VR Enthusiast Puts Mirror's Edge Through Oculus Rift Paces

[Karloff]

VR Enthusiast Puts Mirror's Edge Through Oculus Rift Paces


The googly eyes make the whole video experience.

"For better or worse," as Cymatic Bruce says, this developer's decided to put up video diaries of his Oculus Rift [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/120851-Big-Demand-Delays-Oculus-Rift-Headset] virtual reality experimentation. His Rift arrived earlier this month and, ever since, he's been toying with various Steam titles, everything from Half Life 2 to Team Fortress 2. See Mirror's Edge in a completely new way; just try not to wince when Faith tumbles to her all-but-inevitable doom.

Bruce had better luck here than with his Dear Esther [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpjUzwYesKM&list=UUhQx9wj3OQX5VQd4gK9NKsw&index=3] experiment - older technology and shifting shadows kinda throw a monkey wrench in the works. Music and sound, in Dear Esther's case, more than made up for it. "The horror game element is going to come into play," Bruce says, "something flickering on the edge of your vision, and combine that with someone whispering in your ear ... I would make [that game], and then I wouldn't play it!"

Bruce's one man band, Cymatic Software, is something he's only able to devote spare time to at the moment. "The idea of VR has fascinated me since childhood," says Bruce, "but unfortunately the tech never really delivered on the promise of movies like Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic." Now he has something that might just do the trick, and - Razer Hydra interface and snazzy eyewear at the ready - Bruce is trying out a brave new world.

Source: Cymatic Software [http://cymaticsoftware.wordpress.com/]


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[rofltehcat]

I put my face quite close to the screen and separated the screen in the middle with a piece of paper... quite nauseating.
Considering how many people get headaches or even nausea while watching 3D-Movies (I'm normally fine), I still can't see this thing taking off. It is still an extremely cool gadget though...

 

[N3squ1ck]

I put my face quite close to the screen and separated the screen in the middle with a piece of paper... quite nauseating.
Considering how many people get headaches or even nausea while watching 3D-Movies (I'm normally fine), I still can't see this thing taking off. It is still an extremely cool gadget though...

I was extremely affected by headaches when watching 3d stuff, but the Hobbit with 48 fps was fine with my head, so maybe that would work for me? I dunno.

OT: I still don't see the point of stuff like that in general

 

[Chatboy 91]

YES PLEASE! MIRROR'S EDGE 2 WITH A SIDE OF OCULUS TO GO.

 

[Entitled]

I put my face quite close to the screen and separated the screen in the middle with a piece of paper... quite nauseating.

Well, here is your problem.

The whole point of VR is that your eyes are not focusing at a monitor a few centimeters from your face, but in the distance.

Just as wearing glasses, or looking through a periscope/microscope/really, any kind of optics/ means that the lenses fixed right in front of your eyeballs are adding to your focusing, and takes in the light from the screed as if it would actually come from distant buildings.

Edit: Not saying that the first Oculus rift absolutely won't cause headaches, because there still are issues like latency and framerates that could be improved to more effectively trick your brain, but the basic principle of VR *can* work with good enough graphics.

 

[Entitled]

OT: I still don't see the point of stuff like that in general

And I'm seriously not seeing what is there to see beyond "visuals covering all your field of view and providing a fully immersive virtual environment around your person", and how that is not already not a pretty obvious revolution on it's own.

I mean, seriously, not seeing the point of VR is like not seeing the point of motion picture, or not seeing the point of video games.

It's pretty much going to be the next medium of immersiveness, the logical conclusion visual media and it will turn al non-VR gaming into a form of "old media", just as gaming did to it's predecessors.

 

[mateushac]

Man, I would kill to get my hands on one of these! Too bad I don't know squat about programming and stuff to get it properly running.

 

[Luca72]

I'm prepared to give all of my money for this. I can't for people to develop specifically for VR devices, rather than making VR devices work with current software.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I put my face quite close to the screen and separated the screen in the middle with a piece of paper... quite nauseating.

