Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

60Hz low persistence flicker on the GearVR is slightly unpleasant to me personally, especially in brightly lit scenes. It's probably the most immediately visible qualitative difference when juggling between it and the Rift/Vive for me.

edit: There's no way that I would ever want to accept that 60Hz refresh rate for a resolution bump to 1440x1440. That said, the 75Hz on the DK2 I found to be pretty acceptable, granted I have not tried it since becoming accustomed to seeing 90Hz.
 
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So the low-end is too low end to actually be any good. 60 Hz LCD for $300 could do more damage to the industry than good if people buy in cheap and get their VR experience soured.
 
Honestly anything less than the Vive/Oculus will be a pretty bad idea, because as far as I'm concerned I consider them as first HW, that is, not really good enough yet, but at least non nauseating.
 
I did this sort of thing for an hour or so last night in Rec Room. When everyone has always-on microphones the giggling and chatter becomes quite natural and contagious. A surprisingly hard game at times when you discover people from different corners of the globe have slang you've never heard of for common objects.
 
A few years ago you could spend 5-figures on a professional HMD and get a much poorer experience than what any of the recent 3-figure consumer VR setups provide. Specialty industries, small businesses and arcades of today aren't going to be able to push the technical boundaries of VR just because they're willing to spend 5-7 figures when neither the hardware, necessary core technologies, nor content exist. Current VR isn't limited by the money you have to spend, it's limited by R&D science and engineering (ie. time.)
 
Here's something strange I just came across.

Porn was something I thought would be a major draw for VR, and for some people it probably is. But I got to thinking about it and talked about it with some friends that have VR headsets and while everyone was completely blown away at first, a lot of them find that they find regular 2D porn more interesting after the initial WOW factor had worn off. Although the ones that are very much into POV style porn videos can't get enough of the VR stuff.

Thinking about it, I think it comes down the to the fact that there is very little variety in VR porn. I'm talking about camera position and how the camera moves. Or more accurately how the camera can't move as inducing motion sickness in the viewer would be counterproductive to why people would watch VR porn in the first place. After so many video's they all start to feel the same.

I bring this up because it also mirrors what some friends I know mention about VR games, that after the initial WOW period, things start to feel the same across a wide range of titles. Although video is going to be far more limited as you can't feasibly make it room scale and allow the user to roam around within the "video" as you can with realtime rendered stuff.

It's going to be interesting to see what (if anything) eventually becomes a breakout sensation. Perhaps now that Oculus also has hand controllers, we'll see more innovation in the field. But I still remain highly skeptical.

Regards,
SB
 
I would think for porn a flesh light type device that is linked to the movements of the girl in the video would be the next step. Different feelings for using her mouth or hand and accurate locations lined up with the video.

Also for real time cam girls having them perform the act on a dildo sensor and having it translate to all the fans instantly would be interesting.
 
There's also the fact that VR porn is very bandwidth intensive, the production is very fiddly, and there's still very few sources that are reliable. High quality videos are in the ballpark of 210 MB per minute due to their resolution and frame rate (30min videos are >6GB). Most pay services still haven't learned the basic lessons of VR in regards to making sure the horizon of video matches the real world one, or that stereo separation of the recording has to be correct otherwise it looks like you're getting snu-snu'ed by a 12 foot tall woman.

With regular porn you've got thousands of different producers, millions of videos, and a back catalog stretching back into the 70s. With VR porn you've got literally maybe 2-3 producers that are reliable, so you're looking at a catalog consisting of a few dozen actresses and videos.
 
This might create a whole new niche, though.

Joking aside, it's not as simple as that as the POV actor's body you're in and environment also have the wrong scale. References of scale (objects that your brain know to be of a certain size) are mismatched, including any visible portion of your POV actor's body. It just ends up looking all sorts of wrong. It's akin to watching a movie in the wrong aspect ratio - you can still follow what's going on, but you can never completely ignore it.

The horizon mismatch (where the recording camera's pitch angle is not parallel with the ground) is especially bad because it feels like the world you're in is pitched forward at an extreme angle and can actually give me mild vertigo. What's worse is after 5-10 minutes of being in that environment my brain has attempted to adapt the inner ear's sense of 'down' to what my eyes have been seeing as 'down', and removing the headset and seeing the real world actually feels uncomfortable for a while.

All of this gets compounded by the fact that the download sizes are massive enough that you really can't stream these videos, so at best you're left with paying a subscription fee to a site and spending a not-insignificant amount of time downloading videos only to later find that they're badly formatted or that the 'content' itself is not to your liking. VR (head tracked, stereo, spherical/hemispherical video) porn is definitely novel, but it's anything but convenient right now.

