Carmack On VR Latency 94
An anonymous reader writes "For a while now, John Carmack has been pushing to bring virtual reality technology back to the gaming world. VR was largely abandoned over a decade ago when it became apparent that the hardware just wasn't ready to support it. In 2013, things are different; cheap displays with a high pixel density and powerful processors designed for small systems are making virtual reality a... reality. One of the last obstacles to be conquered is latency — the delay between moving your head and seeing your perspective change in the virtual world. In a lengthy and highly-technical post at #AltDevBlogADay, Carmack has outlined a number of strategies for mitigating and reducing latency. With information and experience like this being shared with the game development community at large, it shouldn't be long until VR makes a permanent place for itself in our gaming lives."
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You mean "Tock"?
Also, VR will make a massive comback if, as I suspect, Google Glass takes off and competitors crop up. This isn't a new idea, since Steve Mann has been wired for VR since, what? The 80's? I think its time has come.
Re:Eerrrr (Score:4, Insightful)
Google Glass doesn't have anything to do with VR. You are confusing it with Augmented Reality.
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incidentally Google Glass has very little to do with AR. Its just a transparent 320x200 (or less) resolution display with camera for your phone :/
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incidentally Google Glass has very little to do with AR. Its just a transparent 320x200 (or less) resolution display with camera for your phone :/
Having a display at a constant spot in your field of view, and a camera perfectly aligned with your field of view, doesn't give you possibilities to quite immersively augment your perception of reality? Come again?
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incidentally Google Glass has very little to do with AR. Its just a transparent 320x200 (or less) resolution display with camera for your phone :/
Having a display at a constant spot in your field of view, and a camera perfectly aligned with your field of view, doesn't give you possibilities to quite immersively augment your perception of reality? Come again?
not if the display is in the corner of your eye instead of overlapping said reality
but hey, Im sure that wont stop Google from redefining AR to "reality with some subtitles in the corner"
Invest in AR, not VR (Score:2)
You mean "Tock"?
Also, VR will make a massive comback if, as I suspect, Google Glass takes off and competitors crop up. This isn't a new idea, since Steve Mann has been wired for VR since, what? The 80's? I think its time has come.
You are confusing VR with AR. Augmented reality systems like Google Glass simply overlay information about our environment in our visual field -- it doesn't replace reality like a VR system is supposed to, it just augments it. Augmenting reality *is* trivial, and the solutions are easily within the domain of current and near-term forseeable engineering technology. Functional VR, otoh, means directly interfacing with the proprioception/kinesthesia network in human neural anatomy that tells the brain what
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If it's ok with you I put your post in my dictionary as a description for "Technobabble".
After decoding it I understand that anything below matrix quality immersion can't be called VR, according to you.
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Carmack, Abrash and Palmer Luckey talked about this during the Virtual Insanity session at QuakeCon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8), And they point out that augmented reality is harder than VR for a few reasons.
The biggest ones are that your latency tolerances are much lower since you are comparing with reality. So any latency you add will be very obvious to the user as the things will seem to "float" on top of the real objects. Furthermore the way our eyes perceive depth makes it very difficul
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"Tick", hyphen, "tack"? Your 3D printed clock sounds like junk.
But his breath is minty fresh.
Two Words (Score:2)
Dactyl Nightmare
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I used to work for a company doing VR arcade games.
Dactyl Nightmare was the big kid in a very small playground.
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Hacking one of the gyro based optical image stabilisers from digital cameras would do the trick. Stabilise the overall frame and lose the motion sickness, lag in moving elements (and perspective changes) won't be noticed or won't be noticed enough to break immersion. Having the entire scene out of sync is very easy to detect, even if you aren't consciously aware of it.
I briefly worked for a VR company last century, 1st day they pointed out that stereo is an option not a necessity, so is resolution. All that
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One: laser ring gyros instead of mechanical accelerometer or visual head tracking systems two: Render a frame larger than FOV and digitally move that before the next frame is rendered.
Not hard.
