Tom's Hardware conducted an interview with Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR. The defining takeaway? Virtual reality needs as much graphics resources as can be thrown at it:
Tom's Hardware: If there was one challenge in VR that you had to overcome that you really wish wasn't an issue, which would it be?
Palmer Luckey: Probably unlimited GPU horsepower. It is one of the issues in VR that cannot be solved at this time. We can make our hardware as good as we want, our optics as sharp as we can, but at the end of the day we are reliant on how many flops the GPU can push, how high a framerate can it push? Right now, to get 90 frames per second [the minimum target framerate for Oculus VR] and very low latencies we need heaps of power, and we need to bump the quality of the graphics way down.
If we had unlimited GPU horsepower in everybody's computer, that will make our lives very much easier. Of course, that's not something we can control, and it's a problem that will be solved in due time.
TH: Isn't it okay to deal with the limited power we have today, because we're still in the stepping stones of VR technology?
PL: It's not just about the graphics being simple. You can have lots of objects in the virtual environment, and it can still cripple the experience. Yes, we are able to make immersive games on VR with simpler graphics on this limited power, but the reality is that our ability to create what we are imagining is being limited by the limited GPU horsepower.
[...] The goal in the long run is not only to sell to people who buy game consoles, but also to people who buy mobile phones. You need to expand so that you can connect hundreds of millions of people to VR. It may not necessarily exist in the form of a phone dropping into a headset, but it will be mobile technologies -- mobile CPUs, mobile graphics cards, etc.
In the future, VR headsets are going to have all the render hardware on board, no longer being hardwired to a PC. A self-contained set of glasses is a whole other level of mainstream.
[More after the Break]
An article about AMD's VR hype/marketing at Gamescom 2015 lays out the "problem" of achieving "absolute immersion" in virtual reality:
Using [pixels per degree (PPD)], AMD calculated the resolution required as part of the recipe for truly immersive virtual reality. There are two parts of the vision to consider: there's the part of human vision that we can see in 3D, and beyond that is our peripheral vision. AMD's calculations take into account only the 3D segment. For good measure, you'd expand it further to include peripheral vision. Horizontally, humans have a 120-degree range of 3D sight, with peripheral vision expanding 30 degrees further each way, totaling 200 degrees of vision. Vertically, we are able to perceive up to 135 degrees in 3D.
With those numbers, and the resolution of the fovea (the most sensitive part of the eye), AMD calculated the required resolution. The fovea sees at about 60 PPD, which combined with 120 degrees of horizontal vision and 135 degrees of vertical vision, and multiplying that by two (because of two eyes) tallies up to a total of 116 megapixels. Yes, you read that right: 116 megapixels. The closest resolution by today's numbers is 16K, or around [132] megapixels.
While 90 Hz (albeit with reduced frame stuttering and minimal latency) is considered a starting point for VR, AMD ultimately wants to reach 200 Hz. Compare that to commercially available 2560×1440 @ 144 Hz monitors or HDMI 2.0 recently adding the ability to transport 3840×2160 @ 60 Hz. The 2016 consumer version of Oculus Rift will use two 1080×1200 panels, for a resolution of 2160×1200 refreshed at 90 Hz. That's over 233 million pixels per second. 116 megapixels times 200 Hz is 23.2 billion pixels per second. It's interesting (but no surprise) that AMD's endgame target for VR would require almost exactly one hundred times the graphics performance of the GPU powering the Rift, which recommends an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290.
In conclusion, today's consumer VR might deliver an experience that feels novel and worth $300+ to people. It might not make them queasy due to the use of higher framerates and innovations like virtual noses. But if you have the patience to wait for 15 years or so of early adopters to pay for stone/bronze age VR, you can achieve "absolute immersion," also known as enlightenment.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by jimshatt on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:09AM
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:17AM
Ooh yeah this is a good porno. Aw hell my Internet connection is lagging. Fuck! My dick is stuck and I can't pull it out!!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:39PM
While this has been modded troll, I could see the technology becoming a problem with porn-addicts.
