The First Look at the New Oculus VR Prototype

Fun article I just read on G forces because I was curious just how many G's an F1 car put someone through:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/motorsport/7681665/Formu...

> For driving games, there's one solution for simulating turns, and acceleration/deceleration. That's rotating your seat. When you accelerate, the chair rotates backwards, and gravity does the work of pushing you back in your seat. The faster you accelerate, the more the chair leans back. When you brake quickly, the seat leans forward, and you feel your seat belt pushing into your chest as it holds you in place. Turn right, chair rotates left, etc.

> You're limited to 1G though. This is enough to give the experience of driving and turning in a fast car, but you're not going to be pulling Formula 1 level Gs, although I don't think the average person wants to experience that anyway.

These motion simulators are cool but they are really big and very expensive, not something that average people will have in their living rooms. A commercial motion simulator for gaming (ie. not a "professional" sim rig) costs around $60000. Even if I had that kind of money, I couldn't explain that to the missus.

And the motion is limited to way less than 1G because the platform can not turn fully horizontal. Maybe some kind of spherical rig could get up to 1G but these things are limited to 0.3 to 0.5G, less than you get driving around in your car in traffic.

I've tried a motion simulator like this once and it wasn't a positive experience. I'm a hard core racing sim fan so maybe my expectations were a little high but all I got was a sore back and a bad lap time. The motion platform can't pull many G's but it shaked and rumbled like hell.

If you could have one of these with a nice seat and strap yourself tightly in, it might be a nice experience but this is never going to be something that will be in people's living rooms.

Btw, this here's someone's cool DIY home rig made with windshield wiper motors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_la_IzrZ4

That was what struck me too, the scale is what is most impressive.

He's a great programmer, sure, but this is a problem solved by a generation of engineers before him. Google "CAVE VR" to find some demonstrations of immersive VR environments which have been used in production for long periods of time without nausea or vertigo.

Indeed most of the human-factors research in this area has been in figuring out just what minimum features and precision are necessary in the tracking and display equipment and software stack to prevent these known problems. Making Occulus was simply a matter of shrinking the tech small enough to fit comfortably in a self-contained unit.

We did one demo that was more or less floating above static terrain, and another with Half-Life 2.

My own nausea didn't actually start up until HL2. We were playing on a laptop (probably not enough horsepower), using slightly unfamiliar keyboard & mouse controls. So some movements were very fluid & second-nature to me, while others were jerky and off because of the slightly-off control scheme.

It's possible the most nauseating moment was taking the headset off, actually. Up to that point, my mouse hand had been a pretty accurate proxy for my in-game hand and arm, but taking my hand off the mouse and then ripping the "world" away with that same (now "phantom") hand was deeply disconcerting.

But it's also possible the nausea built up slowly over the course of playing. I'd love to spend more time with it to see if it's something you really can adjust to.

On the subject of movement while wearing a VR headset, it seems to me that most successful games will be those where your character remains seated. Flight simulators, space combat sims, mech games, stuff like that.

For that kind of game, just the Rift and a joystick should provide an amazing experience.

I used to have a housemate who would come in and watch me play Doom clones, seated behind my shoulder - she would get motion sickness even sitting that far away (in the 15" CRT days)

I've been hearing nothing but stories about i. people getting sick and ii. the rift "completely fooling" people's senses. I had the opportunity to try the dev kit out over the holidays and I was really excited, but after trying a whole bunch of games I was actually kind of disappointed. I understand that it's dev hardware, and it DOES have a ton of potential, but I didn't even have the slightest hint of motion sickness. Maybe that's just my brain. But I also didn't feel like my senses were being fooled. Yes, I could look around and things were 3d-ish, but I really didn't find it immersive. Anyhow, I could see a high res display making a big difference in that department.

> I think everyone's vestibular system is sensitive in different ways. But FPSs in the rift generally feel very "wrong" (not sure how else to describe it), when moving using a controller. Especially when strafing - it produces a sensory response similar to a feeling of drunk stumbling. But in a flight or driving sim, the same kind of movements feel much less wrong, even to the same people. Maybe because similar movement in the real world are also performed via control inputs, and our minds understand that?

I think that this is a very interesting phenomenon, a physical "uncanny valley" of unnatural movements causing VR sickness. Strafing is definitely something that doesn't occur in real life, there's no way you can move directly sideways at regular walking/running speed. If VR ever becomes popular with FPS games, the genre will have to change or the audience will be limited to people immune to VR sickness.

Another interesting case was one of the Rift demos where you travel on zip lines. The physics of this demo were so incorrect that it made me nauseous. My body was expecting a rapid acceleration downwards but instead the movement on the zip lines was roughly constant velocity.

I would welcome more realistic physics to games even if it weren't for motion sickness. Hollywood physics aren't very interesting gameplay wise although it is visually stunning.

I also got horrible motion sickness from flying in a flight simulator with the Rift dev kit. I have flown a lot of flight simulators but doing so with the rift made me feel awful. I think that improved resolution might help here, the resolution was too blurry to make out the instruments on the panel or see the airfield before it was too late to land.

I definitely think that the translation tracking with the external camera will help. I have been using camera based head tracking (TrackIR) in simulator games and it is excellent.

I very much want Oculus Rift to solve the VR sickness problem. If the Rift catches on, in a few years there's no way you'll be able to be competitive in combat flight simulators without one because everyone using a VR solution will enjoy a better situational awareness. So it is going to be a choice between motion sickness (or defeating it) and being a sitting duck waiting to get shot. A head tracker like TrackIR is almost a prerequisite even today.

I can't wait to try the new Rift prototype and the customer version when it comes out and see if they've solved the problem. But I'm not buying one before I can try one out and see if this problem is fixed.

That's a really good point. I hope their PR teamis thinking of stiff like that. The media does seem to catch onto ideas like that all too easily.

He'll I'd be willin to throw up a few times considering the promise the rift shows for the future of gaming.

> The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"

I think this is might be correct, I remember getting motion sickness from playing Doom on a big monitor the first time. And several years later I was playing a lot of FPS games with no ill effects at all.

But it takes a person with strong willpower to practice! I got pretty bad motion sickness from the Rift, and it left me completely incapacitated for hours afterwards. Not only did I feel like puking but I couldn't do any work because my eyes couldn't focus on "2d" text on a monitor (we have a Rift devkit at the office, I made the mistake of using it in the middle of the day).

And I'm not a person with particularly bad motion sickness problems. There are sensitive people who will definitely not touch any VR helmet after the first time they've tried it and become sick for the rest of the day.

There will have to be improvements to the Rift hardware itself, the driver and peripheral software and the games that support it. And more games will have to be concerned about the physical correctness of movement, because it seems to be a factor in VR sickness.

Here's an interesting "competitor" to Oculus Rift with an alternative approach: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...

I think you'd have to put lights everywhere the camera might look. With lights on the user and a fixed camera, you just have to make sure the user doesn't move out of frame.

It can be a single camera with a sort of picture-in-picture setup.

Your vision has some latency. I think it's a good bet that variable amounts of latency can be accommodated by your perception of reality.

If it's possible, then hopefully they can somehow include it in a future release of the device.

Awesome. :)