Tricks That Make Virtual Reality Feel Real | Hacker News Reader

Tricks That Make Virtual Reality Feel Real

nautil.us

68 pointsAoyagi20 comments

I'm not surprised that realism is not essential to the VR experience. In fact, I've been wondering if a more Tron like scene [0] would be better. It would be simpler and easier to scale up to at higher resolutions, while still maintaining high frame rates.

[0] https://fronteffects.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/tron-disney...

I've become convinced that there's one attribute of VR headsets that's more important than realism, more important than presence, more important than input.

Once the novelty has worn off, the main thing that will keep average users coming back is comfort. And none of the bulky, unwieldy headsets that exist today have it.

I'm not sure if we have to wait until VR headsets become as unobtrusive as ordinary glasses or contacts before users get the level of comfort they'll need to use VR for extended periods of time. But we're nowhere near that level with today's technology.

I agree, I had an Oculus Rift Dk2 and while the technology was truly impressive, plugging the thousand cables needed to make it work and trying to make it fit comfortably was never worth it.

The first thing they need for this to work is think of it like a game controller. To play a game with a controller you only need to plug it in, and it will just work. The same needs to be done with VR headsets. You should not have to worry about display resolution and placement, cable management, sound devices, etc, just to play with a VR headset.

The ideal would be plugging your headset into a single USB type-c port with a technology allowing it to act as a display, sound card and controller all at once. Or at least have a kind of dock where you plug in the VR controller and this dock is plugged into your computer in various ways.

Still, I think they should work on this before resolution and accuracy for VR to really work.

I look at this sort of thing the way I looked at my first smart phone in 2004. Sure, they should have been fully graphically accelerated in a less bulky package with a bigger screen and such things were possible even then. But at the same time, I could download and run programs on my phone. I could stream Shoutcast radio in the car and check email or watch little low-res video streams. I even had a Nintendo emulator on it for portable gaming!

The other stuff came eventually. Within 5 years it was finally (relatively) affordable to improve the ergonomics and responsiveness of the UI and within 10 it was common even among cheap, mainstream devices.

I see VR following a similar path. Get the actual basic features up and running first as that's the basis of the platform. Then iterate and benefit from scale to get the nicer, more polished hardware into something under $1000+

Have you tried the consumer version of the Oculus Rift? It's significantly more comfortable than previous iterations, enough for hours of continuous use.

Oculus has placed a huge emphasis on comfort, because "presence"- the visceral feeling of being in a virtual space- is so fickle to achieve. While it's not exactly a binary, there-or-not-there kind of thing, presence is a gestalt that's really easy to get kicked out of, and Oculus found that discomfort was one of those things that would reliably inhibit a sense of presence.

They went to incredible lengths to improve the comfort of the device, going as far as designing new manufacturing processes to wrap the Rift in some bespoke fabrics, and designing the straps to eliminate the "ski goggle wobble", and distribute weight evenly across the head.

"Presence" is a weird thing, because you can kind of pop in and out of it quickly.

Was calibrating my DK2 yesterday and ran the demo scene (the desk with the stack of cards and soda can, etc). I tried to reach for the house plant and the can, knowing full well that they weren't there, and there was nothing triggered in my mind. Then I thought "it'd be fun to knock over the cards" and I swiped my arm through the space they would occupy, and my brain switched for a second or two and I fully expected to be hitting the cards and causing them to tumble. When it didn't happen, it was jarring, because it should have happened.

With the DK1 and DK2, those moments come almost randomly for me, and I keep wondering if we'll get to a point where they can be sustained for long periods of time, or if it'll be like those magic eye pictures where you finally see the sailboat and as long as you concentrate and don't blink you can keep looking at it.

I had a similar feeling when doing the DK2 Desk demo. I was doing the usual looking around then reached out to touch the virtual desk. I had forgotten how close I was to my real desk so when I touched the desk virtually I touch my real desk. This flipped something in my brain, no way could I be touching a virtual desk. It was a really incredible experience.

When I play Elite: Dangerous with DK2 and throttle/stick, I would tweak the position of the actual controllers on my desk so they matched the position of the virtual sticks in the game. The appearance of the virtual throttle/stick in the game is essentially a recreation of the actual model I have and the game is set up so the virtual hands move to mirror what I'm doing in real life.

Obviously with the current setup it doesn't detect my hands in real space so the on-screen motions only happen as I make them in real life but as long as I keep my hands on the controllers, the illusion is great. Move the stick a little to the right and the guy on screen, sitting in the same position does the same.

I think once they add a Leap/Kinect/RealSense type depth cam on the front of these HMDs you'll get some basic hand tracking for better representation. As the article says, it doesn't have to have the most realistic graphics if the feeling of actually seeing your "avatar" moving 1:1 with your actual motions flips some switch in your perception and it's easy to feel like the virtual person in the virtual environment is an extension of you in the real world.

I've played Elite: Dangerous a little bit and have been meaning to get a better control setup for it. The ship's cockpit has an amazing amount of depth to it. And I love how screens in your ship react to being looked at.

From all of the accounts I have read the HTC Vive has already reached that point. I seriously can not wait for it to get released in just a few months!

It is possible to wear the consumer version with glasses, or would you need contacts if you have vision problems?

It's designed to accommodate glasses, and there are also 3rd parties developing custom lens inserts to match your prescription.

As I've gotten older I don't tolerate contacts as well so most of my usage (dev unit v2 in my case) has been with glasses. My prescription is fairly strong so I already get a bit of distortion in peripheral vision. It's something I tune out in reality but in VR, it took a few minutes of getting used to. It wasn't bad but it's a lot like when you first put on a headset and you sort of learn to gaze straight ahead rather than looking at stuff at the edges of your vision while still looking forward.

I'm curious, can you use Oculus Rift without glasses? I tried google cardboard without glasses, and can see clearly even though I'm near-sighted, because the image is only inches from my eyes.

You can wear glasses but it will reduce your field of view.

As in real life.

Far more pronounced. The FOV reduction doesn't come from the glasses frame so much as it comes from the glasses moving your eyes further away from the headset lenses than they would be without the glasses.

Agreed - the Rift consumer version is designed with comfort as a primary focus. I've seen a lot of first impressions mention how premium the Rift headset feels compared to competitors. I think Oculus has prioritized comfort over even basic VR features like room-scale support.

The Vive Pre looks uncomfortable and heavy to me:

http://img-2.gizmag.com/htc-vive-pre-hands-on-7.jpg?auto=for...

Meanwhile, the Oculus Rift looks quite reasonable to me:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8866/18101066053_ab8bab1a2c_b....

I agree but find comfort in the fact that History is on our side: the devices should only get better. In 10 years, give or take 5, you're going to see this technology everywhere. The first iPhone was released in mid-2007. If you had asked me in 2000 whether such a device was possible, I'd have said yes, but not practical.

The time will come, don't worry :)

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