Don't want to join the growing ranks of virtual reality fatalities? In-headset room tracking may be for you:
Occipital, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, focuses on 3D scanning hardware and depth-sensing cameras: One of its Structure camera sensor arrays works with both an iPhone mixed-reality headset and an upcoming home robot. Occipital's team put an HTC Vive VR headset on me, outfitted with an in-development feature that let me see the room even with my headset on. The technology is called Occipital Tracking. Its aim is to replace external room-sensing hardware completely, like the Oculus Rift's cumbersome stands or the Vive's light-emitting Lighthouse system, in favor of all in-headset tech.
Inside-out tracking, as in-headset room-tracking tech is called, has been in place on Microsoft's VR headsets and upcoming hardware like the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Daydream as well as AR devices like the Microsoft HoloLens, but Occipital Tracking aims to make that tech even better for VR with far more room-aware scanning.
Much as Apple's ARKit or Google's ARCore can scan a room and sense edges and surfaces using a camera and the phone's motion sensor, Occipital's tech pinged my demo space and found glowing points in space that formed a map. The test demo alternated between the real world via pass-through cameras and a fully closed-off VR world with edges of the room overlaid. The VR hardware I tried had stereo cameras, but Occipital says the tracking will work with a single camera, too. It really does seem like ARKit/ARCore for VR.
A game could show a partial overlay only when you are in imminent danger of colliding with something, or even create a virtual environment that incorporates real life obstacles (walls, tables, etc.).
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A man in Moscow has died while (or due to) wearing a VR-headset. Apparently while wearing it he stumbled around his apartment and fell over a glass table, cut himself and bled out. No information is available on what he was watching or playing. So VR goggles will soon have to come with some kind of warning label? Real world items may hamper VR experience and cause death?
"According to preliminary information, while moving around the apartment in virtual reality glasses, the man tripped and crashed into a glass table, suffered wounds and died on the spot from a loss of blood"
It must have been a fairly serious cut if you bleed out almost instantly and die on the spot. Did he decapitate himself or something?
http://tass.com/society/982465
Also at Newsweek.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:06PM (2 children)
what's the big deal about walking around the room?
when I play games I prefer to remain seated. I dont want to have to worry about knocking things over, stepping on pets or unplugging things, or dying like that story about the guy and the glass table. darwinism maybe, but it wouldn't have happened if he wasn't required to physically walk around in these games.
i remember some vr centers (back when paying to play was a thing) had treadmills that moved every which way, but that didn't add to the experience; it is easy to get used to flying or just floating around without it feeling like floating if the walking/running was the right speed and a slight 'headbob' movement was introduced.
sometimes i drink and play, and sometimes i drink and play online games! vr and alcohol and multigamer internet play just seems like a 'funny home videos' waiting to happen complete with censored parts that add to the fun...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:49PM
It gives you more freedom to look around.
Even when seated, with untethered headsets you could at least do a 360° spin or three in your office chair or otherwise move your head around a lot without tangling a cord.
A "mixed reality" headset would be able to switch from VR to AR mode (using the front-facing camera(s), which are necessary to make Occipital's tracking work). This would allow you to exit a room without taking the headset off, or otherwise use it for both VR and AR applications.
Do the omni treadmills add to realism? I don't know, I've never used one. It could help prevent players from becoming complete fatasses.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by mmh on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:36PM
I've owned a Vive for over a year and still play it several times a week. Having come from a background of first-person shooter games going way back to Doom 1 and playing competition Quake1/2/3 (I miss the old HEAT.NET days) and competition counter-strike, I can say I will never play a non-vr FPS game again.
The Vive is everything I have always wanted in computer gaming. With the Vive + noise-cancelling headphones, it really tricks you into feeling as if you are in the game. Being able to move around the room, while not required, adds a lot to the feeling of freedom within the game. Being able to walk up to an object and inspect it, or look around it in ways that feel natural and normal.
On Steam, there's a game, Pavlov, which is just a Counter-Strike ripoff, peaking around corners, silently knifing a guy in the back, adds a whole new dimension of fun. Some older PC games have been ported over like Serious Sam, having gigantic monsters sneaks up on you is pretty great. Payday 2 has had Vive support added, and robbing banks in VR is way more entertaining than it was in front of a monitor, and really makes me want to try my hand at robbing a real bank (I'll post a follow up here in a few weeks and let you know if payday2 is a good training simulator).
VR is still very new, and the selection of games, while growing, leaves a lot of potential unfilled. Even with the current lack of good games, I'm really looking forward to and plan to purchase the next generation of VR hardware when it is released.
If you haven't researched any VR stuff, blah blah blah:
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:16PM (2 children)
I'm sure some VR-fanatic will claim how this will break their immersion. Perhaps they could hook up a GPS to it and then geo-fence a safe VR area.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 19 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
Unless you have your system generate a force field, you are still going to have to break immersion somehow.
Maybe you could just put a few layers of duck tape on everything with a corner.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @01:23PM
I put fome layerf of duck tape on my mouf.