Doom guy teleports into VR startup Oculus Rift Virtual reality gaming startup Oculus Rift has appointed digital graphics pioneer and former space cowboy John Carmack as its chief technology officer. The announced was made on Wednesday and will see Carmack work from a new Oculus Rift office in Dallas, Texas. Carmack's appointment follows Oculus Rift tragically losing co- …
The control scheme thing may well already be solved to some degree...
The Wiimote is already here, is fairly easy to get hold of, and already has software for making it pretend to be a pointing device. Going one step further you could use the accelerometers on a smart phone to feed pointing type info to a service running on the host.
Absolutely. Did this years ago with a head-tracking eMagin Z800 headset.
Playing Oblivion with a Wii Balance Board for motion (so you're skateboarding around town :)), Wiimote + Nunchuck for left/right arm (or even pull-back w/button pressed to notch an arrow, release to fire). And head-tracking so you always look where you're... well, where you're looking.
The only serious problem was that you couldn't look and aim independently. Which should be pretty simple to sort in an all-3D game (so anything from Quake onwards).
Another little issue was that I needed to have a multibutton mouse to select which kit combination I was using, and remembering that in the middle of a battle was a PITA. But again, a software fix to output which weapons/shields/spells/etc are equipped over USB/serial/etc would sort this.
If the Rift can bring this sort of tech into the proper mainstream, good for it! I'll certainly be buying one :D
When it comes to the next revolution in gaming, I think this is it.
I was previously entertaining a car sim cockpit though that would have been a one trick pony. This might also reduce my desires for a better monitor as well (was looking at 120hz gaming monitors) as I can quickly see myself favouring full immersion games via the Oculus.
The Virtuix Omni (http://www.virtuix.com/) is obviously going to be a big part of this full immersion setup.
Horizon even did a show about it in 1991 called "Colonziing Cyberspace", the Virtuality system is featured in it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZonQVN4uw
Worth a look just to see the real early days of realtime 3D graphics compared to what a pocket phone of today can accomplish with ease.
Michael Abrash also joined forces on this. Last I read from him he was at Vavle and Valve supported him on trying new things with wearable computing. Not sure what happen with or too his projects there, but having a ASM guru on board never hurt a project. So maybe we will finally see this project being sold in the next 5 years?
BTW, if you search for the Rift, you will see an increase in articles reporting vertigo sickness using it for casual gaming/things. In my opinion vertigo basically sunk the first attempt of VR in the early 90's, so hopefully they can get that worked out, or history will repeat itself. However, the resolution is still nowhere near where it needs to be, so the first incarnation of this device seems to be a bust...seems as it has been pretty much phantom'ish wear for quite sometime already.
Vertigo and motion sickness is caused by latency - the brain gets confused by the disconnect between acted movement and intended movement. The guys behind the headset never claimed to have solved the problem yet, although they seem to believe that they can get it under an acceptable time.
Can they? I don't know enough to say, but I've read several comments from people who seem to know what they're talking about suggesting that the only viable way to do so is a couple of electrodes to detect the impulses in the neck muscles before the actual movement starts.
...and I love it! It's far from perfect but the spirit of what will be is definitely there.
For me the current development version that is shipping is not really of a high enough resolution to truly enjoy and extended gaming session. On paper it doesn't look to bad, but the up close reality of the screens means you can really see those pixels. But I don't care as the head tracking is super smooth, the weight of the unity is fine.
As for motion sickness I had a little bit at first, especially when going up or down some stairs for example. It wasn't bad and felt more like the motion you can get in a lift.
I'm using standard FPS controls no problem, but I am also looking at leap motion to take care of other input to avoid the user groping around for the mouse or the correct hand on keyboard placement.
I really feel the dreams I had as a child of VR are now becoming a realistic reality.
plug an hdmi/vgo convertor box and plug it into your gfx card on your PC, and receive it on your VR headset and binary packets, and you can create your own image format etc
without modern technology and ways of doing things, you might aswell just buy a £15 lcd from maplin, put it in a back to front cycle helmet and wrap it in duck tape and make your own "VR" headset
doubt it, he could do the fisheye panaramic filter to the rendered images in 30 seconds probably, if they fitted a curved screen
http://onemansblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/downtown-seattle-fisheye.jpg
http://fisheyephotography.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/wayanad-ghat-fisheye-panoramic.jpg
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