Valve's SteamVR solves big problems and poses bigger questions
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
Ah, I can't blame them, but it will be sad not to be able to access these experiences.
And, even for able bodied folks, isn't part of the fun of games being able to do virtually things you're not able to do in real life? Limiting games to walking around a small room - might give you immersion, but is that really going to be fun in the long run?
Multiplayer cheat detection might have a problem with it though :/
Oculus is open enough that you could do this on PC, especially once they start working with DLLs instead of static linking for their SDK. But the future with them is grim, you can't touch anything at that level in GearVR, or even sideload an app without a Facebook key signature.
The last license change to the PC SDK added a copyright assignment clause; this could either be so that they can close everything in the future, or so that they can open it--with Facebook I'm guessing it's the former, but I hope not.
The xbox controller came out a long time ago but competitively the controller can't come close to the keyboard and mouse.
The people who are currently most visibly developing and pushing VR are careful about it because they don't want VR to get bad press from people getting sick, and I totally respect that.
I do believe that there is hope that if/when VR becomes more widespread and socially accepted, developers will start pushing the boundaries over time, and we'll get the kind of VR that you're wishing for.
These experiences completely solved motion sickness for me. And I seem to be very prone to it in the rift. It's a shame so many developers seem to ignore the fact that their games make people sick
Two large discs on independent rotation encoders make for an incredibly cheap and portable interface. Moving around the environment is intuitive and user actions have an obvious physical meaning in the environment. You get a rudimentary form of haptic feedback for free, as feeling the angular momentum of the spinning wheels gives the user information about their momentum in the virtual space.
If you really felt like getting fancy, you could add a stepper motor to each shaft for the price of even the cheapest position tracking system. With the motor, you can provide the counter torque to simulate going up a hill or spin the wheels up as you go down a ramp. A system that lets a standing user instantly grasp the terrain under their feet would cost an astronomical amount, but it's trivial in a chair. Just the simple immersion of needing to give a little extra force to get a wheel over a door jam would make a huge difference.
Sure, those allowed for some unique gaming applications but there are also things that weren't necessarily the initial focus but are now common uses of those platforms. I'm thinking of things like immersive 3d "movies" that put you right in the action as an observer while actually seated in your chair. The other massive application that is seeing a lot of promise is 3d telepresence. Instead of doing a video Hangout or a Skype call on a flat screen, you could use depth cameras to record 3d video maps of each endpoint and stream that info to the other participants. You won't just be looking through a little (or big) window into another location, you'll see things as if you were actually sitting there.
I still think the whole idea of treadmills or even Valve's thing to be a sort of attempt to shoehorn the conventions that were successful on 2D screens into VR. I'm glad to see any development and experimentation but I don't personally think the platform will ultimately evolve toward a more immersive extension of the current first person gaming paradigm. Just from my ~8 months of working with a Rift dev unit I've found first person, non-seated experiences to be some of the more limiting or difficult things to pull off well or for extended periods. I'm sure being able to walk around and get 1:1 representation will go a long way but you're still limited unless you focus on more of an AR solution.
Still, it reminds me of a brainstorm/daydream I had a decade or two ago when first reading about modern attemts at virtual and augmented reality. I thought the simplest implementation of a FPS would be along the lines of laser tag. Since laser tag puts you in a predefined environment, you could set something up where the computing was either done on a backpack/wearable platform (or now, I guess on servers that communicate with headsets) and overlay everything on the actual pre-built structure around you. That way you'd get the tactile response of whatever walls and floors and obstacles are around you but the AR/VR stuff would texture things to look like a space station or catacombs or whatever you want. The Valve device seems like an early version of this and I'm interested in how Microsoft's HoloLens will compare in real world usage.
Even if Oculus Rift weren't the early mover here, I think a lot of games will be targeting the "lowest common denominator". They might support physically standing up and walking around in a room, or using 3d controllers, but they'll also support sitting down with a traditional keyboard+mouse setup.
Eventually, we'll see games that assume a standing experience - like the existing games based on the Kinect, Wii balance pad, etc. - but I don't see them being the majority anytime soon (and a number of those can probably be sanely adapted not to require it as well.)
