Whatever happened to Virtual Reality?

Ripley Twenty-Nine said:
Are you talking about these? I used to have a pair, and they worked quite well.
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No, I hadn't seen those particular ones before, though it's the same idea. What I've seen were actually available for windows machines, and came bundled with some graphics card. Similar stuff is still apparently still available, like this:

http://www.edimensional.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=29

Apparently the term for these things is "shutter glasses". They may yet catch on, since they're easily adaptable to already-existing game infrastructure.
 
A rising tide lifts all ships. I wouldn't be surpised if these (or a variant) are as ubiquitous as headphones 2 years from now. Theatres are going 3d to compete with home theatres. Logic indicates that home theatres are going to adapt to keep the arms race going.
 
Dave1001 said:
A rising tide lifts all ships. I wouldn't be surpised if these (or a variant) are as ubiquitous as headphones 2 years from now. Theatres are going 3d to compete with home theatres. Logic indicates that home theatres are going to adapt to keep the arms race going.
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I think a lot of theaters are using polarization of light to separate the two channels (with each eye having a filter to block one channel, and the two channels perpendicular to each other). This requires specialized, and expensive, equipment to do the projection, which theaters can justify and afford much more easily than home users. Some sort of home 3D is almost certainly going to happen, but I think it'll take a fair amount of time to cycle through theater adaptation and the creation of 3D movie content, to high-end home theater duplication, and finally trickle down to the mass market. We're probably talking at least a decade - the kind of time frame it took for HDTV to really start entering the market. But I think it will be movies, not computer games, which will finally push 3D into the mainstream.
 
As mentioned, there are still things like the Wii and PS2 EyeToy for extra immersion, as well as some very impressive (apparently) full-on VR-style goggles, not shutter-glasses, but goggles with two small monitors one for each eye. There's one model out there that works with commercial flight sim software I think.

Slightly more mainstream than those (but even less VR) are the TrackIR systems popular with flight sim flyers - they track (duh) your head movement via infra-red (duh) using whatever monitor you choose to use.

But yeah, truly immersive 360 degree environment VR seems to have gone even more niche than it was in the early 90s when I tried it.
 
Ziggurat said:
No, I hadn't seen those particular ones before, though it's the same idea. What I've seen were actually available for windows machines, and came bundled with some graphics card. Similar stuff is still apparently still available, like this:

http://www.edimensional.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=29

Apparently the term for these things is "shutter glasses". They may yet catch on, since they're easily adaptable to already-existing game infrastructure.
Click to expand...

I very nearly bought some shutter glasses a couple of years back. It's strange that they didn't catch on because Nvidia cards have support built into the driver, so a lot of games work with no additional code whatsoever. The nvidia driver also has analglyph (red and blue glasses) support which I tried while trying to decide whether to shell out for the glasses. Some of my racing games looking pretty darned groovy through them.

You can also get a thingy you stick on the top of your head to track your head movements. This then causes the monitor to pan around, so in a virtual cockpit for instance, if you turn your head left slightly, the display turns left.
ETA: D'oh! I see Big Les has already mentioned this.
The obvious problem with this is that the monitor stays put so you only have limited movement. For full movement you would need an old stylee VR helmet.

I think the problem with the true VR helmets is that the eye had to physically focus on the screens a few inches away. This was tiring on the eye and didn't match what was on screen. I kept meaning to invent some awesome projection system which reproduced the entire light wavefront somehow (much like a hologram I guess). That way the eye could focus naturally on the far distance or stuff nearby. It would be incredibly immersive!
 
lister said:
I kept meaning to invent some awesome projection system which reproduced the entire light wavefront somehow (much like a hologram I guess). That way the eye could focus naturally on the far distance or stuff nearby. It would be incredibly immersive!
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Well, of they weren't on Red Dwarf, there's no hope for any of us lot.

I thought Lister would have had a couple of thousand discs, all of nubile nymphettes on Caribbean Islands.
 
The Atheist said:
Well, of they weren't on Red Dwarf, there's no hope for any of us lot.
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They were :D

reddwarf.jpg
 
Games do NOT work well with NVIDIA's built-in shutter-glasses support.

The problem is the crosshair and other HUD information, which doesnt have a 3D location (they are just rendered as axis aligned quads in 2D)

Only games specifically designed to support it will work well. Expect frustration with games that arent designed for it.
 
rockoon said:
Games do NOT work well with NVIDIA's built-in shutter-glasses support.

The problem is the crosshair and other HUD information, which doesnt have a 3D location (they are just rendered as axis aligned quads in 2D)

Only games specifically designed to support it will work well. Expect frustration with games that arent designed for it.
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That should be the sort of problem that could be easily be handled by a generic API. If Microsoft ever incorporates shutter glass support in Direct3D, it would probably take off.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Motion sickness does not come specificaly from the inner ear. It comes from the inner ear and the eyes getting conflicting information about motion and the brain not liking it.
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As I said though, I've never had that problem. Someone else here said they actually get dizzy in Half-Life, by watching an image on a moniter. I get that that happens but for some reason I've never become dizzy just because I saw something flipping around.

That said, falling into oblivion through the ground in a game HAS terrified the arse off of me. Something about having an infinite void in front of me pulling me in just seems to actually scare me.
 
rockoon said:
Games do NOT work well with NVIDIA's built-in shutter-glasses support.

The problem is the crosshair and other HUD information, which doesnt have a 3D location (they are just rendered as axis aligned quads in 2D)

Only games specifically designed to support it will work well. Expect frustration with games that arent designed for it.
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Well I did say "a lot" rather than "most". I agree some games had problems with HUD displays, and also flat background images that don't appear far enough away in the Z-plane. However as I said, an awful lot worked great straight off and I had a lot of fun with them.
 
I don't remember much motion sensing back then. :D

I think I'm going to wait for cyber brains.
 
If we're talking Red Dwarf's Artifical Reality machine, I think some progress has been made on the *ahem* groinal attachment front...
 
Ok, because of this thread, I just enabled 3D stereo with my Nvidia video card. I played Toca Race Driver. Good. not perfect, but definitely tridimensional. I wonder why efforts regarding this has been neglected?

The only reason I can think is that, despite being more inmersive, you get tired faster, so you will play less... Maybe thats why.
 
There is an article in the May issue of Discovery. Not much has happened with VR but it is still in the works.
 
Bodhi Dharma Zen said:
The only reason I can think is that, despite being more inmersive, you get tired faster, so you will play less... Maybe thats why.
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I was wondering this - rather than just having been sidelined as an area of research, that the games companies actually found prohibitive reasons (maybe tiredness or perhaps even distinct health risks of some sort - neck strain, epilepsy, eye damage... but something that would have been really bad publicity).
 
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