Rivvr Brings Wireless VR to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive | Hacker News Reader

Rivvr Brings Wireless VR to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

techcrunch.com

54 pointsyurisagalov27 comments

So I had the chance to try this at the YC Alumni Demo day at the computer history museum, and it was SUPER cool. Completely wireless and doesn't add any noticeable weight on top of the HTC Vive in general. The ability to walk around the room with a Vive without having that cable tether made the experience truly immersive.

Is the 11ms latency really not bothersome? I'd be concerned about the input latency and the potential for frame rate drops from connection issues etc, especially over longer terms of use.

We have a guy in our office who was heavy VR user, he played for 6 hours, without any complaints. Gamer, with second time VR experience, played during one hour, without any problems. In our team personal record was during 9 hours, we just changed batteries without any problems. It was QA engineer with first in a life time VR experience, and a passion for drawing. Tilt Brush now one of his favorite applications.

I haven't been able to notice it at all. I was standing up, lying down, looking upside down, and doing all sorts of things that would probably make me nauseous (as friends of mine can attest, I get queasy super easily) for ~30 minutes or so, and didn't notice any latency.

If the engineers did their homework then the headset should send a vsync signal back to the console so the software could use dead reckoning to predict where the headset will be. That way it would be relatively immune to longer transmission latencies. Maybe there's a way to do this with the lighthouse tracking, maybe sending the latency measurement between actual and delayed position back through the controllers or something.

Oculus DK2 had a built in latency sensor that measured a coded pixel in the corner of the screen and then fed that back in to the prediction/forward-projection steps. I'm not sure about Vive and Rift CV1. I didn't see anything like it in the iFixit teardowns.

>>Unlike other devices, which are aiming to compress the entire raw HDMI signal over the air, Rivvr uses its proprietary tech to compress the much smaller video feed from the PC, sending just about 40-80 mbps of video signal over the air.

This paragraph seems contradictory to me: other devices aim to compress the video signal over the air (i.e. wirelessly), but Rivvr somehow compresses "much smaller" video feeds from the PC "over the air" (i.e. wirelessly).

This isn't my industry, so what key technical definition or fact am I missing from this picture? The two statements seem to be equivalent.

Maybe it means compression happens earlier in the chain? For example, everyone else is compressing HDMI output and Rivvr is compressing the post VR compositor render target before scan out happens? This would break an app that does front buffer rendering, but afaik there aren't any commercially available VR games that do that. No idea what the actual difference is and I'd like some clarification also.

Techcrunch already fixed this error "Unlike other devices which are aiming to send the entire raw HDMI signal over the air, Rivvr uses its proprietary tech to compress the much smaller video feed from the PC, sending just about 40-80 mbps of video signal over the air." Other companies trying to transmit raw HDMI stream wirelessly using 60Ghz frequency. They trying to reinvent Wireless HDMI which is well known and have a lot of problems. We are using standard WiFi networks 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz.

I wonder how that should work. Less than 11ms per Frame compression time, let's say 9ms (as we need to Account for the way back too for latency) for a 2160 x 1200 stream + audio. And you can't see any compression and we're talking Close up here. Not possible with h264/h265.

Pied Piper.

http://www.multicorewareinc.com/news/multicoreware-demonstra...

This is from 2015. We're almost into 2017.

- A 4k frame is 3.2 x as much data as the 2160x1200 frame.

- In this case, compression was achieved at 60fps using H265.

- The same spec of equipment should in principle be capable of achieving 60fps * 3.2 = 192fps. That's 5ms latency due to compression.

- Add in the simplicity of many VR scenes - think RecRoom, Windlands... should be fairly easy to compress.

- Audio can be compressed in parallel

"Not possible"?

I disagree, "more than possible two years ago"

Let's look at some real live x265 benchmarks, because you skipped the part where they did it on a beefy dual socket server. Let's take: http://x265.ru/en/x265-hd-benchmark, that benchmark is 1080P, let's assume you're correct with your simplicity and it might be closer to reality.

The fastest listed system there does a blazing 33fps (well that's a broadwell, the 2015 dual socket server is probably atleast the xeon equivalent of it).

And we haven't even looked at the image quality/compression artifacts.

I disagree with your assessment.

