Today at Steam Dev Days, Michael Abrash from Valve and Palmer Luckey from Oculus talked about VR. According to the game developers there, it was awe inspiring to hear them talk, and everyone came out of it very pumped for VR. Here's a summary of the events from a blog I was following:
ThesonicreblogValve has issued a challenge to the entire entertainment industry, and that challenge has a name: “presence.” Presence is the magic that vr has always promised, and it is what will transform entertainment.
Presence is the new term for a concept most have never experienced, not even those with oculus kits. It is the result of all their research, it is what vr is and what vr does.
Presence is a state in which, due to a variety of factors, virtual reality becomes imperceptible from reality. A number of technological hurdles must be passed before this occurs – 95hz refresh rate seems to be neccessary (but maybe not!). High resolution is necessary. Latency from motion to last photon needs to cross below 20 ms. Pixel persistence of less than 3ms is a must, and is reasonably the upper limit. A wide fov is necessary, at least 85 degrees (the rift is 90). Positional tracking accurate within 5 mm. Much more advanced optics than currently exist. And all this is just for visual stuff, you also need user input, content, etc.
Once all these meld, however, you are in for a wild ride. Once presence kicks in, you cannot stop your subconscious from feeling like it is real. You’ll feel vertigo. You’ll start sweating under the sun. You’ll get goosebumps in the cold. Once these low level functions of the brain are convinced, for all intent and purpose, you are in the game. The holodeck realized.
The demo valve put together here, they believe, is one of the first vr experiences on the planet to approach presence. You’ve read the impressions, people are blown away even if they can’t quantify why. Presence is why. Immersion is nothing compared to presence.
Valve doesn’t intend to produce a vr headset, theirs is an r&d proto. They might, but it’s not in the works. Instead, they’re freely sharing their research with a number of companies who will bring vr to the masses, she they believe oculus will lead the revolution.
“The doom of vr is coming” said abrash, indicating that soon a transformative experience that will define vr is inevitable. Valve sees vr as the most important venture going forward. Out will iterate on pc, and it will change the world. They believe a consumer vr experience that invokes presence will be available by 2015. Today is day one, the rules of vr are being written right now.
Palmer luckey came in doing clean up, preaching what he’s learned about vr development, what works and what doesn’t. That stuff is widely available online, so I wont cover it… yet. But valve issued the gauntlet – bringing vr to the masses will take the joined effort of the entire entertainment industry. This is larger than one single company. When we arrive, and we will arrive, it will change not just entertainment, but computing entirely.
Ready, player one?
Slides
If that's hard to wrap your brain around, it's understandable. VR is very hard to describe to someone who has never experienced it. This level of "presence" is very exciting, as it was initially thought that the tech to achieve that level was years and years away.
So what will VR have? What does it need to have? What is it lacking? Here are some stats:
Feasible stats for Oculus Rift Consumer- 20 ms motion-to-last-photon latency
- 3 ms pixel persistence
- 95 Hz refresh
- 110-degree FOV
- 1K x 1K resolution per eye
- High-quality, well-calibrated optics
- Tracking (millimeter-accurate resolution translation, quarter-degree-accurate rotation, volume of roughly 2 meters cubed)
Oculus is hopeful they can achieve this and create something close to "presence". Valve's prototype is close to this. It's resolution is actually higher (they used two panels). So with all this good stuff packed in, what's left to do?
Left to be done- Up to 100x resolution would help
- Optics are far from optimal
- Head tracking isn't fully solved
- Eye tracking is far from solved
- Solve per-user lens positioning (IPD, eye relief)
- Get rid of tether (cable)
- Get a display manufacturer to make VR-optimized panels
- 3D audio
- Haptics
- Body tracking
- Input
These things shouldn't be expected for CV1 (consumer version 1), but probably for future consumer models.
Now for some dates. While Oculus did not mention anything close to a date, Valve said they expect this consumer VR to be available in 2015 or soon after. This is different than the "2014 is going to be a great year for VR" that Oculus has been giving us, and is obviously causing a bit of a stir.
Whether it's this year or next, though, the realization that "presence" is going to be achieved in the first consumer model is amazing (the developer kit achieves "immersion" but not "presence", Abrash argues). Maybe even more amazing is how dedicated Valve is to VR.
Vave redesigned their Steam Controller to not have a touchpad since it wouldn't make sense to have in VR. They also released an SDK to further facilitate incorporating VR into Steam, including a VR mode for Big Picture Steam and a way to play ANY game on a virtual monitor inside of Steam's VR.
Valve currently isn't making any VR hardware, but instead is R&Ding and passing that along to hardware developers (like Oculus). Even so, VR just got a huge jolt of energy from Valve at Steam Dev Days!
Cinco de Mayo
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