Our virtual reality arcade platform, VRcade, real-time demo

[Nick3DvB]

Whilst a physical layout would constrain you in many ways you could developed some very interesting game-play dynamics to overcome this, and taking a LIDAR scan of a laser-tag maze should save you some modelling work. The tracking limitations would need addressing, camera coverage in complex environments could get really expensive, that’s why I was thinking about using lots of cheap cameras if possible. I think it makes sense to fuse the IMU data from the HMD, even just as a fall-back, maybe even use IMUs for basic weapon tracking as well? As long as you can still get good positional tracking of the head maybe you could live without full limb-tracking initially, just in built-up mixed reality environments? I believe MR experiences can be be very compelling, even basic smartphone AR apps, GeoCaching etc. If you can make use of the world around you do it, then there’s no need for complex hepatic interfaces etc.

Dedicated VRcades are going to be huge, you really don’t need to sell the experience, it speaks for itself, you just need to over-come some “historical inertia” in your other target markets - these people really don’t want to hear “burn it down and start again”. I've been looking at the big laser-tag franchises in Europe and all have close links to their established hardware suppliers, I think making a direct platform challenge would be a big mistake, and its completely unnecessary, why tread on their toes when you can make more money selling incremental “software” upgrades; in the form of new maps to the venues, or even micro-transactions directly to the player, custom avatars, better virtual weapons etc. Let other people worry about hardware, just focus on selling the dreams…

[WiredEarp]

Personally, I think blending physical walls with virtual ones is the future. Otherwise, you have all sorts of issues with people walking through walls, running into each other, etc, meaning you have to develop 'stuck ghosts' code etc. Immersion will also be better when people can 'feel' a virtual wall (even it its just fabric/inflatable).

I understand that walls lead to camera occulusion issues, but I think combining realities is the next step. That said, this setup is a good first step towards the goal of VR lasertag that many of us have been thinking seriously about.

[STRZ]

Here in Germany we have a lot of fun-fairs, basically mobile attraction parks going from city to city, some very big ones and a lot of small ones all over the country. The biggest, the Oktoberfest you might have seen in Videos. I wonder if you could pack a nice VRcade setup into a mobile ghost train space without the rails and all the other decoration stuff. Moving from city to city you could get away with a fixed setup of walls, maybe updating it every year. Could be easily the most amazing attraction on fun-fairs like this having people standing in the row all the time, even at smaller fairs.

[JamieVRcade]

Here in Germany we have a lot of fun-fairs, basically mobile attraction parks going from city to city, some very big ones and a lot of small ones all over the country. The biggest, the Oktoberfest you might have seen in Videos. I wonder if you could pack a nice VRcade setup into a mobile ghost train space without the rails and all the other decoration stuff. Moving from city to city you could get away with a fixed setup of walls, maybe updating it every year. Could be easily the most amazing attraction on fun-fairs like this having people standing in the row all the time, even at smaller fairs.

I think that's a good idea. Applications like that work well because our system is so flexible. We need to meet certain requirements, but we can make it work in a wide variety of situations.

[JamieVRcade]

Personally, I think blending physical walls with virtual ones is the future. Otherwise, you have all sorts of issues with people walking through walls, running into each other, etc, meaning you have to develop 'stuck ghosts' code etc. Immersion will also be better when people can 'feel' a virtual wall (even it its just fabric/inflatable).

I understand that walls lead to camera occulusion issues, but I think combining realities is the next step. That said, this setup is a good first step towards the goal of VR lasertag that many of us have been thinking seriously about.

According to our testing so far, people won't be running into each other. Not unless they deliberately are trying to cause trouble. At which point, their game will be exited and a floor attendant will remove them after having AMPLE in-game warning. People do not want to walk through walls, even virtual ones. Especially if walking through a wall means that your in-game character suffers and you get kicked out of the VRcade after you paid to be in there. These aren't trolls on Call of Duty, after all. There will be enough buffer room between the end of the in-game level and the end of the capture volume to allow any sort of strange accidents to happen, as well as attendants on the Grid floor who can fix situations like this while maintaining private chat communication with any player they choose.

There are many issues with props, as stated before. I don't think it's impossible, but it's massively impractical and very expensive to build, setup, reset, and maintain all while limiting what you can do with that space. It's extremely limiting just for the sake of being able to lean against something, which is a habit you break after 5 minutes in the VRcade. I probably can't convince you that it's true until you step into one yourself, but I can assure you that it isn't as big of a problem as you might fear and definitely not worth the liability, damage to equipment, limited immersion, and limited function of space.

