New Valve Prototype VR Headset Shows Up At VR Meetup In Boston 41
An anonymous reader writes "The last time we saw Valve's prototype VR headset, which they said was built to the spec that could be found in a consumer product by 2015, it was a using an 'inside-out' tracking approach where a camera mounted on the VR headset tracked markers placed all over the walls and ceiling of the demo room. This week, at a VR meetup in Boston, Valve had a new prototype to show, featuring an 'outside-in' tracking approaching where a single camera trackings IR-LEDs built into the case of the VR headset, much like the forthcoming Oculus Rift DK2. Valve's latest prototype is thought to be using two 1080p displays in portrait orientation, compared to a single 1080p display in the Oculus Rift DK2."
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Prototypes and promises are Valve's bread and butter these days.
Actual delivery? Well....not so much.
Just a prototype for development (Score:2)
Re:Just a prototype for development (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with using two 1080p 16:9 displays in portrait mode is that it is the wrong ratios for covering the field of vision. We should be using two 1600x1200 resolution 4:3 screens in portrait mode. Each 3:4 screen creates a similar ratio of the human eye's field of view (9:13.5) (multiplying the 3:4 screen ratio up, you get 9:12, which is much closer than 9:16 for the 1080p widescreen panels).
Inside-Out Tracking (Score:3)
I've always wondered why you couldn't mount cameras on the outside, and instead of using markers, it would track the room itself, like an optical mouse. Processing would add a fair bit of latency, but you're mostly using the information to correct for drift and error in the gyros, right?
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How many gyros do you think $400 buys?
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about 800, why?
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Focus distance (Score:2)
Inside-Out Tracking (Score:2)
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I believe the gyros are used to take rates, and absolute position is taken from rigid-body tracking
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DOA (Score:2, Insightful)
All these headsets are dead on arrival. Just like the virtuaboy was. Why do these always fail?
This is why: http://i2.wp.com/www.roadtovr.... [wp.com]
One lonely dude sitting in the corner by himself. He can't interact with those around him... if his mom tells him to come to dinner he likely cant hear her and he definitely cant see her so he'll finally find out she's pissed when she slaps the headset off his head.
VR will become a thing when they figure out how to put the display free form in the air in front of you...
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You just need to attach two web cams and microphones to the VR helmet then (with appropriate software) you can see/hear the real world.
Re:DOA (Score:4, Informative)
The virtuaboy was DOA because it was a 5lb monochrome (red/black) monstrosity that had to sit on a table, with barely 3D wireframe games, no tracking, etc whose original creator never intended what was released to be the final product (besides, as seen, it was 2 decades too early for the tech out there.)
Oculus Rift weighs less than a pound and can be worn on the head. It will be bought by 3D shooter enthusiasts would would otherwise buy multiple video cards/monitors just for gaming. I assume it will have a microphone.
I really fail to see what the two have in common. If I were into 3D shooters, I would be saving up for such a system.
This is like claiming in January 2007 the iPhone will bust because of the Apple Newton.
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The virtuaboy was DOA because it was a 5lb monochrome (red/black) monstrosity that had to sit on a table, with barely 3D wireframe games, no tracking, etc
I have one, and quite a few games for it. It's a great system, and the games are a lot of fun. It's easy to control, though figuring out how to hold the controller while looking into the headset is weird at first. It doesn't give anyone in my family headaches. The games aren't just wire frame. They were as good as any handheld out at the time. It's unfortunate that it wasn't done in color. But the red does give it its own very unique feel.
But again, you play that thing and the worlds dead to you. Taking you
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With 3d printing, expired 3D printing patents or will expire soon, 3d design visulization at home could get be a area of growth.
3d artwork, dev workflows for games, games and video conferencing could all be growth areas with todays bandwidth, cpu and emerging artistic creativity.
The other aspect is how will some/many/most users react during and after use?
Thats hours a user will be trapped in your 3d walled garden due to the limits of other web 2.0 sites,
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Ordered mine. But still skeptical. Looking forward to 'Assetto Corsa' with the force feedback wheel and rift.
Week knees nothing, projectile vomiting. It was the downside of the previous generation, even if you got the frame rate to 2 or 3 times the scan rate of the display (mother board/CPU is 8 or 9 years newer then game/headset) it was still pukey. The headsets of that day matched the shooters in sucky resolution. Flight sims back then lost a ton to the terrible screens available than*.
Content will b
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I used a 40'' TV for a gaming screen for a while, sitting monitor close. It did bring out the flaws in the rendering and art.
But I'm old, my visual cortex is trained to 'ignore' grainy images. It not that I can't see the eye candy, it's that if a game is good, the eye candy doesn't matter much.
Jane's ATF was one of the few 'playable' sims under the VFX1. Flight Unlimited 2 also was flyable (FU was more sim then game), though you had to flip the visor up and use the monitor and instruments to take off a
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Flesh light I think already have a product for this and traditional films. Alas being at work I can't look it up.
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> One lonely dude sitting in the corner by himself
So just like me playing computers at home then.
> He can't interact with those around him...
(Other than the initial show and tell) you would not use this for lan parties (or alikes), you would all whip out your laptops for that use case (for me we stopped even doing that and instead whip out a board game for even MOAR socialness or a console game with split screen.
The tech should match the activity. AR sets will not replace TVs/monitors they supplement
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That's a good point, and one of the weird things about VR - either you want 100% immersion, or you actually want very little. The crazy irony is that for VR to be really cool, you need the headset to be able to 100% replicate what the world is like without wearing it. That is, it needs cameras on it so that you can see as if you didn't have the headset on, and likewise microphones and headphones to do the same for sound. Once you've got that working, then start over-laying the degrees of immersion that you
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The last time they failed it was because they were absolutely atrocious. Read the contemporary reports; they never had the chance to reach the stage of causing the sorts of hypothetical social issues you envision. That's not to say that those won't turn out to be problems this time, but they weren't the problem last time. Not by a long shot.
HL3 confirmed (Score:1)
An Apple-Designed Programming Language (Score:2, Funny)
let me guess -- it has one generic all-purpose object type that does everything, and all classes must be submitted to the Apple Class Store, approved, and downloaded before being instantiated.
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Hehe...awesome post dude. I reckon it would totally kill in the right article.