The First Look at the New Oculus VR Prototype

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2014/01/oculus-rift

by Impossible • 13 years ago

152 71 13 years ago

adamesque2• 13 years ago

I got a chance to play with an Oculus dev kit for 15-20 minutes over the holidays, and almost everyone who tried it walked away with some pretty gnarly nausea (experienced gamers and newcomers alike). I'm excited to see so many of the updates in the new prototype focused around alleviating this discomfort.

It's probably telling that they're couching the updates in language that addresses this, rather than just touting the technical accomplishments.

wdewind• 13 years ago

I can't find it (sorry) but there's a pretty amazing interview with Carmack floating around about how he apparently has mostly solved this issue. It really drives home just how much of a genius the guy is.

Edit: this isn't it, but will do the trick http://oculusrift-blog.com/john-carmacks-message-of-latency/...

maaku• 13 years ago

He's a great programmer, sure, but this is a problem solved by a generation of engineers before him. Google "CAVE VR" to find some demonstrations of immersive VR environments which have been used in production for long periods of time without nausea or vertigo.

Indeed most of the human-factors research in this area has been in figuring out just what minimum features and precision are necessary in the tracking and display equipment and software stack to prevent these known problems. Making Occulus was simply a matter of shrinking the tech small enough to fit comfortably in a self-contained unit.

SammoJ• 13 years ago

Were they playing anything or just walking around in the demo? I have one and have tested it out with many people. When people get sick it's usually because they've been in one of the less interactive demos just sort of looking around wiggling the mouse etc. The people who I let loose straight onto Half-Life 2 or other games where there is some sort of goal rarely get the same type of nausea. I think this is worth taking into account when people say "it's nausea inducing".

For insta-nausea put someone in the Tuscany demo and move them around while they wear the rift. Hilarity ensues!

adamesque2• 13 years ago

We did one demo that was more or less floating above static terrain, and another with Half-Life 2.

My own nausea didn't actually start up until HL2. We were playing on a laptop (probably not enough horsepower), using slightly unfamiliar keyboard & mouse controls. So some movements were very fluid & second-nature to me, while others were jerky and off because of the slightly-off control scheme.

It's possible the most nauseating moment was taking the headset off, actually. Up to that point, my mouse hand had been a pretty accurate proxy for my in-game hand and arm, but taking my hand off the mouse and then ripping the "world" away with that same (now "phantom") hand was deeply disconcerting.

But it's also possible the nausea built up slowly over the course of playing. I'd love to spend more time with it to see if it's something you really can adjust to.

TillE• 13 years ago

On the subject of movement while wearing a VR headset, it seems to me that most successful games will be those where your character remains seated. Flight simulators, space combat sims, mech games, stuff like that.

For that kind of game, just the Rift and a joystick should provide an amazing experience.

cortesoft• 13 years ago

I have the dev kit, and am extremely prone to motion sickness. I haven't had too big a problem with nausea except with a few games.

For me, the only time I really get nausea on it is when you do mouse look at the same time as head look... for example, moving the mouse to look one direction while moving my head.

I find by only doing one of those things at a time, I can really limit the motion sickness.

I showed all my family at christmas (mostly the experience demos where you look around without doing any controls) and no one got sick.

AJ007• 13 years ago

Everyone I've shown the Oculus has gotten sick, which is 5 people.

When Wolfenstein 3D first came out people were complaining about puking. I think the hardware updates, game design updates, combined with learned use will mostly solve the motion sickness issues. Hell I get sick from cars if I haven't ridden in traffic in a few weeks.

vacri• 13 years ago

I used to have a housemate who would come in and watch me play Doom clones, seated behind my shoulder - she would get motion sickness even sitting that far away (in the 15" CRT days)

afterburner• 13 years ago

I've tried it along with 20 other people, about 5 minutes each, nobody got sick. Maybe it wasn't a long enough time though.

kyzyl• 13 years ago

I've been hearing nothing but stories about i. people getting sick and ii. the rift "completely fooling" people's senses. I had the opportunity to try the dev kit out over the holidays and I was really excited, but after trying a whole bunch of games I was actually kind of disappointed. I understand that it's dev hardware, and it DOES have a ton of potential, but I didn't even have the slightest hint of motion sickness. Maybe that's just my brain. But I also didn't feel like my senses were being fooled. Yes, I could look around and things were 3d-ish, but I really didn't find it immersive. Anyhow, I could see a high res display making a big difference in that department.

kemayo2• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, I tried out a dev kit at the start of December (Half Life 2, spent probably 15 minutes playing) and had no nausea at all. There were a couple of other people trying it out at the same time, and I didn't hear any of them complaining about it.

thearn4• 13 years ago

I've had the dev kit for a few months now. My experience has been that it depends highly on the type of demo played. Most people seem to have a lot of difficulty with first person shooters, but fare much better with flight sims. Lunar Flight (http://www.shovsoft.com/) is my favorite so far.

