Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings. Then it won't matter that it's VR, given high-fidelity, accurate input. Current VR systems like the Oculus are "just" a stepping stone to something much greater.
That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?
> Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex instead of bothering with all the issues screens+optics brings.
This will not work. The visual system is not an "information processing" system like a computer. In order to wire an "accurate input" into your brain, you would need to duplicate all of the nonlinear optical, electrical, and chemical transformations performed by the eye, in which case you might as well just use your eye.
In other words, we don't just see what comes out of the screen, so wiring that data into your brain will be gibberish at worst and a somewhat compromised new sense organ at best.
Yes, but once you solve those issues, you don't need a super high resolution, light field based (or otherwise adjustable focus) display that's very small and has very high battery life, to achieve the same portability. Your face doesn't need to have a weird-looking and -feeling object on it, and if you can hook into the original eye signal, you get a free dual camera for AR. Oh, and on a less geeky note, it gives sight to the blind.
The resolution and the focus will certainly be solved long before an implant could give remotely similar performance, but an implant would sure be neat for the other reasons.
> Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex
This comes somewhere on the tech tree after "practical flying cars" and "solving world hunger." But eventually, sure, why not.
> That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?
The most common and superficial health issue with VR (and AR) would be simulator sickness. The visual cues don't match what the brain expects via other sense data, so you get sick. It happens to some people much more easily than others.
More direct hazards:
Safety issues, e.g. tripping on stuff you can't see while operating a VR headset, or being distracted due to virtual stimuli.
Vision impairment, primarily in children younger than 6-10 years, but potentially also in older users with compromised vision systems.
Temporary visual impairment, typically after sessions longer than 20 minutes. Pronounced eyestrain due to unnatural focal behavior, object tracking, display quality, and optical alignment.
Viire, "Health and safety issues for VR". It gets cited around lots even though it's over 10 years old now, but I couldn't find a free copy. Look it up on ACM if you have access. You can preview the first page at the following URL. http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machine...
You'll note that these are all late 90s. VR research was much better funded then. You can find more recent stuff though, at least with appropriate database access. More work did get done, but shoehorned under different keywords since "virtual reality" stopped being trendy.
> You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech. (from sibling's child)
Nope. The main difference between 10 year old VR headsets and the ones you can buy today is that the use of bulky CRT eyepieces vs. LED-based eyepieces. The middle ground being LEDs with gradually improving dot pitch.
The human issues remain more or less the same, seeing as nobody has re-engineered the human body in the last 10 years.
My grad advisor had been involved in VR & AR research going back - I forget, 20 or 30 years. So I did a fair amount of reading on the topic. You can make slightly better headsets today, particularly if money is no object - but the core limitations are really the human factors, and the timing constraints necessary to accommodate human senses and rate of motion.
Unfortunately, the teams at Valve and Oculus seemed unaware that solving the problems you cited would require "re-engineering the human body", and naively set about solving these problems with more conventional engineering methodologies. Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness, taking advantage of the near-zero pixel switching time of OLED displays, as well as accurate, low-latency, 6DOF head tracking.
Current state-of-the-art VR tech is a huge advancement from late 90s VR tech, here's a few examples that run contrary to your curious assertion that the only significant VR tech advance of the last decade was the transition from CRT to LED displays:
-The usual inexorable orders-of-magnitude march toward greater processing power
-Commodification of smartphone hardware, which happens to be ideal for VR
-The ability to correct for distortion and chromatic aberration in software, rather than with bulky and complex optics
-Advancements in "sensor fusion", where multiple, complementary tracking sensor technologies are used in tandem, to compensate for deficiencies in any single tracking tech
-Low persistence technology that eliminates notoriously sim-sickness-inducing pixel smearing
You've clearly done your reading on this, but the VR landscape really has changed more in the last few months than the five years pre-Oculus.
> Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness…
Not true. While Abrash seems to makes this claim several times early in the PDF [1], near the end there's this:
> In addition to the question of how games will interact with input, rules about how players can move around a virtual space without getting motion sick or losing presence have yet to be figured out. We’ve found that traditional FPS movement is far from optimal and tends to cause motion sickness, so VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.
