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

[pogo]

I think it’s more to do with the connection between what you see and what your inner ears report. I have direct experience of this as when young I used to be driven an hour or so twice a week and would get terrible car sickness if I spent too long staring at a book (this was pre-digital distractions). I had to spend some time looking out the window to moderate it. Being a geeky kid I would rather be reading so it introduced a definite tension.

I think I grew out of it, or got used to it. It may be something that’s worse when you are young and smaller, so you don’t see out of the windows so easily. But I no longer travel for an hour in the back seat of a car or in any seat of a car - the longest car journeys around here for us are 30 minutes, and I tend to be in the front passenger seat.

Never got seasick despite, or perhaps because of, my extensive time on boats. At one time my daily commute consisted of four ferry trips. Being small ferries they were very unstable but you were always able to see the horizon if you needed it.

[gilesgoat]

MINI NOTE : "I don't know what it precisely is or how it works" but the kind of sickness you get in VR is .. "different" than sea sickness and car sickness while trying to read a thing.

Some of the feelings you get are really "unique" and the part is it really makes feel your body "as if it would be doing that thing" while it's not.

Anyway THE WORST of all the VR sicknesses seems to come from "rotating cameras" .. if you leave the user a control it can spin the camera around "as you would do it in any FPS" guarantee vomit in 5 mins or severe nausea ..

That and even "too fast motions" seems to be two of the biggest culprits.

We found out that as long as you always move in the direction of sight is fine, but if you start moving or spinning and/or doing something 'too much against the real physics of the situation" there
is where you start to feel real shit, not sick, SHIT

[edit] - and I forgot to add "two BIG culprits" as well is : blur out-of-focus and tracking lag, if you put the two together you get "the worst VR experience you could ever get".

We found out you can "cope" with less frame rate but "perfect tracking" and "lower res" but "clear focus" tons better than something that is maybe more HR, faster but it's blurred or lags in tracking.

You would go with something that gives you "pixelony graphics" but is "solid" and "tracks well" you will NOT go for something that his "high res" but blurs and lags.

[gilesgoat]

Is motion sickness set to be over explained to death just like the blue, gold, white, and black dress?

Yes, because where VR is concerned they will never solve it (because that is not the problem - It is not motion sickness).

I am not sure of that, after seeing this and that - SO FAR - haven't seen the latest, I THINK that "technically part 1" you solve it with "zero lag, crisp blur-free graphics, higher frame rate" .. and the "technical part 2" you solve it with "cleverly designed and tested SW".

Maybe you won't solve it 100% of cases but I am quite confident it CAN be solved for 95% of cases, you can make stuff that won't give you shit, again it's probably a case where "30% is in HW advancement and 70% is in SW discoveries".

Research, experimentation, trial and error, keep what works and throw away what does not, etc.

Also part of it is too "getting used and find your own way to use VR" .. VR really needs "a bit of training" .. maybe you won't get "super used instantly" but true the more you use it "the more normal it feels" .. may take MONTHS mind you ..

[pogo]

MINI NOTE : "I don't know what it precisely is or how it works" but the kind of sickness you get in VR is .. "different" than sea sickness and car sickness while trying to read a thing.

I think they are fundamentally the same, i.e. caused by the same thing: the information from your eyes and inner ears not matching. Megan McArdle had a good explanation for it, which is one I’ve read before and seems the best theory – it’s a defence mechanism against poisoning by neurotoxins (e.g. alcohol) which disrupt your sense of balance. By making you nauseous your body is trying to get the poisons out of your body as quickly as it can.

The problem is we’ve come up with lots of ways of supplying non-matching information to our eyes and inner ears without neurotoxins being involved. There’s transport in vehicles, especially when the vehicle is too large to easily see out of, and/or moves erratically. It also happens when you’re not moving, and is common enough it has a name, “visually induced motion sickness”, and is a recognised medical condition. And now VR.

[Darkflame]

I don't think you can rule out focus being an issue for some people. Theres additional seperate mismatch there between where the brain expects and object to be and where it has to focus to make it sharp. Ones telling it everythings at the same distance...yet perspective cues and parallax are saying one things closer then the other.

This could be a much harder to solve then positional/rotational lag vs inner ear stuff.

[zip accident]

I don't think you can rule out focus being an issue for some people. Theres additional seperate mismatch there between where the brain expects and object to be and where it has to focus to make it sharp. Ones telling it everythings at the same distance...yet perspective cues and parallax are saying one things closer then the other.

This could be a much harder to solve then positional/rotational lag vs inner ear stuff.

I suspect that's long solved. The focal distance of the image of the "cross hairs" in WW2 reflector sights was optically at infinity, even though the sight itself was physically in the cockpit with the pilot.

[Dio]

I don't think you can rule out focus being an issue for some people. Theres additional seperate mismatch there between where the brain expects and object to be and where it has to focus to make it sharp. Ones telling it everythings at the same distance...yet perspective cues and parallax are saying one things closer then the other.