[WiredEarp]

Those are some good points. Definitely it simplifies things if you don't have to worry about the walls... you can just get any space and make it into an arena.

[Direlight]

Looks great, but you are going to need a dedicated team to be making games for it. If we didn't have so many "mouse or nothing" people, video game developers (pc) would of had full motion controller support a long time ago. Your average video game is coded with literally decades old input style.

[JamieVRcade]

Looks great, but you are going to need a dedicated team to be making games for it. If we didn't have so many "mouse or nothing" people, video game developers (pc) would of had full motion controller support a long time ago. Your average video game is coded with literally decades old input style.

It takes 5 minutes to put any Unity game into our system. In 5 minutes, we could take (for example) Dead Trigger and make it VR.

You don't have to worry about mapping controls, adjusting player speed, jump height, player animations, etc. Those are all handled in real time now. Replacing a mouse and keyboard is no trouble at all. The only real change is making a level that is the size of whatever play space you have available. Re-using art assets from the original game, you could make several levels in a day. There is literally no challenge in adapting any FPS game to VR.

The reason there are mouse or nothing PC players is because there hasn't been an input device worthy of succeeding it. This is. No input device on the planet even comes close to what we are doing because you are using the best controller in the world when you play in our system. One that you have been using your whole life. Your body.

If a 62 year old woman and a 5 year old little girl can nail targets on their first try with no auto aim or assistance of any kind, you know it's perfect. Unless you hate the idea of actually moving, holding a gun, feeling it kick in your hand, and all of the other immersive qualities it provides, you probably won't have too many issues putting the mouse and keyboard down and getting up to play. That creates the demand and interest to play more and with our ease of integration, there is no obstacle in porting anything over.

[JamieVRcade]

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, FOLKS!

[Namielus]

Im curious; Why did you quote yourself?

[JamieVRcade]

Im curious; Why did you quote yourself?

I have no idea what you are talking about.

[TheHolyChicken]

Well I'm glad for that hiccup, because otherwise I would have missed this thread. Very, very exciting, and I'm looking forward to seeing further updates - particularly the improved positional tracking and finger tracking etc. It's looking strong already.

[Aabel]

This is amazing! Really great work! and I am not at all surprised that people are hesitant to walk through walls lol. I was thinking that would be the case and it's great to hear that it is. Am I understanding it right that you guys are going to be developing your own optical tracking cameras?

I look forward to your first location opening, will definitely be taking a trip up the coast to check it out.

[JamieVRcade]

This is amazing! Really great work! and I am not at all surprised that people are hesitant to walk through walls lol. I was thinking that would be the case and it's great to hear that it is. Am I understanding it right that you guys are going to be developing your own optical tracking cameras?

I look forward to your first location opening, will definitely be taking a trip up the coast to check it out.

We are using commercial cameras, but proprietary software. Look forward to having you play! Thanks.

[bobv5]

"Lightsabers are odd. When they contact a target, they cut right through it, which is perfect, but when they contact another lightsaber, they clash. So they will need a real prop to clash into, but now you have a real prop being swung at real people wearing expensive gear."

Co-Op lightsabres are easy. Players have them, enemys don't. Probably have to call them laser swords instead though.

When you say physical walls are expensive I assume you are refering to the tracking hardware, not the actual walls? Because a few sheets of plywood and some screws is not going to cost much. Or perhaps you meant more robust player gear, insurance, or whatever?

From your point of view, this is could be a reason to not include the walls, but I would like to be able to run full speed out of the way of incoming fire, relying on the nice, safe, bullet resistant wall to slow me down, rather than my legs.

I also think the Rift is a bad choice. It is built to be as light as possible for people who payed a lot of money and don't want to break it. Not for an adrenaline pumped idiot who runs into walls. Even without the walls, the HMD's are going to get accidentally droped, thrown on the floor in rage or fear, people are going to fall over, arcade gear is built really tough for a reason. A possible solution to this is to smear fibreglass car body filler all over the things, but I think a better solution would be a proper Rift like arcade HMD.

Good luck, the demo looks great.

[Aabel]

From your point of view, this is could be a reason to not include the walls, but I would like to be able to run full speed out of the way of incoming fire, relying on the nice, safe, bullet resistant wall to slow me down, rather than my legs.

Perceiving the wall is there is almost every bit as good as the wall actually being there. The VRcade will make players perceive walls that do not exist in the real world, however for the game world they do, and players will respect them. Being able to physically collide with a wall is really a minor thing in the over all experience when you weigh in the advantages of not having walls in the capture space.

