Half-Life 2 Writer on VR Games: We're At Pong Level, Only Scratching the Surface 125
An anonymous reader writes: Valve's Chet Faliszek has been in the video game industry for a long time, and his writing has been instrumental for games like Half-life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Valve is now developing a virtual reality headset, and Faliszek was on hand at a VR-centric conference where he spoke about how the technology is coming along. He said, "None of us know what the hell we are doing. We're still just scratching the surface of VR. We still haven't found out what VR is, and that's fine. We've been making movies in pretty much the same way for 100 years, TV for 60 years and videogames for 40. VR has only really been [in development] for about a year, so we're at Pong level." One of the obstacles holding VR devices back right now is getting the hardware up to snuff. Faliszek says, "There's one thing you can't do and that's make people sick. It has to run at 90 frames per second. Any lower and people feel sick. Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."
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Pretty much the only moviegoing experience I actually enjoy is Studio Movie Grill. When people do those kinds of things there, it doesn't really bother, and I think the reason why is because there has to be plenty of room between seats so that the wait staff can do their jobs, so when people are being obnoxious they're so far removed from you that you don't notice, and the wait staff are really good at not interrupting your movie. That and when you need something you don't have to go out to the lobby (excep
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I don't think it's much of a luxury theater. Feels more like a restaurant that also happens to be a theater. Tickets are usually $9.50, which is more than most theaters, but they have groupon deals like all the time where the tickets are $5, which is a lot less than most theaters.
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Am I the only one who thinks the frame rate isn't whats getting everyone sick?
Resolution and convergence are my big issues. I think the holy grail is a high resolution light field display, but this will require significantly denser pixels if you use microlenses for head worn VR. Maybe once you tackle that you can go for the high frame rate.
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The resolution is fairly secondary to lag. If there is perceptible lag then VR sickness tends to follow.
Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well. (Score:5, Interesting)
It causes illness for good reason. A mismatch between visual field angle and vestibular angle doesn't occur very often in a natural environment - the only place you'll find it is on a boat and when wearing head-mounted displays. Before those, it always indicated something impairing the vestibular system, which likely implied a poison. There's evolved response based on this: 'Visual/vestibular mismatch, probable poison detected, initiate purge of stomach contents before any more is absorbed and make a note not to eat the green berries.'
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So we're basicly throwing an error, which hopefully will be catched in a suitable container?
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resolution is my only issue with oculus rift 1st gen sdk. even the head tracking worked well enough(and most of the time I don't want it, i just want a good 90degree+ head mounted stereo display.
the fps etc. some researchers are focusing purely on that and bringing it up as a big deal because it's the only thing they can help with. -- because making higher resolution displays is not something they can try to get credit and press for.
and really, you would think that a friggin VR expert supadev would r
Re: Tell that to 3D movies as well. (Score:1)
Yeah, we're at least at the Arkanoid stage in VR. Looks awesome, much fun, but quickly becomes frustrating due to controller limitations.
Re: Tell that to 3D movies as well. (Score:1)
"You should be off pudding!"
Nonsense (Score:1)
Nonsense, we've had VR junk around since at least Wolfenstien and some of the crazy Nintendo VR stuff. That stuff was AWFUL and more worthy of being called Pong. See http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wolfenstein/wolfenstein6.htm, that's 1994 so 21 years ago. The VR Boy was 20 years ago. Hell we even had a TV show called VR.5 in 1995
The stuff that is coming out now is barely worthy of being called VR since it doesn't make good on what was promised 20 years ago, nor impoves upon it in any tangible way. Much in
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that your argument suggesting the current stuff isn't worthy of being called VR and that the old stuff was plain "AWFUL" is just proving his thesis that VR is still in its infancy and that we still don't know what the hell we're doing with it, right?
Re: Nonsense (Score:2)
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So? Pong wasn't the first video game either. Pong didn't make it into homes until 1975, but by then home gaming consoles had been around for nearly a decade. See: the brown box.
