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

[Darkflame]

Good quote. Thats both very true and very wise.

To bad their was some mudslinging at AR products though. Odd that between Rift, MagicLeap and Hololens Microsoft is the one not dissing on the perceived competition.

[pogo]

Microsoft don’t have anything to show though. Start badmouthing the opposition and they can’t respond if asked to show their own hand, as their own product is years from being ready.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

They'll always have IllumiRoom[tm]!


Oh.

[Darkflame]

Microsoft don’t have anything to show though. Start badmouthing the opposition and they can’t respond if asked to show their own hand, as their own product is years from being ready.

They demoed it to a dozen or so people and their write ups are online. Its not vapour-ware, its a working product thats not refined enough to put in a case. The idea that's automatically years away is just a guess. (theres a conference where they give developers more details next month, incidentally)

Also, its not like the Rift has any schedule of release. Your just guessing.

[pogo]

What they showed was very far from finished product. There was no public showing, no cameras allowed, and it was nothing like even the still prototype products being shown by Oculus and Sony. E.g.

While production HoloLens systems will be self-contained and cord-free, the developer units we used had a large compute unit worn on a neck strap and an umbilical cord for power. Production hardware will automatically measure the interpupillary distance and calibrate itself accordingly; the dev kits need this to be measured manually and punched in. The dev kits were also heavy, unwieldy, fragile, and didn't really fit on or around my glasses, making them uncomfortable to boot.

If Sony and Oculus are months from shipping then Microsoft are years away. The good thing about that is by then things like nausea should be a solved problem, or at least one people know much better how to work around, and people should be more used to and accepting of VR. Assuming something doesn’t happen to “send the industry back to the ’90s”, per John Carmack’s warning.

[offyoutoddle]

The good thing about that is by then things like nausea should be a solved problem, or at least one people know much better how to work around, and people should be more used to and accepting of VR.

Its not solved for conventional FPS yet, certainly I can't play them these days without running for the sick bag. Do you think they can find ways to solve this?

[gumboot]

They also haven't solved it for small boats, and that tech is thousands of years old.

[pogo]

They also haven't solved it for small boats, and that tech is thousands of years old.

But small boats aren’t programmable. So far the reports suggest it’s not VR that‘s the problem but software running on it, such as particular FPS’s. If so it will hopefully be solvable, or at least avoidable, by smarter programming and choice of what sort of software runs on VR.

[gumboot]

Content creators are also not programmable. Just look at all those fucking awful shaky-cam movies.

If the director has good sea legs they may be very unsympathetic to the rest of us and torture us horribly.

[pogo]

[KlaxonCow]

They also haven't solved it for small boats, and that tech is thousands of years old.

The US Navy did actually look into this and they came up with a "false horizon" device.

It's pretty simple, really. The device projects light to create a "horizon" line on the walls of a room below decks, but it's all cleverly gimballed, so that, as the boat rocks around on the sea, the "false horizon" always tracks the real horizon.

This then gives you a visual cue which matches what your sense of balance is telling you, which they found very effectively reduced sea sickness. Stop the sensory mismatch from happening and symptoms quickly reduce or go away.

Because though we colloquially call it by a bunch of names - "car sickness", "sea sickness", "plane sickness", "train sickness", "motion sickness", "simulator sickness", etc. - this really is all the same thing, which is a sensory mismatch problem.

When you're feeling sea sick, folks tell you to go up on deck to "get some fresh air". The fresh air itself actually does nothing useful (well, except that the act of taking deep breaths can calm you down a touch, if you're getting a touch panick-y about it). It's actually about being able to see the horizon and to feel the wind against your skin - or, in other words, to get more confirmatory sensory clues that your sense of balance isn't wrong.

If all your senses are telling you much the same thing, then you won't feel nauseous. It's the mismatch between the senses which is the problem.

Similarly, when feeling car sick, folks often say that you should wind the window down for "fresh air". Again, getting a lungful of fresh air isn't really what's doing it at all. What's actually happening is that you're getting the wind on your face, you're able to hear noises flying by (sometimes, the sound-proofing of modern cars is a detriment, as they can often be too good, regarding kinetosis), it simply encourages you to actually look out of the window and so forth. It's getting more confirmatory sensory information.

The more your senses match up, the less nauseous you'll feel.

And, yes, note that in the above examples, one's sense of touch and hearing also entirely help. More broadly, kinetosis should be regarded as nausea caused by any sensory mismatch. Not just a mismatch between sight and balance alone - though that one is, indeed, usually the main problem.

