A couple of years ago Sony came out with some glasses that had LCD displays in them, there was one set that you could watch TV on and another (probably higher resolution) that could substitute a computer monitor, I dont see these things advertised anymore so maybe they just didnt work or were too expensive - I think the TV ones were around $1500 and the monitor ones were about $3000.
I have a strange feeling that these things would screw your vision in no seconds flat, or at least give you a headache.
I have a strange feeling that these things would screw your vision in no seconds flat, or at least give you a headache.
I had a friend who said he tried them and they gave him a small vertigo like feeling, but I thought he was just being a wuss.
I tried one of those old virtual reality games when I was a kid and I dont remember feeling disoriented or anything. Then again I didnt have seizures from playing sonic the hedgehog either.
There are still companies doing VR glove interfaces, but true 3D glasses are just too dang expensive.
Right now, the only 'killer app' for 3D is... MMORPGs. When things like There take off, I think we'll see a lot more social 3D environments start to pop up.
Sims Online failed because it was too pricey and kept too much of the 'game' concept, when most people just wanted to build things and chat. There has a chance to fill that niche, and make something of it.
Personally, I always thought someone should just take the open-source Quake/Quake 2 code to make a massive chat environment. That would provide people with an established code-base, a variety of 'avatars' already availible or easy to develop, and individual connected servers instead of a centralized model. You could build your own world with established Quake tools, then provide 'portals' to other worlds and chat with people that way.
Right now, the only 'killer app' for 3D is... MMORPGs. When things like There take off, I think we'll see a lot more social 3D environments start to pop up.
Hey I like the look of that there thing, shame it doesnt support mac yet (although they did include a way to ask for a mac port which is thoughtful).
So obviously technology is not the barrier (pricey 3d headsets aside) the problem is finding something useful (productive?) to do with a virtual world, I think Apple could very well be the people for the job.
Here at work we have an SGI Onyx driving six LCD projectors at 1280 X 1024.
It's displayed onto three 'screens' for one big display.
(something like)
_ _ _ _ _
/-------\\
/---------\\ but with less 'curve' than that.
Each screen has two projectors on it projecting in passive stereo. When Correctly polarized glasses are worn, images appear in full stereo. It's pretty awesome to walk down the main street of a city in full stereo.. or fly around in a flight sim.
We also have electromagnetic tracking devices to navigate the system and our latest toy is a gesture recognition system (Think Minority Report).
Fairly impressive stuff.
-Dan
EDIT: Trying to draw the ASCII pic.. hopefully you get the idea its a curved screen..
So obviously technology is not the barrier (pricey 3d headsets aside) the problem is finding something useful (productive?) to do with a virtual world, I think Apple could very well be the people for the job.
Well put. Currently, visualising protein structures and such is the only really useful application of stereoscopic display. AFA reading email and copying files in 3d, well, *groan!* ;D
Does anyone remember VR5 "is Real" and Sliders? They all centered around that idea that other worlds exist with the aid of computers.
Man I remember how they spoke the name of each show. "VR.5 is real," was said by a woman's voice who sounded scared but serious and Sliders was whispered by some number of people, probably the cast at the same time.
They were two thought-provoking shows that may have propagated ideas for the Matrix (1999). They also had very interesting story lines, with Sliders being more of dimension roaming, but still fundamentally the same idea of different worlds and VR.5 pertaining more to this subject.
Forget VR, I wanna see those portable HUD that I have seen at so many hardware shows. Being able to walk around with a opaque screen in front of me would be more useful. Hook it to my laptop in my briefcase and have it so it doesn't shut off with the lid closed and I would be set. Though I have never seen it demonstrated on a Mac, only PC.
On the VR side, I remember quite a few years ago getting to play with a huge VR setup and finding it cool, but ultimately not very useful. The idea is nice, an interactive 3d desktop, but not practical.
BTW, good to finally post on the site. I have been reading the site for some time now, but have not had anything to really say.
I've toured our rather extensive VR facilities here at Iowa State and it appears that both the processing power and interface are sub-par for usefull home VR.
