My wife and I went to see Coco at the movie theater a couple weeks. Her religious beliefs include an afterlife and she told me she could only hope that her mom was enjoying an afterlife in a place as beautiful as the world depicted in Coco.
So when we got home, I booted up the Coco VR experience in my Oculus Rift and called out to her that I had a surprise. She slid the headset on and lost herself in another world for about half an hour.
“What in the heck!!?!”
“Ohhh my gosh!!!”
“I’m going to cry, it’s so beautiful!!”
“Hold me so I don’t fall while I look off the edge of this bridge!” (as she peered in real life into the trash bin outside the kitchen).
I think that many of us are gamers and see VR from the gaming angle. But it’s also a visualization tool for helping us share experiences we can only imagine. That’s the aspect that holds the most interest to me and that I try to curate when I have people try VR for the first time. ymmv of course.
Djscman
1708
What is inside out tracking? That must be different from coco tracking.
If you need any testers for your Magic Leap doohickeys, I’ll volunteer.
LMN8R
1709
Inside out tracking is what HoloLens and the Windows Mixed Reality headsets currently use - basically all the sensors are in the headset itself so that you don’t need things like the Vive lighthouses spread across your room. I assume Magic Leap uses something similar too.
I have a few friends at Microsoft who specifically worked on the custom-designed “Holographic Processing Unit”. It’s a separate chip inside the HoloLens which is exclusively used to process data from the many sensors on the device to enable precise tracking as the user of the headset moves around. It’s based on tech that was originally used for the Kinect to a much lesser degree.
The upcoming new Oculus stand-alone will be wireless with inside-out tracking:
as will Vive Focus:
Seems I was wrong here too! The new dash doesn’t necessarily pause the game - Lone Echo switches to the pause screen by design I guess. And X Rebirth actually keeps going in the background when the dash is open (so I switch to virtual desktop while it’s loading).
I noticed that in From Other Suns, calling up the virtual desktop doesn’t pause the game! So you can basically ‘alt tab’ using the Oculus button to move focus to a pinned desktop window, and use it while still inside the game. So awesome!
This now seems to work as a launcher! Pop a cartridge in and a virtual HMD appears above the console, put it over your head and the game launches. Hardly more convenient than pointing and clicking using the dash quick menu, but still…
I also tested the ‘revert’ functionality - you can switch between the old and new dashes by clicking a single button in the beta options. So no reason not to try it out! (though Windows 10 is required for Virtual Desktop and overlays. Also minimum of AMD: 17/11/2, NVIDIA: 388.31 drivers)
Skipper
1712
Roger, you just blew my mind. I knew -nothing- about this technology and have been reading some links on it. This would be a game changer, for me at least.
Teiman
1713
I don’t understand why we don’t use something like VR gloves. Is so obvious. The position of fingers would be very easily controlled that way, so we would import a lot of body language into the game world.
KevinC
1714
I thought Valve was working on a controller that does so.
Edit: it’s the Knuckles controller I was thinking of.
Probably because it’s not as simple as ‘hey let’s use gloves’. Oculus showed some prototype tech earlier last year:
“Unfortunately, hands have about 25 degrees of freedom and lots of self-occlusion. Right now, retroreflector-covered gloves and lots of cameras are needed to get to this level of tracking quality.”
Taken from blog page sharing Michael Abrash’s talk to Global Grand Challenges Summit, well worth a read:
What you really need is some kind of sprung gauntlet, so you can just track the hand’s physical position/orientation in a gross manner and have the fingers be self-tracking for how clenched they are. But that would be uncomfortable, and wouldn’t really offer much benefit over what the current Touch controllers do, which is surprisingly effective - thumb up/down, index in/out and fist open/closed.
I just wish these companies would adopt the same, standard controller, whether it’s the Touch controller, or Vive, or whatever Mixed Reality is using… make it dead-simple easy for devs to write a VR control scheme once, play anywhere. Look at what happened with Fallout 4 and the effort it takes making the game work properly with Touch controllers. Ridiculous.
At a minimum, make them all similar… the controllers on the PS and XBox are similar enough that little effort is required when making cross-platform games. Why can’t we have the same with VR?
end of rant.
KevinC
1718
I think that’s a good goal, but I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of the maturity of the platform/technology. It’d suck if every game these days still had to conform to a one button joystick or two button NES gamepad. :)
I think we still have many years of shaking out control schemes, some of which might be radically different (like a glove/gauntlet).
vyshka
1719
https://haptx.com/
The gloves haptx is working on give haptic feedback.
Teiman
1720
That must be pretty powerful.
In PSVR you can play with the controller in “Virtual Worlds” and the feedback of using the controller to poke a floating ball in the main menu is amazing.
A haptic controller may allow crazy thing like playing music, or using virtual keyboards :D
KevinC
1721
I’m assuming hapticporn dot com is already registered.
[quote=“Djscman, post:1708, topic:77265”]
What is inside out tracking? That must be different from coco tracking.[/quote]
Hah. Inside-out tracking means you don’t need external sensors all around the place to track your position. The current HTC and Oculus devices require you to stay within the boundaries of your sensor system. With inside-out tracking, those boundaries go away.
Unfortunately, your room’s walls do not go away.I’m far more constrained by available space than sensor range.
vyshka
1724
I just saw this in my timeline on twitter
https://www.blackbox-vr.com/
Apparently some VR gym thing. It would be interesting to see, but I don’t think I’d like to subject my hmd to all the sweat generated from working out.
Tman
1725
There is tech that will briefly superimpose objects from the real world into your virtual world so that you don’t go hitting / walking / tripping over things.
It’s a good compromise between immersion and banging your knees and knuckles. Requires a bit more processing (and image transfer from the HMD back to the PC so that it’s rendered in) but well worth it IMO.
Hopefully we can begin to see more of this with Inside Out becoming far more prevalent.
LMN8R
1726
One of the benefits of true Inside Out Tracking is that you’re not limited to just a single room. With high quality IO tracking, every single room can be mapped in real time as needed.
Of course at that point if you’re still tethered to a powerful gaming PC that doesn’t really matter, but it’s just one more hurdle overcome on the way to truly self-contained AR/VR.