Well, here is your problem.

The whole point of VR is that your eyes are not focusing at a monitor a few centimeters from your face, but in the distance.

Just as wearing glasses, or looking through a periscope/microscope/really, any kind of optics/ means that the lenses fixed right in front of your eyeballs are adding to your focusing, and takes in the light from the screed as if it would actually come from distant buildings.

Edit: Not saying that the first Oculus rift absolutely won't cause headaches, because there still are issues like latency and framerates that could be improved to more effectively trick your brain, but the basic principle of VR *can* work with good enough graphics.

As I'm on the Occulus forums, there seem to be other issues too.

But it boils down to the same thing most of the time - motion sickness and similar effects happen because what your body is doing physically doesn't match what you're seeing.

The more of a mismatch there is, the more likely you are to feel sick.

Hence, amongst other things, watching pre-recorded footage of someone else using a headset is pretty high on the list of being nausea-inducing. (The view moves all over the place, but your head does not move at all.)

The current Rift headset can still be considered an early prototype, despite what it might look like.

Notes from frequent users of it suggest avoiding nausea will be a major concern with actual game design.
But the current list of things to watch for includes:

-Maintaining high framerates (60 fps minimum)
- Tracking head position and rotation accurately (currently the headset only tracks rotation)
- Low latency. This is critical, especially with head movement. A typical game can have more than a 50 ms delay between you using some kind of input device (mouse, keyboard, game controller) and something actually happening onscreen. That's fine in most cases, but if the view tracks directly to head movement, anything more than 20 ms is very noticeable.

There's many other things like that, but it basically amounts to reducing the mismatch between what your body does and what you see.

And the video shows a hack using mirror's edge, which is a game that was not designed for VR... So the results won't exactly be optimal.

 

[Big_Boss_Mantis]

I just felt the urge to drop by and say that "The Lawnmower Man" is a terrific movie, and that it works very well in a lot of aspects.
It was one of those movies that I saw as a kid, loved it, but was afraid of watching it again in adulthood, for fear of being disappointed.
I was very glad that I was wrong in this case, and I found out that it stands out very good even nowadays (even if its CGs are obviously outdated).

OT: seems like a very interesting concept, but I don't think the technology for VR is upon us yet. Glad to see it advancing, though.

 

[synobal]

One issue I see with the Occulus is that when you look to the side and then move in that direction your character is then looking foward but you're looking to the side still. So if you want to turn your head straight you have to adjust your character again. It seems really awkward, I can't imagine it's an issue for games designed for the occulus but otherwise you're spending most the time playing with your head cricked at an awkward angle.

 

[weirdee]

*reads title*

this sounds like a terrible idea for your center of balance

*reads article*

yep

 

[aba1]

Done right this would be the funnest thing EVER! I would be up for this in a
instant!

 

[Saulkar]

If only they would take my money but alas they only offer the dev kit and I am not a dev.

 

[Somebloke]

They'll take your money, as far as I know, and just using it with titles prepared-/hooked into by a third party drivers- for the device, takes no coding skills, but you may be better off, anyway (...and the Oculus guys have often strongly suggested this..), holding off until the industry has settled- and agreed on a set of standards that works well and can be relied on -- this is very much a stage of throwing things at the wall and see what sticks.

If you want to experience that process, though, seeing the no-gos fall by the wayside and the iterative refinements of solutions, and don't mind the relatively low resolution, etc, of the dev kit model, and think it's worth the money and brief distraction to the Oculus guys; then don't be shy about joining in.

Some people have already published experimental environment builds which use off-the-shelf controllers, to add positional tracking to the HMD, so that you can lean around corners and crouch and such (vanilla devkit only tracks rotation - not translation), and others are trying out different lenses (trying to get to use larger portions of the screen area, as well as providing more room for your eyelashes, without sacrificing field-of-view), and different control schemes and input devices, ranging from regular controllers to vaious kinds of hand-tracking devices, to dance mats to omnidirectional treadmills to just having a large enough space to move around without walking into a wall.
Some play around with Haptics (think force feedback), Augmented Reality, and Telepresence, too.

