Coincidence? I think not.
Pretty sure the technology back in the 90’s is not even remotely close to this.
Great info! I’ll wait, then.
There’s a big difference between putting TV screens over your eyes and the total immersion the current technology is offering.
It’s like the difference between a Playstation 1 and a modern gaming machine. Those DisneyQuest headsets had VERY laggy input; I remember it feeling like being drunk. And the display did NOT cover your field of vision fully; it was like looking at a blurry 3D TV.
Cool for the time, but modern tech can provide a much, much more immersive experience.
Well, I guess I don’t really need that Rift thing so much anymore.
Any1 else think the Rift is now a doomed project?
Yup. As I just posted to Twitter … If I thought VR would amount to anything then Facebook buying Oculus Rift would be great news for Sony.
2K refers to the horizontal axis. I had to google it when I started seeing it after 4k made the big splash after the last CES. It usually refers to 1920 but 2160 counts too.
Well, Mark Zuckerberg is promising to keep his hands off Oculus’ operations, but that almost never happens. It’s in his and Facebook’s best interest to leave them be, however, and I hope he knows that.
If anything, hopefully Sony will keep working on their headset so consumers at least have one good alternative.
This is potentially good news for Virtual Reality.
It’s good news because it will speed up adoption tremendously. Facebook is about as viral a marketing mechanism as you’ll find. If facebook users start joining in Oculus Virtual reality games and events, it’ll force their friends to buy in as well.
It’s also good news because it’s going to drive a whole lot of investment into better games and virtual experiences. I’ve always thought that VR could trigger a whole new world of interaction between people. Imagine facebook putting on a ‘virtual concert’ where a live band streams a concert and attendees are put in the virtual audience with their friends. Big news conferences could have facebook VR camera gear there so that the public can attend as if they were there. Olympic games, you name it. To make such big venues happen requires a mega company like facebook to be involved.
Now, it could all go horribly wrong:
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Facebook could lock down the hardware so that it only works in their app environment. I don’t think that’s likely simply because there will be many competitors now that billions of dollars are in play.
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It could drive app development away from sophisticated games and experiences and more towards “Farmville VR”.
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Serious privacy concerns arise, tainting the entire field of VR.
#1 is the most likely bad outcome, but I think that’s overshadowed by the potential upside of putting a huge cash-rich behemoth like facebook behind VR. You know that that’s going to accelerate development of alternatives from Google, Microsoft, and other big online players. Competition is good. It will drive more rapid improvement and more widespread adoption.
Also, it’s going to drive down the price. Facebook has no interest in profiting off of hardware sales. They’ll sell them at cost to get them into as many facebook user’s hands as possible. From their point of view, if they can build a virtual reality ecosystem inside facebook, that creates one more barrier that potential competitors have to overcome. And facebook can build these things in huge quantities that really drive economies of scale - something that Oculus wouldn’t manage to do for years on their own.
All in all, this means we’re going to get better VR sooner and cheaper. Whether facebook screws that up remains to be seen, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
The this is … you don’t need a head-mounted display to do any of this. You can have big social experiences RIGHT NOW with normal display technology. (Look at World of Warcraft.) Most people don’t want it. And they’re not going to want it any more if it involves strapping something dorky onto their heads.
Oculus is a display technology. It’s like 3-D TV. Which just finished bombing because nobody wanted to wear dorky glasses to watch football.
The really crazy thing is that Facebook could have spent considerably less than $1B to just recreate Oculus’s work. It’s not rocket science. $10 million would be plenty to put together a crash program to make comparable HMDs. Buying Oculus only makes sense if you can’t wait a year to spin up your own program, if you want to do something with the tech RIGHT NOW. (Which is why it would have made sense for Microsoft to buy Oculus.)
Really? Is it finally dead? Please?
Have you tried the Oculus Rift? Yes, it’s ‘display technology’, but it’s fundamentally different than other technologies in that it provides ‘presence’. You feel transported into a different world, a different reality. You get just a taste of that with the Dev Kit, but apparently the newest versions are much more immersive, and the consumer version will be more immersive yet.