[JamieVRcade]

"Lightsabers are odd. When they contact a target, they cut right through it, which is perfect, but when they contact another lightsaber, they clash. So they will need a real prop to clash into, but now you have a real prop being swung at real people wearing expensive gear."

Co-Op lightsabres are easy. Players have them, enemys don't. Probably have to call them laser swords instead though.

When you say physical walls are expensive I assume you are refering to the tracking hardware, not the actual walls? Because a few sheets of plywood and some screws is not going to cost much. Or perhaps you meant more robust player gear, insurance, or whatever?

From your point of view, this is could be a reason to not include the walls, but I would like to be able to run full speed out of the way of incoming fire, relying on the nice, safe, bullet resistant wall to slow me down, rather than my legs.

I also think the Rift is a bad choice. It is built to be as light as possible for people who payed a lot of money and don't want to break it. Not for an adrenaline pumped idiot who runs into walls. Even without the walls, the HMD's are going to get accidentally droped, thrown on the floor in rage or fear, people are going to fall over, arcade gear is built really tough for a reason. A possible solution to this is to smear fibreglass car body filler all over the things, but I think a better solution would be a proper Rift like arcade HMD.

Good luck, the demo looks great.

Yes, co-op lightsabers are very easy. People will want to duel, though. That is what I meant when I said it will be tricky. Against AI it will be a piece of cake.

By expensive, I mean the warehouse space that we will have to lease, manage, and build out that can only be used for ONE layout. That's what I mean by expensive, compared to an empty room with no walls that can be used for any level in any game or any non-game application.

When you are offering this level of immersion and control, having to stop your own momentum is just real life. That's the way it is. You WILL have to stop yourself and start yourself. It takes the physicality of real life that you know and it puts it to use in a virtual world under uncommon conditions and circumstances. That's what is exciting about it. It isn't a traditional game where you can run straight into a wall to stop you, but then again, you can bob and weave while running in VR when you hardly can in a game.

The Rift, right now, is the ONLY choice. We could build our own, but we want to leverage the technological minds at Oculus, who are dedicated to making the world's best HMD. In addition, allowing people to use that brand in the VRcade will make them feel excited and will let us rely on a quality product. The Rifts are cheap. In addition, they are kits, so we can disassemble them and put them in a hard plastic case. People WILL break them, but that is no excuse to COMPLETELY not use them. They are affixed to your head, they aren't a controller. You would have to make a conscious effort to drop your prop, take off your rift, and break it. At which point you were seen by dozens of cameras and are now responsible for fixing it after blatantly breaking it...or however we want to handle it.

We may also partner with Oculus to make a VRcade Rift which addresses the problems and scenarios that you pointed out. The Rift DEFINITELY stays.

[JamieVRcade]

From your point of view, this is could be a reason to not include the walls, but I would like to be able to run full speed out of the way of incoming fire, relying on the nice, safe, bullet resistant wall to slow me down, rather than my legs.

Perceiving the wall is there is almost every bit as good as the wall actually being there. The VRcade will make players perceive walls that do not exist in the real world, however for the game world they do, and players will respect them. Being able to physically collide with a wall is really a minor thing in the over all experience when you weigh in the advantages of not having walls in the capture space.

This. Exactly. People are getting hung up on relatively small downsides of not having real walls and aren't really considering the massive list of benefits of not having walls. At least it doesn't occur to them initially. Not having walls GREATLY outweighs the cons of having walls and the pros of having walls are very small.

[Namielus]

I think your solution is good enough, and I have considered going this route myself.
Don't get me wrong on what I am about to write, because I am loving your work.

But you are downplaying the benefits of haptics in my opinion. I think its too simplified to say
that the pros of having walls are not that many.

Maybe not walls, but stairs, interacting with doors, leaning out window frames, climbing etc.

I agree optitrack is not ideal for this type of thing because they require a fairly large setup volume
and smaller capture volume.

So for 1:1 room tracking you either need the optics on your persona, tracking active or passive markers around the room.. - Or you would have to use magnetic tracking like a wireless hydra or Polhemus G4.
Polhemus G4 is too expensive for what it is, but its a good technology that expands pretty well and
has a much smaller setup volume than capture volume.

I think a combination of IR-cameras and magnetic trackers can provide a feasible way of setting up a full scale room with tracking.

I do agree that the cons for this are many, I just dont agree that there arent many pros.

Btw, I am doing extensive research into setting up the best possible way to 3D scan people and make avatars of them.

Is this something that would interest you?

