John Carmack Is Building a Virtual Reality Headset 118
An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, is using his spare time to develop a modern virtual reality headset. After purchasing such a device last year, Carmack became frustrated with how slowly the technology has progressed over the past twenty years. So, he decided to push it forward himself. PCGamer reports that he's been showing off his prototype behind closed doors at E3 this year, and has an interview with him about the problems with VR and the technical challenges he needs to overcome. They even get a look at the prototype itself, which is currently held together with duct tape."
Very Pukey. (Score:5, Informative)
Years ago I bought a VFX-1 to play Descent2, Flight Unlimited, ATF-NATO and an old Helicopter game who's name escapes me..
From that I gained the insight that VR helmets are less pukey if you have a good solid controller in your hands. Heli games are better applications as down generally remains more or less down.
Until someone solves the puking problem VR helmets aren't much use. The problem was never a lack of pixels. It's lack of coordination between inner ear and visual as well as lack of coordination between parallax distance and focus distance.
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Let this be a lesson that new technology is supposed to be rolled out in pr0n first not twitchy action games.
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60 FPS isn't enough. Less than 80 degree FoV isn't enough.
Also, 60 FPS on Xbox? You'll have to pick very specific games to get constant 60 FPS.
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For the record I got consistent insane refresh rates on very old games by using an old computer (games designed for 66MHz running on 1GHz). The video only refreshed at 60Hz (LCDs sucked) but the response to head movements was within one frame.
Still pukey.
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That's the problem with 60Hz. 1 frame => 16-30ms. Enough for your brain to detect the difference in movement between you eyes the the inner ear. People that can get pukey will not have a good time.
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IMHO the fast machine resolved most of the lag related puke. It was noticeably less pukey then when it was running on a slower machine.
Still made me sick after enough use. It was progressively worse based on software type: Heli sims and mechwarrior (up remains up) then fixed wing sims (up wasn't up, but there was a horizon and up was mostly up, plus coordinated turns mean Gs would be perceived as mostly down anyhow) then worst of all Descent. Which I take as correlating with how badly it synched with the
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Yea. I know people that can't play Decent on a normal monitor without getting sick, so I wouldn't play that on a HMS if I had any tendency of getting pukey ever.
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I was running very old games on old hardware. LCD was only 60Hz but games were reporting 250fps. Less pukey then when the helmet was new, but still pukey.
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So basically, what you think we really need to make a better VR helmet isn't more pixels, but a wireless helmet with enough force feedback to make your inner ear movements match the screen.
After riding some of the arcade-sized VR roller coasters, I'd tend to agree. The real reason the ones that do work, work, is not because of the screen, but because of the giant robot arm throwing the cage around.
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I don't think force feedback will do it. Tricking my inner ear by accelerating my head seams to have limitations, especially when we're discussing a helmet, not a moving platform.
Needs a breakthrough to work in general. For now by coding/game designing around the pukeyness some limited uses might be possible. Like I said above, it works much better if up stays generally up and you've got good solid controllers in your hands (and secured to the desk/chair).
Carmack is just the kind of person to 'get this
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"I think VR done right has the potential to reboot the arcade industry. Get the kids off their parents couch and off to the mall where they belong."
Being a clautropile and autistic and generally suspicious of large crowds to begin with, I'd love one for my own home with a multi-directional treadmill. The Wii balance board is great, but I need to be able to push something with my feet.
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Show me a modern Helmet without these problems. Until then you are talking out of your ass.
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Comanche 3. (Looked it up.) The sequel IIRC. Only problem was the heli was invisible in VR helmet mode. It did rock.
I should boot that old computer up. It's still gathering dust along with an old set of controllers. Those very old games rock on an old 1Ghz (Needed an ISA slot and Video with VESA feature connector).
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I also have something to sell, please buy it.
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Never get motion sickness IRL. Planes, boats, helis. Badly made IMAX and VR helmets on the other hand. Still my tolerance for the Helmet was much better then most peoples. Also you did get used to it, slowly and never completely. Trick was to keep sessions short (15 minutes, just long enough to get Mothra home to Monster Island in Janes-ATF) and never push to the brittle edge.
It still worked last time I booted it (years ago).
After RAGE (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to urge Mr. Carmack to consider releasing games that aren't crap, with bits of the map locked via code distributed with the disc to a single purchase.
I'd also like to commend him for releasing his previous engines under the GPL and being an all round cool dude otherwise. id's attitude with RAGE was such a contrast.