In fact, this is the challenge with VR, because it's able to produce sensory mismatches that are impossible in reality. It adds an extra layer of concerns to the general problem.

Whilst feeling sea sick, you at least don't ever have the problem that reality is suffering from latency / lag problems. But that's an added dimension to the problem in VR.

Another one that's easy to miss - because we're all erroneously taught that there are only "five senses", which isn't actually true (I mean, you'll note that "sense of balance" ain't even in the traditional five!) - is that we do also have a sense of our own bodily presence. The brain keeps track of the spatial orientation of our limbs. Coupled up with our sense of balance from the inner ear, this creates the vestibular system.

VR can also have problems in this department. Because, when you look down, you typically don't see your arms or legs, where you know, from your vestibular system, they really ought to be. Note that just rendering a body ain't a useful solution either, as if you've raised your hand up in reality, but your rendered hand hasn't moved in VR, then the sensory mismatch there is arguably worse than if you'd just not bothered to render a body for the avatar at all.

This is where Kinect / LeapMotion technology could prove handy. Because if cameras are tracking your body accurately, then you can potentially have a rendered body that matches your real bodily position.

Though, this also brings up a potential "uncanny valley" problem with all of this. As mentioned, if you can't render an avatar's body in the right positions, it might actually cause less sensory mismatch not to bother rendering a body at all.

Ironically enough, VR this time around is somewhat more of a "victim of its own success" than back in the '90s. Because the closer to reality we get it, then the more one has to concentrate on getting all the fine details deadly accurate. It's worth noting that, with the Oculus Rift, there are reports (admittedly anecdotal, but enough of them to suspect a genuine pattern, which does add up with what the theory suggests ought to be the case) that more abstract graphics actually often cause less nausea problems than attempts at more realistic graphics. The issue is that the closer you get it to reality, the more the brain willingly accepts it as reality (because more things are adding up to tell it "this is real") and, thus, it becomes more intolerant to accepting sensory inaccuracies from said reality. Such as lag, or the parallax being slightly off or whatever.

The point being that it's probably best to view the entire thing as an overall "sensory mismatch" problem, so you're picking up on all the issues.

For example, there's always a tendency to treat audio as the poor relation to video. But your ultra-realistic graphics could actually become a problem, if it's matched up with some shitty simple left / right panning audio. Because, as you're making the graphics really good but just leaving the audio behind, you're widening the gap in "sensory mismatch". Don't forget the importance of also needing to beef up all the sensory information together - at least throw in some interaural time difference (sounds subtly reach the ears at different times) or whatever to make the audio more "surround sound". Because the brain will accept the visual information as more "real", if the audio is also backing this up, and you'll get less "sensory mismatch".

(It's not just a "sense of balance" vs. "what you see" issue alone. Though that is the biggest one to ensure you get right. VR adds the additional problems, not physically possible in actual reality, that all of the senses can potentially mismatch in some way. In reality, you don't have to worry that someone feeling sea sick is seeing their own arm in the wrong place, or hearing the calls of the seagulls above coming from the wrong direction - that's just not physically possible to happen from actual reality, so that, indeed, we're not used to this added layer of "sensory mismatch" problems that could occur from our previous experiences, but they are possible in VR, as the entire "reality" presented to the player's brain is artificially created.)

[pogo]

[tenshi_alpha]

New research on reducing VR simulator sickness - virtual noses!

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases ... games.html

No really. They put a nose in peripheral vision, and people get sick less quickly. It's fascinating!

I get sick in normal non-VR running-about-in-first-person games, and I have wondered about the influence of noses on simulator sickness before.

After all, a lot of it is down to peripheral vision, and a prominent bridge acts as a divider between left and right for people with them. It blocks out some of the data your eyes would receive in the middle - where there's more of a difference between what each eye sees.

I'm half Chinese and have quite a low bridge to my nose. A higher percentage of Asian people get simulator sickness too; and they often similarly have a low bridge to the nose.

I wonder if there's anything to this. Maybe I should experiment and try playing games that would normally make me sick, while wearing a fake nose.

[Yak]

IIRC there was some discussion of virtual noses on the Oculus forum a few months ago, and the gist of it at that time was that the Occy as it stands didn't have a wide enough FOV to allow adding a realistically positioned virtual nose. Who nose though, maybe it'd help!

Never thought I'd ever have cause to talk about virtual noses. Truly the modern world is amazing.

[Jamesac]

Of all the virtual body parts I expected to get recreated for the user in VR, I have to admit that "nose" didn't make the list.