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

[venusian]

Glasses that project directly into your eyeballs? That would be Magic Leap. http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-se ... 1660441103

[Whiteball]

Glasses that project directly into your eyeballs? That would be Magic Leap. http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-se ... 1660441103

No, that would be scary.

[zip accident]

http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/ ... y-fun.html

Erm, they're really not joking?

[pogo]

Glasses that project directly into your eyeballs? That would be Magic Leap. http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-se ... 1660441103

No, that would be scary.

You would think. But then there are people today who pay to have lasers to burn away part of the lens in their eye, in a procedure that is irreversible and can result in permanent damage. Many more put contact lenses into their eyes which though safer and less permanent can still cause problems.

But 'projecting directly into your eyeball' ? I don't think it's really doing anything magical. Absent some major Borg-like surgery it's not going to be doing anything that odd; it must still work by creating images that get to your eyeball through your lens; that it tracks your eyeball and does so at various depths to create genuine layers depth of field for your eye to focus on is just a natural progression from what Rift does now.

I.e. It sounds like the sort of thing I was thinking of earlier. Much smarter glasses with form factors more like Glass and able to do VR, augmented reality and more useful things like telephony, navigation help using a combination of new display technologies and software. Sounds still a long way finished consumer device, but there may be more specialised applications for it before that.

[Dio]

My point before was that the key thing about the form factor of Glass that you seem to want is that it's not a huge intrusive bit of tech on your face.

I really struggle to see how that is possible across the majority of the FOV.

[Dio]

Finally got mine working and had a play on a couple of things.

The Minecraft port is fascinating. Not very good - at least in part because it doesn't make a high enough framerate, so there's a lot of judder on head movement. The most interesting thing is how the perception of distance is so completely different in VR.Things that seem 'a fair old way away' in the 2D version are really very close in 3D, and the 1x1m size of the blocks is both clearly perceptible and gigantically intimidating. Climbing to the top of a hill is definitely a bit much for the ol' lizard brain, but the view from the top at sunset is bloody amazing.

[pogo]

My point before was that the key thing about the form factor of Glass that you seem to want is that it's not a huge intrusive bit of tech on your face.

I really struggle to see how that is possible across the majority of the FOV.

By placing the screen(s) where the lens is. It could then use cameras to film what you'd normally see and put that onto its screens, and/or make itself opaque and translucent, even partly so to display a HUD over what you're looking at. Or mechanically, flipping down/sliding into place when needed.

The main thing that needs to be solved is getting it in focus that close in, so you longer need screens held a couple of inches away from your face. Well worth doing if you solve the focus problem many people no longer need glasses as it can all be done by software and in the display hardware. There's actually a big market there for smart glasses; no more bifocals/varifocals, just glasses that adjust, automatically or under user control, so they're always in focus across the whole FOV.

Yes they'd be expensive but they'd also replace your phone and camera as well as your glasses. A device like that could do very well even if cost $1000.

People are already working on this from a different angle, in cameras. Lytro are onto their second generation of focus-independent cameras now and it's much more like a camera than a weird gadget.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/59499 ... lum-review

That's still a way off fitting in a phone or glasses, but a decade ago would you have guessed a $1000 SLR bought in 2004 would be easily beaten by a phone today?

[Dio]

I don't see any way the laws of physics allow you to do something like that in a device in a form factor no more intrusive or objectionable than a pair of glasses.

[gumboot]

I don't see any way the laws of physics allow you to do something like that in a device in a form factor no more intrusive or objectionable than a pair of glasses.

Screw the laws of physics, then. Use an Apple RDF.

[Dvorak]

My. Goodness.

This year, Santa was real nice, and so he brought me a SDK 0.4.4 developer build of - wait for it - TxK DKII
(Don't ask me how this came to pass, it just somehow happened, and, shit, I was so dumbfounded about that...)

What a remarkable experience, that.
Fuck. Me. Sideways.

I mean, I've got the DKI and I've got the DKII, both of them for quite a while now, and I've tried lots of demos, games and some real strange pieces of proof-of-concept software - but TxK DKII is one of the best experiences I made with the Rift so far. It really is.
Which came to me as a total surprise, since I'd always have thought that my thing would be some massively huge worlds, epic landscapes or vast galaxies and the like - but not an überactive vector tube shooter. But, hey.

I've spent hours with it now, but I still cannot exactly say, why it is so cool.
Superfast graphics with glowing Vectrex-style vectors - you can press the pause button on the controller, move around - and you can have one of these totally surreal Rift moments when your neo-cortex is totally convinced that this glowing stuff really is actually around you, while only your weak Vernunft tries to tell you that it is 'just' graphics.
And it all totally fits together: the additional depth information for stuff that crawls up towards you the tempest tube, the techno soundtrack, the really slick gameplay...

Jeff, Giles, just a humble opinion of mine and nothing more, but I'd say this is the way to go.

Eagerly anticipating the commercial product.

[rowan]

This year, Santa was real nice, and so he brought me a SDK 0.4.4 developer build of - wait for it - TxK DKII
<snip>
Fuck. Me. Sideways.

Cunt.

[Darkflame]

Glasses that project directly into your eyeballs? That would be Magic Leap. http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-se ... 1660441103

I am not convinced the end product will be projected any more then existing specs are.
They are already doing a hard task - replicating the lightfield to give (ie, with correct focus, exactly how it is in real life, OR and essentially all methods till now are "just" stereoscopic).

Not sure they can do a lightfield with mere projection.
Plus, you know, you need specs anyway to make stuff darker then the background - you cant project black.

MagicLeap certainly has the right end goal - Pokemon IRL is AR killer app. That will sale it to millions pretty easily. After that, its mass market enough tech that will progress about the same speed as graphics cards did I think.

. A version which works as a phone and runs all the apps you'd expect on a phone, except with a different interface, would be far more useful and attractive.

https://www.spaceglasses.com apparently has phone app emulation via virtual screens as one of their goals.

I am not convinced you want a built in phone myself though....to do specs well its going to be costly, do we want the upgrade of both closely tied together?
Same reason I dont like PC's built into monitors I guess. Modular lets me upgrade separately...and replace separately when one breaks.

[Yak]

My. Goodness.

Glad you've been enjoying it .

I must admit I'm surprised myself how well the game fits in VR, especially considering that it was designed for just about the opposite of an immersive scenario - the small screen of a handheld device - and considering its dim distant ancestry in ancient arcade hardware. It did take a good bit of adjusting (mainly to add detail to things as your viewpoint is considerably closer, and modifying particle effects to persist even if "behind" the camera so as to provide a true surrounding environment) but it's worked out better than I could have hoped really. It just feels so natural and comfortable to be in there. Someone said upon trying an earlier version in Manchester that it felt like the game had always somehow existed that way and the DK2 just lets us finally see it that way .

The pause mode is unexpectedly lovely too. Great fun being able to move around inside the paused game and see all those vectors as almost-real objects floating in virtual space .

[Dio]

The pause mode is unexpectedly lovely too. Great fun being able to move around inside the paused game and see all those vectors as almost-real objects floating in virtual space .

Yes, my brother and I really noticed this one.

[zbandito]

Pics n vids? :-)