Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kaijyuu]

Flying cars were less than 5 years away, 20 years ago.


And we won't ever get "full immersion" until we get Matrix-esque VR. Hopping around in your living room (or personalized gaming chamber, if you prefer) is the last thing I'd call immersion.

[nenjin]

In short, fuck meatspace.

[alway]

PCs will merge with consoles (particularly things like Kinect), and this to produce full immersion virtual reality chambers. Think I'm crazy? All the tech required is either here, or less than 5 years away.

That's not full immersion... That's just a big television. Increasing the size of your TV does not full immersion make.

Here's the issue when it comes to VR:
1. For it to be ubiquitous, it must be cheap enough for the masses. That means sub-$1000, if not sub-$500 range.
2. It must be compact. If someone has to build/clear out an entire room just to use it, you are doing it wrong; that would never catch on.

To meet both requirements enabling VR to be anything more than the personal projects of obsessive uber-gamers, one must think smaller rather than larger.

The problem there is that ATM, VR/AR glasses are very poor quality. Having talked to people who worked on a capstone project involving AR glasses and having tried out some VR glasses myself, I was anything but impressed. The maximum screen resolution was about what you would expect from a netbook; something like 1024x768 or 800x600. The glasses produced simply enormous amounts of heat, both making your face extremely hot after 20 minutes of use and supposedly their group went through a couple pairs that fried themselves simply from their own heat after being left on for a few hours. They also tended to have very high power draws, resulting in the frying of several PCs' USB ports.

Yes, such systems will improve, and rapidly, but it will be at least 10 years before that sort of VR glasses will be ready for the mainstream. And still, even a VR display does not full immersion make.

There's also audio; which at the present is typically done very poorly, and is quite overlooked in games and in the coursework training those of us going into the industry when compared to effort put into graphics.

One of the other potentially interesting developments over the next decade or so are EEG based input devices such as the NIA or Emotiv headsets. Unlike input devices such as keyboards, controllers, Wiimotes, ect, they are nonexclusive. Thus they have the potential to enhance the input ability of a user; particularly when it comes to information about the user which would not explicitly be inputted using a standard input device. If you can get even a very basic, general idea about that user's excitement levels or emotions in real time, the range of features one could implement with that data is quite vast. It will probably be at least about 5 years though before it is able to become mainstream, as it is currently gen 1 technology, and still has a few issues to sort out, with electrical interference being one of the big ones.

[Osmosis Jones]

The thing with the giant TVs? that's just it; it will be that cheap. OLEDs means printable screens that can be made like wall paper, and plastered over a whole wall. Since they will be producable by lithography techniques, they will scale to mass production extremely easily. That means limited innovation required in manufacture, and near infinite sizes. When not in use, they could show things like a blank wall, or a cloudy sky, or a starscape.

As for VR head sets, this tech will probably help;

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-darpa-sights-high-tech-contact-lenses.html

[alway]

As for VR head sets, this tech will probably help;

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-darpa-sights-high-tech-contact-lenses.html

No, it won't. At least, not until well after VR headsets are passable. Those are meant for AR, not VR, and are meant for projecting something very small over a user's field of view; a HUD essentially. A useful HUD system can consist of as little as 1 pixel, as it provides an overlay of some sort of data which can be interpreted by the user. Even something with less pixels than a graphing calculator is a highly useful HUD; but it isn't a robust VR system.
With a contact based system, heat becomes even more of an issue than in headsets, as it is sitting directly on one's eye. It has to be made even more lightweight, with even smaller pixels; which translates to requiring more technological development than a VR glasses based setup.

[Osmosis Jones]

As for VR head sets, this tech will probably help;

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-darpa-sights-high-tech-contact-lenses.html

No, it won't. At least, not until well after VR headsets are passable. Those are meant for AR, not VR, and are meant for projecting something very small over a user's field of view; a HUD essentially. A useful HUD system can consist of as little as 1 pixel, as it provides an overlay of some sort of data which can be interpreted by the user. Even something with less pixels than a graphing calculator is a highly useful HUD; but it isn't a robust VR system.
With a contact based system, heat becomes even more of an issue than in headsets, as it is sitting directly on one's eye. It has to be made even more lightweight, with even smaller pixels; which translates to requiring more technological development than a VR glasses based setup.

Heat buildup? There isn't a screen on the user's eye, merely a contact lens; the screen is on the glasses. The reason I figured it was relevant is that said lenses can be used to greatly shrink the form factor of a set of VR goggles to basically the same size as current 3D tv glasses by allowing the use of a traditional screen rather than direct laser projection or other methods.

[alway]

Ah, okay, that makes sense.

[jokerkv]

gaming will be more of an occupation i guess