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Re:After RAGE (Score:5, Interesting)
Please direct rants at the right people. Mr. Carmack is a programmer. He programs. He is not a producer, director, design lead, art lead, or really anyone who would be responsible for either the game being fun/not fun, or for business decisions regarding on-disc DLC.
If the game were to crash, or to run poorly, or to have obvious code-related glitches, then by all means, blame Carmack. But from what I've heard, that's not what the problem is. The game runs fine, even has some quite remarkable technical features (he streams textures directly from disc into video memory via DMA), but it's just not fun or interesting to play. You don't blame the writers for bad special effects, you don't blame the level designers for terrible voiceacting, and you don't blame the engine programmer for the game not being fun to play.
As an aside, I find it quite interesting that id's public face is essentially their lead programmer. Most companies, it's a game designer, or a writer, or in some cases an artist (or often some combination of the above - game developers wear many hats). I know of no other "public face" who is purely, or even principally, a programmer.
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I know of no other "public face" who is purely, or even principally, a programmer.
How about Tim Sweeney, Epic Games? In my mind he is the "other" Carmack. I can't think of one without thinking of the other.
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To be perfectly honest, Cliff Bleszinski seems more like Epic's "public face". He may not have started the company, but he's definitely the guy the gaming media prefers to talk to.
Don't get me wrong - Sweeny's an awesome programmer, deserves far more credit than he's given, but he seems too media-shy to be *the* Epic guy.
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If the game were to crash, or to run poorly, or to have obvious code-related glitches, then by all means, blame Carmack. But from what I've heard, that's not what the problem is. The game runs fine, even has some quite remarkable technical features (he streams textures directly from disc into video memory via DMA), but it's just not fun or interesting to play. You don't blame the writers for bad special effects, you don't blame the level designers for terrible voiceacting, and you don't blame the engine programmer for the game not being fun to play.
It's interesting that you should mention that, since texture pop-in was actually a big problem with RAGE. It was bad running from my SSD so I can only imagine what console players had to deal with.
As an aside, I find it quite interesting that id's public face is essentially their lead programmer.
Perhaps it's because he's the only founder left?
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What was wrong with RAGE?
It was a dungeon crawler with a little car racing mixed in. What were you expecting?
Re:After RAGE (Score:4, Interesting)
What were you expecting?
An actual ending, not just a hook to the upcoming DLC.
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A fair complaint, but that is again not a gameplay or programming type problem. That is just publishers being publishers.
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Two reasons: that was to be expected from an episodic game, and it was one HELL of a hook.
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For the game part :
- An ending bad enough to ruin any game SPOILER : you kill the last wave of standard enemies and bam, the end. No boss fight, no plot twist, no answers given, nothing. IMHO it is unforgivable.
- No deathmath, limited modding potential. Used to be the best part of id games, now all we have are a limited coop mode and multiplayer car game.
Otherwise, while the main game is not the absolute best I ever played, I found it quite fun for the ~15h it lasted.
For the engine part :
- Low texture resol
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My role model. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, every time I hear what Carmack is up to Im never disappointed. I hope to emulate his productivity one day. Also with respect to VR, I wish him luck. VR has always been a bitch and I doubt it'll be easy. Though he could potentially push id toward devqeloping VR for the military and thus keeping id above water.
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Seriously, every time I hear what Carmack is up to Im never disappointed. I hope to emulate his productivity one day. Also with respect to VR, I wish him luck. VR has always been a bitch and I doubt it'll be easy. Though he could potentially push id toward devqeloping VR for the military and thus keeping id above water.
Outside of Computer Games, please list all these successes. John has money to waste so it seems.
Oculus Rift - 'low' budget HMD - soon@KickStarter (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps worthy of a mention - since John Carmack mentions it in several videos as well - is the tentatively named Oculus Rift. It's aiming to be a 'low' budget HMD, and a KickStarter project is set to be launched June 14th.
For more information, see:
http://oculusvr.com/ [oculusvr.com]
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14777 [mtbs3d.com]
( There are more interviews with John Carmack linked to from that thread, and he participates there directly as well. )
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Please note that the Oculus Rift (tentative name - I think actually they're just going for 'Rift' right now) is not John Carmack's project. He's simply showing a keen interest. I guess you could potentially argue that John Carmack could just throw money at them as an expression of that interest, but right now the people b
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Hey, thanks for the link.
Interesting project, and I specially like crowdfounded stuff like this.
Thanks again.