[Direlight]

The reason there are mouse or nothing PC players is because there hasn't been an input device worthy of succeeding it. This is. No input device on the planet even comes close to what we are doing because you are using the best controller in the world when you play in our system. One that you have been using your whole life. Your body.

Motion controllers are not new, we had good 3 axis ones available for years and now 9 axis ones & optical. I doubt your claims too that you can implement fully working motion controllers in 5 minutes per game. I think you can implement it, just not in 5 minutes (pretty sure you have to test it for bugs etc.)

As for as the variety of games, you have to obtain licensing rights to use them or build games yourself. Both cut into your profit margin or time. I do think you have a good business plan for the most part, very dubious of the walking around freely part though. Maybe set it up on like a boxing ring if you are not all ready planning that.

[Aabel]

But you are downplaying the benefits of haptics in my opinion. I think its too simplified to say
that the pros of having walls are not that many.

I think you are underestimating the degree to which our brain fills in gaps of information, have you seen the magic pot? Haptics is probably the one area where accuracy is the least needed.

In development trade offs have to be made, and from what I have seen VRcade has made excellent decisions in this regard to create a robust immersive platform for Virtual reality arcades that can be programmed and re-purposed very easily. These guys are delivering holodeck 1.0 major props to them. Personally I am very glad they didn't get hung up on so many of the things people here seem to be obsessing on, a lot of it is just plain unnecessary once you have a solid HMD and low latency tracking.

[JamieVRcade]

I think your solution is good enough, and I have considered going this route myself.
Don't get me wrong on what I am about to write, because I am loving your work.

But you are downplaying the benefits of haptics in my opinion. I think its too simplified to say
that the pros of having walls are not that many.

Maybe not walls, but stairs, interacting with doors, leaning out window frames, climbing etc.

I agree optitrack is not ideal for this type of thing because they require a fairly large setup volume
and smaller capture volume.

So for 1:1 room tracking you either need the optics on your persona, tracking active or passive markers around the room.. - Or you would have to use magnetic tracking like a wireless hydra or Polhemus G4.
Polhemus G4 is too expensive for what it is, but its a good technology that expands pretty well and
has a much smaller setup volume than capture volume.

I think a combination of IR-cameras and magnetic trackers can provide a feasible way of setting up a full scale room with tracking.

I do agree that the cons for this are many, I just dont agree that there arent many pros.

Btw, I am doing extensive research into setting up the best possible way to 3D scan people and make avatars of them.

Is this something that would interest you?

We were in talks with Polhemus and others and what we found, even beyond price, was latency problems. Most alternate solutions, even if they did work, wouldn't be fast enough. They don't need to be in order to work in the applications that they were designed for.

I am debating on the avatar thing. I want 3d faces scanned in, but then you have realistic faces of people being shot at. If we did a build your own avatar, the art styles wouldn't match up if we offered both options. So I'm not sure. I'm always interested in looking at tech, though!

[DaveRuddell]

The reason there are mouse or nothing PC players is because there hasn't been an input device worthy of succeeding it. This is. No input device on the planet even comes close to what we are doing because you are using the best controller in the world when you play in our system. One that you have been using your whole life. Your body.

Motion controllers are not new, we had good 3 axis ones available for years and now 9 axis ones & optical. I doubt your claims too that you can implement fully working motion controllers in 5 minutes per game. I think you can implement it, just not in 5 minutes (pretty sure you have to test it for bugs etc.)

As far as the variety of games, you have to obtain licensing rights to use them or build games yourself. Both cut into your profit margin or time. I do think you have a good business plan for the most part, very dubious of the walking around freely part though. Maybe set it up on like a boxing ring if you are not all ready planning that.

I think there is an odd disconnection of communication here. I think the reason there are so many "mouse or nothing" players is because the mouse is a standard input device that everyone seems to have. If a developer has a well-known, well-adopted form of input, he will code against that, hence the mouse and keyboard. Almost everyone has a mouse and keyboard to interface with a computer. Motion controls are nice, but a generic control probably doesn't work for all games and coding support for devices like that can be a pain in the @ss. I think with the release of things like the Leap, we'll see the new input devices come into play. Microsoft seems to think that Kinnect for PC will also be a big success (we'll see about that). If a new motion controller is generic enough to work for most games and easy to code against for devs, I see a big adoption of it.

As for our workflow, we have a Unity package that can be dropped into any existing project and wired up in about 5 minutes. The caveat is that the setup is basic. You have positional/motion control over your character and props along with a replacement for the Main Camera object that feeds into our DIY Rift. Direlight, you are right in saying there is a certain level of debugging and tweaking that needs to be done, but for the few simple projects and games we've dropped it into, setup time is somewhere between 3 min and 10 min. We have not tested with an external multiplayer environment yet (that will be a big challenge for existing games). But for the sake of being able to just "drop it in" and walk around in your game, it's about 5 min. This is also assuming that you have a first-person-camera based game.