The first costs on materials, power and research, and the second requires loads of processing power. Cheap compared to the cost of, say, an F35, but expensive for consumer electronics (which I gather is the point for this article).
For your edification as an armchair specialist on laser ring gyroscopes, framebuffers and all things VR, may I suggest that you at least bother to multiply the number of bits per pixel times the number of pixels times the FPS, to at least get a handle on how much data needs to be
Whenever anyone mentions cheap VR headsets.... (Score:5, Funny)
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.... I can't help thinking this [buytvhatnow.com]
Seeing that makes my think of The Jerk.
How long before people start suing for neck strain?
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Yep. The fun part is that this isn't even much a joke, the Oculus Rift is essentially that thing, just in a nicer box. There where even iPhone add ons that did stereo and head tracking. Kind of funny how some cheap crap from the shopping channel and the future of virtual reality are just inches apart.
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1) Oculus has a single 1280x800 display, not two
2) The FOV is just a matter what lenses you stick over the display
3) iPhones have tracking too [youtube.com]
4) A little plastic thing you put on your iPhone is cheap as well (iPhone not so much)
No, I am not claiming that a crappy iPhone add on is as good as the Rift, Rift obviously had put a bunch more thought put into it. I am just remarking how closely related that cheap gimmick is to the Rift. It's very similar technology, the Rift just has a lot more polish and fine tun
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Turns out that Palmer himself actually was involved in one of those iPhone add ons [mtbs3d.com].
The obvious solution! (Score:5, Funny)
Surely any dedicated gamer would see the value in simply injecting a thickening agent into the endolymph of the Vestibular system. With careful dose control, that should induce a matching lag in the perception of motion, thus providing a highly realistic experience!
*Ability to walk and/or perform normal ocular saccades not guaranteed, please refrain from the use of industrial silicones in medical applications.
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Surely any dedicated gamer would see the value in simply injecting a thickening agent into the endolymph of the Vestibular system. With careful dose control, that should induce a matching lag in the perception of motion, thus providing a highly realistic experience!
*Ability to walk and/or perform normal ocular saccades not guaranteed, please refrain from the use of industrial silicones in medical applications.
You can do this magnetically.
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Better to focus on the motion programming ie things like what level of motion is ignored, how much can you reduce resolution during motion (less processing less lag), adding in catch up and, simply skipping areas during rapid motion. This tends to match reality, where you head is tending to catch up to your eyes point of focus and you only really focus in on detail once you head motion has mostly stopped.
Like 3D movies (Score:2)
Maybe it's time for a VR grand comeback.
(... I'm still waiting for my holosuite...)
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There has been 3D movies for decades, (50s or 60s... to lazy to check) but just recently the technology allow it to became mainstream.
Fort Ti and House of Wax were both in 1953.
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Good VR exists, but it's rare. (Score:5, Informative)
Stanford has an elaborate VR lab. [stanford.edu] The system is 120FPS, and the lag is low, but I'm not sure how low. There's full motion tracking of the subject in a 20 foot by 20 foot space. They have public tours every Friday. Sign up and try high-end VR.
This isn't a graphics lab. It's a psychology lab. Some of the results are scary. [stanford.edu] They've had kids go through a VR experience of swimming with sharks. A few weeks later, the kids are asked about it, and a sizable fraction of them believe they really did it, adding details that were not in the sim like what they ate while visiting the sharks.
They're always running psychology experiments, and looking for volunteers. Pays $15/hr.
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> This isn't a graphics lab. It's a psychology lab. Some of the results are scary.
> They've had kids go through a VR experience of swimming with sharks. A few
> weeks later, the kids are asked about it, and a sizable fraction of them believe they
> really did it, adding details that were not in the sim like what they ate while visiting
> the sharks.
That's entirely normal. A bunch of people who all saw the same thing at the same time from the same location a few weeks later, such as a car accide
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Sledge Hammer: No, I prefer to get my information from more reliable sources, like rumor and small children.
In general, though, the unsubstantiated recollections of small children wouldn't be enough to put somebody to death.
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Sledge Hammer: No, I prefer to get my information from more reliable sources, like rumor and small children.