I think one of the big limitations is no one can figure out how to make a cheap, safe way to immerse oneself. You can't simply put someone in goggles and have them play quake without strangling themselves with the cord as the spin around to fight someone behind them. Similiarly you can't just let them walk around in a VR environment because they will walk into a non-VR wall.
I've been in a CAVE and tried the cantilevered stereoscopic VR, very cool, but not very real feeling.
I think the first real usefull step toward 3d will be the use of these multilayered LCDs that give a small sense of depth to your GUI. I think being able to organize files and windows by depth as well as in 2D would kick ass.
?Your not thinking fourth dimensionally !? Yeah ?back to the future 2? with the Indians.
But seriously it is a time problem, (Got time to sit at your desk all day?.) and I am thinking about portable computing here.
Were is the truly portable computer the ?wearable? one that was in a lot of science magazine's and pops up every now and then.
Imagine being able to integrate the entire mother board of a computer into an integrated circuit (IC) and just plug other modular integrated components into it.
Imagine a computer (IC motherboard) that was about four inches square and about ten millimeters thick and had some sort of Z.i.f. socket on both sides to allow bus access.
You could clip another identical module on top of it (ram) and another under it ?the hard drive? (like the one out of an ipod) and under that the battery. (The whole thing would look a lot like sandwich.)
On top of the ram put a display/graphics board linked to a pair of those display glasses you know they have come up in the next tomb raider movie again ?pop? so that the whole thing would wear a lot like a walkman the only thing that is not there is a suitable input device but then that depends on what you are doing as surfing the net and making video calls would only require a hand held jog or trackball. With wireless connection and voice input also some sort of integrated artificial intelligence (AI) in the system you could get up and really get going moving around and interacting.
Yeah I know voice input doesn?t work in a crowded room well that depends on where you put the mike remember the movie ?Speed? the mikes in that were on there throats and so didn?t pick up the noise in the environment. If that doesn?t do it for you whip out a blue tooth virtual keyboard!.
Its greatest benefit is as a personal information interface and it looks like the ultimate evolution of the ipod but would allow much greater flexibility of content than the current setup. What it lacks is a way to share visual content with others no also connected to or using hardware but some kind of note pad sized touch screen connected somewhere either on the input device or on it?s own or a wireless connection to a projector in the board room (if that?s what your worried about) or TV.
Personally I think it?s greatest advantage is the ability to get information in front of your eyes while on the job in industries that are not particularly open to technological integration at the moment. Think about first person shooter games were we take for granted the ability to see vital information maps, supplies, communications links and external surveillance footage.
Imagine if real troops could have all that information and more in front of their eyes while carrying a weapon down busy street or through the jungle. How about technicians looking through systems wiring in big buildings with the map and specifications right in front of here eyes as they move through the crawl space?s.
Best of all imagine being able to navigate this forum or elsewhere on the internet and have the computer read the text out to you as you walk down the street or go jogging not bad huh!.
Wave of the future maybe ???. nah??? 8)
(Related)
Can any of the browsers currently read out the text for you so you can do do something else while listening to a thread ?.
( Gee imagine an audio forum where you record audio bytes instead of text. It would be a lot like listening to citizen band two way radio, total garbage here in Sydney Australia should hear the swearing pointless !.)
I like even more the idea of combining virtual reality with portable electronics to create a virtual overlay of the real world. I noticed the other day that I couldnt see radio waves (I dont think anybody can ) and thought how much more interesting the streets would be if I could see the 800mhz and 2.4ghz spectrum - the use is obvious wifi and data transmissions.
I do not have internet access where I live nor is it available (I post from my office) but I have found that if I walk around with my ibook (looking like a complete dork) I will eventually stumble across a wifi site. I know where there are a couple near me now so I dont have to look anymore (for the time being anyway).
Wouldnt it be nice to have enhanced vision able to see into different spectrums of electromagnetic radiation and then have informative overlays tell you all about them. Not to mention this could easily be combined with GPS for location based information. This would be a tremendous help in locating wifi hotspots in unfamiliar areas. Augmented reality sounds great and later I might check up on those students who do that Borg project thingy.