John Carmack (Score:5, Interesting)
He's an amazing programmer that has done more than his fare share of contributing to the world of computer graphics. In a world where everyone is fighting tooth and nail trying to enforce copyrights and patents, he simply released the full source codes to the programs he wrote. That is altruism at its best and for that he is on the very top of my list of awesome programmers.
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Re:John Carmack (Score:5, Informative)
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It actually was to the communities that surrounded the games still. People still update and play things like quakeworld today. I'm sure more then a few curious programmers looked to see how things were done in the engines that were released.
Also all those early ID quake engine games were hugely modifiable, allowing people to make things from custom maps to actual gameplay code and come up with tons of things which spawned games like counterstrike, team fortress, quakectf, and even halflife. You don't see
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Errr, yes... they are very useful! Are you aware how many games are based on Id game engines?
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He's an amazing programmer that has done more than his fare share of contributing to the world of computer graphics. In a world where everyone is fighting tooth and nail trying to enforce copyrights and patents, he simply released the full source codes to the programs he wrote. That is altruism at its best and for that he is on the very top of my list of awesome programmers.
What the hell are you babbling about? He's not Ed Catmull or dozens of other brilliant mathematicians, engineers, etc., who have extend theoretical Computer Graphics and GPU/GPGPU designs to make John's games more bit depth, and photorealistic shaders, etc. He's not writing the OpenGL Spec or OpenCL, or contributing to programming languages new features getting approved.
What has he actually brought to the World of Computer Graphics, other than demand improvements in OpenGL and DirectX for him to leverage?
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John Carmack is a programmer, not a scientist.
His main skills are at understanding theory and efficiently implementing it, not creating new theories.
Without people like John Carmack, all we would have would be useless equations and equally useless pieces of silicon. Of course the reverse is also true, it is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing.
Ok then! (Score:2)
It's about time. This should have been done 10 years ago, and was but never made it past the novelty stage.
Instead 3D card makers and game makers kept stressing capabilities, making things as pretty as possible at 30fps, whatever that level of complexity was.
Screw that! I want 3D for a game I spend hours "inside" every day.
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Is that you, Buffalo Bill?
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the googles, they burn! (Score:2)
I really don't want to get retinal burn-in of something like this [wikimedia.org]! (not goatse, much worse.)
Kudos to whatever troll replaced Jaron Lanier's wikipedia profile picture with that of a Psychlo from the movie Battlefield Earth!
Another Interview Here (Score:5, Informative)
There's another video interview with John Carmack about the headset over at giantbomb.com, and doesn't have some of the terrible background noise: http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-john-carmack-interview/17-6164/ [giantbomb.com]
He really goes into detail about why he was disappointed with previous headsets, and how he went about making his own and optimizing refresh rates and such.
Aliens (Score:1)
Building the headset is the easy part (Score:3)
Building the headset is the easy part. It's creating something useful to do with it that's hard.
I tried all the first generation gloves-and-goggles systems, including Jaron Lanier's original one. They sucked. Lag between position sensing and graphics generation was huge; you turned your head and waited for the low-pass filters in the position measurement system to settle and the graphics system to catch up. That's no problem to fix today. You really need a frame rate somewhere in the 60-100 range, and, more important, you need low frame latency. A graphics card that's pipelining two frame behind won't do it.
The advantage of goggles is that, with the proper optics, you get an image focused at infinity and a wide screen.
The problem with gloves-and-goggles VR is that manipulation in free space without force feedback sucks. But Carmack is just using this to play Doom, for which it should work fine. (Basic problem with VR without force feedback: you can shoot stuff and drive, but not much else works. Fortunately, shooting stuff and driving covers most of video gaming.) More physically-oriented games, like some of the Kinect stuff, ought to be better. But you absolutely have to have the motion compensation good enough to provide a reliable visual horizon, or your users will fall down.
(The video is embedded in some cheezy ad container with three ad sources, and is considered hostile code by Firefox 12: "[Exception... "'DNTP Redirect Blocked' when calling method: [nsIChannelEventSink::asyncOnChannelRedirect]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "" data: no]". Lame.)
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My opinion on desktop VR has been that really, the application isn't gaming, but just regular desktop productivity.
Most people spend all day wearing headphones or ear phones anyway, so a suitably light-weight helmet wouldn't really be that much of a burden. But with enough resolution, there'd be enormous benefit since you could do away with needing multiple monitors and instead just make the whole 180 degree or more space in front of you your computer "desktop".
