John Carmack's VR head set

eastmen

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http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-john-carmack-interview/17-6164/


I wont even pretend to understand half of what he is talking about but it looks amazing . Hopefully he gets someone to put out a quality one

edit more stuff

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14967 here is a long detailed post

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/jo...erview-inside/

3-part longer interview

http://roadtovr.wordpress.com/2012/0...han-june-14th/

The guy who made the oculus rift is going to do a kick starter it seems .

They should have waited till the end of the year and smoothed out some of the details a bit more for the kick starter though.
 
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I wonder why he did this in Doom 3 and not Rage.
I think he should be as confortable working with idtech4 as he would with idtech3.

He's awfully worried with latencies everywhere but he's using an analog video feed to the HMD.. wtf?
 
I wonder why he did this in Doom 3 and not Rage.
I think he should be as confortable working with idtech4 as he would with idtech3.

He's awfully worried with latencies everywhere but he's using an analog video feed to the HMD.. wtf?

Doom 3 BFG edition will be released for consoles soon...

are you saying VGA connection adds significant amount of latency to that display?
 
I wonder why he did this in Doom 3 and not Rage.
I think he should be as confortable working with idtech4 as he would with idtech3.

He's awfully worried with latencies everywhere but he's using an analog video feed to the HMD.. wtf?


That's not John's fault. He modified the HMD but he didn't design or build it, it is a prototype cobbled together from basically off the shelf parts.

I think it's a given that he'll work this tech into Rage at some point, iirc he has even mentioned this in previous interviews.

I wish Carmack would do a weeky podcast or vidblog, I could listen to him all day nerding out about whatever topic fascinates him at the moment.
 
He's awfully worried with latencies everywhere but he's using an analog video feed to the HMD.. wtf?
Latency is a huge issue with HMDs. I tried such a device back around 1999 or so - it was absolute cutting edge at that time, driven by a Silicon Graphics Onyx graphics supercomputer with 4 CPUs and oodles of RAM (for its time, of course, now every PC has more), and probably cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.

The head tracking lagged at least a second behind all your motions, and it had an update rate of about 4Hz or so, so any twitch-like motions were likely to not register at all, or only partially. It was extremely frustrating, bordering on disorienting when your eye view did not match up to the motions of your head...
 
Didn't head-mount VR craze died with the '90s already? The thing never made it to the mass market, but boy was it so much praised by the media and Hollywood back then.
 
I wonder why he did this in Doom 3 and not Rage.
I think he should be as confortable working with idtech4 as he would with idtech3.

I think you meant "id Tech 5 as he would with id Tech 4".

Meh, I remain skeptical. My problem with HMDs on FPS is always going to be player movement. Same problem as with http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/21/diy-vr-game-gun-packs-built-in-motion-tracking-optional-mullet/

What you gain in immersion by moving your head to look around you lose because you're still pushing buttons to walk around.

Didn't head-mount VR craze died with the '90s already? The thing never made it to the mass market, but boy was it so much praised by the media and Hollywood back then.

It seems to revive with every new console generation: http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1587/E3-2006-Trimersion-Head-Mounted-Display-HandsOn/p1/
 
I don't care about head tracking to much , but i'd love to put on a head unit and just be in the game with a view that takes up my full eye sight. I could imagine playing star wars 1313 in a set up like that
 
At the momemt high fov equates to heavy hmds with a center of gravity far away from the bridge of your nose ... the oculus rift doesn't seem convenient.
 
Why is that ? Does high fov means the screens need to be situated further from the lens ? Can't they just used bigger screens and different lens to achieve the effect. Especially with OLED, can't they use curved OLED or something.

High fov is really what's needed for HMD to be worthwhile considering all the hassle. You know replicating proper big screen IMAX experience rather that just your average home theater system.
 
The main limitation is the "speed" of refractive lenses ... you can't make the focal length arbitrarily small, which limits how small you can make the optical path length.
 
Mirrors would enable redistribution of weight. Optical fibres to route images would also work quite nicely...

Contact lenses with in-built displays have already been demonstrated...
 
He was aiming for 500 dollars?
For 800 dollar you can have this thing but with:
-Infinitely better image quality
-no/ less ghosting
-less input lag
-smaller
-less weight
-higher resolution
-more comfortable
-official standards
-fully digital interface
-much more

You have to do without the xyz positioning though.
Reinventing the wheel much?

If carmack were aiming for a 50 dollar positional device for the HMZ-T1, then I would kickstart it for a 1000 dollars :)
(we need 10.000 euro helmets at our research lab do it would be a steal :D)
 
At the momemt high fov equates to heavy hmds with a center of gravity far away from the bridge of your nose ... the oculus rift doesn't seem convenient.

Hi, I am the guy behind the Rift. It only weighs 0.6lbs, and the center of gravity is pretty far back on the bridge of your nose.

He was aiming for 500 dollars?
For 800 dollar you can have this thing but with:
-Infinitely better image quality
-no/ less ghosting
-less input lag
-smaller
-less weight
-higher resolution
-more comfortable
-official standards
-fully digital interface
-much more

I regret to inform you that you have no idea what you are talking about.

-HMDs do not suffer from crosstalk/ghosting. The Sony is no better.
-Did you even watch the interview? The HMZ-T1 has over 50ms of latency, which is why Carmack cannot stand using it. The Rift has less than 20ms.
-The Rift is bulkier, but it is also much closer to your face.
-The Rift is more than 30% lighter
-The prototype Carmack had was VGA, current units have DVI, VGA, and HDMI
-The Rift is far, FAR more comfortable than the HMZ-T1.

On top of all that, the image size of the HMZ-T1 is less than 20% of the Rift. It is the difference between a nice laptop screen and your phone's screen at the same distance.

The HMZ-T1 does have a lot of advantages (Like HDMI 1,4 support, and a better contrast ratio), so no need to make things up.

Best,

PalmertTech
oculusvr.com
 
Palmer, nice to have you around. :) Any chance that you'd drop a line in this thread when you start your Kickstarter campaign? Also: any timeline on that?
 
Hi, I am the guy behind the Rift. It only weighs 0.6lbs, and the center of gravity is pretty far back on the bridge of your nose.

Hi, and thanks for taking the time to answer here. Very happy that you guys are working on this, because I think the time is ripe for this tech to actually 'work'. I am and always have been very interested in 3D, and I am hoping that with the next generation of consoles the consoles will be powerful enough to aim for 60fps always, enabling 30fps split screen and 3D support. Well, I can hope, right?

2D is really becoming the most important bottleneck now preventing people from looking at a very high dpi screen like the iPad 3's and thinking they are looking through a window. I'm not pretending that we'll see that happen glassesless in the short term, but the stuff you are working at now should be within reach and particularly for games the effect could (and should) be stunning.

I was very interested in the HMD-T1, but without having actually been able to try it impressions online clearly showed there were still some issues left. Glad to see that you've managed to nail the most important of those! Very curious to see where this goes from here.
 
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