So, that leads me to the conclusion that perhaps there might be some future resurgence of the arcade. Except they'll have VR headsets and omnidirectional treadmills instead of Pacman.
Wait, maybe there will be Pacman, but you'll be running.
I say this, after going through the original Crescent Bay demo at Oculus Connect, where being able to walk around even within a 4x4 foot cube of space it was amazing having real world movement match your characters.
Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of physical effort people are willing to take for video games, but there's some precedent with Dance Dance Revolution for example.
Also, walls.
as palmer luckey has said a guy playing COD is not actually capable of doing all the stuff a real marine does, so then the question is how far do you take it?? like if i'm playing an nba game it seems fairly plausible that my 1 foot vertical could become a 3 foot vertical, or that my poor mechanics shooting a basketball where in real life i only sink the 3 pointer 10% of the time, when i'm playing as stephen curry the game interprets as 50% of the time..
i think one of the problems is that what makes video games so compelling and addictive is that they are an order of magnitude easier to get really good at then real life... e.g. sword fighting in a game versus sword fighting in real life.. if games become too realistic in their mechanics e.g. i actually have to master good footwork and how to swing a sword properly the game because too difficult
yeah force feedback would be really cool but it's unclear how you manufacture those, it's like 4d cinema,, hasn't really caught on right... developers seem to talk a lot about trying to avoid breaking immersion, and maybe that mean no 'force feedback' is better than bad force feedback. but i don't know. makes me think that it might be an all or nothing problem.
With sensor lights picking up the foot movements. I bet the engineering challenge of giving sensory feedback to the foot is easier than making the treadmills work.
I fully expect we'll see a massive re-exploration of all of it in the next 30 years, especially as VR becomes a $100 billion market across consumer/enterprise/govt. Eventually a few optimal approaches for the home will come out of that market process, similar to gaming today: you might have a basic controller, you might buy a driving wheel, you might install an entire flight simulator environment, all depending on how far you want to go to boost your experience.
Omni treadmill shoes used over a large 12ftx12ft are or so could work. But too heavy.
Unfortunately, this kiboshes treadmills and things like the Virtuix Omni. At least until we manage to fool the vestibular system as well as we can the eyes.
If we can trick the neurons on site, then might as well trick it right before it plugs in at the brain...in which case, we probably will have optics covered as well. Thence we can get rid of the headset altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_vestibular_stimulation
You need a lot of floor space to get the real effect of movement. You also need reliable motion tracking and a display image solidly aligned with the real world, or users will fall down, or, in a non-flat environment, fall off things.
This could bring back laser tag.
edit: Actually, that doesn't seem to be what I was thinking of. Here are some examples of redirected walking:
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/109/1/AISAT-Redirected.pdf
http://vrguy.blogspot.com/2013/07/redirected-walking-can-sav...
http://cb.nowan.net/blog/2008/12/02/redirected-walking-playi...
This probably requires a gym-sized space to work well. You could have multiple people in it, if the game kept them bunched up and on the same illusory axes, so their relative positions matched in the real world and VR.
This could bring back something like LAN parties. You need a big empty space, and everybody brings their headgear.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...
Perhaps you can find the segment online somewhere, Discovery has the after show online but not the segment itself.
Also, THEY WERE RIGHT!!. 5 years ago you'd have failed miserably in the market with this.
The OLED screens alone had required billions of dollars in investment. Same with the inertial sensors, or small digital cameras and SSDs. All this tech has improved thanks to the smartphone boom in the last 5 years.
Obviously some day we will have flying cars, when we dominate all the anti gravity and the rest of the anti particles, and antimatter.
But if you try to make a business out of flying cars today, you will most likely fail because you got too early.
Steam is just one of the players that will give you access to their content exclusively via their channel on their device. It's all modeled on Apple. I was once very excited about VR but watching what is happening has cooled my interest considerably. It will probably be a long time before the shakeout that can make it interesting again.
"So we're gonna just give that away. What we want is for that to be like USB. It's not some special secret sauce. It's like everybody in the PC community will benefit if there's this useful technology out there. So if you want to build it into your mice, or build it into your monitors, or your TVs, anybody can do it."