It’s not just an improvement on existing displays - it’s a transformative experience. Imagine instead of watching football in 3D you could watch it in a way that made you feel you were actually sitting on the 50 yard line. Instead of seeing fish ‘pop out at you’ from a 3D screen, you’re actually in the ocean with fish swimming all around you.
I think that the experience could overwhelm the ‘dorky glasses’ limitation.
Yeah, and Morpheus, and a variety of other experimental VR rigs since the mid-90’s.
VR is interesting for some niche experiences, but once the novelty wears off, it’s generally inferior to a normal flat-panel display for most uses. The only thing a headmount gives you is the ability to control pitch and yaw with your neck muscles instead of your fingers.
That’s just not true. The thing that headmounted control gives you is transparent interaction and the belief that you are ‘there’. That’s a huge deal.
Aside from immersion and gaming, think of what this does to the amount of visual data you can comfortably use. A monitor is a fixed piece of real-estate with a fixed resolution. But in a virtual reality environment where I can easily look left and right and up and down, my effective resolution is multiplied dramatically. I run triple monitors at home, which causes me to have to turn my head to read different monitors. I can achieve exactly the same thing with a VR headset. In fact, I can do better. If my monitor’s field of view is 25 degrees and my headset is 960 X 1080 per eye, Then my effective horizontal resolution is perhaps 10X that, and my vertical resolution is perhaps five times. (assuming I don’t want to turn around just to read something). Add in the ability to move around in a 3D virtual space, and the amount of visual data I can comfortably absorb skyrockets. Even for business applications that could have a tremendous impact.
We haven’t scratched the surface of what VR can do. As usual, the first applications for it are going to be gaming and porn. But it may be that the ‘killer apps’ for it are things like data visualization, modeling, telecommuting, training, and applications we can’t even conceive of yet because they won’t make sense until there is ubiquitous VR. The Facebook deal helps make VR mainstream, and that may trigger entire new software categories.
I’m hoping we’re getting closer to the computer interface in Minority Report.
Are there glasses that allow you to shoot videos in 3D? As in, you put on the glasses, whatever your head points towards is filmed in 3D and then people with VR sets get to see it in 3D.
Beyond the endless pornsibilities, that could be quite entertaining. Especially if it can be small and rugged enough for athletes/daredevil types to wear it. I get hazy looking at pictures of urban climbers, seeing it in VR would be quite something. Parkour might be fun too.
I don’t see how they could give everyone free camera movement of real events, though. Wouldn’t that require cameras pointing at every minute of angle?
AFAIK that’s not possible. Well, I suppose I should amend that to “not possible for real 3D”. In the latter case you need cameras filming from multiple points of view at the same time, and even for the optical-illusion 3D you get in cinemas relies on at least two cameras set somewhat far apart. I don’t think the width of a human head is enough of a distance for that. I also believe the exact focus of what is being filmed determines the precise distance the cameras need to be apart so that they can be later meshed into a 3D flick, so that too would put a damper on homemade 3D movies.
Well, maybe not porn, 'cause the subjects don’t move about too much :). But something like filming a crowded street immersively would be difficult.
Not so much. A HMD is much more intrusive than a flat screen, and while looking around is more transparent, you still need to do all your other interactions through some other sort of physical interface like a controller or a keyboard. A physical interface that you can no longer SEE, by the way.
The optics distort the smaller screen so it fills your visual field. But they don’t add more pixels. It’s going to be a long time before you’ll be able to read comfortably in a headmount.
Yeah, I worked for a company in the 90’s that tried to develop a 3-D replacement for the computer desktop. People have been trying to crack that nut for a while. 3-D information metaphors are slow to navigate and confusing. Trying to do so in a headmount won’t solve that problem.
Believe me, I’d love to be proven wrong. I’m consulting on a couple of Morpheus games right now and if there’s a headmount in every living room, that’s good for me professionally. But I’m not holding my breath.