I think everyone's vestibular system is sensitive in different ways. But FPSs in the rift generally feel very "wrong" (not sure how else to describe it), when moving using a controller. Especially when strafing - it produces a sensory response similar to a feeling of drunk stumbling. But in a flight or driving sim, the same kind of movements feel much less wrong, even to the same people. Maybe because similar movement in the real world are also performed via control inputs, and our minds understand that?

I think there are some interesting questions there. In the coming years, an entertainment concept as vague as "immersion" might actually have tangible metrics associated with it, since its exactly that kind of understanding that will be needed to overcome this "VR sickness"

exDM694• 13 years ago

I think everyone's vestibular system is sensitive in different ways. But FPSs in the rift generally feel very "wrong" (not sure how else to describe it), when moving using a controller. Especially when strafing - it produces a sensory response similar to a feeling of drunk stumbling. But in a flight or driving sim, the same kind of movements feel much less wrong, even to the same people. Maybe because similar movement in the real world are also performed via control inputs, and our minds understand that?

I think that this is a very interesting phenomenon, a physical "uncanny valley" of unnatural movements causing VR sickness. Strafing is definitely something that doesn't occur in real life, there's no way you can move directly sideways at regular walking/running speed. If VR ever becomes popular with FPS games, the genre will have to change or the audience will be limited to people immune to VR sickness.

Another interesting case was one of the Rift demos where you travel on zip lines. The physics of this demo were so incorrect that it made me nauseous. My body was expecting a rapid acceleration downwards but instead the movement on the zip lines was roughly constant velocity.

I would welcome more realistic physics to games even if it weren't for motion sickness. Hollywood physics aren't very interesting gameplay wise although it is visually stunning.

I also got horrible motion sickness from flying in a flight simulator with the Rift dev kit. I have flown a lot of flight simulators but doing so with the rift made me feel awful. I think that improved resolution might help here, the resolution was too blurry to make out the instruments on the panel or see the airfield before it was too late to land.

I definitely think that the translation tracking with the external camera will help. I have been using camera based head tracking (TrackIR) in simulator games and it is excellent.

I very much want Oculus Rift to solve the VR sickness problem. If the Rift catches on, in a few years there's no way you'll be able to be competitive in combat flight simulators without one because everyone using a VR solution will enjoy a better situational awareness. So it is going to be a choice between motion sickness (or defeating it) and being a sitting duck waiting to get shot. A head tracker like TrackIR is almost a prerequisite even today.

I can't wait to try the new Rift prototype and the customer version when it comes out and see if they've solved the problem. But I'm not buying one before I can try one out and see if this problem is fixed.

corysama• 13 years ago

The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"

The bad news is that while better tech and better design can significantly reduce motion sickness, I doubt we will ever completely eliminate it.

The really bad news is that nausea is funny. It's great for catchy headlines and quippy comments. I'm really afraid that the Rift will get a reputation as a "vomit helmet" and that will lead the masses to dismiss it. That would be a tragedy.

It's really important PR for VR to get the word out: If you feel sick, stop. Don't try to push through, you'll make it really bad. Try again much later. With practice, it will get better and better. When you get over VR sickness, all kinds of awesomeness awaits!

mrfusion• 13 years ago

That's a really good point. I hope their PR teamis thinking of stiff like that. The media does seem to catch onto ideas like that all too easily.

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

He'll I'd be willin to throw up a few times considering the promise the rift shows for the future of gaming.

exDM694• 13 years ago

The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"

I think this is might be correct, I remember getting motion sickness from playing Doom on a big monitor the first time. And several years later I was playing a lot of FPS games with no ill effects at all.

But it takes a person with strong willpower to practice! I got pretty bad motion sickness from the Rift, and it left me completely incapacitated for hours afterwards. Not only did I feel like puking but I couldn't do any work because my eyes couldn't focus on "2d" text on a monitor (we have a Rift devkit at the office, I made the mistake of using it in the middle of the day).

And I'm not a person with particularly bad motion sickness problems. There are sensitive people who will definitely not touch any VR helmet after the first time they've tried it and become sick for the rest of the day.

There will have to be improvements to the Rift hardware itself, the driver and peripheral software and the games that support it. And more games will have to be concerned about the physical correctness of movement, because it seems to be a factor in VR sickness.

