Race for wireless VR headset heats up The race is heating up for a wireless virtual reality headset with HTC announcing a $220 add-on to its Vive system that will allow you to unplug from your PC. The "Tether-less VR upgrade kit" attaches to the existing Vive headset and comprises a wireless transmitter and receiver that sits on top of the head strap and a battery …
In years long gone we had a rather nice sideline manufacturing NiCad battery belts for use with professional hand held movie and TV cameras cameras. They worked very well and we sold quite a few to the TV stations.
Their use dwindled as professional cameras changed to digital and started to use internal batteries. Maybe their use will turn full circle.
A waist belt of batteries would be a more comfortable way to provide even longer-lasting power. I doubt if users are going to be diving under doors or doing other gymnastics in a headset.
It being VR, not AR, it'd be wiser I'd think not to move around that much at all unless the blind dog program is significantly extended or the VR helmet is combined with a crash helmet.
As for the batteries, do you really want a lot of batteries that close to your nethers (given the recent Samsung thing)?
Better some sort of limited capacity hip harness to gather kinetic energy* from movement.
*Dance games are going to big, what else did you think I meant?
I doubt kinetic energy collectors will draw enough power to handle something that beastly. Not to mention the weight and drag on your body. Now, a backpack unit would probably be more comfortable, and any wires from it can conveniently run down your back and out of obvious sight.
That said, whatever happened to the AR monocle?
"I wouldn't like them in something enclosing my head. Batteries distributed round a belt could be less energy dense types - and a quick release buckle would solve the problems for emergencies."
But lithium batteries can go up quickly: even more quickly than fumbling for a quick-release buckle, which may be too late if the fire got to your clothes first.
It being VR, not AR, it'd be wiser I'd think not to move around that much at all unless the blind dog program is significantly extended or the VR helmet is combined with a crash helmet.
One knows *precisely* where the walls and floor are. And yes, we do, in fact, do acrobatics.
Solution looking for a problem that presto, doesn't exist. Also fwiw batteries rofl.
I had a panic moment that it did - but quite happily accepts my Pixel XL with a Rhinoshield bumper on it.
Quite deliberate, as they seem to be aiming to allow it to accept all manner of phones shortly.
Downside is, that unlike the dedicated doodads, I can actually see pixels outside of the thingie - but I'll trade a bit of inefficiency for compatibility.
Display resolution, colour fidelity, weight, comfort and power requirements are alll unsatisfactory. The only sensory input that could be satisfactory with current technology is acoustic. Touch and acceleration aren't being addressed at all with headsets.
For a first person view in a storyline or game, a better approach (which wouldn't make much money for a hardware and software manufacturer:) might be to do some serious research into lucid dreaming. Could psychologists find techniques to make lucid dreaming very easy for everyone. Could lucid dreamers be led by external cues so that a plot could be followed without having to learn it first? If so could you also cue arbitrary incidents for real time gaming? Are there any trick cyclists reading this thread who'd care to comment?
Yes (I assume). Dreams can be very much visually led from recent visual memory (the film you watched, sitting at the desk all day, driving etc).
Lucid dreaming though might have more to do with how deep you are sleeping. So while VR might effect what type of dreams you have, if you wish to induce a "it's so real I'm there" via lucid dreaming... I'd not want to take the drugs that cause it.
This is just a side comment, but I only recently discovered that people *don't* lucid dream very often. I have them regularly, at least once a week, both knowing I am dreaming and being able to influence the environment. I thought it was entirely normal until I was talking to my partner and she said she never or almost never had them. Apparently this is the more common situation.
In the last lucid dream I had, a couple of days ago, I demonstrated to my interlocutor that it was a dream by forcing the sky to go into a grid pattern like the Holodeck from Star Trek, then jumped 30 feet into the air and hovered for a few seconds. I have also explained, in various dreams, to other characters (I think this is the best word in this case) that they aren't real as this is just a dream. Once I realized I was in a dream when I decided that the best way to do what I needed to do was to switch to third-person view, so I could more easily see around me.
A recent piece of research explained that gamers are much more likely to have lucid dreams than non-gamers, which might explain it.
"After all, you have dreamt it all before [...]"