On a side-note, later today I plan to release a small Unity package for the DIY Rift community that you can drop into your Unity3d games. This is perfect for those of you who are SUPER anxious and built your own Rift and also may be way down on the shipping queue. The package doesn't include head-tracking, but you can hook into that with cyber's Vireio driver. You will also need the Vireio driver if you don't have Unity Pro. This is due to the fact that the warping/barreling effect requires a vertex/fragment shader which only runs in Unity Pro.

[Aabel]

I do think you have a good business plan for the most part, very dubious of the walking around freely part though.

How so? They are basically taking an optical motion capture approach, but optimized for low latency VR, there really isn't anything to be dubious of here. They obviously have a talented and funded development team, have solved some big issues and are close to having a marketable, maybe even franchise able business/product. This is super exciting. If it weren't for arcades it's doubtful there would have been much demand for consoles. VRcade is going to give people a chance to have a Rift experience without having drop several hundred for their own HMD and peripherals and maybe even a grand or more on a new PC. VRcade is going to wet the general public appetite for VR.

[JamieVRcade]

The reason there are mouse or nothing PC players is because there hasn't been an input device worthy of succeeding it. This is. No input device on the planet even comes close to what we are doing because you are using the best controller in the world when you play in our system. One that you have been using your whole life. Your body.

Motion controllers are not new, we had good 3 axis ones available for years and now 9 axis ones & optical. I doubt your claims too that you can implement fully working motion controllers in 5 minutes per game. I think you can implement it, just not in 5 minutes (pretty sure you have to test it for bugs etc.)

As far as the variety of games, you have to obtain licensing rights to use them or build games yourself. Both cut into your profit margin or time. I do think you have a good business plan for the most part, very dubious of the walking around freely part though. Maybe set it up on like a boxing ring if you are not all ready planning that.

This last week we have implemented perfect working motion controls in several experiences. Seriously, there is almost nothing to it. Get the system to talk with the engine using our software and start walking around in any environment in any game with a gun of any appearance. I don't know what else to tell you other than it works great. Yes, we can get motion working in 5 minutes. There are no bugs because our system is worked out to take the reliable, clean, fast motion tracking data and put it where it needs to go. Not saying there won't be bugs in the future or that there won't be strange cases where things don't work right EVER, but it definitely works as advertised right now.

Now if you have some hybrid job that you need to do where the character's hands are sewn to the gun and they need to move correctly based on where the gun goes, yeah, you will need to test to work out the visuals should there be any issues, but functionally, the gun goes where you put it. So does your head. So does your position. End of story.

Of course we would have to spend time and/or money to get games in the VRcade. Were you under the assumption that I thought that was going to be free or quick? We can adapt games to the VRcade, which will mean that a deal will be in place that is mutually beneficial to everyone involved, or we will develop the experiences ourselves. This is how it has always been.

[Namielus]

Aabel,
I was saying, that there are more than just few benefits to having haptics. Not that its absolutely necessary. I am not dictating what VRcade should do, should have done, or anything like that.

If you read my post again it is stated quite specifically that I am loving this setup.

VRarcade has a lot of benefits, so does other solutions. End of story.

Not going to continue that discussion here, because its about something else than VRcade and irrelevant at this point Just made it very clear what I meant, hopefully.


anyway, about avatars:

I think realistic avatar generation is too expensive for just one session. Even with lots of cameras, it seems to require some cleanup by a 3dartist.

What I would imagine myself, is that people buy these avatars of themselves and get them on a thumbdrive, downloadable or similar. The capture time is fast, 1millisecond if you have enough cameras. The photogrammetry processing and the cleanups are what takes time.

By offering it as a permanent avatar they own, you can defend a higher price on getting a personal avatar because its an item people buy. Maybe it could be included in a subscribtion to one of these venues.

Then they could bring that avatar into different multiplayer games at home etc, and I personally would pay a lot for that.

[JamieVRcade]

Aabel,
I was saying, that there are more than just few benefits to having haptics. Not that its absolutely necessary. I am not dictating what VRcade should do, should have done, or anything like that.

If you read my post again it is stated quite specifically that I am loving this setup.

VRarcade has a lot of benefits, so does other solutions. End of story.