Here's an interesting "competitor" to Oculus Rift with an alternative approach: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...

analog31• 13 years ago

I don't think I got sick, but had a hard time because of my bad vision, and was fearful of getting eyestrain headaches. I commented to a colleague that the device would benefit from some sort of corrective adjustment of the optics, such as the "diopter" and "pupillary distance" adjustments in a high quality microscope. And apparently a certain fraction of people have limited or no stereo vision. The pupillary distance could be done digitally.

kabouseng• 13 years ago

What about nausea pills like the ones you take for sea sickness? Would that perhaps help, until you at least get used to the feeling.

weaksauce• 13 years ago

I can imagine the nausea induced by a game like mirrors edge would be off the charts. I'm looking forward to this though!

simoncion• 13 years ago

The unofficial Mirror's Edge Oculus port (on the Kickstartered dev hardware) caused virtually no nausea for me. (Well, except for the parts where camera control is taken away from you, natch.) I cannot say the same about the official TF2 Oculus software. I'm not sure what the difference is between the two, but it was most definitely there for me.

rwmj• 13 years ago

No front-facing camera yet? That would give you some of the advantages of augmented reality, cost next to nothing, and allow gamers who are physically sitting together to interact more.

Gmo• 13 years ago

Seconded. After having tried the headset, that was exactly my thought. Just put a cam in front and a way to switch view quickly to be able to also see people with the headset on if you wish.

jayd16• 13 years ago

That's true. They already incorporated a camera, they should have put the camera on the head unit and the lights on some kind of light bar.

sopooneo2• 13 years ago

I think you'd have to put lights everywhere the camera might look. With lights on the user and a fixed camera, you just have to make sure the user doesn't move out of frame.

krisgee2• 13 years ago

Camera latency + processing latency + display latency = vomit machine.

Not saying it's impossible just that it's a bit harder than slapping a camera on the Rift.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

It can be a single camera with a sort of picture-in-picture setup.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

Your vision has some latency. I think it's a good bet that variable amounts of latency can be accommodated by your perception of reality.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

I'm sure they can add that in future releases, right now they're just trying to get the core product right at the lowest cost possible.

iandanforth• 13 years ago

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/368957329200271360

Being worked on.

doctoboggan• 13 years ago

Check out this guy's project where he does just that using two cameras:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA

erikpukinskis2• 13 years ago

cameras you mean.

bcjordan• 13 years ago

The first day I hooked the Rift Dev kit up to the Razer Hydra I nearly broke my monitor trying to juggle virtual balls. It was awesome.

One of the most incredible experiences has been playing as the Team Fortress 2 pyro. Perceiving the 3d-volume of the flame flowing out from the gun was a serious "wow" moment.

There's a lot to be excited about here. It sounds like the resolution is going up and the latency is coming down significantly in the next revision. Carmack's devlog tweets[0] are just fascinating. The team is filled with incredible devs. I'm cautiously optimistic that believable VR is possible and, if so, I'm pretty sure Oculus will make the thing that fools your brain first.

[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

ericd• 13 years ago

The Oculus dev kit is absolutely incredible on fast hardware with the right game (http://owlchemylabs.com/aaaaaculus/ for example, is one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had, without much nausea). I expected to be somewhat lukewarm about it, but it almost immediately became the most exciting bit of consumer tech in my eyes, whereas the Glass had the opposite trajectory for me.

Most of the issues I've come across have been from low frame rates with low-powered hardware (most laptops), and games with jarring transitions (loading screens where everything freezes are terrible). The dev kit also has very visible pixels, which gives it a substantial screen door effect, and there's some blur when turning your head. The biggest issue, though, is that there's no way that I know of to match what's going on in your inner ear with what's going on screen in something with a lot of quick acceleration/deceleration like a driving game.

However, I think that with translation tracking, less motion blur, better resolution, and games that are well suited to it (maybe not driving), it's going to be completely transformative. And I think it will open up new fields outside of games.

If you have a bit of cash you wouldn't mind spending, I would highly recommend ordering one of the dev kits from their site ($300), even if you don't immediately plan on developing for it. It will most likely spur a lot of ideas for you, game related and otherwise.

User8712• 13 years ago

For driving games, there's one solution for simulating turns, and acceleration/deceleration. That's rotating your seat. When you accelerate, the chair rotates backwards, and gravity does the work of pushing you back in your seat. The faster you accelerate, the more the chair leans back. When you brake quickly, the seat leans forward, and you feel your seat belt pushing into your chest as it holds you in place. Turn right, chair rotates left, etc.