After nearly 70 years my dreams are rarely repeats - although my bladder annoyance means I wake up remembering dreams more often than I used to. My dream alter-ego is no different than my waking self. Turning down immoral opportunities in real life is one thing - doing the same in a dream is strange. If I ever realise I'm in a dream then I usually wake up immediately.
One exception happened a few times. I would realise I was dreaming and wake up in a familiar bedroom. Then I would realise I was dreaming and wake up in a different familiar bedroom. In this way I would go through various places in which I had slept regularly. It took a while to be sure when I finally was awake in my current bedroom.
Yes! That's precisely how it is done. You live in a simulation now which only provides the relevant inputs for your life. Computing your entire world would be wasteful.
Using VR within your virtual reality requires less processing power than the virtual reality you now experience, so choosing this reduces computing cost and is being promoted within the greater simulation.
Actually even with a completely lag free high framerate display people would still get eyestrain, because the VR displays are only stereoscopic 3D (where the 3D has that flat popup book look).
A pseudo holographic (a.k.a. lightfield) display could get rid of the eyestrain altogether as you would be looking at a fully 3D scene. Have a look at http://www.seereal.com/
With regards to cutting the cord, is there any way to achieve lag free local wifi? It seems to a layperson like me that some super low latency direct wifi allowing the heavy processing to be done on a PC gaming rig is a more realistic way forward than trying to beef up a battery limited mobile processor.
With regards to cutting the cord, is there any way to achieve lag free local wifi?
Probably not wifi as we have it now. You can minimise gaming/VR problems over wifi, but they aren't usually down to pure latency. If you've got a high strength wifi router, a good signal at the device, a good antenna & processor on the device, there's no interference, and no device contention, then you'd be unlikely to perceive any worse latency over wifi compared with ethernet.
Unfortunately, back here in the real world, most of us use cheap routers, have interference from our own domestic appliances and via powerlines, competing signals from routers within a few hundred yards. And then there's other people in the house streaming movies, mobile phones, tablets, Chromebooks etc all happily auto-downloading large auto-updates, the signal perceived by the device varies depending on aspect relative to the router, you've structural attenuation and reflection from the house.....
Now, unless you can tick all those boxes as solved, what happens is that the router frequently gets frames that don't match the checksum, and the frame is discarded (there's no error correction on the UDP protocol used by most games, so suspect data is simply discarded). The consequence of that is that the latency varies dramatically and that causes particular problems for games, added to which the causes of bad packets can last from mangling a single packet, through to about two seconds of lost data - that's why you see other characters jumping around maps, shot by somebody you didn't see, or don't see your inputs reflected in the game. If you put the heavy lifting on the PC, you avoid the need for such a meaty processor and power on the VR headset (VRH), but you'd still have the problem of packet loss between PC and VRH, which would be most significant for online VR gaming. Put simply, VR gaming over wifi would be pants other than in the absolute optimal conditions.
It would perhaps be possible to improve things with a new wifi protocol optimised to support gaming, but that'd involve new routers, new receivers, and new game software. All do-able, but probably on a ten year time scale by the time it is in production (of course, I don't know what's being developed now). A more feasible short term solution would be a single purpose transceiver on the end of an ethernet wire, using a single purpose gaming protocol that isn't competing with wifi, which means the protocol can be properly optimised and the system designed to overcome or avoid interference effects. It might be feasible to do that over radio, but in this application a better solution might be Li-fi. Li-fi has hitherto been a solution searching for a problem for several years. That ought to be far better at avoiding the interference problems of wifi, subject to having the continuous connection between VRH and the Li-fi receiver.
If that could be made to work you'd solve the online gaming connectivity issue (within the house, at any rate) and it would be possible to do that heavy-lifting split. Whether a market that seems happy with cardboard holders for phones as a VRH would pony up the additional (guessing) £100 for a Li-fi link I don't know - and don't forget that for widespread adoption it has to be as simple as a console (and indeed on that basis probably use a console rather than a PC for the heavy lifting).
"Actually even with a completely lag free high framerate display people would still get eyestrain, because the VR displays are only stereoscopic 3D (where the 3D has that flat popup book look)."