The point is, prior to now, we've had stuff called "VR" that we'll look back on decades from now and will refer to as a "precursor to VR". We're one year into what history will consider true VR. Likewise, Pong may not have been the first, but it ushered in the modern era of video gaming, in much the same way that Oculus ushered in th
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The point is, prior to now, we've had stuff called "VR" that we'll look back on decades from now and will refer to as a "precursor to VR". We're one year into what history will consider true VR.
the "pong level" VR out now has only two improvements over the "pong level" VR from twenty years ago: resolution and faster computers. I remember playing a shooter game in a VR headset at an arcade that was quite immersive. They put you in a waist-high ring that prevented you from walking around, which is what a lot of people naturally tried to do when they saw the virtual 3D game. So Valve is right: they're at pong level. But they're also wrong: VR has been at pong level for decades, and might never im
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There is more to it being pong level than the hardware (and I think you are oversimplifying that). There is also the raw gamedesign aspect of it. The big difference between the hardware running pong and the hardware we use now is speed and optimization. The game design, partially enabled by the hardware improvements, improved drastically, though. We had to learn how to make video games, what design elements sucked, what was fun, etc. Early video games, by and large, were awful, because we didn't know what w
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Also larger screens - FOV is key in getting (most people's) eyes to override their inner ears for motion input. I tried several of the "higher end" consumer VR headsets years ago - not one of those sets of postage-stamp goggles gave a true sense of immersion.
And faster computers are *vital* to reducing lag below subconscious perceptual levels - you may as well say the only difference between a pedal-cart and an Formula-1 race car is a faster engine and better seat belts.
Re: Nonsense (Score:1)
What was the first video game then? Wasn't the first version of pong played on an oscilloscope? (and part of some litigation with Atari)
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or you could call it by it's more recognizable name, The Odyssey.
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No, Odyssey was a different device that came later. I'm talking about The Brown Box [si.edu].
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Self-correction: turns out you're right. Having read through my own link now, I hadn't realized that they licensed the brown box to Magnavox and that it later got turned into the Odyssey. Learn something new every day.
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See my self-correction [slashdot.org]. Turns out you were more correct than I gave you credit for initially. My apologies.
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>What value do we get with VR that we don't get with regular TV or monitors?
Immersion. This is not the same as privacy, and anyone who has tried recent VR will tell you there's a big difference.
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"Immersion" is about script and character and (literary) world building, not technology. The most immersive games I've played were all old enough to have terrible graphics, but they had lots of interesting detail in the world to get lost in.
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No, that's "substance". A.k.a. cognitive immersion. A completely orthogonal attribute to sensory immersion.
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Right, it's the kind of immersion that matters. Now if we could only get movies where the characters weren't 2-dimensional. "The goggles, they do nothing!"
I don't need peripheral vision to feel part of a game world, as long as I can look around the world from a first-person or over-the-shoulder view (it would help a lot in racing games, since there your too busy with other controls to also look around with your hands). It's been ambient noise, clever soundtrack, and attention to detail (so that you can
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Having used head tracking in a number of racing and flight simulators I can tell you it aids the immersion and situational awareness *immensely*, even more than you would imagine. I haven't actually had an opportunity to try an Oculus or its competitors, but I would suspect that adding a screen that stays in front of your eyes, offers "perfect" 1-to-1 motion tracking, and stereoscopy, would be another massive step forward. Consider that in the real world you're moving your head constantly, and your brai
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Improve the substance of modern games and movies: that's a more complicated problem.
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You don't know what you're talking about.
Nonsense, we've had VR junk around since at least Wolfenstien and some of the crazy Nintendo VR stuff. That stuff was AWFUL and more worthy of being called Pong. See http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wolfenstein/wolfenstein6.htm, that's 1994 so 21 years ago. The VR Boy was 20 years ago. Hell we even had a TV show called VR.5 in 1995
By Wolfenstein I assume you mean Wolfenstein 3D, which came out in 1992, isn't VR. It's not even running a 3D engine. Virtual Boy wasn't VR either, it was a very low quality stereoscopic eyepiece on a stand. I owned both Wolf3D and a Virtual Boy when they were first released and they are nothing like the VR stuff we're getting now.