Another thing that looks cool in theory but is pretty crappy in practice. Gestural interfaces suck, not because the tech isn’t there but because of muscle strain, lack of haptics, and the steep learning curve to memorize specific gestures.
I agree about gestural interfaces, but disagree about visual bandwidth. The consumer version of the rift is reputed to be 1440p. That’s 1280 X 1440 per eye. The current oculus rift is only 640 X720 per eye, and it’s already good enough that I can read all the instruments in a virtual flight simulator.
Now granted, that resolution is spread out over a 100 degree field of view, so it’s not going to be as sharp as a monitor. But when you combine that with the ability to turn and look around and look up and down, the amount of visual information that’s available to you goes up a lot. In addition, immersive 3D can provide navigation spaces that are huge yet usable because they can trade on our ability to pattern-match even when we can’t see much detail.
That 100 degree field has many advantages, though. One is that our eyes are much more sensitive to motion in our peripheral vision. That opens the door to new kinds of visual cues.
A good example of how this is transformative is in a flight simulator. I’ve been using flight sims for decades, and I fly full-size planes as well. The first thing you notice in a flight sim is that your view is locked. In the real world, your head is always swiveling around - especially in a traffic pattern when landing. Sure, I can toggle views in a flight simulator, but it’s just not the same because my peripheral vision is not involved. Three monitors helps, but it’s still not the same.
When flying on instruments, you’re trained to do a visual scan across all your instruments. On a monitor, if all instruments are shown they tend to be too small to read details. In 3D space, I get the full effect of swiveling my head to maintain situational awareness. If you’re flying a big jet, instruments are overhead, in the console, basically all over the place. That’s why some hard-core sim pilots have as many as 9 monitors. One VR headset will do it better and feel much more real.
There’s a helicopter sim for the rift that I recently tried - and was blown away by how much more visual processing I could do. Like real life I could look down at the ground while seeing how I’m moving back and forth in my peripheral vision. I could get situational awareness by just swiveling my head around like I’d do in real life. Even at the crappy low rift resolution it was an instantly more engaging simulation and it made it much easier to fly.
Another example is a racing game, where your eyes need to stay focused on the road ahead, yet your position relative to other cars is picked up in your peripheral vision. A VR headset works beautifully. Single monitors require you to constantly switch views, which raises the cognitive load and breaks the suspension of disbelief.
Samsung is saying that they plan to have a 4K smartphone display by next year. That’s 1920 X 2160 pixels per eye. You can expect to see a 4K display in the second-gen consumer Rift or in a ‘premium’ version. Even spread out over 100 degrees FOV, that would be enough to make any screen door invisible and really give you a sense that you’re looking at a real world. The visual bandwidth will be immense. If you had that 4K display on your monitor it wouldn’t be as usable because your eye’s resolving capability won’t take advantage of it very well. But spread throughout your entire field of view, it will be like having HD resolution everywhere you look. Of course, you’ll need the hardware that can drive that many pixels.
And if that’s not enough, if VR takes off in a big way it’ll drive development of new, higher resolution displays. It’s not going to be long because we can present a virtual world that’s nearly indistinguishable from the real one.
The Minority Report gestural interface looks cool in a movie, but a much better way of handling multiple pages of a display in 3D space is to simply lay them out in logical order and let you move through them. There’s a rift demo of a virtual art gallery which shows how this could work. When I’m standing in the middle I can see dozens of paintings. But off in the distance I can see even more, but without much detail. But the 3D tells me how to navigate that space, so I can simply look where I want to go, hit the forward button, and zoom to another interesting place in the ‘gallery’. No gestures required. Just look and go. And of course, visualizations can be in 3D as well. 3D is generally a gimmick for visualizations on a desktop except in a few cases, but in virtual space at ultra-high resolution, it will be amazing.
Obviously this is all in its infancy, and we don’t know how this new ecosystem is going to evolve. Maybe a much better interface mechanism will come along. In any event, the potential is there for a real transformation in how we use computers.