You're limited to 1G though. This is enough to give the experience of driving and turning in a fast car, but you're not going to be pulling Formula 1 level Gs, although I don't think the average person wants to experience that anyway.

Here's a similar simulator. You'd just be using the rift instead of a TV mounted display.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFCRh-anfRg

Edit: Just noticed the system in the video also does up and down. I imagine that's an awesome effect when you go down a hill fast, and get that sense of weightlessness for a brief second.

doorhammer• 13 years ago

Fun article I just read on G forces because I was curious just how many G's an F1 car put someone through:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/motorsport/7681665/Formu...

exDM694• 13 years ago

For driving games, there's one solution for simulating turns, and acceleration/deceleration. That's rotating your seat. When you accelerate, the chair rotates backwards, and gravity does the work of pushing you back in your seat. The faster you accelerate, the more the chair leans back. When you brake quickly, the seat leans forward, and you feel your seat belt pushing into your chest as it holds you in place. Turn right, chair rotates left, etc.
You're limited to 1G though. This is enough to give the experience of driving and turning in a fast car, but you're not going to be pulling Formula 1 level Gs, although I don't think the average person wants to experience that anyway.

These motion simulators are cool but they are really big and very expensive, not something that average people will have in their living rooms. A commercial motion simulator for gaming (ie. not a "professional" sim rig) costs around $60000. Even if I had that kind of money, I couldn't explain that to the missus.

And the motion is limited to way less than 1G because the platform can not turn fully horizontal. Maybe some kind of spherical rig could get up to 1G but these things are limited to 0.3 to 0.5G, less than you get driving around in your car in traffic.

I've tried a motion simulator like this once and it wasn't a positive experience. I'm a hard core racing sim fan so maybe my expectations were a little high but all I got was a sore back and a bad lap time. The motion platform can't pull many G's but it shaked and rumbled like hell.

If you could have one of these with a nice seat and strap yourself tightly in, it might be a nice experience but this is never going to be something that will be in people's living rooms.

Btw, this here's someone's cool DIY home rig made with windshield wiper motors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_la_IzrZ4

krisgee2• 13 years ago

The Oculus dev kit is absolutely incredible on fast hardware with the right game

It's amazing even with the wrong games sometimes. Playing Planetside 2 and being man sized completely changed how I viewed the game. The previously small feeling rooms were revealed to be cathedral scale and running with a group of vehicles across the plains of Esamir watching tracers and tank rounds flash in the night as ESFs duelled over the mountain sized mountains was amazing.

So like I tell everyone who hasn't tried a Rift yet, believe the hype, all of it because for once it's true.

bagels• 13 years ago

That was what struck me too, the scale is what is most impressive.

blazespin• 13 years ago

The dirty little secret here is that Nausea isn't just caused by hardware alone, but also by software. There are a significant number of things software can do wrong which makes the improvements on the Rift redundant. For example, jumping from large heights, moving too quickly, stopping too suddenly, poor clipping artifacts, inconsistent lighting, and much much more.

OVR can talk all day about how they've 'fixed' nausea, but until they fix the games people want to play (which aren't going to be optimized for a pretty small subset of hard core gamers that have one of these), they're going to have a hard time selling the HMDs.

That all being said, I have one and love it dearly and try to get everyone I know to buy one. Realistically though, it's going to take awhile to fully launch this device.

prawn2• 13 years ago

Any word on whether they've managed to remove the cable between the headset and the base, or if that's possible/planned? Would wireless make the latency issue too problematic? Looks like it's still there in the picture and it can be a bit annoying in practice.

(I have a Rift dev kit lying idle in South Australia if anyone is keen to try it out or buy it cheap. It's very interesting but I'm not a game developer so not in a position to do more than muck around with demos!)

mugiwara• 13 years ago

I am interested, will contact you on the email in your profile...

Tepix2• 13 years ago

You can use an Asus WAVI to eliminate the wires between your PC and the Rift. It does both HDMI (1080p) and USB with very low latency.

prawn2• 13 years ago

If it's possible, then hopefully they can somehow include it in a future release of the device.

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

I got my dev kit last fall and had high expectations. I was somewhat disappointed in it. No doubt it's awesome tech, but it is true dev hardware; the screen is very pixelated and the software is buggy. I got sick almost immediately, and the nausea and disorientation lasted for almost 24 hours. I expected to play Oculus games for all weekend when I got it, and ended up using it very sparsely. All in all I've probably not spent any more than 2 hours in the Rift.