I thought that because I used to have a problem with this on crappy VR headsets back in the 90s. I haven't remotely experienced it on the modern ones.

Indeed there's an argument that infinite projection is significantly better for the eye than monitor use (it's a more relaxed state).

[Darkflame]

"infinitely far" is certainly better then up close but its still wrong. Not everything is infinitely far. Your talking of a disconnect between reality and simulation and I just think your glossing over a potential one here.
Its not necessarily "eye strain" so much as "brain strain". Another cue not being dealt with correctly.

It might be, for example, that some people are sensitive to this and do better in games where nothing goes too close to the player for extended periods. So, open fields rather then corridors.

For that matter, even just stereo-separation is a problem if things go much too close as you gotta train yourself not to go cross-eyed. Although I guess that's a more obvious lesson designers would learn pretty quickly.

[pogo]

Putting the focus at infinity makes sense to me. Far more people will be able to focus at that distance. Not only because if you have glasses to correct your vision it corrects them so you can see distant things, for driving etc., but also as you age (basically once you pass 40) you start to lose the ability to focus which means your eyes are permanently focussed on infinity.

You eyes are pretty adaptable as far as working in stereo/not going cross-eyed. Many optical tricks rely on this. E.g. 3D stereograms only work as you can force your eyes to go less cross-eyed, independent of the focus, before refocussing when the images line up again. Obviously VR headsets don’t want to make your eyes do too much work and tire out, but that aspect shouldn’t be too hard to get right, using some simple mechanism to adjust for different eye separations.

[zbandito]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9048/test ... han-oculus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leg2gS6ShZw

[zbandito]

The Tested interview video with Valve had some interesting information about Steam VR and the Vive. In particular, the dual laser trackers seem much more advanced than anything else currently being shown. The corner units placed in the room are not sensors; instead they emit timed IR laser pulses (so it might have Bluetooth in it for wireless power control and signal syncing), aimed at spinning mirrors or other scanning systems. Unlike LIDAR it doesn't look for a return signal. Instead, the photocells are on the headset and controller, and are capable of sub-millimeter positional accuracy at a high refresh rate (100hz was mentioned in one video segment I saw but that number has yet to be officially publicly documented that I know of, and could perhaps be much higher).

It's mentioned that this method is computationally light in it's requirements, and makes it easy to add additional headsets or trackers. I personally think accommodating multiplayer experiences in the same space is very important for the long term, broad social acceptance of VR/AR. It's a fun novelty yet quite exclusionary on it's own, but shared experiences are something that bonds people together and the technology may hold some unexpected implications towards peoples lives in the future in that regard, but I digress...

The SteamVR controllers are described as being a Steam Controller split in half, complete with haptic touchpad on each unit. It's not a small controller and one report mentioned smacking it into the headset while playing or painting.

Sony may be touting higher video frame rates, but there doesn't seem to be any possibility that the PS Move and PS Camera can match the tracking sensitivity of this scanning laser setup.

Anyone guessing at price? Considering a DK2 is $300, I'd imagine they are aiming near that range; maybe $400-$500 max.

[zbandito]

Also; given that the lasers are not on the Vive headset, that must mean the two front cameras are in fact... cameras. Before getting some additional details I had been thinking the laser was fitted on the headset itself. So what of the second front-facing camera? Perhaps one has an IR filter on it? Or it's saved some space to put the cameras in the middle, squeezed between the two display panels, in order to save some depth and weight (via leverage)? What other reason could there be for putting them stacked vertically? It doesn't seem terribly likely that this setup could infer effective virtual camera placement; two cameras further apart than normal IPD should allow a software 3D view that can interpolate an accurate representation of a smaller IPD. Perhaps it is used for depth sensing, to fade in the overlay of a real-world obstruction, without the system needing to know an accurate map of every object (including the mentioned controller-headset impact)?

[zbandito]

Some in game footage using the Vive / SteamVR controls

http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/10/818348 ... ontrols-on

[zbandito]

Tracking info mini faq;
https://twitter.com/DShankar/timelines/ ... 9598857217

ApetureVR demo;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEDLFqbdJ4I

[pogo]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/te ... arket.html

Nothing new except the quotes from John Carmack stood out:

In explaining why Oculus has gone slow, Mr. Carmack described what he called a “nightmare scenario” that has worried him and other Oculus executives. “People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up,” he said.

“The fear is if a really bad V.R. product comes out, it could send the industry back to the ’90s,” he said.

In that era, virtual reality headsets flopped, disappointing investors and consumers. “It left a huge, smoking crater in the landscape,” said Mr. Carmack, who is considered an important game designer for his work on Doom and Quake. “We’ve had people afraid to touch V.R. for 20 years.”

Probably from this: