspect what this means is we'll start to see 3d films that are rendered in realtime. Essentially like the cutscenes we see for AAA video games, except they'd be feature length without any gameplay in between. If VR really takes off, we might even see companies like Pixar re-release their films for realtime viewing.
I would love to see a company like Pixar produce new realtime 3d films for the Rift, but it seems unlikely that would make financial sense for them. I suspect what we'll see instead is indie shorts first, followed by larger and larger budget films. The same trajectory that CG films took in the first place.
An interesting implication of this is that live footage will be basically impossible to incorporate into a true VR setting. As video resolution gets higher we may see multiple angles of scenes being recorded in ultra-high-def, and then digitally combined into a voxel scene. Probably data from something like the Kinect would have to be mixed in too, to resolve all of the voxels. That could be replayed on a Rift, but the director would have to really constrain the kind of lighting, materials, and motion for that to work well. It would be extraordinarily difficult, and I suspect you'd still have a lot of strange artifacts.
This could actually be a big shot in the arm for pure digital film production!
I have a Rift and I'm bullish about its prospects for gaming, but I'm pretty skeptical about using this for non-interactive entertainment.
What would be the point of allow the user to move around (in a limited fashion anyhow) inside the movie? It doesn't improve storytelling (as games can by adding interactivity and perspective) - it strikes me as a gimmick, much like 3D films in general.
You get the whiz-bang coolness of "OMG I'm in this thing!", but ultimately it's a lot more gear than a straight-up television/movie screen for next to no gain. 3D movies had a few years of glory but is now deeply unpopular - I foresee the same for VR-movies.
I suspect there'd be a niche but viable market for non-interactive or semi-interactive content. Off the top of my head, I can see a handful of use-cases where immersive VR would be a huge plus over a two-dimensional image:
* Being able to view complex choreography (martial arts, dancing, etc.) from different angles
* Conveying a sense of size and scale -- e.g. Pacific Rim, Godzilla
* Recreating some emotion or feeling imparted by the surrounding environment -- e.g. the franticness of a war zone, the claustrophobia of a submarine
Absolutely. There is a ton of work going on to shoot a movie, camera angles, positioning, orientation, shaking, motion speed and smoothness. If you take this away it will be like hiring the most incompetent camera-man confined to a wheelchair to shoot all movies you watch.
You have to consider that from a consumer tech point of view, linking that film set to an Occulus Rift at the moment, is not a huge leap. In fact, it's so close, almost the biggest problem it faces is going to be on a creative level of re-thinking how to tell stories in a new medium. I don't think we're more than 5-10 years away.
There is already a demo for the Rift where you are placed in a virtual cinema complex (multiple screens, a patron walks past, the dorky carpet, etc). From the main hall, you can enter a cinema to watch an existing movie or choose one from your hard drive to play. It enables you to choose whichever seat you want which is a funny gimmick.
Or sports watching, Not sure if this is possible yet, but I'm imagining a 360 degree camera at the courtside of every sporting event. Then this is streamed to you at home so you can focus in on whichever part of the play you choose and feels like you are sitting courtside of a game.
They gained a huge asset with Carmack working full time for Oculus. I'd never have been interested in this, but now I am. It's progressing very nicely.
I don't disagree that Carmack was a huge win, but it's a little insulting to Palmer and the rest of the team to suggest that he's the reason for their progress. He's only been on the team for a few months. A lot of what they're doing has been in the works for a long time.
Plus, all I've heard about what Carmack has been doing is that he was working on Android stuff in the beginning.
Now I'm thinking I ought to start thinking about a 3-D desktop environment. I know it sounds nuts to use this technology to just render a browser and a bunch of terminal windows, but that could be an awesome working environment.
It is neat to have bigger and higher resolution screens, but I can only read the text at one point in space anyway.
I hope that while they're putting the finishing touches on the current product, and work on deploying it soon, they will also keep in mind what the guys at Avegant are doing, and either do their own R&D with this type of technology for future products, to completely eliminate the screen and the need to use UHD or higher resolutions in the future (or at least not for sometime), while making it easier for the eyes, or they buy them out.
The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too.
To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did.
Edit>> link to original thread http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fxpqb/xpost_from_rc...