Companies such as Samsung and Facebook's Oculus promote their virtual-reality headsets by highlighting awe-inspiring 3-D experiences for gaming and virtual travel. But one of the most popular activities among early adopters of the technology is less novel: watching 2-D movies and TV.
"It's been a surprise on the VR circuit because much of the work is driven by people coming from the gaming world, who are fairly dogmatic about what VR means," says Anjney Midha, founder of the San Francisco venture capital fund KPCB Edge. Figuring out what people want to do with headsets is crucial if companies such as Facebook are to make the devices widely popular.
Midha says consumer interest in a new way to view 2-D content shouldn't be surprising given the popularity of watching movies and TV on mobile devices with small screens. A 2-D video viewed using a VR headset can fill your visual field as if you were watching on a giant home cinema screen, even if you're in fact in a cramped dorm room or the middle seat on a budget flight. Virtual-reality apps from Netflix and Hulu even surround their 2-D content with a virtual theater, room, or beach scene to enhance the experience. Flat content is less likely to make you uncomfortable or nauseous, as 3-D content can.
People use the headsets in 3D reality to enter a 3D virtual reality where they can experience a 2D representation of 3D reality.
Virtual reality has arrived for real at the Tokyo Game Show, one of the world's biggest exhibitions for the latest in fun and games.
That's evident everywhere. Players at the booths are donning chunky headgear covering their eyes and ears, immersed in their own worlds, shooting imaginary monsters or dancing with virtual partners, at Makuhari Messe hall in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba.
The show, which gave a preview to reporters Thursday ahead of its opening to the public over the weekend, features 614 companies demonstrating more than 1,500 game software titles.
It's still anyone's guess how VR will play out as a business in years ahead. But most everyone agrees that's the way of the future. And Yasuo Takahashi, director at Sony Interactive Entertainment, the game division of Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony Corp., believes 2016 will mark VR's debut year, helping revive an industry that has languished with the advent of smart phones.
Is the video game industry in need of reviving?
(Score: 5, Informative) by kaganar on Saturday September 17 2016, @06:56PM
Hi there. VR is my day job. I thought you had some comments and valid question worth addressing.
Some yes -- it has to be viable business instead of money thrown down a tube -- and some no -- this is all very experimental and has a chicken-and-the-egg problem that early mobile phone and apps did. Remember the poor interfaces of early mobile phone apps? Remember the phones with built-in keyboards that died out in a generation or two? We're still just getting fully into the first generation, and it's already pretty awesome. However, there's years to go on getting this stuff completely right and stable.
You're quite right, stereograms have been around a long time. But what may not be obvious is that stereoscopics are not the cool or hard part of VR. The "cool" parts in no specific order are: spatial relevance, immersion, and natural interaction and perception, and these are surprisingly achievable with the right content without stereo, but stereo certainly helps immersion if you've got it.
Here's a few of the reasons why VR is harder than stereoscopics, many of which can be found in Oculus' excellent best practices [oculus.com] section, an insightful read for anyone interested in VR:
I know you meant this somewhat tongue-and-cheek, but that's a potentially harmful perspective -- a lot like saying painting it just putting colors on some paper. As mentioned above, it's easy to get motion sick, and normal video games do not translate well in this manner. Where do you render the UIs? How far away? It requires game-specific modification. Does your game hit 60fps all the time? (Obviously classic Doom will, but newer games won't.) In many games, cut scenes only have content where your view is directed -- in VR you can look anywhere. Furthermore, classically designed cut scenes will create a "where do I look?" problem in VR. What does VR mean for non-FPS games? RTSes? Do you want to be tethered to a keyboard and mouse? No? Different code has to be written to work with VR-centric controllers. More nitpicky, for the software rendering engine in DOOM it was performant to not handle full head rotation, so changing pitch or roll [wikipedia.org] is unavailable -- even in later doom engine games where changing pitch was available, it was (badly) faked with shearing instead of actual rotation.
There's a lot your asserting here. Think of this like swimming versus swimming well. Making computers render pretty graphics isn't that hard. Making them render fast isn't that hard. Making them render pretty graphics fast is much, much harder. Toward that end, various technologies [nvidia.com] are becoming more prevalent [oculus.com] to help us render faster, and faster translates to more content, artwork, and effects, which means more beautiful.
Filming movies with two camera lenses is not enough for stereoscopic 360 content. With today's technology it's not a perfectly solvable problem. To do it correctly, you'd need to be able to produce different pictures for each eye in all orientations from a certain vantage. That means each eye moves relative to that vantage, which means there's no simple transformation going on like mathematical rotation or translation. Right now we fake it in a way that only works reasonably for yaw-only orientations, and even then it requires stitching video with notable compromises usually worked around at a high level content level, not technical, and still produces a result that doesn't actually represent correct stereoscopic imagery under even the best conditions. There's a reason why professional sterescopic 360 recording equipment looks like this [gopro.com] -- monoscopic 360 captures require far fewer cameras, and even the consumer level ones aren't half bad at that.
I'm a little nearsighted with a decent amount of astigmatism -- enough to wear glasses for driving -- and my wife can't see from one side of the bed to the other, but has less astigmatism. The two of us prefer not to wear our glasses during our VR experiences with the Vive, Rift, and Gear systems with some equipment adjustment to compensate for our vision issues. On the Gear this is a simple wheel that rotates to adjust focal length. On the Rift and Vive it depends on where you position the HMD on your head a great deal, and the hardware adjustment features for distance between your eyes (important for correct stereoscopic rendering) also has an effect on the sharpness and optics. I've witnessed far-sighted relatives using these systems, and they also find the experience no more clear with glasses and do not have difficulty seeing unless the headsets shift out of place due to poor strap adjustments.
That said, I'm not aware of specific concerns for optically disadvantaged individuals such as myself -- although I'd have to assume that internally it's a consideration because there's so many of us. I get the feeling it just happens to work out reasonably well.
I can only speculate. First, for many existing games products like vorpX [vorpx.com] are useful -- again, vorpX doesn't work with every game because it requires per-game modification and tweaking, and even then it doesn't work 100% perfectly on every game. I'm certain money is a consideration. Woohoo, more than a million [fortune.com] people used VR in some form in April. But more than 1.2 billion [venturebeat.com] people play games. So, VR, is at a 0.1% of that. That's even worse than supporting Mac as a platform which many companies don't do, even if they run a stock game engine that supports it out of the box. The quality assurance cost alone probably isn't worth it. And then you have problems where content doesn't match the VR experience. Sure, there's creative solutions to make it easier (okay, so just make over there really dark), but it requires stepping through the game and massaging each portion of it, or leaving it in an unpolished state leading to a poor experience and tarnishing the company/franchise/whatever.
No, this is a patently different experience. Like trying to view TV on your eReader. You can, in fact, get pictures to show up on your eInk display, but it will not be of any benefit and look pretty stupid.
Actually, people need both technical and hands-on experience -- trying the various systems in the ideal scenarios for each makes it pretty clear what each one is capable of. I'm not a gamer, but I here's my perspective from using all the commercially available systems:
Because you're covering a much larger field of view, panel resolution needs to be much higher for the effective DPI you want to achieve. Even if you were pushing 4k panels on each eye, you wouldn't get 1080p resolutions. So, no, this does not replace TV yet. Interestingly, it doesn't matter as much when you're moving your head because when your eye is tracking an object it's going through various pixels and the sub-pixel effects allow you to perceive more resolution than their actually is. On the other hand, you still see a bit of a "screen door" effect. When you try on a headset you'll likely see it right away, but in about 10 seconds you totally won't care and probably won't even notice once the content starts.