Rivvr is apparently a spinoff of Sixa, the appropriate techcrunch article https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/09/sixa-secures-3-5m-as-it-la... repeats the 11ms latency. Maybe it's the same technology? The comments to the techchrunch article do not sound convincing either.

Really looking forward to watching the development of this. Ultra low latency, high quality signal compression and network based (which I assume this is based on other comments) distribution is hard. It has a lot of use cases outside of this scenario.

I know there's some really interesting work being done in the broadcast space (e.g. BBC R&D with VC-2 [1]) and the various low-latency implementation of H.265 which seems to be driven by UAV use. Are you guys/girls expanding on something existing for the codecs used or going down a completely different route?

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/vc-2

Maybe they do a final motion adjustment on the receiver just at the video level. Seems slightly interesting. I doubt they've made any breakthroughs in compression. maybe eye tracking could reduce the bandwidth even further (though the latency in this case means it can't go as far as a wired installation).

I'm really curious about how VR will solve the movement problem.

See, a virtual environment is only part of the equation. Oculus peeled the onion back further, with touch (and Vive equivalent).

How will they solve movement? Using a pad to move forward or backward is not nearly as immersive as walking...

I've always wondered why they dont stick a camera on the front of it, then overlay the virtual world onto the physical world.

Wouldn't that delve into the augmented type of reality rather than virtual?

The Vive has this feature although its not used in games.

It is used for overlaying some info like the room borders and barriers.

It is exposed to the devs but the quality of the camera doesn't really allow for AR experience so it's not really used.

You can enable this on the Vive through Steam VR, and has a couple options:

- Show borders of things the camera sees on top of the 3d

- Show camera view aside from your controller in the "menu/system" screen

It requires more bandwidth through USB, though, so it might not work.

(I know there is a third option, but i cannot recall what it does)

There's a forum post from a few years ago [0] with a few links to projects; I don't know how active they are though. One of them [1] is an array of treadmills running in one dimension, mounted on a track that moves them in the perpendicular direction, and it tracks your movement to keep you near the centre of the platform. Another [2] holds you in place while you run with slippery shoes inside a saucer-shaped surface.

[0] https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/388/2d-treadm...

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-softwar...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/the-virtuix-omni-vr-t...

The Void is a company doing some interesting stuff involving movement within VR. [1] However, to feel like you're walking in a straight line you have to have a space of (if I recall) about 30 feet. Humans are actually really bad at walking in a straight line without any visual cues [2], and this amount of space can trick someone to walking in circles while feeling like they're going forward.

Unfortunately, most of us don't have a basketball court to walk around on, so this sort of solution will probably be reserved for bespoke VR experiences made by The Void and other companies like them.

[1] https://thevoid.com/

[2]http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/131050832/a-...

I've tried a few different headsets with different control schemes, and I don't think it's even the immersion that's the problem. It's the motion sickness. If you're not walking, but your view is, that's a problem.

I wrote my original post quickly, and forgot to specify, that one of the MAIN problems I see with the movement issue is indeed the nausea.

I'm not someone who has every gotten motion sickness. I can read in a car, love roller coasters, and have never been sick on a boat once in my life.

Certain movements in oculus give me motion sickness.

Quite concerning is that my person experience in talking with oculus engineers is, they have no good solutions for this. And looking at all the current solutions doesn't provide much hope either. The Omni tracker is perhaps one of the "best" solutions allowing natural movement in a VR space... But I have a hard time believing that will ever be mainstream.

Part of that question is immersion, to which I have no good answer. An expensive, tipping chair perhaps. There are some disneyland type rides where the audience area is moved around with hydraulics, and they make you feel like you are accelerating by tipping the whole room backward.

The other part of this question is nausea - I played Onward for a while and it started to make me uncomfortable, because you can move with the control pad. I'm not very susceptible to nausea but that did it.

Then I learned to simply _run in place_ whenever I move myself in game. It works wonders. I played for 4 hours twice without even the slightest nausea.

I think triggering in-game movement by some physical movement - it doesn't even have to map one-to-one to physical steps - does a lot to create a notion of control over what is happening, removing the queasy 'whole world is sliding around ' feeling.

After all, we learn to move our legs in circles to move forward (when on a bike), pull on a set of handlebars (when rowing), etc., without becoming sick over it.

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