Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[Dvorak]

It's quite astonishing that a pair of lenses, a tablet, a bit of gaffer tape and a modern GPU produces a VR system that's significantly superior to the best the world had come up with to that point.

I think, we all feel that there's something out there.
But the How and What we cannot know yet.

We'll see.

[gumboot]

I saw a car that does that. Four cameras around its outside, and it warps it to present a top-down view of itself for parking.

Sure, but that's not being fed directly to your eyeballs .

Interesting question: what FOV do night-vision goggles present? That's basically a similar scenario to a camera on the outside of a VR headset.

I think most night vison goggles are meant for far-field, and often act as binoculars (or rifle scopes) at the same time, don't they? I couldn't imagine you'd want to be doing hand-to-hand combat or needlecraft (or some combination thereof) with them on.


Anyway, I was going to say that in the worst instance the perspective correction needn't be worse than <insert-youtube-link-here>, but when I went looking for that video I came across this which starts out by demonstrating live, at the outset, what I had in mind:

[gumboot]

Oh, that video also mentions positional tracking. Complementary to what I was saying about stereoscopy being hard and also unimportant, parallax cues are arguably a greater contributor to depth perception for the majority of the visual field, because people can move their heads further than just the distance between their own eyeballs, and it's interactive, and it works for more people, and the director can't be a dick about trying to exaggerate the effect to prove you have the feature.

Also, would one need some kind of jetpack-style control interface so that the player can be put into more scenarios where the visual technology can be appreciated? 360 degree FOV is no bloody good if you have to look out a car window to get anywhere.

[Darkflame]

Parallax is indeed a much greater effect, but lack of stereoscopicness would still be pretty noticeable. Very few people have strictly zero sterovision, its much more common just a bit weaker.
I suspect without sterovision most HMDs would instantly feel "off" even if the person couldn't identify why.

I'm sure people are working on Rift-based solutions to these. But there may be resistance, from users happy with using the web and content owners happy with how things are now. Google in particular own the biggest library of VR content in Streetview, I can't see them making it available for Facebook's device any time s

Dunno about that, as Google are happy to have their apps on iOS stuff.
As long as they get advertising from it, not sure it bothers them even if it is technically a competitors platform.

[gumboot]

Parallax is indeed a much greater effect, but lack of stereoscopicness would still be pretty noticeable. Very few people have strictly zero sterovision, its much more common just a bit weaker.
I suspect without sterovision most HMDs would instantly feel "off" even if the person couldn't identify why.

My point is that stereo depth perception diminishes to fuck-all over a fairly short distance, whereas movement is continuous and contributes over a greater range of distances.

Shutting/hiding one eye isn't quite the same thing because that removes not only depth cues but all the expected correlation between the two eyes for matters like error cancellation.

Things are still going to be "off" though, because there's still the third cue. Focal depth.

That might not be impossible to fix. I've had an optometrist point a measuring tool in my eye... you just need one of those running continuously and the optical hardware to compensate tightly coupled with it and the software to retune the focal depth of the rendering on the fly.

One assumes that somebody is working on that.

[pogo]

Dunno about that, as Google are happy to have their apps on iOS stuff.
As long as they get advertising from it, not sure it bothers them even if it is technically a competitors platform.

But not on Windows phone. iOS has succeeded, Google can do nothing to influence that. They can't even put second rate apps on iOS to drive people to Android. They tried it with their maps app, then Apple made their own Maps, made it default, and suddenly Google had to make their app better to make sure people still used it. But Google aren't going to help MS out with their lack of apps problem.

Or consider MS: they'd love to be able to put Office only on Windows Mobile/8/RT devices. But the users are on iOS, including many of their customers. So there's now an Office for iOS.

Rift is an unproven device. It will need the support of developers to succeed, especially at first. I can't see Google being in any hurry to support Rift now it's owned by Facebook, given they are each other's biggest competitors in adverts or social media. Only when it's established with an installed base.

If anyone's likely to prove a worthy competitor in this it's Google. Maybe with their own hardware, based perhaps on Glass. Or maybe someone else will do something which they can support without helping FB. In particular they might get behind an effort to produce an open standard for VR devices, where there are multiple products which all run the same software.

[Yak]

Well I am completely stereoblind but I can use and develop VR stuff just fine. The things that generate the sense of "presence" for me are exactly the same cues that do that IRL, namely a display that pretty much fills my entire FOV and a simulated environment that responds in the ways I expect when I move my head. I may be missing the extra "special sauce" that stereoscopy lends to the entire experience but I don't miss it since I never see it IRL anyway. Just being able to look around seamlessly is enough to make the experience awesome.

I'm glad that suddenly VR has become good and super cheap simultaneously since none of the other purely stereoscopic "3D" fads have been anything other than an inconvenience for me. Proper VR through a HMD is great fun for everyone and something I can also enjoy fully. Even just the simple stuff I'm doing so far is super enjoyable and makes me grin every time I go "in" .

[gumboot]

Anyway, I was going to say that in the worst instance the perspective correction needn't be worse than <insert-youtube-link-here>, but when I went looking for that video I came across this which starts out by demonstrating live, at the outset, what I had in mind:

Self-viewing through portals at 7:00 in, by the way; and comedy locomotion at 7:45 where the fact that he can't physically walk around conflicts directly with the fact that he can see his real self as he sets off.

It looks like his camera isn't attached to his face, but I'm not sure exactly where it is. It doesn't seem to be the thumbnail view in the bottom left, either. I think if the camera(s) were mounted on the head then the distortion would be less severe and it should look a bit better. Obviously the portal problem would be much worse.

[Jamesac]

One answer to that is 'buy some more VR headsets' – if watching TV is inclusive it could be even more so if people are experiencing the same content but able to independently control their viewpoint.

Honestly, I'd rather give camera control to the director. That's the director's job, to set up the story and manage the information flow. The other problem is that, if I'm wearing a headset that completely blocks my sight and headphones that almost completely take over the audio, other people might as well be on the moon as in the same room.

Even just the simple stuff I'm doing so far is super enjoyable and makes me grin every time I go "in" .

So I need a DK2 Rift basically right now.

James

[gumboot]

Well I am completely stereoblind but I can use and develop VR stuff just fine.

I think you're not missing as much as people presume, but you might be in a privileged position to estimate how much the loss of position tracking affects your depth perception, since it's bound to be more for you than for most of us.

...

in other news .. WTF?

[gumboot]

On the director's camera thing, I'm glad they won't be able to shake it unnecessarily anymore.

And if 360 movies do take off, I can imagine a period where half the FOV is present but suspiciously undetailed and unpopulated, because that's where they've edited out the crew.

[Jimaroid]

Crew? What crew? My money is on Pixar being the first studio to make the mass market breakthrough VR film.

[defsdoor]

I don't want to watch a film and have to keep turning round thank you very much. That's for interactivity stuff - i.e. games. Films are for sitting on your arse and zoning out for 90 minutes or so.

[Misfit]

So I need a DK2 Rift basically right now.

This is a point I'm wondering.

We don't develop (well not games), but the tech lust is high to get one. Cockpit games being the key.

Presumably the price of the v1 is going to drop dramatically on eBay soon. But I think that may just annoy me with v2 about to surface.

[Mqark]

So I need a DK2 Rift basically right now.

This is a point I'm wondering.

We don't develop (well not games), but the tech lust is high to get one. Cockpit games being the key.

Presumably the price of the v1 is going to drop dramatically on eBay soon. But I think that may just annoy me with v2 about to surface.

You can have my V1 for 200 quid if you like... It's just sitting gathering dust.