[quote quote=843]I spend a lot of free time in VR and some of the cool things are meeting up with friends around the world to shoot some pool, play paintball, watch Netflix or go see Reggie Watts at a virtual comedy theater. One concept in VR is teleporting. In order to get from one place to another in a large world, you point to where you want to go, press a button and your “body” travels to that location. One day after a few hours in VR, I went upstairs to the fridge to grab a beer. I closed the fridge door, pointed my finger at the couch in my living room and pressed a non-existent button. Confused as to why I was’t moving, my wife yells out “Did you just try to teleport you fuckin’ idiot?!!?”[/quote]

That’s funny, but some astronauts have found the same thing coming back to Earth after a long time in space. Their wife will ask them to e.g. pass the remote and they’ll say “Sure!” pick up the remote in one hand and “waft” it gently towards them as if it were weightless.

Of course, it falls right on the floor at their feet instead. If someone with the calibre of an astronaut takes time to adjust between different environments, us regular schlubs don’t stand a chance 😀

What’s really interesting is that you presumably don’t have this kind of lapse after using a monitor to play or socialise, but you do experience it after being in VR.

[quote quote=827]VR is still to much in it’s infancy, it will probably die and be reborn many times, just like 3D. I just don’t think the tech, software, & networking capabilities are there yet, until they can deliver something like the anime Soul Art Online.

The only thing that will probably keep it alive is the porn industry, sadly[/quote]

I think the tech is there. The e.g. Vive was already a great bit of kit, but now the Vive Pro has been released offering something like 67% better resolution. I do agree that the killer apps aren’t quite there inc. networking, though.

[quote quote=848]The feeling of lady parts one inch from your face in a consequence free environment is the 1st and biggest draw if you can get past that it’s infinitely amazing. I just think people aren’t ready for it, they can barely distinguish reality from fake news on flat old Facebook!

I love the idea of simulated travel, time travel, flying, meetings, playing collective games and things like that. I can see a really scary dark side to it all though.[/quote]

I’m not going to lie, I’d try VR porn first chance I got 😀

And simulated travel/time travel would be awesome; imagine going back to Woodstock, or travelling on the Titanic, or engaged in a Star Trek mission (we’ve got the beginnings of that last one already).

As for the downside, yeah, there are always going to be fuck-ups who spoil it for others. It’s bad enough online these days meeting a troll who can only communicate by text interface, and maybe change the content of your posts and change your avatar. Imagine how much worse trolls would be with your entire VR presence under their control.

[quote quote=864]Yeah, but imagine how much better it would be if the headset wasn’t so huge, & uncomfortable. If it could be ran on a small device in your backpack, didn’t need items in your hands, more portable, etc. VR in the 90’s blew donkey dick, sure it is much nicer, but as tech evolves it usually gets smaller & cheaper[/quote]

With it needing to be big enough to present a screen that fills your field of view, AND able to block out all chinks of light from the environment, there will always be constraints on how small you can make a headset. Maybe future devices using imaging tech that we can scarcely imagine will be even more elegant, but I don’t see the current solution as a barrier to a perfectly satisfying VR experience.

Hell, I’m fine with the size and comfort of Oculus Rift even as it is now. I’ve worn a Rift for half an hour at a time and don’t even remember what it felt like to wear, it was so balanced and light it was no more remarkable than putting on a hat. There must have been a screen door effect as well, I just don’t remember noticing any because of what I was doing.

Cost-wise, Rift is available for £399 with controllers. I paid £300 – at 1998 values – for a frigging 17 inch CRT monitor back in the day, I’m perfectly fine with the idea that I can pay a little more than that for a functioning VR headset today. I’d pay twice as much, if necessary – just don’t tell Palmer Luckey I said that 😀

The biggest impediment to me using VR so far was the cabling. THAT has to go, and there are ways round it available already.

[quote quote=875]jeebus, that huge smiley bug is back, mikeb[/quote]

Christ – and how.

[quote quote=960]Here’s a good link inside of Microsoft.com about various “Mixed Reality” projects:[/quote]

Thanks, that link offers insights into some interesting projects.

[quote quote=960]Mixed reality is a funny way to put it as I feel it’s where most people reside naturally on social media/the Internet.[/quote]

For me, yes and no.

YES, because cyberpsace and social media have ALWAYS been part of this sort of “dimension” into which we could extend ourselves, to give and receive vivid impressions.

NO, because in VR we’re not just looking at exchanged messages on a flat screen, when we can tell “reality” is within our line of sight. VR bumps it up a notch and actually keeps us totally immersed; it gets our vestibular system involved, and presents us with experiences so that no matter where we invest our attention, we only get more of the same environment. And in very striking ways, that is the difference between “seeing” there and “being” there.