Production and logistical issues aside though, in the fleeting moments where everything works I've actually gotten flashes of something akin to VR "presence" in a way that I wasn't expecting. Things like a simulated kiss or similar gentle skin-to-face contact results in a very brief physical sensation. My guess is it's some sort of associative sensory memory being triggered (your memory associating a proximity and type of contact with a very very subtle physical sensation). Presumably the same idea as seeing a virtual spider crawling on your virtual hand, or being tickled by a virtual feather and having it provoke a shiver/tickle on the implied point of contact.

Other things that I've noticed that will be very interesting when the display tech gets much better, is with high quality video sources and close proximity between the camera and actor (such that the video source and display resolution have adequate resolving power for very fine material detail). The texture of skin, subtle brdf, specularity, scattering, etc, combined with the stereo recording gives a reality to the material that is unmatched in real-time VR rendering. With real-time rendering right now you've got some amount of specular reflection from environment maps that doesn't play well with stereo depth perception because they're effectively positioned at infinity. Couple this with the inability to have multiple planes of focus (eye lens accommodation) means that materials with a non-trivial directional/specular reflectance component produce bad stereo information. This is something that stereo video recording does not exhibit because the lighting is physically correct (obviously), and the camera lens has a natural limit of focus that ensures distant environment reflections are not at the same plane of focus as the surface. The result of this is that certain materials at certain distances can look damn close to reality.
 
Other things that I've noticed that will be very interesting when the display tech gets much better, is with high quality video sources and close proximity between the camera and actor (such that the video source and display resolution have adequate resolving power for very fine material detail). The texture of skin, subtle brdf, specularity, scattering, etc, combined with the stereo recording gives a reality to the material that is unmatched in real-time VR rendering. With real-time rendering right now you've got some amount of specular reflection from environment maps that doesn't play well with stereo depth perception because they're effectively positioned at infinity. Couple this with the inability to have multiple planes of focus (eye lens accommodation) means that materials with a non-trivial directional/specular reflectance component produce bad stereo information. This is something that stereo video recording does not exhibit because the lighting is physically correct (obviously), and the camera lens has a natural limit of focus that ensures distant environment reflections are not at the same plane of focus as the surface. The result of this is that certain materials at certain distances can look damn close to reality.

This is something I've noticed with transparent and semi-transparent materials. Traditional video and real time rendering in VR look absolutely flat compared to transparent and semi-transparent materials (like clothing) in good VR video. I had wondered why this was, but thinking about it after reading this, physically correct lighting combined with correct stereo positioning is likely a big reason for it. When I get back to the US, I'm going to try to take a closer look at this. I had previously just thought it was the stereo positioning (each eye see's slightly different image). But that wouldn't have explained why real time rendered VR didn't look good. However, combined with physically correct lighting (each eye seeing it correctly from the correct perspective) would go a long way towards explaining this.

The illusion still breaks however if you move your view (head) too much to the left/right/up/down of the location from which the camera was located.

Regards,
SB
 
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R.I.P Oculus: https://twitter.com/ID_R_McGregor/status/821886479425302529

Anyway, people in the VR industry have known for a while that the whole Facebook -Oculus acquisition was shady as fuck. Oculus lured Valve employees to hand out Valve's prototypes to them so they can demo VR to investors (yes..using Valve's HW) and get bought by FB. Those same Valve employees then jumped ship and joined Oculus once the FB deal was made... leaving a handful of Valve R&D folks totally fucked up. Thankfully for them HTC miraculously cut that deal for the Vive and worked their ass off to get it out before the Rift (Valve was never planning to release any HW and was expecting Oculus to be their partner the same way HTC is now..but they totally messed up by not making them sign anything while sharing their technologies with them..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414190

It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.

Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.
 
I'm not sure if Carmack backing up his work e-mail warrants a "RIP Oculus"? I would think Carmack's theft of his e-mail shouldn't be something Oculus has to legally answer for if there's no indication that it was conspired with Oculus/Facebook, or that the information contained within the e-mails was actually leveraged.

It's also no secret that Oculus have been hiring researchers and engineers away from many different companies and academia during the first couple years. Forsyth left Valve for Oculus almost a year before the Facebook acquisition. Following Carmack's departure from Id Software we saw something like five or six other senior employees go with him. Then from Valve we saw Abrash and Atman Binstock join around the time of the Facebook acquisition. Nvidia and Google were also poached from. I believe that year Oculus went from something like 75 employees to 300+, and from a single building to three or four in different cities.