Traditionally the porn addict couldn't do their public thing because the only porn available would be in magazines, VHS tapes and DVDs, or technologically confined to desktop computers. Even with the advent of decent laptops, to watch porn in a public (or even in a public restroom scenario) was too unwieldy and cumbersome.
Phones changed the game drastically. Much productivity was lost on the job as employees begun watching porn on their phones and masturbating in restrooms of their employers and the public. They walk everywhere, among us now, sweaty and grunting and breathing heavily and kneading themselves in between their restroom porn fixes.
And that's the way things are now. Imagine all those people who would now have something like that affixed to their heads at all times. You'd be seeing them everywhere, doing what they do now except non-stop with splotches of semen all over the crotches of their pants. Everything would devolve back to the caveman days as porn-addled mankind communicates in moans and grunts because that's all they see, all day, every day.
Yeah, no. We saw what happened with the Glassholes. The occulus and all others like it must be publicly shamed accordingly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:06PM
Pfft. Like hell people will wear Oculus in public. That's mugging 3.1. Employers will not adopt VR because they won't figure out how to squeeze productivity out of it. AR might get some adoption in niche workplaces like health care, but the employer will hold back the cum tsunami. VR's big market will be gaming, with a side market of immersive content that targets the baseline of Cardboard/phone holders.
What happens in the basement stays in the basement. Only your entire home is your basement once you are on the floor wearing Oculus and twitching your fingers. The crowd that can play shitty MMOs for 20+ hours a week will adopt Oculus fast. Some porn users will adopt Oculus, but not a significant proportion will blow $300 on a new head-mounted display. Instead, the MMO crowd will heavily overlap with the Oculus porn segment, and some of this porn will be gamified.
The public shaming of Oculus will never happen because Oculus will shame itself into the basement and stay there for 420 hours a week. Unlike Google Glass, there is no front-facing camera on the initial Oculus although v2 will have it. It will never be associated with the relative ease of recording that Google Glass was. Will the Cardboard users be shamed? I think they will have trouble finding a significant amount of VR content to view on the bus or park bench, and they will be relieved of their wallets if they try to feel the immersion. Cardboard could be seen as an evolution of restroom porn fix, but that won't decrease productivity any further, because the TTJ (time to jizz) will be the same.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:55PM
The overlap would be extremely minimal, basically just render list generation, maybe shadow map generation if they're using a shading method like that. Once you start on the actual hard-work portions of the frame render, it becomes independent for each camera.
Plus, latency is an absolute killer for VR. I don't think adding 100ms of network latency will be tolerable when they've gone to great lengths to cut the display latency down from 16ms to 11ms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @03:11PM
Agreed, we're playing a game, not watching TV or streaming a movie enhanced with fancy CGI. Our actions will be interactive, as opposed to simply "3D".
Considering the bandwidth needed to transmit the graphics between cards in SLI or Crossfire, and considering the bandwidth needed to actually deliver it to a digital monitor -- the cloud is not the place I want my real-time stream of highly complex computational data and results are.
Something has to get the data to the GPUs in whatever datacenter. Something has to manage the workload across GPUs, then put it on the network to deliver to me.
If people use wireless, will they lose frames while playing because the video stream dropped? Where is the game itself hosted?
If we're talking about a phantom console type of streaming, or STEAM OS/big picture streaming, then these VR glasses are not even applicable beyond the local LAN due to the bandwidth needed... and how it'd compete against everything else it encounters. In real time.
Turn your head, and that action has to go to "The Cloud" and then send it back...
Getting a high speed connection for the internet at home would not be enough unless the content being accessed is nearby on a similar speed and low latency connection... people using netflix in your neighborhood/apartment complex will surely impede such application of VR use...
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday August 14 2015, @08:53AM