Lol. Thanks for breaking it down for me.

Yes, 1-2 years HD VR. The new challenge is tactile immersion.

Found 2 videos of people playing.
this is a short one with someone looking around.

and this one is a longer set of gameplay (looks like the guy would have played the whole game if Palmer didn't stop him).

EDIT: Virtual Insanity Final video went up an hour ago http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8&feature=plcp

I've been thinking about something with the RIFT that many people may not of even considered.

Alot of games allow you to record the game, not a video of it but in the game so to play it back you need the game and it loads the level and runs through it with everything that happened when it was recording happen.

With the RIFT you could have it so that instead of just playing back the recording like that so you see everything they saw, have you tethered to the player so that you cna see everything they saw or if you like look around at whatever you want with full head tracking. You could even allow them to untether from the player and freely move around the game world to watch what the player is doing from wherever they like or see it from the monsters point of view they are fighting etc. Ontop of that as an advanced mode or something even have slow motion controls and virtual cameras etc that they can setup and play with to let them create their own movie from everything that happened in that game.

As an extension of that you could also have a live mode as well so that a player plays the game just like they do now with a monitor but a second person on the system with the RIFT on is just going along for the ride and can look where they like instead of seeing what the player sees or like with the recordings allow them to untether from the player and go around the world themselves.

Of course with that kind of live play there will be some problems as the framerate will drop by half that may not be a problem for PC but if a console is already maxed out it could be and you'd need a 2nd set of controls for the viewer to move around with which wouldn't be a problem with a console but a PC wont have any unless they purchase a usb control pad or something for them to use. There could also be problems if you allow them to untether in live mode where the viewer could go ahead and tell the player whats coming up or where things are etc which I guess is fine for single player but would be a problem for multiplayer. Then ofcourse you have the issue of needing the warped SBS display (whether 3D or 2D) for the RIFT and an unwarped 2D (or 3D if they have the gear but again will tax the system alot more) non SBS for the actual player.

You could even have a type of internet spectator sport created where people view live feeds of tournaments that are sending this ingame recorded data (instead of video) to them though of course it will mean anyone wanting to watch it will need the game and it will only look as good as their system can run it.

@Endothermic : This exists already!
Source engine games allow you to connect to live games (including tournament ones) and receive the game data, spectacting the game view a variety of views, including a first person free look view which would be perfect for this.
In Dota 2 you can even do this and also receive the voice of the commentator live too, directly in the game (though it's a RTS view for this game so it would be strange with the Rift, I guess. CS:GO will probably support it too.)

Can you do it with recordings of the games though?

Thats what interests me the most (and hence mentioned first) being able to head track around or freely move around a recording instead of having the POV fixed to the player.

Never got into the whole watching games live thing only read bits about it and don't recall reading anything about being able to record games and do it with that though only with the live viewing however I also didn't do really extensive reading on it since I wasn't going to do the whole watching live games

Halo 3, Halo: ODST(I think) and Halo: Reach can all do this with their game recordings.

Destructoid have posted a hands on impression:

http://www.destructoid.com/quakecon-pre ... 2547.phtml

Seems as if he never tried a hmd before since he is complaining about the limited 90 degree fov...

Here is another, more positive, feedback: http://gamersnewsnetwork.wordpress.com/ ... xperience/

What about some of you guys, has anyone tried the rift at quakecon?

When I read the destructiod article and saw the line about the "limited 90 degree FoV" I felt the intense urge to drop kick the guy.....

Really cool articles all around. I also look forward to some more feedback from the press and anyone who tried the setup.

There's 2 limitations I haven't thought of until reading the Destructoid article and watching Virtual Insanity:

1. No HUD elements. Not even a crosshair for aiming. Perhaps all GUI elements need to be 3D to work correctly. I played counter-strike in stereoscopic 3D and found the crosshair was hard to use since it was on a different 'plane', so you couldn't focus on the crosshair and the enemy you wanted to target at the same time. Or maybe crosshairs should go away completely in favor of ironsights for a more natural experience.
Not sure how ingame menus/inventory should work, but it may not work as a simple 2D overlay (speculation).

2. Looks like there is a technical obstacle to having the body and head point different directions. The gyroscope has drift, this drift is corrected by the accelerometer (which always points down due to gravity). So if the drift makes the gyro think your head is 'rolled' to the left, the accelerometer can check the direction of down and verify/correct. However, if your yaw (y-axis) is off by a few degrees due to gyro drift, there is nothing that can correct this. You would need some kind of compass, TrackIR or Razer Hydra type thing to correct yaw problems.
So Arma style head/body de-coupling does not appear possible with the current tech in the Rift. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Success.


Fail.

Sadly he didnt express his concern regarding fov in more detail. I cant think of any situation where i would describe such a huge fov as limiting since it easily outperforms even the biggest (home) cinema installations...

That could add an interesting element of gameplay for some games, although sniper rifles would require more effort to simulate, you could have a more realistic western game, where you use eye hand coordination to aim more so than just sight line up.