The stuff that is coming out now is barely worthy of being called VR since it doesn't make good on what was promised 20 years ago, nor impoves upon it in any tangible way. Much in the same way "3D" TV's flop and most 3D films at the theater are garbage. We're trying to solve the wrong problem with VR. What value do we get with VR that we don't get with regular TV or monitors?
Immersion. VR offers a new canvas with which to experience environments. It could be a virtual tour of a real life place, or a movie or a
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VFX was the pong (Score:2)
I had a full vr helmet in the late 90s to play doom, decent, and so on. I can't remember the name of the helmet but it came with a mouse that looked like a hockey puck.
I would venture that this was the VFX [stereo3d.com] family of helmet (VFX-1, VFX-3D)
It was one of the first 3D helmet, with extensive support in games.
Resolution was shitty (~260 vertical column per eye) in fact so shitty, that manufacturer did give separate count of R, G and B pixels (call it "790" horizontal resolution !).
Field of view was also awfully small (think looking into a small windows in front of you, as if you looked a laptop screen, instead of today's occulus rift's "surrounded by the picture everywhere").
Im
I'd be happy with fullhd per eye + 60fps (Score:2, Offtopic)
yeah, it would be enough, really. I've used the rift(ks). half life 2 worked fine with it. surprisingly it was better to play with just a HACK than with the official tf2 shit! why? they fucked up the control options for the official(like 5 choices and none of them traditional kb+mouse! all had to try to stuff in head control for up / down and separate aiming from head movement or other weird things)
also what many of these journos forget is that some people will get sick from just looking someone else play d
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VR is not going to be just a hard core gaming medium. I thought the same thing at first as well. That was until I picked up a GearVR for my note 4. That was when I realized that there was a lot more than just games. And there isn't even any real content yet. Just lots of 5-10 minute demo level items that I find myself watching over and over.
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Currently we have 1/2 HD per eye at 75fps or 1/2 1440p per eye at 60fps. The next gen will likely be 1/2 4k per eye at 75fps.
With VR it is less the amount of motion and more the consistent fps greater than 60fps, 75fps is good 120fps would be near perfect. This makes porting games to VR difficult due to them not considering this a requirement during original development.
only a year? (Score:5, Insightful)
VR has only really been [in development] for about a year
wikipedia lied to me! [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah, isn't this the pong level?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Though we may still be about there but with better graphics.
Then again maybe that could be said about the gaming industry in general beyond MMOs :D
Re:only a year? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately many people think that VR didn't exist before Oculus Rift. Which is, of course, BS. There was good quality VR available before as well but unless you have worked for a large university, the military, NASA or some large aerospace/car company, you were unlikely to encounter it due to the costs of the equipment involved. Industry-grade HMDs still cost $15000, they used to start at $40k but I guess after the cheap Oculus became available, that price point became untenable. `CAVEs and large projection setups that are commonly used for both research and training work can cost millions.
The worse part is that also quite a few people from these companies - Oculus, Valve and others that are jumping on the VR bandwagon now - tend to ignore the decades of existing research. Most people there are businessmen and (briliant) engineers, not researchers (with a few exceptions). They tend to massively reinvent the wheel and to rediscover things known for many years, because they don't know where to look for them. If they didn't, they would know that increasing framerate and decreasing input latencies is not going to fix the motion sickness. Sure, laggy, smeared image in the HMD will make people sick. However, you can and will get sick even at 120fps - it depends much more on what you are rendering than at how you are rendering it. A virtual rollercoaster will make people throw up even at 4k resolution rendered at 250fps with perfect head tracking. It would look awesome, though ...
