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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Virtual Boy pretty strongly illustrated that if you can't do this perfectly, you shouldn't do it at all.

Absolutely. But the Virtual Boy was clearly before its time. The hardware just wasn't ready.

Within the current constraints (including budget), making a "good enough" product is clearly not feasible.

I think that's clearly not true. The response from everyone who's tried the Oculus Rift has been that real VR has finally arrived. And the Oculus Rift is one guy's prototype; the resources of a company like Microsoft or Sony could drastically improve it in several dimensions. Specifically, they could source a higher-res, higher frame rate, lighter, lower-latency OLED display, and connect it to rendering hardware with all the latency-reducing features John Carmack just described. These features aren't necessarily expensive from a hardware POV; it's just that nobody's seen the need to implement them yet.

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> Specifically, they could source a higher-res, higher frame rate, lighter, lower-latency OLED display

None of those are actually remotely as important as the fact you're still using your head as a dumb camera joystick, there's no ability to track eye movement and the mismatch between what you're seeing and your inner-ear pressure is going to make a number of people throw up.[1]

These are fundamental problems that have been a part of HMDs for the last twenty years of me playing with them and the Rift addresses absolutely none of them. The Rift itself is not significantly different than its HMD contemporaries, it's actually aiming for the low-end gamer market and so far seems to be mostly pushing 'What's old is new again' without having made significant progress along the way. The most interesting part of the Rift kit is the tracker, not the actual HMD itself.

[1]: In a study conducted by U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in a report published May 1995 titled "Technical Report 1027 - Simulator Sickness in Virtual Environments", out of 742 pilot exposures from 11 military flight simulators, "approximately half of the pilots (334) reported post-effects of some kind: 250 (34%) reported that symptoms dissipated in less than 1 hour, 44 (6%) reported that symptoms lasted longer than 4 hours, and 28 (4%) reported that symptoms lasted longer than 6 hours. There were also 4 (1%) reported cases of spontaneously occurring flashbacks."

Read up on 'Simulation Sickness' for more details.

> mismatch between what you're seeing and your inner-ear pressure

How does your inner-ear pressure change such that it cannot be fixed with better display and rendering?

Because the working theory on what causes simulator sickness is related to the inner-ear detecting motion. If your eyes are detecting motion, but it does not line up with what your inner-ear pressure is telling your body, the end result is the body emptying its contents under the theory that it's been poisoned. Simply improving the quality of the picture isn't going to solve that.

It seems to me the oculus rift can accrately account for all head motion when you are standing still. There is no need for eye-tracking: All the rift has to do is detect all head bobbing & rotation, and update the view acocrdingly. Your eyes can still look around on the lcd screen.

What the rift _can't_ do is account for long term linear acceleration (eg in a car or walking around), it's true. If you had a large empty room to walk around in with the rift on, even this could be accounted for, however.

Eye tracking would be awesome but it's not required for good VR. I fail to see how "using your head as a dumb camera joystick" is a problem; that's the whole point of VR.

Motion sickness is a real problem for some people (but not all). With low latency and thoughtful game design I think it can be mitigated. The bigger problem is the social acceptability of blocking your entire field of vision for long periods of time. I won't pretend that VR doesn't have problems, but the payoff is large enough that the problems are worth tackling.

> I fail to see how "using your head as a dumb camera joystick" is a problem; that's the whole point of VR.

Perhaps you should try playing some VR games for a while. I clocked quite a few hours playing the old Virtuality SU2000 games like Dactyl Nightmare and I've idly kept up with HMDs. The chief problem is that without eye tracking, it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you. Mind you when the HMDs were much heavier back then it sucked a lot more, but it's still pretty shitty not being able to glance aside. Nope, gotta move your entire head for absolutely everything related to what you're currently seeing, if you move your head for any reason you can't maintain focus on objects naturally, etc.

> Motion sickness is a real problem for some people (but not all).

Probably not something you should underestimate. See Nintendo's 3DS launch and about-face on their stance on pushing 3D once they found a small but significant percentage of their users could not actually see the 3D effect. This lead to policy that the 3D effect could not be used for anything related to actual gameplay mechanics, reducing it entirely to an optional gimmick.

Simulation sickness affects even more people than the 3D issue. It's a real problem if you want to go mainstream.

Just to clarify my position, I'm not against the Rift nor do I have anything against HMDs. I simply see the Rift as a step along the way to whatever device truly popularizes the tech. I don't think we're there yet.

> The chief problem is that without eye tracking, it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you. Mind you when the HMDs were much heavier back then it sucked a lot more, but it's still pretty shitty not being able to glance aside.

Isn't that more of a problem of field of view? With a wide enough field of view, you could just look at whatever you wanted to. Basically make it like real life, where what you look at is the combination of where your head is pointed, which the computer needs to use to update the screen, and where your eye is looking, which the computer doesn't need to care about. Or are you thinking of using eye tracking to something else, like determining what you're pointing at like a mouse? Yet another option you have in VR is what you're targeting, like how Dactyl Nightmare uses the gun you're holding to map directly into the virtual world's gun. Using the head position to AIM rather than just LOOK seems like a bad way of doing things.

Yes, you're absolutely right that a lot of what I'm complaining about would be solved with sufficient FOV and things certainly have improved since the SU2000 system in that regard. But we're not at 'sufficient' at the moment, at least in my experience based upon trying more recent examples, like an obscenely expensive Sensics kit. It's possible that it will be sufficient long before eye-tracking winds up in consumer HMDs.

But yes, the other part of my previous remark regarding 'dumb joystick' was more directly related to using the head for aiming/pointer duties, which also unfortunately has cropped up before and I quickly conflated the two issues together.

it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you.

That's only a problem if your FOV is too small. With a large enough FOV and a light display there's no reason why eye and head movements shouldn't work exactly as they do in real life. The Oculus Rift has twice the angular field of view of the SU2000 in both dimensions, for 4x the subtended angular area.

Edit: Oh I see, your complaint is about using the head tracking to control a game, e.g. by pointing a gun. Yes, I think that's a bad idea. Head tracking should only control the camera. All game interaction should happen through a controller. A motion controller like the Razer Hydra would probably work well for this.

if you move your head for any reason you can't maintain focus on objects

Again, only true for crappy hardware. With a good enough display, 120 FPS, and low latency, there's no reason why tracking moving objects shouldn't work just fine.

I think a lot of people got disillusioned with VR because there's a lot of crappy hardware out there. Even the expensive stuff is crap. I tried Canon's augmented reality system at SIGGRAPH last year and the latency and FOV were awful, despite the $120,000 cost. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the Oculus Rift is the proof.

We seem to be so close to agreement here that I'll just have to vote you up and take you at your word regarding the Rift. It's entirely possible my experiences have all been unfortunate ones. I've not tried the Rift yet, though by all means I will. :)

Well, my word about the Oculus Rift is secondhand, since I haven't received mine yet. And I haven't tried the Sensics device you mentioned below; that hardware looks quite nice, so it would be quite disappointing if that level of device still wasn't good enough for a great VR experience. My opinion may change after using the Rift for a while, but given what people are saying about it I'm still optimistic :)

Modeless, can you please answer this "trick" question? If a flat piece of cardboard that is 10 inches wide occupies 10 degrees of my horizontal FOV, how many degrees of my horizontal FOV will 20 inches wide flat piece of cardboard occupy? Both cardboards are positioned at the same distance from my eyes, of course.

Thanks.

>This lead to policy that the 3D effect could not be used for anything related to actual gameplay mechanics, reducing it entirely to an optional gimmick.

Citation? I had not heard this about the 3DS.

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