Is Virtual Reality Dead? 42
DarkZero asks: "In the early '90s, virtual reality was considered to be 'right around the corner'. Books, magazines, movies, and TV specials told us it'd be around in the next five years, and in 1995 Nintendo's Virtual Boy gave us a brief glimpse of 'the future of video games'. Well, the Virtual Boy died pretty quickly, and now, in 2001, the books, magazines, movies, and TV specials about virtual reality are gone, and web searches about virtual reality lead to web sites that stopped updating in 1996 and corporations that went bankrupt long ago. Is there any hope left for VR hardware and software in ANY fashion, corporate or independant?"
Re:Me Too (Score:2)
I certainly hope not. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what I'm hoping to work on once everything is up and running. Once a few breakthroughs are made throughout the industry, I'm sure the hype will start up all over again and with the current developments of 3D graphics on the market, it will probably be more realizable since the cost of everything has dropped significantly. We can only look forward.
CyberBlood
VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:1)
Total Recall. A little bit different, instead they just implanted the memories of the vacation in your head.
me
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:2)
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:1)
No. Response time!=response speed. When the response time increases, it takes you longer to respond. Just like you win a race by having the shortest time, whereas you then have the highest (average) speed.
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:2)
No. Response time!=response speed. When the response time increases, it takes you longer to respond. Just like you win a race by having the shortest time, whereas you then have the highest (average) speed.
You're right. I should have said improve the brain's response time, meaning make it faster. I'm still wondering if the original poster's comment about slowing the reaction time would work. How does reaction time relate to response time/speed? Are they the same thing? If it takes longer to respond|react|whatever, you can't do as much. Unless you're going to slow the "internal clock" of the brain and not the physical reaction time.
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:1)
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:1)
Re:VR not dead, just taking a nap (Score:2)
So, to that end, it would suggest that there is still lots of 'headroom' (pun intended) for boosting our processing and 'life frame rate' capacity, as others are actually dependant upon these higher levels of perception for their careers. Mind you, we could just put people at near the speed of light, and then they really
I'm not sure all this is a good idea, tho! It may be nice to visit France for 2 years, in one second, but you'd return as a 'different' person, if you truely experienced it. My conclusion is that we'd have difficulty maintaing the relevence of friends/family/collegues in our lives as we depend on our situational contexts and shared experiences over time in order to form friendships. Being able to 'gain' so many experiences without the 'cost' of sharing them over time with other people can only lead to social isolation and strains in our collective relevence to each other and the rest of the world.
The problem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of this is the model that made sense to the researchers didn't make sense to everybody else. Stock traders still don't use cool VR views of it, they stick to what makes sense to them, even though it could be done better, for example.
What you see the most applications of VR in are various forms of visuilization, a few choice applications that caught on, and games.
So what you have is consumer-grade 3D hardware for FPS games, and then the really expensive stuff for scientists.
VR/Interactivity (Score:1)
No killer app (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember seeing the first cave and talking with the student who came up with it. She was quite interesting, and the ideas pretty solid, but the workstations available at the time were completely insufficient for anything but proof of concept stuff.
I guess Caterpiller bought one (they were near University of Illinois in downstate Illinois), but their needs were quite simple. They were just testing operator visibility in prototype tractors.
Even today, they are expensive to build and operate.
However, now that the triangle counts are up and the displays getting better (check out Emagin for the next generation of oled displays the size of a postage stamp) the technology is ready, but we've many years of practice in mobil computing and still no killer app.
Until now.
Here's a system that can be built today, and, like many technologies hooks on to the one known good selling center in society. Sex.
Take a portable computer, add a headmount. On the headmount add a couple video cameras. You need two in order to do distance mapping. Now you can send the unadulterated video stream to each eye in the HMD and the person is getting real life, but the computer knows what's going on. Distance to object, object identifcation and other messages can be displayed on the HMD as an explanation to the wife/boss as to why the device is valuable.