I took a look (online) at those CAVE type systems, wow, neato, why isnt that a consumer product ?, Im suprised the porn industry isnt onto this. I would very much like to see a CAVE (or similar stereoscopic immersion technology) in person, but unfortunatly I dont live near such things.
polygon pushing power is still not yet up to snuff for "convincing VR"
(hence dominance by SGI "reality engine" $1Million graphics subsystems or custom E&S rigs)
volumetric shaders for advanced fog, smoke, lighting and shadow are helping, and raytracing/radiosity algorithms have come a long way towards delivering truly accurate constructive solid geometry - as if actual glass sphere, not a polygonal shell with alpha/texture, so you get actual physics... early 3D tools (and most modern 3D games) worked with polygons. high end 3D tools built "virtual reality" in a truer sense of material/lighting behaviours, but photorealistic raytracing costs so much processing time that smooth 30fps animation has historically been beyond all but big iron
cluster rendering farms might be practical, depending on the complexity and model size you're trying to simulate (military battlefield sims require either massive computers or they give the full map, but drop to low res blocky polygons for inactive (over horizon or depth cued) regions
we're almost there if you've got enough super-premium GPUs to throw at the problem, and one could argue that Quake and similar game development has helped accelerate the move to more immersive 3D environments by raising the minimum standard bar for "believable" texturing and lighting, even if the models are still polygonal rather than solid or metaball.
IMO, some of the more interesting research in VR is being done in adaptive focus, allowing for a "fully constructed scene" to look convincing yet have only the eyeball-tracked focal centre actually rendered at "realistic" resolution... the rest a bit fuzzy (allowing GPU to "dedicate" itself to the area of current interest as priority). this will go a lot farther towards tricking the brain into believing the virtual world is real since it mimics real world focal acuity, where the edges of your vision aren't as sharp either.
2. lag
human perception is a curious fusion of cues from multiple senses.
spin your head and the world updates. spin with eyes closed and some folks get dizzy. spin with delayed video of where your eyes expect to be and the nausea spikes further. (similar problems with registration between inner ear messages and eyeball messages cause rapidly spinning figure skaters and drunks doing roadside tests to lose synch between their faculties and balance)
some VR systems employ movement tracking systems with update rates that don't mesh with the update capability of the graphics system, or, to put it another way, the CPU can't pump the new view smoothly enough for the brain to anticipate and compensate.
long duration (30 minutes) exposure to laggy updating VR has been documented to cause headaches, eye-strain, and temporary balance disorders.
the fastest updating systems (least lag) normally get there by sacrificing polygons or limiting textures or not bothering to anti-alias edges. some of the early Arcade VR systems (Pterodactyl, Maze, Dogfight) were built on customized Amiga 3000 computers. crappy polygon count, crappy textures, lame lighting, nowhere near the FX of a modern FPS, gameboy screens as headmounted displays, and you could tell.
which brings us to
3. poor Head Mounted Displays
as noted above, some of the early "consumer" VR systems used colour gameboy LCD screens (less than 2" diagonal). not much res to work with... like 360x360 or less. some early "visor" displays like the Sony iView approach 640x480 at a perceived 6-10 foot focal distance.
newer visors are semi-opaque, more intended for "mediated reality" overlays than full attention DVD watching, and can trace their history to Military HUD systems. most of these systems are piping the video in from somewhere else and bouncing it off a half-mirror. heavy gear required.
< OT: this is where flexible OLED displays may come to our rescue >
Stereoscopic shutter glasses are used to simulate 3D by sequencing offset views of a scene or object into alternating eyes (the shutter polarizes each lens in turn) to trick the brain into reconstructing position information with skewed depth. usually, the model doesn't update with head movement, but with mouse action. not as convincing an "immersive" experience.
CAVE-type systems dispense with head mounted monitors and turn the walls, floor and ceiling into projection screens. some track user position with IR, some with video chromakey, some with more "traditional" wired sensors
4. cost
some of the above technologies are good at solving some of these problems, specialization costs.
trying to solve most of these problems in a consumer system?
maybe the G6 or G7 with OLED contact lenses. won't be cheap til then.