Not going to continue that discussion here, because its about something else than VRcade and irrelevant at this point Just made it very clear what I meant, hopefully.


anyway, about avatars:

I think realistic avatar generation is too expensive for just one session. Even with lots of cameras, it seems to require some cleanup by a 3dartist.

What I would imagine myself, is that people buy these avatars of themselves and get them on a thumbdrive, downloadable or similar. The capture time is fast, 1millisecond if you have enough cameras. The photogrammetry processing and the cleanups are what takes time.

By offering it as a permanent avatar they own, you can defend a higher price on getting a personal avatar because its an item people buy. Maybe it could be included in a subscribtion to one of these venues.

Then they could bring that avatar into different multiplayer games at home etc, and I personally would pay a lot for that.

What about the clash in art styles when people who didn't pay play with those who did?

[Namielus]

I have seen themes done multiple times, sometimes called scenarios. What you are making is a platform, the content should a breeze after that.

Personally, I dont see a problem in mix of styles. You see that in lots of online games. But you could restrict it for certain scenarios, and make players use regular avatars when desirable.

[bobv5]

LOts of replys have been made before I sent this, sorry if I missed anything relevant to this post, but if I take the time to read the new replys, even more new repls will be made.


"By expensive, I mean the warehouse space that we will have to lease, manage, and build out that can only be used for ONE layout. That's what I mean by expensive, compared to an empty room with no walls that can be used for any level in any game or any non-game application."

Fair enough.

"When you are offering this level of immersion and control, having to stop your own momentum is just real life."

I think we may be misunderstanding each other. Having to stop your own momentum is not real life. You could also just run into the wall. Probably foolish in a sim, but IRL you wouldn't care, if it avoided bullet induced death.

"That's what is exciting about it. It isn't a traditional game where you can run straight into a wall to stop you, but then again, you can bob and weave while running in VR when you hardly can in a game."

When you say "traditional game", do you mean a computer game, or something like paintball or laser quest? Just to be clear, I meant run in to a physical, IRL wall, ingore the bruises.

"The Rift, right now, is the ONLY choice"

" The Rifts are cheap. In addition, they are kits, so we can disassemble them and put them in a hard plastic case. People WILL break them, but that is no excuse to COMPLETELY not use them."

When I said "Rift like", I meant Riftish guts, different case. A misunderstanding, not a disagrement.

[Direlight]

How so?

Running into things, why do you think almost every VR setup talks about treadmills etc.

As far as time tables goes and unity, other programmers here said implementing hydra etc. would take time and the game its self requires modifying unless, you are emulating the mouse (also takes time to customize it per game).

People here have a bad habit of promising things and then when launch time comes it is not close. Doom 3 took 1 day to implement, release comes and nothing.

Setting up and rebinding controls often takes more then 5 minutes. I see some very good tech demos on your youtube page, I don't see even 1 full game though let alone dozens. I am being realistic and I know how interface coding goes, 5 minutes is not realistic for anything other then generic emulation (not even tweaked for that game) or every unity, modder, and console programmer is slower then molasses.

I am personally excited for your arcade and wish I had funding for a similar wireless system, just don't get cocky.

[JamieVRcade]

How so?

Running into things, why do you think almost every VR setup talks about treadmills etc.

As far as time tables goes and unity, other programmers here said implementing hydra etc. would take time and the game its self requires modifying unless, you are emulating the mouse (also takes time to customize it per game).

People here have a bad habit of promising things and then when launch time comes it is not close. Doom 3 took 1 day to implement, release comes and nothing.

Setting up and rebinding controls often takes more then 5 minutes. I see some very good tech demos on your youtube page, I don't see even 1 full game though let alone dozens. I am being realistic and I know how interface coding goes, 5 minutes is not realistic for anything other then generic emulation (not even tweaked for that game) or every unity, modder, and console programmer is slower then molasses.

I am personally excited for your arcade and wish I had funding for a similar wireless system, just don't get cocky.

We rip out the original camera. It's gone. We replace it with ours, which listens to our tech on how to move. We rip out the gun. It's gone. We replace it with the exact same 3D model and track it like the head. The gun prop has intelligence to know when to recoil and when not to recoil as well as to fire when the trigger is pulled. The thing is, we aren't tacking on a control interface onto an existing architecture. We aren't retrofitting stuff to work with our controls. We create the in-game counterpart, which behaves how we tell it to. That is probably the biggest difference between what developers trying to put the Hydra into an already existing game is.

Now, getting the full skeleton to work is the same concept, but depending on how the original model is rigged, work will probably have to be done there. Walking around in first person is all I am, and have been, talking about. That part we have handled. I'm not being cocky, we have done it multiple times. I'm not making any big promises that we can't already answer with a yes.