[quote quote=983]The Movie “Ready Player One” looks like it’s making a decent attempt at showcasing a lot of the swirling thoughts of VR:

I expect it to be kind of a corny kid/tween movie, I hope it’s better than that
[/quote]

Me too, but I’ve given up hoping that movie adaptations will live up to the promise of the original material. If the movie version of “Ready Player One” helps legitimise and spread awareness of the potential of VR to people who otherwise wouldn’t have taken VR seriously, it will have done justice to the original book.

I’ll believe it’s not just another film that exploits some poorly misunderstood but perfectly respectable concept when I see it. I well remember the pointless mysticism and wild public misconceptions around shit like “Doom”, and “Dungeons and Dragons” back in the day. I remember the premise of the 1980’s film film “Weird Science”, that one of those new witchcraft “computers” was a perfectly acceptable mechanism for a woman to be conjured out of nowhere, and for it to start snowing in someone’s bedroom.

I want “Ready Player One” to be responsible and realistic in its depiction of VR. If it’s actually a good film on top of that, that’s a bonus.

[quote quote=992]This looks fun:[/quote]

It looks cool – the only caveat being that it offers a 3D experience, but it doesn’t offer the full potential of VR if all of the new prompts in the environment always come from the same axis.

[quote quote=1056]Like so much about virtual reality, that idea is still mostly a promise. The technology has yet to become popular with consumers, for many reasons—headsets are bulky, expensive, and silly-looking, and the VR experience doesn’t always look or feel all that real.

Debevec and others working on VR see light fields as a potential solution for that last problem.[/quote]

That’s cool tech, but I see the problems of “bulky” and “silly-looking” as basically one problem – or at least, two problems with a Helluva LOT of overlap.

And this system doesn’t address either issue – nor the one of expense. It only addresses the problem of depth/distance in a game, something that – for me, anyway – was a non-issue at this stage. Hell, I haven’t even seen it listed in a top five of issues affecting VR uptake, or of consumer demands.

Still, every move forwards is progress! 😀

[quote quote=1102]

[/quote]

Cool find. A great example of how if we can programme it, we can display it in VR.

I wonder how many additional dimensions VR could help us visualise…

If Facebook tanks I hope it doesn’t take Oculus Rift, which it obviously now owns, down with it. I want to see how the next Rift benefits from FB’s money and John Carmack’s technological insight.

http://time.com/money/5205630/mark-zuckerberg-net-worth-facebook-stock/

Test Reply

[quote quote=1225]There is more – just so much to consider for a 2 minute VR ride![/quote]

Absolutely, although I experienced a company a couple of days ago that has a pretty efficient way of selling a range of VR experiences, including rides:

https://vertigovr.co.uk/

Their venue featured padded, actuated seating for convincing VR rides (I tried four altogether, I couldn’t get enough of them), a line of cubicles with Vive headsets suspended on booms for arena-type play, a platform for VR FPS play, and a “5D” room.

Harvey Rheingold in his book “Virtual Reality” wrote:

It isn’t hard to imagine a place something like a contemporary health club, with booths of various sizes and kinds of padding, and equipment such as stationary bikes and treadmills, where cyberspace apparatus of various kinds is available on a membership or by-the-hour basis.

That was in 1991. The future’s here, folks! 😀

Ralph N. Haber, “Flight Simulation” (1986)

How can pilots be trained for such complex tasks without killing them in the process? The preferred solution, introduced in WWII, is the flight simulator, in which the pilot can practice many flying tasks while sitting safely on the ground. He or she can even practice responses to unlikely events, particularly those that might lead to disaster.

…Losses in combat are concentrated almost exclusively among pilots with five or fewer combat missions; if the fifth mission is survived, the probability of surviving the remaining ones is 95%, regardless of how many additional missions are flown. These figures suggest that if all pilots could be given the equivalent of their five combat missions before they face the enemy, losses could be minimised drastically, perhaps altering the outcome of the engagement or war.

This pic was taken in Jan 2018:

[url=https://postimages.org/][img]https://s17.postimg.org/qj8dkzy4v/180110-_F-_WW501-1025.jpg[/img]

The VIVE Pro is out now – it features 78% more resolution than the first-gen VIVE; one reviewer said the difference made it not just easy to now read text on a book page in VR, but to read text from such a book on the opposite wall of the virtual room.

https://www.vive.com/uk/product/vive-pro/

The main pisser is that it is STILL wired, and doesn’t come as a package deal with vital accessories – like controllers, and sensors – like the VIVE does.