5. hyperbolic early predictions
unrealistic expectations of "total simulacra tomorrow" put folks off the virtual that didn't meet that ideal
bad press from those who were disappointed by the early systems may have spooked venture capitalists whose dotcom binge suggests much more R&D might have been accomplished by now if the buzz hadn't soured
read Howard Rheingold's book for a good background to VR.
Comments
Originally posted by AsLan^
A couple of years ago Sony came out with some glasses that had LCD displays in them, there was one set that you could watch TV on and another (probably higher resolution) that could substitute a computer monitor, I dont see these things advertised anymore so maybe they just didnt work or were too expensive - I think the TV ones were around $1500 and the monitor ones were about $3000.
I have a strange feeling that these things would screw your vision in no seconds flat, or at least give you a headache.
Originally posted by Placebo
I have a strange feeling that these things would screw your vision in no seconds flat, or at least give you a headache.
I had a friend who said he tried them and they gave him a small vertigo like feeling, but I thought he was just being a wuss.
I tried one of those old virtual reality games when I was a kid and I dont remember feeling disoriented or anything. Then again I didnt have seizures from playing sonic the hedgehog either.
Right now, the only 'killer app' for 3D is... MMORPGs. When things like There take off, I think we'll see a lot more social 3D environments start to pop up.
Sims Online failed because it was too pricey and kept too much of the 'game' concept, when most people just wanted to build things and chat. There has a chance to fill that niche, and make something of it.
Personally, I always thought someone should just take the open-source Quake/Quake 2 code to make a massive chat environment. That would provide people with an established code-base, a variety of 'avatars' already availible or easy to develop, and individual connected servers instead of a centralized model. You could build your own world with established Quake tools, then provide 'portals' to other worlds and chat with people that way.
Originally posted by Kesh
Right now, the only 'killer app' for 3D is... MMORPGs. When things like There take off, I think we'll see a lot more social 3D environments start to pop up.
Hey I like the look of that there thing, shame it doesnt support mac yet (although they did include a way to ask for a mac port which is thoughtful).
So obviously technology is not the barrier (pricey 3d headsets aside) the problem is finding something useful (productive?) to do with a virtual world, I think Apple could very well be the people for the job.
SGI Rooms
and
SGI Walls
if only apple played with stuff like this . . .
It's displayed onto three 'screens' for one big display.
(something like)
_ _ _ _ _
/-------\\
/---------\\ but with less 'curve' than that.
Each screen has two projectors on it projecting in passive stereo. When Correctly polarized glasses are worn, images appear in full stereo. It's pretty awesome to walk down the main street of a city in full stereo.. or fly around in a flight sim.
We also have electromagnetic tracking devices to navigate the system and our latest toy is a gesture recognition system (Think Minority Report).
Fairly impressive stuff.
-Dan
EDIT: Trying to draw the ASCII pic.. hopefully you get the idea its a curved screen..
So obviously technology is not the barrier (pricey 3d headsets aside) the problem is finding something useful (productive?) to do with a virtual world, I think Apple could very well be the people for the job.
Well put. Currently, visualising protein structures and such is the only really useful application of stereoscopic display. AFA reading email and copying files in 3d, well, *groan!* ;D
Originally posted by 709
/OT/ That reminded me of this clip. (Not for the easily offended).
Now THAT was funny!
Man I remember how they spoke the name of each show. "VR.5 is real," was said by a woman's voice who sounded scared but serious and Sliders was whispered by some number of people, probably the cast at the same time.
They were two thought-provoking shows that may have propagated ideas for the Matrix (1999). They also had very interesting story lines, with Sliders being more of dimension roaming, but still fundamentally the same idea of different worlds and VR.5 pertaining more to this subject.
Man those were good shows.
On the VR side, I remember quite a few years ago getting to play with a huge VR setup and finding it cool, but ultimately not very useful. The idea is nice, an interactive 3d desktop, but not practical.
BTW, good to finally post on the site. I have been reading the site for some time now, but have not had anything to really say.