There are some sensor combinations that come with a compass that uses the earths magnetic field. It looks like the hillcrest sensor does not, so I'm not sure how they will solve this, except maybe the drift is small enough to simply ignore those small changes.

An example of a sensor combination that includes compasses:
http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?ca ... _id=1056_0

Also, I thought Carmack/id had been working on decoupling and in the "Virtual Insanity" round table he said that they have a new demo that they will be showing tomorrow, I was under the impression that would include decoupled head and body. It will be interesting to see what comes with that, it might answer all your questions.

I can see how people can say that even 90 degrees is limited by the fact that you can still move your eyes around and see the borders, but I can also see how expecting more than 90 degrees is also rather ridiculous, since there are many games today that use HFOVs less than 90!

Something I tried, is to hold a book or something up to my eye, with one of the corners near my eye, to get a idea of how 90 degrees will look. It's enough that trying to move my eye away from my nose enough to see past the edges is slighty uncomfortable.

Simply overlay HUDs wouldn't work anymore (they'd all be ad infinite depth, so would look 'behind' most of the scene, even though they obscure things 'in front'), but as long as you hang your UI elements in 3D space, it should work. I could see having your UI floating uniformly close to your viewpoint to be an isue, as it would require a lot of focus switching between the 'near' UI and 'far' scene, but you could hang much of the contextual UI next to the scene objects themselves (e.g. player's names float over the player model).
It's reasonable to assume that people will generally face forwards when using the HMD, with temporary movements to 'look around'. Thus, you could keep a record of past yaw guesstimates, and if the value doesn't change outside a certain range for a certain time, and the average is within a certain distance of where you're currently guessing 'forwards' is, the average of that range is assumed to be 'forwards'. Of course, this assumes the person is sitting in a chair facing a constant direction. You might also have to wait for a rapid head-slew to reset the centre position, in order not to have the view appear to drift back into alignment.

Yeah, I think also that stereoscopic vision doesn't work well when not looking straight ahead. The natural thing to do when you are properly examining something is to aim your head at it, instead of only moving your eyes.

What might be interesting to have is bias lighting, like the kind used for some HDTVs, where you subtly light up the border of the screen based upon what is happening in the virtual environment, and stimulate peripheral vision.

I have tried that too. Works quite well on low fov hmd, but I don't think rift will need it.

Yep. Not 100% sure about the older source games but in Dota2 at least you can (and every game is recorded!).
In TF2 there's the whole "replay server" thing so I'm pretty sure it works there too.


I have a 3D screen, and the Nvidia driver can automatically add a 3D crosshair to the game, which work great. The only hard part, with a few games, is disabling the game's default crosshair.
Inventory and stuff usually just render at 0 depth (ie. not sticking out of the screen, not going "into" the screen either), which isn't ideal but not a big problem, except with games with 2D hud elements constantly in the middle of the screen (like a RTS with life bars above the units).

I was also thinking it could be used by games, like where they use red to indicate the direction you are receiving damage from. It could be used for stealth games to let you know whether you are hidden or visible. One of the games I worked on, The Saboteur, had something where the lower your health the more the edges of the screen turn red (I don't recall if we dropped that or changed it). This is a lot more immersive than having a hud that tells you how much life you have left or your stealth state.

Once you venture closer to reality, things like crosshairs will have to disappear anyway. A game I am working on casts a line from the gun and places a crosshair just in front of whatever it hits. But that is sort of a cheat really and as I have hand tracking, to get accurate shooting you really need to raise the gun up to eye level and look along the sights as you would in RL.

When you have yaw drift like this, you need to have a reset to center button on your controller which you press to recenter your torso to head every now and then.

I think that the best solution for the cross-hair is to have them painted on a single eye view. You need to be able to switch it from one side to the other since different people have a different eye as dominant, but it's the only way that really makes sense to me. It also seems to be the easiest to implement. When we have independent tracking of the gun relative to head, then the implementation becomes a bit difficult, but I still would prefer the single eye gun sight.

With regards to the drift.. I'm not sure that the yaw drift is really a problem if we have independent movement/gun tracking since you constantly update your movement relative to the view anyway, so a tiny incremental adjustment would only be noticed if you were standing in the same place and looking left and right constantly.

Carmack added a red-line sight on all guns to replace the crosshair. Several of the guns have ammo counters on the weapons already.

I would think simulating a real world laser sight by placing a decal (laser dot) on whatever surface the gun is aiming at would work well. They do this with the sniper rifle in TF2.

I'm sure there will be many problems that were artificially solved in traditional FPS using a 2D HUD that might be solved more intuitively using real world analogies in immersive VR.

Greetings,

I've been lurking since thy beginnings of page 40 of this thread, and some really interesting stuff came up.

I also wanted to add a tiny suggestion: It would be very cheap and easy to add a button on the glasses at the place of ones forehead (or a light sensor) to detect whether someone has his Rift on. This could come in very handy to let the computer automatically switch between displays, or for example an autologout feature (instead of escape).

Something entirely different and maybe not so convenient/necessary: adding two to three (infrared) leds on the outside of the Rift. One could use a wiimote to do some easy and cheap additional headtracking, or a modified webcam for that matter.