In fact, the stand-alone price for these accessories is so high that it would be CHEAPER to buy the HTC VIVE and VIVE Pro than it would be to buy the VIVE Pro and the accessories separately, which seems to be either a poor pricing choice or a blatant gouge, whichever way you want to look at it.

You’ll also need a shit-hot PC, but by now that’s a given.

[quote quote=1350]

[/quote]

Wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of those; the lack of cabling would be sweet.

But you don’t get anything for free. The trade-off would be how reliable the inside-out tracking would be, and the issues that come with battery power (charge time, endurance, lifetime etc).

[quote quote=1367]This reminds me of the scene from Guardians of the Galaxy 2 where the fleet of drones / fighters were all remote – same with the last scene in Black Panther. It’s so crazy that video game skills are military skills now and that fighters don’t have to be in the thing they are fighting with. VR is a weapon, VR is a crazy thing man[/quote]

Yeah, but it’s also surgery, recreation, therapy, exploration, data visualisation…I know an astronomer who used an Oculus Rift to virtually explore the surface of a comet. Imagine how valuable that experience was to him.

Technology will often blow both ways; do away with all nuclear materials, and you also lose nuclear power. If we got rid of all poisons we wouldn’t be able to perform chemotherapy, it’s the same old story.

Me, I’m most interested in VR for its potential to change or expand our idea of what reality even is. Even the tech that we’re using right now has already transformed concepts that we used to think were pretty well-established. In the old days, you *discussed* things with people who could actually hear you, you *befriended* people whom you’d actually met and had reason to trust, and – absurdly to our eyes – you could only join a *community* by travelling to where it was physically based. If what used to be rock-solid ideas like those ones can be transformed by the kind of basic tech we’re now using, where will VR take us?

Not gonna lie, I like the idea of VR porn. Imagine having Tera Patrick or Gianna Michaels right there…

If VR porn takes off I think it would help mainstream the tech and also just…bring the world a lot of happiness 😀

For those who haven’t seen it, “Ready Player One” has been released since the last time I posted in this thread.

ONE SENTENCE REVIEW: as a film it’s fine, although a bit by-the-numbers. It is “responsible” but not always realistic in its depiction of VR in the future, and it misses the point in a few places.

I won’t need to see it again, but at least it didn’t damage VR’s brand.

Also since the last time i was here ANOTHER VR entertainment centre has opened up in a town near me:

I haven’t tried the “maze” yet (I’ll do that next time I’m in just to tick the box) but I did try “Richie’s Plank Experience”, a very fun game where you fly around the skyscrapers of an anonymous city with a jetpack, putting out fires.

It’s a great little distraction, very well done, with cool scenery and details – one of the the best I’ve played on VR yet. But it suffers from the old problem – it’s not a killer app or game, and although it’s great fun it’s also quite limited, so it doesn’t have a great deal of replay value (YouTube link below).

“Richie’s Plank Experience”

[quote quote=1479]I just got back from Universal Studios Orlando and 2 rides there: Minions Mayhem and Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon that completely and totally blew me away. The feeling of total immersion which included wet, heat, bumps, sounds, flying, free falling, driving – literally the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced as far as VR type things go. I can’t imagine what the coming years will bring

They call it “4D” but it’s VR. I can’t imagine the type of things being created privately right now.[/quote]

Damn. That ride sounds immense; makes “Richie’s Plank Experience” look like a freakin’ pile of puke 😀

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[quote quote=1715]

The Oculus GO https://www.oculus.com/go/ looks like it might be perfect for me – a “prosumer” but not avid user. They disconnected it from the wires too – big deal for me

Oh, yeah, cable-free is the way to go. A local VR entertainment centre has untethered HTC Vive powered by a PC/battery combo in a backpack. It adds a lot to the experience, and you barely notice you’re wearing it in mid-game (a maze experience, in this instance).

Anyway, I see your Oculus Go and raise you the Oculus Rift “Half Dome” prototype:

Archangel – “Hellfire” – the first free-roam, multi-player ‘Mech combat game for VR, out now.

Graphics are a little chunkier than we’re used to, but reviewers are raving. The future is here:

Any Trekkies out there? Updated Star Trek VR experience:

[quote quote=1748]But what do we do to play? Does everyone need the same stuff? (Like controllers and whatnot?)[/quote]

I don’t know, but it says it’s for the Rift AND the Vive. And the controllers for each are pretty much established by now (especially for the Vive which, unlike the Rift, NEVER relied on an XBOX controller for that part of the experience).