I think one of the big limitations is no one can figure out how to make a cheap, safe way to immerse oneself. You can't simply put someone in goggles and have them play quake without strangling themselves with the cord as the spin around to fight someone behind them. Similiarly you can't just let them walk around in a VR environment because they will walk into a non-VR wall.
I've been in a CAVE and tried the cantilevered stereoscopic VR, very cool, but not very real feeling.
I think the first real usefull step toward 3d will be the use of these multilayered LCDs that give a small sense of depth to your GUI. I think being able to organize files and windows by depth as well as in 2D would kick ass.
But seriously it is a time problem, (Got time to sit at your desk all day?.) and I am thinking about portable computing here.
Were is the truly portable computer the ?wearable? one that was in a lot of science magazine's and pops up every now and then.
Imagine being able to integrate the entire mother board of a computer into an integrated circuit (IC) and just plug other modular integrated components into it.
Imagine a computer (IC motherboard) that was about four inches square and about ten millimeters thick and had some sort of Z.i.f. socket on both sides to allow bus access.
You could clip another identical module on top of it (ram) and another under it ?the hard drive? (like the one out of an ipod) and under that the battery. (The whole thing would look a lot like sandwich.)
On top of the ram put a display/graphics board linked to a pair of those display glasses you know they have come up in the next tomb raider movie again ?pop? so that the whole thing would wear a lot like a walkman the only thing that is not there is a suitable input device but then that depends on what you are doing as surfing the net and making video calls would only require a hand held jog or trackball. With wireless connection and voice input also some sort of integrated artificial intelligence (AI) in the system you could get up and really get going moving around and interacting.
Yeah I know voice input doesn?t work in a crowded room well that depends on where you put the mike remember the movie ?Speed? the mikes in that were on there throats and so didn?t pick up the noise in the environment. If that doesn?t do it for you whip out a blue tooth virtual keyboard!.
Its greatest benefit is as a personal information interface and it looks like the ultimate evolution of the ipod but would allow much greater flexibility of content than the current setup. What it lacks is a way to share visual content with others no also connected to or using hardware but some kind of note pad sized touch screen connected somewhere either on the input device or on it?s own or a wireless connection to a projector in the board room (if that?s what your worried about) or TV.
Personally I think it?s greatest advantage is the ability to get information in front of your eyes while on the job in industries that are not particularly open to technological integration at the moment. Think about first person shooter games were we take for granted the ability to see vital information maps, supplies, communications links and external surveillance footage.
Imagine if real troops could have all that information and more in front of their eyes while carrying a weapon down busy street or through the jungle. How about technicians looking through systems wiring in big buildings with the map and specifications right in front of here eyes as they move through the crawl space?s.
Best of all imagine being able to navigate this forum or elsewhere on the internet and have the computer read the text out to you as you walk down the street or go jogging not bad huh!.
Wave of the future maybe ???.
(Related)
Can any of the browsers currently read out the text for you so you can do do something else while listening to a thread ?.
( Gee imagine an audio forum where you record audio bytes instead of text. It would be a lot like listening to citizen band two way radio, total garbage here in Sydney Australia should hear the swearing pointless !.)
I do not have internet access where I live nor is it available (I post from my office) but I have found that if I walk around with my ibook (looking like a complete dork) I will eventually stumble across a wifi site. I know where there are a couple near me now so I dont have to look anymore (for the time being anyway).
Wouldnt it be nice to have enhanced vision able to see into different spectrums of electromagnetic radiation and then have informative overlays tell you all about them. Not to mention this could easily be combined with GPS for location based information. This would be a tremendous help in locating wifi hotspots in unfamiliar areas. Augmented reality sounds great and later I might check up on those students who do that Borg project thingy.