Much of this research has been done already, over decades, in pro-level and hobbyist circles -- what differs here, is that this is a push towards consumer-grade products at associated pricepoints. Sometimes, old paths are being revisted to see whether a new angle of approach has opened up sometime along the way.

 

[N3squ1ck]

OT: I still don't see the point of stuff like that in general

And I'm seriously not seeing what is there to see beyond "visuals covering all your field of view and providing a fully immersive virtual environment around your person", and how that is not already not a pretty obvious revolution on it's own.

I mean, seriously, not seeing the point of VR is like not seeing the point of motion picture, or not seeing the point of video games.

It's pretty much going to be the next medium of immersiveness, the logical conclusion visual media and it will turn al non-VR gaming into a form of "old media", just as gaming did to it's predecessors.

I just tink it will pull you more out when there is a lag or something, also, as long as you can't rack the full body motion, you are still doomed to hold your controller, which is in my opinion a bit contradictory to the whole "everything is so immersive"-thing

But then again, I am the guy who almost always gets a headache from seeing 3D stuff, so I am overly critical of that stuff and don't want it to happen ^^

 

[Entitled]

I just tink it will pull you more out when there is a lag or something, also, as long as you can't rack the full body motion, you are still doomed to hold your controller, which is in my opinion a bit contradictory to the whole "everything is so immersive"-thing

It's not so much contradictory, as still imperfect. Obviously it's not the matrix or the holodeck, but it's still a mile closer to it than anything else.

I mean, clicking with a mouse or pointing at a touchscreen doesn't feel like actually touching objects with your finger, either. It's still more intuitive than fucking text commands.

It's the same here. Maybe just looking through a 110 degree view to a digital world that surrounds you in 360 degrees with head racking, won't feel like actually "being there". It still sounds more promising than looking at a shitty rectangle on a table.

But then again, I am the guy who almost always gets a headache from seeing 3D stuff, so I am overly critical of that stuff and don't want it to happen ^^

If you are actually getting a headache from having a 3D vision, the solution would be to poke out one of your eyeballs.

It is more likely that you are having a headache from the fake 3D of polarized screens feeding two images from the same place, not to mention that they look unrealistic as they are tiny figures jumping out from a screen.

But actually having two separate video feeds in front of your two eyeballs, is no different from the basic principle of having two eyeballs to begin with.

 

[N3squ1ck]

I just tink it will pull you more out when there is a lag or something, also, as long as you can't rack the full body motion, you are still doomed to hold your controller, which is in my opinion a bit contradictory to the whole "everything is so immersive"-thing

It's not so much contradictory, as still imperfect. Obviously it's not the matrix or the holodeck, but it's still a mile closer to it than anything else.

I mean, clicking with a mouse or pointing at a touchscreen doesn't feel like actually touching objects with your finger, either. It's still more intuitive than fucking text commands.

It's the same here. Maybe just looking through a 110 degree view to a digital world that surrounds you in 360 degrees with head racking, won't feel like actually "being there". It still sounds more promising than looking at a shitty rectangle on a table.

But then again, I am the guy who almost always gets a headache from seeing 3D stuff, so I am overly critical of that stuff and don't want it to happen ^^

If you are actually getting a headache from having a 3D vision, the solution would be to poke out one of your eyeballs.

It is more likely that you are having a headache from the fake 3D of polarized screens feeding two images from the same place, not to mention that they look unrealistic as they are tiny figures jumping out from a screen.

But actually having two separate video feeds in front of your two eyeballs, is no different from the basic principle of having two eyeballs to begin with.

Yeah, maybe, I mean I will try it out if I get my fingers on one, but I am just really skeptical