Of course the real reason it's valuable is because of the 'skins' that will be available on the net. These skins will be used by the PC to replace the normal appearance of that chick walking by with Miss January. And because you're only remapping a portion of the image, the framerates from todays hardware is sufficient to present realtime images.
Add to that suitable audio, and the world becomes a much more interesting place to wander around in.
a killer app would help... but... (Score:2)
Sight - this one VR is pretty good at, movement, perspective etc.
Sound - what can you hear right now? the problem with reality is that you don't always hear what you want to hear... there are layers apon layers of sound... right now I can hear the office air conditioning humming, phones ringing, groups of people talking in 3 different directions and someone making a weird metal clicking kind of noise that sounds frustrated. That's reality.
Smell - this is a part of body information a lot of people forget about. You sense of smell can tell you a lot about your environment. The smell of the sea... that weird smell at the movies, part popcorn, part excessive vacuuming...
Taste - this is the sense I think VR will have the most trouble capturing. If you've ever been too close to a campfire, you'll know that smoke has a taste as well as a smell. Then you've got your more pedestrian taste situations, like eating a meal...
Touch - not quite as elusive as taste, but far more complex is the sense of touch. Touch measures so many things, instantly. Texture, pressure, temperature, movement... as well as shape recognition. Even when you're not touching anything, your skin is giving you loads of sensory feedback.
When virtual reality stops being about image projection and sound, and starts mimicking real reality, I think it will be a lot more interesting to people.
Right now, my own reality kicks ass over a cave.
I'm not saying VR developments as they are are not impressive, but this is a young technology, don't expect too much from something not fully grown.
An adult VR could produce Better Than Life, Red Dwarf style... or, the Matrix...
Re:No killer app (Score:1)
This is an article called "Telepresence Bi-Autoerotic Intercourse" It's nothing too complicated but very interesting. It's about switching perspectives when having sex with a virtual reality helmet and the possibility of putting yourself in a remote controlled car by attatching a camera to it and wearing a helmet that receives signals from the camera as it moves around in the car.
Re:No killer app (Score:1)
An example of getting this piece done is a Palm, now add sunglasses that are really a flat VR screen. more of a monitor, you know the kind that projects in the eye, or on the lenses. It would provide a "large UI" for the device. See this would be a killer app, train the users, and get them ready for the next phase of VR as robustly envisioned. Anyone want to invest?
VR isn't dead... (Score:4, Informative)
Check out my URL - I am one of the "underground" sites (though I haven't had much time to do anything lately) - there are others out there.
Cybermind [cybermind.co.uk] are the rebadged form of W Industries - and seem to still be a big player in the commercial entertainment uses of VR (mostly in Europe and some parts of the US).
Other areas VR is being used in is commercial and academic research - mostly CAVE-style setups. NASA helped start up (via a grant) Flogiston [flogiston.com], which sells the "flostation", with an interest in using it to train astronauts. The DOD has their "Dismounted Soldier" training project (a good site is Rudy Darken's site [navy.mil], but it appears to be having problems).
One thing I desperately want to do is republish, in CD form, the entire PCVR magazine archive (of what I have - which is all of the back issues, and a bit of the software that came on floppy). I have tried to contact the original publisher through numerous leads, but no luck (his name is Joeseph Gradecki - if anyone knows of his whereabouts, please contact me). I tend to wonder what the response would be if I did something like this. I figure it would at the minimum help the homebrew VR community (what little is left of it).
Re:VR isn't dead... Yes it is (Score:2)
This [optusnet.com.au] is a photo I took recently of one of the original sets of VR entertainment devices, the Virtuality-something.
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, mentioned in an ("Back In Time") interview that he believed VR's day would come soon. And I'm not inclined to dismiss that too quickly. However, up to this date it's like the Newton phase of PDA history.
I am not sure what you are meaning here... (Score:2)
To be honest, the Virtuality 1000 wasn't a superb piece of machinery, but at the time, it was the lowest cost, best made solution for VR entertainment.