Some things jumped out at me from watching the videos.

It seems to me that the gun aim is locked to the head tracking. Wherever the player looked the gun followed. I was expecting the mouse to orient both the virtual torso and gun, and the head tracking would only affect the virtual head. I can see the benefit of tying the gun orientation to the head orientation, however now there is no visible indicator of what direction is forward.

But as I closed my eyes and imagined it I realized something pretty cool, as long as the head tracking doesn't drift (too much) the player would retain an instinctive sense of what is "forward" because your mind is aware of how your real head is oriented in relation to your real torso. Am I on the right track here?

One thing that has been on my mind is how accepting would people be of external equipment for tracking purposes? Would consumers be ok with setting up 4-8 tripods around their living room if it meant having a good tracking system for use with the Rift?

I think so, people put up with surround speakers because of the obvious benefit of directional sound,

maybe you could even integrate the tracker kit with the sound system?

Being a developer kit, I think the idea is that small modifications like this should be easy enough for you to try out yourself and feed back if you have reasonable success.
I like the idea of the LEDs for use with wiimote. Could be a good, cheap solution for absolute lateral position.

Yes, true indeed. However I'm not really a hardware tinkerer myself so I thought outing it here would be a good idea. The button might be easy enough to add to the developer version, however it would indeed not really be necessary yet.

Triangulating ones position is a good idea, Krenzo, especially given the Kinect has a too high latency, this could be a better alternative. I wonder how this could be best achieved: through leds or with radiowaves, or even sound waves..?

ADD: Sound waves may seem crazy, but while wearing a headphone one wouldn't notice the syncing sounds. One could use his/her dolby surround set, then add some mics to the headgear..
ADD: Just saw Nick3DvB's post, had the same idea apparently

There used to be a device that used sounds waves for tracking, I have it some where. It was for the PC and came with virtua cop. It was kind of a gun remote thing. Now I am going to have to look for it :/

I think that good position tracking will use a combination of the double integration of the accelerometer with long term correction using something like the led/wiimote.
If you are getting one and want to do it yourself, then all you really need is the power, a couple of IR leds in series with a resistor. Then drill a couple of holes in the case for the LEDs to poke out of. The main problem will be getting the software for it though. Free Track, but this seems really high processor usage with a regular webcam. This should be much better with the wiimote, since it does the image analysis to get the dot positions itself, but haven't tried this.

android78: Kinda curious, what happens with LED tracking when you turn 180 degrees from the camera?

Nintendo Powerglove uses ultrasonics for the movement detection.

Yes, Krenzo was just telling me about that, there is a dedicated tracking thread going here btw:

viewtopic.php?f=120&t=15040&p=77377#p77377

It doesn't much like it when you turn more then about 80 degrees left or right. But it is uncomfortable to do this without turning your body anyway, so don't think it matters if you are are sitting while using it. I still see that, for now, we will be using a controller to essentially tell the game what our torso is doing (anything from the neck down), but could accurately track what the head is doing, so turning more the maybe 90 degrees in each direction shouldn't bee a problem.

Very interesting link related to tracking and what M. Abrash metioned on the VR panel:
"Stereoscopy is not that important. Parallax is more important: we need good head tracking".

http://bit.ly/bTG7pt

(from @Cb_VRGeek twitter)

Thanks, I've been banging on about parallax for a while now:

http://3dvision-blog.com/forum/viewtopi ... 3543#p3543

This is why we really need to get a sub mm lateral tracking solution nailed asap.

While this idea is fresh in my head I thought I'd share it. The Rift and Sixense Hydra seem to make a perfect pair, not with the Hydra base on the desk, but attached to the player!

Have a backpack containing hydra base (properly aligned to the player's body axes) and laptop, which is also connected to the Rift; this gives you a mobile HMD setup with orientation tracking in the headset, and relative hand tracking from the player centre using the hydra. I imagine people that are interested in walkabout VR with large rooms could track the player, but I am just interested in being able to turn 360 degrees without tripping over wires. This for me would be the ultimate way to play any first person game. For accurate aiming iron sight which snap to the player's assigned dominant eye would be sensible, and perhaps a floating 3D reticle/laser dot for things such as spell casting in Skyrim.

Sadly my laptop would give me about 30 minutes of play time on the battery, but a ceiling suspended power chord would let me turn around several times before becoming a problem. I have a swivel chair which would let me spin round all day (and avoid the awkward problem of tripping up and falling on my face wearing the Rift).

Tl,dr: Oculus Rift for view control, Razer Sixense Hydra for hand offset (eg. gun or sword (see Clang kickstarter)) powered by backpack laptop.

The Hydra has problems if the base is not stationary. It seems to lose the signal for a few seconds at a time and then maybe re-calibrate or something (once every 5-10 seconds).

I never said anything about the Oculus Rift HMD project yet and want to let you guys know how wonderful I think it is. I don't know alot about the parameters containing VR and am just learning by reading posts. Its also great that the people who were programmers and hardware nerds back in 1990's can now live and enjoy some updated cool gadgets.

Anyways, hope everything goes your way.