I took a look (online) at those CAVE type systems, wow, neato, why isnt that a consumer product ?, Im suprised the porn industry isnt onto this. I would very much like to see a CAVE (or similar stereoscopic immersion technology) in person, but unfortunatly I dont live near such things.
polygon pushing power is still not yet up to snuff for "convincing VR"
(hence dominance by SGI "reality engine" $1Million graphics subsystems or custom E&S rigs)
volumetric shaders for advanced fog, smoke, lighting and shadow are helping, and raytracing/radiosity algorithms have come a long way towards delivering truly accurate constructive solid geometry - as if actual glass sphere, not a polygonal shell with alpha/texture, so you get actual physics... early 3D tools (and most modern 3D games) worked with polygons. high end 3D tools built "virtual reality" in a truer sense of material/lighting behaviours, but photorealistic raytracing costs so much processing time that smooth 30fps animation has historically been beyond all but big iron
cluster rendering farms might be practical, depending on the complexity and model size you're trying to simulate (military battlefield sims require either massive computers or they give the full map, but drop to low res blocky polygons for inactive (over horizon or depth cued) regions
we're almost there if you've got enough super-premium GPUs to throw at the problem, and one could argue that Quake and similar game development has helped accelerate the move to more immersive 3D environments by raising the minimum standard bar for "believable" texturing and lighting, even if the models are still polygonal rather than solid or metaball.
IMO, some of the more interesting research in VR is being done in adaptive focus, allowing for a "fully constructed scene" to look convincing yet have only the eyeball-tracked focal centre actually rendered at "realistic" resolution... the rest a bit fuzzy (allowing GPU to "dedicate" itself to the area of current interest as priority). this will go a lot farther towards tricking the brain into believing the virtual world is real since it mimics real world focal acuity, where the edges of your vision aren't as sharp either.
2. lag
human perception is a curious fusion of cues from multiple senses.
spin your head and the world updates. spin with eyes closed and some folks get dizzy. spin with delayed video of where your eyes expect to be and the nausea spikes further. (similar problems with registration between inner ear messages and eyeball messages cause rapidly spinning figure skaters and drunks doing roadside tests to lose synch between their faculties and balance)
some VR systems employ movement tracking systems with update rates that don't mesh with the update capability of the graphics system, or, to put it another way, the CPU can't pump the new view smoothly enough for the brain to anticipate and compensate.
long duration (30 minutes) exposure to laggy updating VR has been documented to cause headaches, eye-strain, and temporary balance disorders.
the fastest updating systems (least lag) normally get there by sacrificing polygons or limiting textures or not bothering to anti-alias edges. some of the early Arcade VR systems (Pterodactyl, Maze, Dogfight) were built on customized Amiga 3000 computers. crappy polygon count, crappy textures, lame lighting, nowhere near the FX of a modern FPS, gameboy screens as headmounted displays, and you could tell.
which brings us to
3. poor Head Mounted Displays
as noted above, some of the early "consumer" VR systems used colour gameboy LCD screens (less than 2" diagonal). not much res to work with... like 360x360 or less. some early "visor" displays like the Sony iView approach 640x480 at a perceived 6-10 foot focal distance.
newer visors are semi-opaque, more intended for "mediated reality" overlays than full attention DVD watching, and can trace their history to Military HUD systems. most of these systems are piping the video in from somewhere else and bouncing it off a half-mirror. heavy gear required.
< OT: this is where flexible OLED displays may come to our rescue >
Stereoscopic shutter glasses are used to simulate 3D by sequencing offset views of a scene or object into alternating eyes (the shutter polarizes each lens in turn) to trick the brain into reconstructing position information with skewed depth. usually, the model doesn't update with head movement, but with mouse action. not as convincing an "immersive" experience.
CAVE-type systems dispense with head mounted monitors and turn the walls, floor and ceiling into projection screens. some track user position with IR, some with video chromakey, some with more "traditional" wired sensors
4. cost
some of the above technologies are good at solving some of these problems, specialization costs.
trying to solve most of these problems in a consumer system?
maybe the G6 or G7 with OLED contact lenses. won't be cheap til then.
5. hyperbolic early predictions
unrealistic expectations of "total simulacra tomorrow" put folks off the virtual that didn't meet that ideal
bad press from those who were disappointed by the early systems may have spooked venture capitalists whose dotcom binge suggests much more R&D might have been accomplished by now if the buzz hadn't soured
read Howard Rheingold's book for a good background to VR.
there's always the Holodeck
(Janet Murray's book is worth a read too.)
http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/Proje...hicsImage.html
We got yer VR, yer AR, yer HMDs... whatcha want?