Abrash admits that "traditional FPS movement" still makes people sick despite all the technical improvements touted earlier in the paper. His solution doesn't work for FPSs but instead proposes new types of games instead of the ones that people want to play. Flying fighter jets, the type of simulation that gives simulation sickness its name [2], does not involve the "slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction" that Abrash says is needed to prevent sickness.
Like you I was excited that Valve had solved the simulation sickness problem, but on closer reading found that it's just not true. Many people have the desire to use VR tech in virtual worlds doing things that involve normal-speed head movements without getting sick, but Valve has not solved this problem.
Simulator sickness is different from motion sickness. That is, there may be low simulator sickness, but it turns out that pulling 9G turns or rocket jumping while running backwards at 40MPH, while not a problem on regular computer screens will get most people motion sick in real life, and hence in VR.
From personal experience and in watching a number of people in my office try out the DK1, I can definitely confirm that there are a number of things that are quite different when strapping on the Rift - relative scale of objects becomes much more important, world detail (books in bookshelves etc) takes on a much more interesting quality, and movement speed is definitely something that seems to scale down - feeling comfortable moving at walking/realistic speeds vs getting sick at traditional video game character speeds.
>Unfortunately, the teams at Valve and Oculus seemed unaware that solving the problems you cited would require "re-engineering the human body", and naively set about solving these problems with more conventional engineering methodologies. Miraculously, they've succeeded
Too bad they didn't listen to the status quo and go about re-enginering the human body instead.
Practical flying cars, at least as they are seen in films, requires a method of flying that does not rely on aerodynamics or reaction mass and has an energy store that is far better than petrol.
Today we have experiments that bring limited sight to the blind and cochlear implants that bypass the ear are routine operations. I would say that gaming implants are a lot closer than you might think and are almost certainly closer than practical flying cars.
Solving world hunger isn't really on the tech tree, given there is already surplus food. It is firmly on the politics tree.
>Practical flying cars, at least as they are seen in films, requires a method of flying that does not rely on aerodynamics or reaction mass and has an energy store that is far better than petrol.
That's not true. All you'd need is batteries with higher capacity and some clever engineering of ducted fan propellers with variable geometry. You couldn't manage nearly as high speeds as passenger airliners in the lower atmosphere, but you could certainly manage cruise at speeds and efficiencies around those of a car. A modern sailplane cruises at an effective energy consumption of 3 kW (4 HP) at 100kph (calculated as sink rate at max L/D times gross weight). You wouldn't get this efficient without some really smart engineering of the lifting surfaces, but there are plenty of avenues that haven't been explored yet if you've got VTOL capability and don't have to engineer the wings for safe landing speeds.
The key is that the design has to use wings, it's the only practical way to generate lift efficiently.
I said as they are seen in films. The ones in films vtol right next to pedestrians and other vehicles and have no wings. To achieve that, they are not pushing air around.
Of course you can always get a microlight, but they already exist and they are not flying cars.
There are huge engineering avenues that haven't been explored at all in this regard. As I said, all contemporary aircraft have large wings in part because they have to maintain high lift at low speeds, when landing. There is a big likelihood that some design compromise could be made where a lifting-body design, foldable wings or similar concept could be used to make a much smaller and more lightweight vehicle. A more realistic answer to your initial post is that we don't know yet, not that it is impossible.
I still fail to see how papers on older tech (and it was more than just the size of the eyepieces, eg Virtual Boy) can be said to apply to the same tech today.
Cars in the 90s were less safe than cars today. You may build upon car safety studies in past decades but you need to test and re-confirm the conclusions of the older test subject hold true for the modern test subject.
Some things _may_ still hold true but where in science do you draw the same conclusion for a blanket category of "All VR"?
Re unnatural focal behavior, there's some early work on holographic displays going on at MIT (and elsewhere) that could, in the future, solve that problem.
I realize I can do some digging. I was just hoping for pointers to make that process easier and more fruitful - otherwise I will probably not bother myself to be honest. I imagined you would have something more relevant to share about this topic, compared to a search, since you say it bothers you that there is no discussion about this. I'm inviting you to start some discussion.
You should at least be able to find the Abstracts. You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech. I think if you wanted to show concern you could point people towards real problems when you make claims like that.
That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?