Was the HMD big and heavy? Yes. Was the HMD low-res? Yes. Was there "lag"? Yes.
But if you played properly, and "looked past" the pixels (instead of what too many people did, which was to focus on the pixels) - there was a whole 'nother world in that box...
The Virtuality 1000's HMD (the Visette) was actually a very nice HMD - its folded optics design allowed for a relatively wide FOV with full focus adjustment (so that if you wore glasses, you could still use it). It provided nearly full immersion. The 1000 was also based on a souped up (OC'd?) Amiga 3000, with a ton of custom processing boards for graphics and sound, as well as 3D tracking (you could, for instance, actually duck and croutch as you played).
Dactyl Nightmare was the "premier" game for the 1000 - a funky form of paintball where not only you shot at other players on this strange "floating" game arena, but you had to watch out for (and/or kill!) a flying pterodactyl that would grab you and drop you to your death!
Anyhow, you can't base your whole opinion on that one system - did you ever play the Virtuality 2000 system? Much lighter equipment, much lighter and higher-res HMD - great equipment.
I have yet to try out Cybermind's (which is who W Industries/Virtuality became) new systems - I hope to next time I visit Vegas - but I have no doubt that they will be great machines.
Re:I am not sure what you are meaning here... (Score:2)
Yes, I did try to play it once and I was unable to see properly -- my glasses fogged up quickly, but without them I couldn't focus. No, I never played the next model up because there was never one available here.
Despite this, my interest in retro gaming has meant that I have actually tried to contact the owner of the store to acquire these neglected bits of history. I don't hate them, just like I didn't hate my Newton, but the technology has (at best) stalled. Gaming-wise it's as dead as the classic FMV titles like Night Trap and Ground Zero Texas.
Re:I am not sure what you are meaning here... (Score:2)
Keep trying to aquire them - just don't expect the owner to "give" them to you - even a used 1000 model goes for around $5000.00 (when they were sold new, they went for about $25,000.00). If the owner doesn't know the value of them, you might be able to go as low as $3000.00 - but it would be tough.
I thought about buying one of those used systems once - but as I gave it more thought, I realized that instead of spending all that money on something like that, I could probably build the system myself using parts I had, plus parts I could buy - it just wasn't cost effective to buy it ready made. But if you want it to try to make a buck off of (I thought about going to swap meets, etc), that is a possibility...
Flight Simulation... (Score:2, Interesting)
I piloted an Airbus A320 for about an hour in one of those nice CAE toys [cae.com]. It is really amazing. You can feel the irregularities of the asphalt as you accelerate on the take-off ramp, and the inercia makes you stick in the seat. All the commands and movements of the cockpit are perfect. The graphics of the landscape are good, but they don't get close to photorealism.
To make the things work, they use an IBM RISC/6000, equipped with several boards and equipments that are present on fly-by-wire systems of the actual planes. There are also special boards to control the hydraulic systems that make the whole thing swing. The instruments that are in the cockpit are also the same of an Airbus A320.
It doesn't have anything to do with helmets, gloves or helmets, but they are a demonstration of the cool things VR can do.
Better question: was it ever alive? (Score:2)
Will it ever live? But what are the real uses of VR outside games? Not many. Virtual tours of homes or museums or other buildings, maybe. But I don't think there's enough interest to spend the time and money to build these VRML worlds. We're having enough trouble getting broadband and real time audio/video to homes, let alone something a bit more bandwidth-consuming like this.
You call that VR? (Score:2, Interesting)
When we get real-time Final Fantasy movie quality or better images, then we'll be getting close to VR. When the AI has advanced to the point where I can have a real conversation with a Virtual Person and that Virtual Person interacts with its environment logically, then we'll have VR.
The media blew what was possible out of all proportion, people got tired of the hype and being disappointed, then tired of waiting. That's what happened.
are you kidding?? (Score:1)
Look at it sideways (Score:1)
VR did not die, it just took a sideways step, look at 3D graphics these days, I think this is where it all went, not into bring the user into the enviroment.