Can we put you inside your Unity game with a prop today? Yes. Will it take 5-10 minutes. Yes. That's all I'm saying.

[bobv5]

Assuming the dude has acsess to the unity source project, it would be as simple as dropping in his VR player. I have spent hours playing with Unity, just making environments and droping in the FPS prefab player. Not one line of code was needed.


EDIT: Stupid forum didn't show he ninja'd me.

Care to tell how the haptics work?

[Direlight]

Yes Yes its so easy except for the fact...

Valve needed a team of guys to implement motion controls and headtracking.
Modders here are taking days to weeks to implement just basic look & aim.
Tutorials on youtube about unity & motion controls sound far more complicated then you describe.
It is somehow more difficult to implement hydra (even they it has more support from the community)
Games have different control schemes, even shooters.



If it is easy as you say, whatever your custom software or scripts are, they would make tons of money selling it to other unity developers. Maybe you are doing that I don't know. All I know is everyone else is not implementing it that quickly and you don't have much content yourself (that you have shown).

Note: I am not saying you can't modify games, I just need more evidence it is that easy for the time allowed. Also, the time you spent programming the special software counts as development time.

Look at it from my point of view. My own experience with just emulation takes more then 5 minutes. It is nice to see though someone making 3d controls for 3d games. Consoles have been doing it for years.

[Nick3DvB]

anyway, about avatars:

I think realistic avatar generation is too expensive for just one session. Even with lots of cameras, it seems to require some cleanup by a 3dartist.

What I would imagine myself, is that people buy these avatars of themselves and get them on a thumbdrive, downloadable or similar. The capture time is fast, 1millisecond if you have enough cameras. The photogrammetry processing and the cleanups are what takes time.

By offering it as a permanent avatar they own, you can defend a higher price on getting a personal avatar because its an item people buy. Maybe it could be included in a subscribtion to one of these venues.

Then they could bring that avatar into different multiplayer games at home etc, and I personally would pay a lot for that.

My guess is that most people would want to be uniquely identifiable, either a stylised version of their physical self or a customised altar-ego, but it has to be adaptable enough to be in-keeping with the artwork of any given game world, and to keep up with the latest "virtual fashion" craze. I see Avatars and other user-owned assets being a HUGE market eventually, on the scale of iTunes / eBay, something like the Unity asset store but standardised across all engines, someone’s going to make a fortune…

I was saying, that there are more than just few benefits to having haptics. Not that its absolutely necessary. I am not dictating what VRcade should do, should have done, or anything like that.

If you read my post again it is stated quite specifically that I am loving this setup.

VRarcade has a lot of benefits, so does other solutions. End of story.

Not going to continue that discussion here, because its about something else than VRcade and irrelevant at this point Just made it very clear what I meant, hopefully.

Spot on Namielus. I hope I didn’t come across as combative on this point either, we can and should discuss the relative merits of MR vs VR, without it degenerating into an argument about which is “better”, there is a place for both, everyone perceives their environment slightly differently and it’s going to be a matter of personal preference in the end. Until we have an feasible alternative to optical tracking it’s a moot point anyway, the occlusion issues are a deal-breaker at the moment.

If the consumer Rift ends up with “eye” cameras (for visual pass-through if nothing else) then we may be able to do inside-out tracking with markers or a more advanced computer vision solution, but we’re not there yet. Whilst most of us just sat back and waited for the future to happen a few had the foresight to just get on and do it, the fact that VRcade have built something that actually works now is an incredible achievement, a few short years ago even most members of this forum wouldn’t have believed it was possible, as for the general public - it’s going to blow their minds…

[bobv5]

If it is easy as you say, whatever your custom software or scripts are, they would make tons of money selling it to other unity developers. Maybe you are doing that I don't know. All I know is everyone else is not implementing it that quickly and you don't have much content yourself (that you have shown).

I don't have any software. What I meant was that the VRcade guy probably has a VR player character prefab.

[Namielus]

Also remember, when you buy an avatar of yourself that looks realistic - its just as, if not more enjoyable to the other players. After all its the other players that actually sees you.

[zalo]

I have no reason to disbelieve that they could do a half-assed implementation of their system into any game. After all, the prefabs have already been made, and it's not like it's a new engine or anything. But I see this as being beside the point. The Arena/Warehouse will obviously have to run a custom game.

On the subject of avatars, why not hire a couple models (one female, one male) who are kind of bland looking, and photogrammeterize them as the default players? Perhaps even yourselves? They'll still be real people, so the art-style is coherent. Odds are, you'll see them everywhere in the game, so that kind of cheapens their looks. Perhaps you could even make them slightly lower quality (optimized?)