I however don't see me running around with that in my room. Maybe I'm too old for that but it's not what I have in my mind when I think about VR devices. What I think of is Cyberpunk. Gibson. Guys starving in their chair having such a device on my head. I still have a Wii flying around somewhere in the dust...
Consider that computers, microwaves and maybe even TV's started at tens of thousands of dollars - and that's before adjusting for inflation - and it's hard not to say it's already stupidly good value for money for an entirely new medium.
It will, for sure, improve some human-computer interactions in a few domains where it is easily deployable (mainly entertainment and industrial manipulations).
Other than that, I don't see it used that much. It is still cumbersome to wear, doesn't seem to be usable in mobility, and won't solve common problems in a business environment.
(But I'm still waiting for it, heh.)
Lighthouse is really exciting in that way because being able to get peripherals into virtual space accurately would be a boon.
It literally makes your desktop into a big screen display floating right in front of you. For a background you can have a space scene with a planet similar to Saturn and asteroids floating around you. Immediately I fired up and watched 2001 A Space Odyssey on my new virtual big screen display. I could also work on code in any editor.
It's just your desktop in virtual space. But this gives me some neat ideas, especially business applications. Startups that exist only online are not that uncommon. Imagine a virtual office application where employees across the world can work together in a virtual space. It could be a office setting or on the bridge of the Enterprise. Each employee has a workstation with displays that you could check out in real time. For example, say you're having an issue with a database, you could get up and move over to the work station of your admin and help resolve it and see what he does on his screen. You could have meetings on the moon. And all while working from home, thousands of miles apart. Combined with voice group chat, it could be a killer app.
As someone working on an indie studio in Texas, with my partner based in New Jersey, the idea of doing that makes me very excited.
You need real world training for all of the above, but I'd be curious to see how the VR training could help people get started. I wouldn't buy a VR headset for any of these things alone, but combine it with games, entertainment, virtual workspaces (you could be sitting in a 10x10 basement, but feel like you're sitting at a desk in a penthouse overlooking New York), and I think they could be quite versatile, and a worthwhile purchase.
I can imagine big business in creating alternate reality assets, such as virtual homes. I wonder if you could combine the real world and the virtual world as well. For example, I'm building a new home, so I make a 20x20 room, dividing a 5x20 and 15x20 section with a sliding door. I put a bed in the 15x20 area, and a railing in the 5x20 section. There's nothing passed the railing, it's just a railing 2ft from a blank wall. However, I create a virtual world that matches the geometry. I put on the headset, and I can sit down on my virtual bed, or walk across the room and slide the door to the balcony. With the headset, the balcony looks like it's on the 20th floor, overlooking the ocean. I can lean on the railing and look down at the world below, while in the real world, I'm just wearing a headset staring at the wall in front of me. I could put a fan in the 5x20 room, so in VR, it feels like there's a breeze on the balcony.
It sounds a little crazy, but is it? You can turn an unfinished space, such as a basement, into a billion dollar VR dream home. There could be a VR home generator, where you enter the floor plan of your basement, and it generates a VR home with rooms and doors that match that space. I'm curious to see where things go, it'll be an interesting decade.
If it is indeed immersive, the silence following the delivery of a killer joke would be excruciating.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legac...
I've tried the Oculus DK2 and the headsets are still too heavy on your face, too low res, and not responsive enough.
The problem is that "immersion" is just not important enough. It doesn't add enough to the experience to overcome the downsides.
DK2 is pretty damn responsive, but only if you have everything set up just right and are on a beefy GPU.
Resolution is going to go up rapidly, we already have 1440p phones.
Playing half-life 2 with Razer hydras converted me even back on dk1. I expect room scale walking to be even more immersive than moving around with the joystick on the hydras, but way limited in what types of games translate well due to room size. But I think they can do some great things, a lot of what we do in the real world is room-scale.
Just hanging out in a virtual theater with friends watching content is pretty awesome already, your friends just aren't there yet.
It does separate you from your body and give you a blindfolded feeling, lots of improvement needed there. For that reason AR will probably overtake it for a lot of uses for a long time.