Then again, I could just be mad, but I think this is where it all went.
Take care all - Robert Lazzurs
Problem with Headmounted VR (Score:1)
Essentially, the method of producing 3D images used in headmounts only approximates one of six ways that we perceive depth and distance. Exposed for over twenty minutes, the brain adapts to the comuter-generated images causing confusion between the brain's and eyes' perception, a state that remains after the head-mount is removed.
From the book: "How long your brain remained confused was an open question. It varied from person to person. Some people adapted back to the real world almost immediately. Others seemed to take hours. No one knew what kind of effect it would have on growing children, who have highly flexible nervous systems. Could long exposure to a head-mounted display 3-D environment cause permanent damage? Even today, no one knows for sure (certainly, no one want's to do such a study) but the open question of permanent brain damage was enough to scare Sega away for good."
Strangely enough, there are plenty of such devices out on the market now by rather reputable names like Phillips. Did they look into the risks?
One of the sites that stopped updating in 1996... (Score:1)
This was my first significant web effort back in 1994 and since then, I never managed to acquire much hardware, or find the time for any 3D programming, or even think of very many good applications for it. I have experimented with a couple of "toggle goggle" designs (one big LCD shutter for each eye, synchronized with alternating images on your monitor); they work, but are a little cumbersome and for me, the applications are very few. I'm not a big-time gamer, although I did play Descent in 3D a few times (in 1995 or so). I would like to think that VR has many general-purpose uses, but so far not many. Actually I don't completely understand myself why I lost interest, just too much else to do maybe.
VR and AI continues (Score:2)
As for VR being used, well, the VR application that predates VR - the flight simulator is still there and an integral part of learning to fly in most commercial and military situations.
The military is also sponsoring other VR work for simulations like Quake for various combat and peace keeping situations.
In medicine, VR training is coming. There is a conference called MMVR [nextmed.com] that keeps growing.
In a number of niche applications, mining, 3D sculpting and various other things, VR tools are being used in a production environment every day.
AR, augmented reality, is a field that has arisen and used knowledge gained from VR.
Really, it's like AI. In the 80's AI was going to solve everything and we'd have intelligent machines doing many tasks that require consciousness today. It didn't happen as simply as we would have liked, but the technology developed in expert systems and reasoning is being used all over the place in various ways. The same is true for VR, the hype has gone but the technology continues to go on and finds applications.
Challenges to be overcome (Score:1)
For VR to become attractive to the masses, it needs to be more generic and interactive, which means that it must be easier to create interactive worlds.
Networking is also important, to be able to interact with other people.
For a world to be perceived as realistic, it needs to simulate actual-world physics, and doing this
in realtime over a network is hard and attempts in the past often resorted to hard-coded methods.
Then there is the aspect of having the system be secure. In other words, there are still a few technical problems that must be solved before massive deployment of VR is possible
Redundant (Score:1)
Lanier made a couple of tactical errors (Score:2)
2) VPL (Lanier's company) got sold to a French firm that TOTALLY botched, ruined and shelved the company.
BTW Lanier = Jaron Lanier. Look it up.
Re:Lanier made a couple of tactical errors (Score:2)
Re:Lanier made a couple of tactical errors (Score:2)
They've got a set up that kind of looks like jail: Lanier (with dreads still) talking to someone (actually a wall) who's remote, but it looks like they're having a conversation through glass (like a bank teller). Cool stuff.
Funny you mention Virtual Boy...you forget Atari (Score:1)
Why wasit stopped? Expenses, for one (Atari was nearly bankrupt at the time, and couldn't afford to support a high-end and pricey VR headset). The head-tracking was a bit off, too-headaches and motion sickness were common. (They may have disabled it afterwards, I'm not sure).
Still, to this day I want one...but you hear about VR nowadays about as often as you hear about Atarui
Links:
http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Jaguar/Jaguar_VR/j
Why nobody cares about VR (Score:1)