That way, the people with REAL avatars really stand out. You'll know it's the same guy who frags you every time by the look in his eyes... or... her eyes.

This could be awesome if you can really pull off motion tracking across such a wide area, and still assign each point to its rightful owner. I suggest comparing the velocities of the points and the velocities integrated from the accelerometers in the rift.

[WiredEarp]

Re hacking other games in 5 minutes - I guess if you have precreated gun objects, you could easily add VR capable (IE, independent movement capable) guns etc to existing games. However, I assume this is with games you have source code access to? If not, I'm surprised if its that easy to hack another Unity game that quickly without having source. There are other issues however with doing it 'correctly'. For example, a FPS game may show a box or other obstacle on screen that has gaps in it. The game itself will not let you shoot through the hole in the box, because the authors never considered that someone would be able to crouch to that level and fire. Hence when a VR player, who inevitable gets himself into all sorts of situations that are not possible in games, will be disappointed by the fact that he cannot move his gamegun or head through the hole, or shoot through the hole. Just an example, because many games have decisions like this made, based on what the author at the time considered possible player movement.

That said, I think these issues will be less of a consideration in future with games crossing over between desktop and VR genres. My point simply is that I think the best VR games will be those that have been designed for VR from the start, and allow people to do things they cannot in desktop games. For example, one of my tactics in Dactyl Nightmare was crouching and sticking my whole arm/gun through the centre of an obstacle very similar to what I am describing, and using it as a shield that I could shoot through. The fact that I was able to do this at all significantly added to my immersion and enjoyment.

[DaveRuddell]

zalo & WiredEarp: You are both right. Our implementation into an existing Unity game would be "half-assed" within the 5 minute time constraint using our own prefabs. I tried to explain this is my previous post, but you know... noise and all. So it DOES require the full Unity project to work and it is only a replacement/addon for the Main Camera object and a tracker script for whatever is being used as a gun prop. This means games with that use the "arms-only" FPS style will begin to lose immersion or just not work at all unless you can disconnect the arms from the gun. So... certain games will work great, but others will need more tweaking.

The warehouse/arena will run a custom level/version of a game, but this isn't entirely limiting. One of the big selling points that we are pushing on is having the ability for Indies and VR enthusiasts to market their at-home/mobile experiences using the arcade. Imagine you spent 6 months working on this awesome mobile game and now you can create a simple level that leverages all of the main game engine code/art/sound/other assets and have a deliverable product within, we'll say, a week with all of the debugging and testing. Now people play the small experience in the VRcade, which you get money for, PLUS they know you're game exists outside of VRcade. Maybe it's mobile, maybe it's a PC game with the Rift and Leap, maybe it's XBLA.

The main point is that there is a new way for people to start playing and experiencing games and we want to foster that new creative experience. There is a LOT of work to be done on this front and much of it will have to be carefully designed and planned for. Our end SDK product (VRDK) will resemble something like MiddleVR, but with a few extra integration points. I plan to be able to provide some common VR components alongside our own so that you can simultaneously build a game for the Leap and Rift or a dataglove AND have a workable VRcade game at the same time. People don't like to build the same thing multiple times and they want it easy. We're going to try to deliver both of those. On the flip side, this also means that you will have to understand the limitations of our system when porting a game/level to use with it. There are many creative ways to get around the space limitations and make the player feel like the space is much bigger than our average 40'x40'. Even with 10'x10' you can create something that makes people feel they are going everywhere in the world while not having to leave the capture volume.

In the next couple weeks we'll have full body tracking that can be mapped to a Mechanim-ready character model and controlled in-game. This is also a prefab that "replaces" existing character animations. The hope is that it's another "easy" 5-minute process, but it could also be a pain if your character is rigged or setup in a non-standardized way. At this point it's about delivering the best support anyone could ask for. We have a huge Unity developer meetup this coming week where we'll hopefully get some Mechanim experts on board with our cause. We also need all of your help and feedback to know what current VR devs want and use outside of our small team, so that's one reason we're on here talking to all of you. If we can't make this a painless and happy experience for all of you guys, what's the rest of the world going to think?

[Direlight]

We also need all of your help and feedback to know what current VR devs want and use outside of our small team,

Arena style first person fighting & dueling games. Think of the old VR games like Virtual On (but not 3rd person).

Not like Hawken either, make it a more agile game and have more devastating attacks & transformation abilities. Virtual on had fairly small maps too.