It's a cool, mind-expanding demo that shows how VR is the future, and of course sufficient if you're developing a game that depends on it, but it's not quite the experience many developers will expect. I'm glad they're iterating.

lowglow2• 13 years ago

If people are truly interested in wearables and externals like this, we need some feedback on our next hackathon: http://www.techendo.co/posts/hackendo-san-francisco-wearable...

blhack• 13 years ago

Cool, there is also a wearables hackathon happening in Phoenix next week by #hackphx: http://hackphx.com/

They've done some really awesome hackathons in the last year or so.

(Full disclosure: this happens at a hackerspace I'm very active in [heatsync labs], and I have volunteered at the last couple of events)

lowglow2• 13 years ago

Awesome. :)

julianpye• 13 years ago

I wrote up a blog post today about the Oculus and its potential to grab a big bite out of Hollywood at https://medium.com/best-of-tech/1a3151f2bc55

Don't mistake it with the Digital 3D experience that came to home televisions and is absent this year at CES - it is a totally new ballgame.

daemonk• 13 years ago

I understand that simulation/motion sickness is a biological response to discrepancy between what you see and your sense of balance.

I've always wondered how much of the simulation sickness is psychological. What if someone made a game where you play a paraplegic in a wheel chair. You are allowed to move your head and look around via the oculus rift, but you move with a joystick on the wheel chair via the controller. So will psychologically disabling natural movement make a person less sick?

GuiA• 13 years ago

I have a Rift SDK.

Motion sickness is very present (for me) in games like Minecraft; however, in a demo like Titans of Space, where your character is stationery in a spaceship (and only the spaceship moves, but you can look around of course) I don't get motion sickness at all.

I hear that positional tracking could improve the motion sickness situation.

kaizendc• 13 years ago

I received DevKit V1 a few weeks ago and had the privilege to demo it to a few friends and family over the holidays.

Everyone from ages 4 to 80 absolutely loved it. Most of these people are not even gamers, and they could see the incredible potential of this device.

It is truly a novel experience. Now I'm just trying to save up some cash so that I can invest in this company when it goes public!

drak0n1c• 13 years ago

I wonder if the already amazing 110 degree FOV could be bumped up even more with curved, wider eye-displays that wrap around to the wearer's temples?

Such a setup might benefit not only peripheral vision but also 3D perspective. Are there downsides I am not considering? (assuming that curved display tech is/becomes performant enough for Oculus' purposes)

erikpukinskis2• 13 years ago

Are there downsides I am not considering?

Since total resolution is (for all intents and purposes) capped, there's a 1:1 tradeoff between FOV and PPI. Some people already think Oculus has gone too far, and would be better with a narrower FOV and higher PPI.

knodi• 13 years ago

I can't wait for this.

bm1362• 13 years ago

Anyone in Seattle looking to sell a Rift? I'd like to give it a shot but don't intend to spend $300.

sopooneo2• 13 years ago

This Rift deeply excites me. But I wonder what time-scale we need to consider for this to be an intermediate step?

That is, we're putting an interface on an interface here. Picture on eyeball. How long until we can mainline this stuff?

Kiro2• 13 years ago

I'm worried that the motion sickness was a side effect of the experience being so realistic and that the removal of it will make it less real. Please tell me I'm wrong!

Kiro2• 13 years ago

Not sure how I should interpret the downvote. I WANT to be proven wrong since I'm getting one so please tell me if I am.

idoco• 13 years ago

A classic case of "Shut up and take my money!"

leoc• 13 years ago

It's going to be pretty disappointing if the production Rift's resolution is 1080p or only a little higher, especially because it will make the Rift much less useful as a general-purpose computing display for non-gaming tasks. Hopefully they're just being coy so as not to give display manufacturers too much leverage over them. I've been worried that they'll badly mugged on price by the panel makers.

exDM694• 13 years ago

Here's an interesting competitor to Oculus Rift called CastAR that uses a very different solution. It uses a head mounted mini projectors and a retro reflecting surface. It's different from Oculus in the sense that it doesn't block the external world like a head mounted display does. This is an advantage in gaming because you can actually see the gaming controllers. It also allows interesting AR solutions.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...

This project was originally Jeri Ellsworth's research project at Valve but the funding was pulled and these guys are trying to kickstart a new business.

When playing a flight simulator with the Oculus Rift, I had this problem that I could not see the physical controls. I was using a full HOTAS (hands on throttle and stick) controller so regular flying wasn't a problem but when I had to lower the landing gear, I had to peer down my nose under the Rift's head mounted display to see where the button for the landing gear was.

I'm not going to pick any favorites because I've only tried one and not the other but I want both of these projects to succeed! This way we can have competing alternative technologies and whoever prevails will be made better by the competition.

The First Look at the New Oculus VR Prototype

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