Oh. I thought it was: "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."
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The only terrifying part is that the government still uses both against all evidence that they don't work.
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Our high-school English/Drama teachers did an exercise like that - they set up a classroom skit where they got into an argument or something, and started messing about with hitting each other with fake glass bottles. When it came to the class being given the exercise of writing down an eyewitness account, every person saw a different order of events, even though it was quite obvious the order from a recorded video.
Oculus Rift (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.oculusvr.com/ [oculusvr.com]
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Carmack gives them a shoutout at the very bottom of the article. He doesn't mention them within the article itself because he's not in the hardware business, he's in the software business, and he's talking about techniques that can be used on the software side to improve the experience.
Where have I seen this before? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, yeah. Michael Abrash did this two months ago. [valvesoftware.com]
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I actually found Abrash's article more useful because it looked at the problem from end to end, from head tracking sensors to display technology. Carmack mostly talked about everything between the game engine and the GPU.
But yeah, I was actually making a point about Slashdot's relationship with Carmack.
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Well it's funny, there was a horde of people suggesting more basic versions of John's warping techniques in the comments section to Michael's blog post. They were all dismissed because he felt the silhouetting John talked about was too much of a deal-breaker for realism. John's experiments seem to suggest otherwise, so it'll be interesting to see two competitive headsets using different sets of tricks to try to fool peoples' sense of realism.
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Matthew Regan and Ronald Pose did this in 1994 [google.com].
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Considering that the two were on stage together at QuakeCon talking about this issues I don't think it's all that strange. ;-)
The Virtual Insanity session (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8) is well worth watching if you are interested in these things. As is Carmacks keynote from QuakeCon 2012.
Something I still remember (Score:4, Insightful)
One commentator, however, said something that has stuck with me ever since. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of...
"Eventually the current fad for Virtual Reality will pass, and everyone will forget about it. Then one day you'll look around you and realise that it's everywhere."
(*) If you remember it too, then yes- it really *was* [abime.net] that long ago [amigahistory.co.uk]
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As a tech advance I actually don't care much about Virtual Reality. The VR stuff would be nice for some games and maybe porn, but I doubt it'll be everywhere any time soon. Augmented reality would be nice (but latency for this won't be as big a problem). What I'd want is human augmentation ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909 [slashdot.org] ).
It'll be nice if you could have a minimap in your vision that updates with locations of stuff of interest, cool HUD sort info, and other fancy tech (as ment
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Eventually, in all aspects of the VR discussion, it all boils down to pr0n. We all want ___________* naked, moving, responding to us, in immersive 3D, in our bedroom. Admit it. This is what "the possibilities are endless" means.
* mileage may vary.
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Balance the weight of the VR screen with counter-balances around the head, and you produce a hideous unwieldy 'helmet' that will still cause neck-pain when the head is 'snapped'.
throughout time military helmets have had a certain amount of weight to them.
It is no coincidence that military flight simulators do NOT use VR goggles, even though they have the funds to do so.
Such systems are about training a pilot to use a real jet. a real jet has an large amount of very small controls.
here's an enthusiast simulator startup video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBFb45nPSNs [youtube.com]
in a military simulator you can physically interact with all of those switches. so I would guess the military doesn't use VR goggles yet because of the latency and the difficulty of tracking exactly where the pilot's hands are.
You see, modern games now render using a high-latency pipeline, with some work for future frames being calculated before the current frame is even done. It is ESSENTIAL that the input loop is low frequency compared to the render system.
I
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I don't think you read the article. He's talking about ways to design new displays that can reduce the head-movement -> display latency to 3ms or so, without going through the GPU.
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It was not just hardware (Score:3, Informative)
Numerous studies showed that extended use of VR could cause severe problems, namely permanent lazy eye (loss of depth perception). I believe it was Nintendo that dropped a VR product because of their own studies (I'm too tired to go look for the data at the moment). Government studies also found this to be true, so working in VR in Government jobs is restricted (or was when I was there) to 8 hours per week.