The problem is mainly the content, not the technology - the content must work with the technology idiosyncrasies (I won't call them limitations - that implies they could be overcome, but sometimes it would require changing the laws of physics or it would cost so much that it just isn't practical), not ignore the specificities of the medium ("let's play COD with an Oculus Rift, that will be awesome!" *BARF*) or expect that the "technology will improve" and motion sickness won't be an issue, no matter what wild camera gyrations, cool fly-throughs and slow motion cut scenes the game designer has put in. It is the same thing as the film directors having to learn how to shoot in 3D - the "film language" (how you convey your message through camera work, lighting, etc) changes quite significantly when you are in 3D and not every film director was/is comfortable with going there. Even the visually stunning Avatar had some issues with stereoscopy here and there. That is why the worst 3D movies were the ones converted from the regular 2D, where the media specificities were ignored.
This is very much where we are still at the begining - virtual reality as an entertainment and story telling medium. It is not a question of technology anymore, it is more about finding sensible ways to do things in VR so that the experience is fun, pleasant and something people will actually like to return to. With careful design work and working with the medium and not against it you can render even at 30fps and nobody will get sick.
In my 15 years of working with VR (involving both large projection setups and HMDs) I have never encountered anyone getting sick because of the frame rate. It was pretty much always because of poorly made content not suitable for the technology being used, poorly implemented navigation that didn't respect the specificities of the medium ("teleporting" camera, forced/constrained camera movement, head bobbing, poorly synchronized/unsynchronized treadmills ...), poor camera work/tracking ("mouselook" in FPS really is wrong for VR - you don't have head bolted rigidly to your shoulders!) and similar issues. Then you have issues like people feeling discomfort/headaches because of eye strain due to poor focus, moire, poorly set up stereo rendering, etc. It often gets incorrectly attributed to "cyber"/motion sickness, but that has nothing to do with it at all. Finally, there are people who will get sick and dizzy even from looking at a static image
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His point is that slow framerates tend to cause sync problems, especially for keeping the graphics and head movement completely synced. If what you are seeing is behind what your senses are telling you, even people who don't get motion sick will start to feel ill.
It's not a silver bullet, but it is a big problem.
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120fps looks FAR better than 60fps. And low latency games feel a lot snappier than high latency games. If that ALSO helps sickness to any extent, then that's just icing on the cake.
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I call BS on a large part of this. I have had slight movements at low frame rate that has made me almost hurl immediately, yet a game like Windlands [oculus.com] which is like a spiderman simulater with swinging from tree to tree I was able to play with large sooping motions for hours without getting sick.
Anecdotes aside, this seems to be echoed pretty heavily in the Oculus share forums and VR related sub-reddits.
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So I think it might be alright for a rollercoaster sim, where looking at it on a monitor vs looking at it with
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My memory must be lying, too.
Not only was I worked on VR for the military and entertainment 20 years ago, but I corresponded a bit with Valve's own Michael Abrash several years ago on reducing latency in VR headsets.
Surfac (Score:1)
Surfac
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pong level
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Re:Pong was bigger in its day (Score:4, Interesting)
It may seem quaint now, but at the time it was truly revolutionary, as was Space Invaders and Asteroids which soon followed. To us, they were much cooler than the pin-ball machines we played at the time, after all they were something completely new.
Yes I was born in B.C. (Before Cellphones) and my kids were born in A.D. (After Direct TV).
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Pong showed up in about half the taverns in town at about the same time, as well as malls, pinball arcades, and bowling alleys. They were everywhere for a short time, and then came Space Invaders, and Pong vanished almost overnight until it was resurrected in the early gaming systems.
I had a Tabletop Tennis (Pong clone that only did pong va
Really? (Score:3)
Stop screwing around with VR and finish Half-Life 3 already!
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If they want to get HL3 working with next gen systems they must figure out what that looks like. They assume it'll be VR.
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Stop screwing around with VR and finish Half-Life 3 already!
Seconded. Can we start a "refocus Valve" petition?
Car analogy (Score:2)
"Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."
Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea. If people can't just get behind a steering wheel and drive to Manhattan then automotive technology is an epic fail. Technology should be as simple as a baby's foot.
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Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea.
The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment. People already know how to physically exist in a location. If the VR system requires special training to interact with, then the V isn't doing a very good approximation of the R.
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Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?
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Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?