It's not so much that the 3D is popup-style (because you can do stereoscopic videos, too, which wouldn't have that look). The catch is that the eyes get confused because it uses accommodation (changing focus) as a depth cue, and you can't do that with a stereoscopic panel. Videos can get away with it by using a fixed focal point, but in active 3D like games, the eye expects to judge depth by adjusting focus which doesn't work. That's why interest in light field techniques such as integral imaging/plenoptics. Attempting to project a genuine light field in thin air (a true volumetric display) poses two problems: how to make the light point visible without a reflection point, and keeping up with the raw amount of data necessary to pull it off (ex. a 300x300x300 light field encompasses 27 million voxels. Updated 30 times a second requires updating 810 million voxels a second). Plus there's the problem of a depth limit.
The technology you're referring to is called foviated rendering, Nvidia demonstrated it a while back, I believe it delivered a 50% performance boost.
There are 2 other useful consequences of eye tracking:
1. Eye movement can be mapped to virtual avatars. Apparently this makes a huge difference to the feeling of 'presence' when interacting with people through VR as you can achieve eye contact, follow the direction of someone's gaze etc.
2. Gaze driven user interface functions as already implemented with the Hololens.
Sounds like Vapourware, or for a better description, too good to be true.
If released it will probably be on par with mobile phone VR, not PC VR.
The refresh rate, FPS, image quality, head tracking etc are vastly higher quality on PC than a phone.
As an example, the PS4 head tracking VR, is currently inbetween the two techs, and uses a camera for tracking. Many report motion sickness from it, as the hardware is just not quite quick or powerful enough for it just yet.
The PC setups mainly need very highly powered systems, to do all the work quickly enough. Smaller devices start to lack this, and start to look like a bizarre slide show.
I can't see the quality on a unit solely strapped to your noggin' matching that of a PC - I mean gpu units alone would add an unfeasible weight, not to mention heat, so they must be using arm and mobile gpu's.
Still, the additional weight of battery and processing systems in the head unit isn't something I'm in favour of, at worst put them in a backpack and tether the headset to it, so all it needs is the screen.
decent GPU's are not that heavy, my 1.2kg laptop, which includes battery has a GTX 970, 1TB spinning rust a decent battery, screen etc...
Although I agree backpack is better, although wireless is preferable.. lightspeed is lightspeed... so wireless technically could be just as lag free as wired
when you realise how much money you pissed up against the same
No different to any other male-dominated hobby, where serious money is paid for "the right gear". If you're a fly-fisher, your rod and reel together could well cost a grand. A serious "starter" road cycle is £500, with the real men's machines over two grand. Photography has always been about spending a minimum of two grand on a collection of camera bodies and lenses. In golf, otherwise sane men pay silly money to dress like Rupert Bear, even sillier money to be part of a club of like-minded nerds, and eventually end up spending £300 on a single club, when they could buy an entirely adequate full set of 12 clubs for less than that. A ten pin bowling enthusiast will be tempted by bowling balls costing the fat end of £500. Let's face it:most men are suckers for any form of hardware related to their hobby, so a bit unfair to single out the VR brigade. Even on appearance there's a male need to look weird in a collective manner: So as noted, golfers dress like Rupert, fishermen have an entire parallel universe of dedicated apparel, ten-pinners have to wear clown shoes (its the law, I believe), and cyclists seem bent on making themselves look like insects. VR enthusiasts don't look any more twatty than those others, do they?
Bizarrely, there are two hobbies where this appears to break down: Firstly, road running, where for some reason you're pushed to be able to spend more than a couple of hundred quid tops, and even fully togged up you don't look unduly weird. This smacks of either ignorance or lack of ambition on the part of the shoemakers and clothing companies.
And secondly (disclosure: my sport of choice) Couch Potatery. I am now at 8th Dan, and regularly take part in regional championships, and mentor our local youth squad. This involves no kit other than a pair of horrible old grey joggers, a holey t-shirt (plus a telly and sofa that I had already), and some consumables such as beer and pork scratchings (much cheaper than cycling, where a 100ml bottle of chain lubricant can cost up to twenty quid).
I'm hoping that CP will be a demonstration sport in Tokyo, and if Team GB can see the massive medal potential that our talented and dedicated CP'ers have, we should get development funding, and be contending for medals in 2024. As a community we're particularly proud that our Paralympian CP'ers are always part of our core squad - none of this double standards and discrimination that we see in gymnastics or field events! CP is open to anybody able to find a sofa, some time and imbued with a degree of laziness. It is blind to race, gender, religion, sexual orientations, blindness, disability, social class.