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A graphics card that's pipelining two frame behind won't do it.
Yes it will, because the human brain is more than capable of editing that much discrepancy out of your perception. In fact, a rather large portion of the human brain is designed to weed out those kinds of discrepencies and provide your consciousness with a consistent interpretation of reality.
Want some proof? Touch your toe with your hand, did you see the action before you felt it? Of course not, you perceived both happening at the same time. Despite the fact that there's no way the timing from all the
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Here's my money - take it! (Score:2)
I'll have my $500 dollars and the cursed Teach Yourself Vrml 2 in 21 Days [amazon.com] book in hand waiting to fulfill a young kid's dream! I don't think you'll disappoint Mr. Carmack!
Sony HMZ-T1 available now (Score:2)
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He specifically tried the HMZ-T1, but he found it lacking.
http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen/419167#419167
Heard those things can be dangerous (Score:5, Interesting)
According to an engineer who worked on the Sega VR project, [sega-16.com] there's a very serious problem with this sort of device:
There is a danger with HMDs: the IPD (inter-pupilar distance) must be properly set. IO Glasses gets around this by having a really big aperture. Sega had a thumbwheel to adjust the IPD. Here is the danger: if the IPD for the LCDs are wider than the user IPD, you force the user’s eyes to look outward. This is the opposite of cross-eyed. This can really stress the weak muscles around the eyes, and can cause permanent damage in less than 30 minutes. What I heard was the Sega lawyers brought up the liability issue on the eye damage. That is the reason I heard the project was canceled. Take it with whatever block of salt you want.
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I'll take that with a huge grain of salt. Every time you look left or right, you use the same muscles that you would use if your eyes were looking in opposite directions.
It has nothing to do with the muscles, instead the nerves.
So the MAN finally steps back up (Score:2)
On the serious side, if anyone should be at the helm in changing the way gaming is done, its Carmack. Unless he was on some crazy drugs when he thought up how to do real 3D with quake.. then we might need to all chip in and get him some new "inspiration."
"on there", "on here" (Score:1)
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The "hmm" has gone after each sentence, that was painful to listen to when he became more animated. I'd say some sort of speech therapy has been put into action over the years.
A brief tour of VR memory lane (Score:3)
Courtesy of the Museum of Horrifying Technology, 666 Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, IL.
"And this example right here is the SEGA VR headset from 1992, we like to call it "the Ringu" because any time someone uses it, a little Japanese girl shows up and kills them in an ironic and disturbing manner. We don't know why? Apparently they thought it was an important feature. Now over here, we have the VR headset that makes you go blind and bleed from your nose."
Good luck John. You're going to need it.
Useless (Score:1)
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You think he bought his previous set for games?? I don't think so.
Which game? (Score:2)
Is he going to use any of his previous games like Wolf3D, DOOM, etc.? ;)
I tried one of those dedicated VR headsets in college. Ugh, they were heavy and annoying. It was a shooter game. I don't remember its name.
Jaguar VR (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFZCgNBxkcM [youtube.com]
Honest question: 2 screens needed? (Score:2)
or would that cause eye strain and/or nausea ?
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One of the greatest features of a VR HMD is the 3D stereo.
It's the best possible 3D stereo because you don't have the ghosting of monitor 3D displays. And if you can feed the dual displays fast enough, they can kick out frames at full refresh rate, unlike a monitor 3D display where the left/right frames have to take turns.
You can, of course, run an HMD in 2D mode (like when you are navigating your desktop) and it looks just like a flat screen.
It is the latency between your head movement and updating your vi
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or do I have it backwards: the depth queues provided by 2 separate view points are what make it work, not the view that updates based on head movement?
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Short answer: it all helps. Both the 3D, and the tracking help.
Since we are talking about "Virtual Reality" the more factors or senses that contribute to you impression of reality, the better.
If the field of view exceeds your field of view, that's better (what Carmack was talking about with the 90 x 110 deg. FOV.)
If there were different focal points (like there are in real life) that would be better.
If there is accurate head tracking, that's better. (Although I admit I often game with tracking off, because
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Another reason is that when things are this close to your eyes, you can't focus correctly and your eyes will cross and go wonky. Try holding an apple to your nose, you no longer see is correctly. Now try holding a fly to your nose, you still can't see it correctly. Yes?
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So, are 2 screens needed for anything else?
VR Headset + Armadillo Rocket = (Score:2)
Awesome private trip into space without any of that getting blown to bits problem!
Lot cheaper too..