More studies need to be done to determine safe levels, and most importantly people should be made aware of the potential risks to health. Currently there are no warnings that I'm aware of and most people have no knowledge of the studies.
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Nintendo's product was the Virtual Boy [wikipedia.org]. It flopped in the market and they discontinued it. I never heard anything about them pulling it due to health studies; people just had general eye discomfort from the red flickery display and didn't like it. It didn't get to any sort of point where "real" injury stemmed from it.
Also note that the Virtual Boy sat fixed, it was not head-mounted so there was no motion tracking and no weird vertigo effects. Spending time where you're actually moving/looking around a s
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The Nintendo Virtual Boy failed due to being an undesirable product to most of the population(not me, I loved the thing....but I do think it was a bad idea and definitely way to pricey when it came out). It had nothing to do with safety concerns.
Having said that, there was a study way back which claimed stereoscopic displays would negatively impact the development of children less than 6 years old. There was also the concern of staring at a dark+red display too long since the display(unlike the Occulous)
Google Failure (Score:2)
It's not like Google magically broke you jackass. Here [avsforum.com] is one page, and here [sciencedaily.com] is another. When reading that second one, remember what is discussed in the first. Also follow the links in the first article. The Government studies are harder to find, but do exist.
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I looked into this claim when the Oculus Rift was first presented (and the same references were made). BTW the experiments were funded by Sega as they were also looking into making a VR headset.
The only claims I could find are made by one guy. (Who I can't remember the name of right now, but he was involved in the Sega VR project.) And it seems like this is the only person to have said that there are medical problems with using VR. (IIRC he was also involved in the more recent scare that 3D TVs could hurt y
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I worked in the DOD on VR projects which is why I know of the studies showing potential harm from viewing. One may argue that at the time, we used 48hz per eye and now we can get better so it may not have the same impact. The studies did show a chance of it happening increasing based on amount of use.
What is easily provable is that immersion can cause severe headaches,nausea, disorientation, and in rare cases panic attacks. This is why 3D movies use very little depth in their visuals, and more single eye
VR is just not that fun (Score:2)
Its like the Wii, its awesome for a little bit, but at some point your just going to want to sit down and play a game like normal. Thats kind of like the way VR is, its awesome ... then it becomes more and more of an inconvenience, then one day you clean off your desk cause the damn gear, is in your way.
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I think this will only be true until they get the visuals and interaction to the point where it feels like you're in an expansive environment. I remember that Mario 64 was the watershed game for me; the first one where I actually felt like I was freely exploring around an actual place, not just looking at pretty effects on the screen as most 3d (on a 2d display) games were up to that point.
Right now, they all feel like you're operating a camera as part of the "experience". Once that is transparent, things
Nintendo seems to have already solved this (Score:2)
Combine with UDRTRT (Score:1)
I wonder if they can combine it with the unlimited detail rendering technology developed in OZ.. That would be kick-ass
Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4 [youtube.com]
Wake me up when... (Score:2)
we can crash someones brain with a QR code.
Carmack? (Score:1)
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IMHO, Megatexture style engines are the future. The reason is that we our eyes resolution is limited, there is a point where adding more detail is useless and we are close to this point right now. On the other hand, storage capacity and bandwidth continues to increase, making repeating textures less interesting.
Also, RAGE is designed to run 60 fps on XBOX360 and PS3, as a result, a lot of compromises were made. It probably explains the mostly static environment.
I was also a bit disappointed by RAGE but I do
A bright future for this kid Carmack (Score:2)
Imagine what he could do in any number of R&D areas if he didn't have to ship games bogged down by boring narratives, bland level design and twenty-year old ideas of corridor-based run-and-gun.
I wish he'd turn his attention to improving AI and developing emergent gaming. The next frontier awaits, but our Einstein is bent on rendering the same old mousetr
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Caramack is very interested in the way things look - visual fidelity of computer generated images. While working on AI is a somewhat related field, it may not simply interest the guy. His talent has been to find ways of producing impressive visuals with low resource costs, this IS the kind of guy we want working on VR (and AR for that matter), given the current st