That's not to say that Carmack and Valve's influence haven't been central to Oculus's success of course. Without Carmack demonstrating his modified prototype at E3 2012, having Quakecon 2012 advertise the Kickstarter launch, (along with Abrash and Newell), I don't think there's any doubt that Oculus would have gone no where. Given that marketing assistance however, I'm not really sure how else the last 4 years were supposed to go? By the following year when the DK1 was getting delivered Oculus were getting significant seeding, VC rounds, and the writing was on the wall that they were going to need to be much more than a niche peripheral manufacturer for PC gaming and help Valve get a few more game sales on Steam. Even Abrash's talk at that Quakecon discussed the probable future of VR/AR becoming a platform-play battleground for the biggest companies in tech.
 
I'm not sure if Carmack backing up his work e-mail warrants a "RIP Oculus"? I would think Carmack's theft of his e-mail shouldn't be something Oculus has to legally answer for if there's no indication that it was conspired with Oculus/Facebook, or that the information contained within the e-mails was actually leveraged.

It's also no secret that Oculus have been hiring researchers and engineers away from many different companies and academia during the first couple years. Forsyth left Valve for Oculus almost a year before the Facebook acquisition. Following Carmack's departure from Id Software we saw something like five or six other senior employees go with him. Then from Valve we saw Abrash and Atman Binstock join around the time of the Facebook acquisition. Nvidia and Google were also poached from. I believe that year Oculus went from something like 75 employees to 300+, and from a single building to three or four in different cities.

That's not to say that Carmack and Valve's influence haven't been central to Oculus's success of course. Without Carmack demonstrating his modified prototype at E3 2012, having Quakecon 2012 advertise the Kickstarter launch, (along with Abrash and Newell), I don't think there's any doubt that Oculus would have gone no where. Given that marketing assistance however, I'm not really sure how else the last 4 years were supposed to go? By the following year when the DK1 was getting delivered Oculus were getting significant seeding, VC rounds, and the writing was on the wall that they were going to need to be much more than a niche peripheral manufacturer for PC gaming and help Valve get a few more game sales on Steam. Even Abrash's talk at that Quakecon discussed the probable future of VR/AR becoming a platform-play battleground for the biggest companies in tech.

The Zenimax lawsuit is all about Carmack copying data from his work at id/Zenimax after leaving the company (one day later). Now that his admitted this (and also admits that's it wasn't the wisest decision he could have made) the nature of the data has even less relevance now in the eyes of the Jury. He clearly admitted to a crime..stealing (it has also been proved that he copied code, which he admitted too but says he has not be used on any Oculus product etc..). So yeah Zenimax is going to do everything to bury them now and get what they have always asked for since before the FB acquisition = Money. Palmer had signed an NDA with Zenimax when "working" with Carmack and decided to act like it never existed after Zenimax asked for a 15% in the company (Luckey, Irbine & Co only wanted to give them 2%). Zenimax is trying to prove that without Carmack Oculus wasn't worth the $3B Facebook paid for..and they are right. Carmack brought the press, most of the tech and the VCs. For example, Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz who's also on the FB board invested in Oculus 37M and then pushed Zuckerberg to invest/buy them because "they have this guy [Carmack]".

And this is where Valve's got screwed...the demos that where shown' to VC's (Zuck, Andreessen etc..) where using's Valve's in-house room-scale prototypes and everybody at Oculus/FB knew this. Zuck even attempted to posh most of the of Valve's VR team after the deal but only those of where already part of the shady deal went to FB (those who insisted that Valve hand out its tech to Oculus..). But hey they can now all act like no-one was aware of the Zenimax NDA, or that Carmack wasn't the catalyst of the whole thing etc..Jason Rubin is a veteran in the industry and his father is a big as lawyer so yeah they didn't go in blind and knew what they were doing. They just fucked with the wrong guys (Zenimax) who ironically are run by a bunch of lawyers...FB or Oculus hiring people was never the issue. The issue was/is the way Oculus sold itself to the VCs and finally to FB while totally ignoring Zenimax's NDA and shitting all over Valve (this is all Valve's fault though they should have made them sign something..). Karma's a bitch though... The HTC Vive is outselling the Rift 2-1..
 
When will the Vive 2 be released? I thought with the -$100 sale in the last year the launch would be imminent, but apparently it's not. The cost reduction is nice but I hope the total resolution reaches 4K as the current 1K-per-eye resolution is severely lacking even for the movie theater usage which is my main interest right now on the Rift.
 
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