And built and even partially assembled by robot, and assembled with the aid of robots (such as all the head bolts getting torqued at once, hopefully correctly but I wouldn't bet on it, hand-built is still the best.)
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Learning to drive doesn't make people nauseous, give them cold sweats, give them vertigo, trigger headaches (traffic does that, learning doesn't).
Back when 3D cards first became available for general consumption, I bought one and conditioned myself to 3D by the simple expedient of playing Descent until I horked. Then playing till I horked again. Rinse mouth out and repeat.
Yeah. I was young and stupid.
Now, 20-ish years on? If you told me I had to do that all over again, I wouldn't bother.
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I remember Descent and Terminal Velocity, etc. I can't even imagine getting sick just playing them.
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I remember Descent and Terminal Velocity, etc. I can't even imagine getting sick just playing them.
I know, right?
Hell, I didn't even completely "cure" myself.
I'm fine when I'm playing. But I *still* cannot watch someone else play.
Re: Car analogy (Score:1)
Never had much trouble with motion sickness in Descent, but I grew up with very long car drives in the summer vacation as a kid.
Descent did disoriented me quite a bit. I think I spent nearly an hour on a level, not recognizing any location... Until I rolled 180 and noticed I was staring at the entrance. I'd flown the whole way back upside down...
As for watching others play anything 3D; how can you not get sick? If not by motion, then by frustration that they are DOING IT ALL WRONG! But more seriously, watch
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It's also a bad choice of phrase, as currently 'VR legs' only work if you have either a lot of space or a very elaborate omnidirectional treadmill. Bit of a difficult problem that.
Though I suppose it might bring back the arcade? If you need a suspended harness or a sizeable warehouse for full-immersion runarounds, it's going to mean people traveling to places. Pressing a 'walk forward' button isn't going to be the same.
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There's just a slight difference and you've not chosen an analogous situation.
It's more like telling users that they'll just have to get used to feeling ill every time they look through your new holographic windscreen, no matter how much it makes them hurl. "You'll get used to it", as they have to pull over and shut their eyes for ten minutes before they can resume driving,
There's only one game on the planet that makes me feel ill when I play it (Duke Nukem 3D), something to do with the way the perspective
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BS (Score:2)
VR was at a pong level about 30 years ago.. Because those suckers don't know what VR is or how to use it doesn't mean it only started a year ago.. Yeah, maybe HE started a year ago, but VR was already on the market in 1995 for consumers, and to just dismiss consumer helmets like the Forte VFX-1 is really ignorant/snobbisch (and those were even further along than 'Pong-level')..
Let's not forget VR has been in use in the industry for a long time already, the only difference now is, you can do it on the cheap.
VR isn't the only thing we're on Pong level at (Score:2)
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You won't believe how advanced these fields are.
It's easy to dismiss modern game design as "just better graphics" until you learn why things are the way they are. You may not like some design choices, especially if such choices are driven more by profit than player enjoyment, but there is often a lot of things going behind it.
So sure, there is room for improvement, same for graphics, but AI, GUI, plot and mechanics are mature fields, with a significant history.
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Three deadly issues for VR (Score:2)
1) Glasses. If you don't wear them, you don't care, but if you do, you pretty much can't deal with head-mounted VR wear. I've tried a lot of VR devices over the decades and *none* of them are glasses-friendly, including Oculus.
2) Field of view. Ninety degrees isn't enough for immersion. True enough, you can move your head for depth 'feel', but you're still looking through a window.
3) Lag. There's been enough said about this. It will improve over time, though, if there's enough of an audience.
VR has been development for MANY years (Score:2)
Chet full of Shit (Score:2)
And let's not forget that horrid sci-fi show from the 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01... [imdb.com]
I'm sure that was inspired from somewhere. Although I also remember doing wireframe VR sims of hang gliding in the early 90's.
A year my A$$ (Score:2)
I think Chet Faliszek needs to do some research into his own field. It gave you headaches, was limited to only 2 colors, and it tanked, but to say that it wasn't VR is byond dumb. [wikipedia.org]
The main problem is focus for me (Score:1)
This is the only issue I get from VR, but then
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