My only worry is that CP might go the way of rugby, and from the first flush of success we will then see the amateur sport lose out to well-funded professionals, enjoying lucrative sponsorships from people like DFS, Marks & Spencer Home, top regional sponsors like Lee Longlands, or supplier-sponsors like Mr Porky Pork Scratchings. And once you get to that stage, you're into performance enhancement, doping scandals and all the rest - I want CP to stay CLEAN, stay AMATEUR. YOU can make a difference! Write to the IOC, demanding that CP is a demonstration sport in Tokyo, write to your MP demanding that measure be taken to ban professional CP, and pester UK Anti-doping to proactively develop tests and measures! TUE's would normally be a problem, but so many of the top CP'ers have Asperger's that it would actually be a far more level playing field than in athletics or cycling.
I think I might have gone a bit off topic there. Oops.
"And of course, there is also the PlayStation VR which is also wired and which only works with Sony Playstations"
You make it sound like an "also ran". Playstation VR delivers 80% of the experience at 20% of the cost, so is the ONLY one that is likely to make it a mass market product, and the only one that's going to be getting the games (because of it's userbase). With an installbase of 60m PS4 gamers, you only need a couple of percent to be interested in VR, and you have a decent userbase that's WAY bigger than the FacebookBR and HTC niche offerings.
With an installbase of 60m PS4 gamers,
You don't think that if VR is to take off, it is going to be gaming platform rather than hardware platform that matters (so Steam et al rather than PSn et al)?
But in any event, the hardware is so poor that I think we're looking at another tech flop like 3D TVs. Look at the picture at the head of the article, and then ask whether that's ever going to be mass market? Try it - put an airline "sleep mask" on, sellotape a tin of beans to that, then don a pair of closed-ear headphones. Comfortable? Stylish? Good for hours of gaming?
VR can only become mainstream when it is as subtle (note 1) and lightweight as a pair of Google Glass specs plus a pair of earbuds.
1: All things are relative, But I'd rather look a Glasshole than be caught in the junk being touted at the moment.
Quote: "VR can only become mainstream when it is as subtle (note 1) and lightweight as a pair of Google Glass specs plus a pair of earbuds.
1: All things are relative, But I'd rather look a Glasshole than be caught in the junk being touted at the moment."
Whilst a lighter weight headset would be welcome, it's not like the current hardware can't be worn for hours on end without any real issue. The only time I had issues with the Vive was in mid summer, as the room where mine is set up doesn't have much ventilation, and no air con (in the UK). But on those days I'd more likely be down the pub anyway.
2+ hour sessions are easily achievable with current hardware, and people really should be having a break at that point anyway, even if on a monitor/TV. If your having issues before 2 hours, then your wearing it wrong!
And who exactly is going to be catching you whilst sat in your own house? I couldn't give a monkeys what anyone else might think of what I'm wearing, when in my own home.
Where do you get this from?: "Playstation VR delivers 80% of the experience at 20% of the cost"
At best, it's likely to be 50% of the experience, as it's very limited hardware compared to the Rift or Vive.
Also price wise, Playstation VR retailing at £350, and that's just for the headset.
The Vive is £759.00, but that includes full room scale and two handsets, so x2 the cost, but more with it.
The Rift is £549.00 for just the headset. So that's x1.5 the cost of PS VR.
Even if you include the cost of the PS4 and PC, it's still nowhere near x5 the cost for PC VR.
A PS4 is around £280-350 depending on model, a VR ready PC is about £750 (pre-built with Windows 10).
So...
PS4 + PS VR = £700
PC + Rift = £1,300
So x1.8 in cost (not x5 as you state), but for a much much more capable platform.
Having a large Lithium battery or a pulsed Microwave transceiver on your head will always be a bad idea, the first could burn your head (even kill you), the other may cause Brain damage or cancer especially after long periods of use! The larger Lithium batteries get, the more dangerous they become, as illustrated by the exploding and flying Lithium cells when a Tesla car hit a tree recently!
No way is a power constrained CPU going to do high spec. VR, especially at higher display resolutions; what is needed is a VR headset with display units and sensors with a light power and optical data cable plugged into a vertical stand overhead, connected to a powerful _desktop_ gaming computer. Moore's Law is already in decline, so don't expect much more processing power for the same electrical power now.
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