Standing next to id Software’s John Carmack, I almost lost my balance and fell over during the first few seconds of playing Doom 3 on a prototype Rift virtual reality headset, an ugly wad of electronics attached to an elastic ski goggle band.
While wearing the headset I still had to press buttons on an Xbox 360 controller to switch weapons, move forward and fire, but aiming and looking were accomplished simply by turning my head. It was surreal and surprisingly responsive. After the initial disorientation and dizziness dissipated, I was entirely immersed within the world, with the game’s visuals wrapping around my entire field of view.
The Rift is the best headset of its kind Carmack has ever seen. After id Software shipped Rage, Carmack decided to check up on the status of virtual reality, something he hadn’t looked at since the early 1990s. “We did a bunch of deals with people way back with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and they were all loser deals with companies that went bankrupt. That was not the right time,” he said. He assumed there’d been a lot of progress in the meantime. He bought a few headsets and was disappointed.
“They just sucked really bad. They were not at all what I wanted to see.” He started disassembling the models and trying to solve problems the manufacturers hadn’t. “It was getting to the point where there were a few people questioning ‘what’s John doing playing around with all this stuff in the office? He should be working on Doom 4 all the time.’”
An opportunity to legitimize his tinkering with headsets at work came up when id Software decided to revamp Doom 3 and handle development internally. “How do you get people to give a damn about an eight year old project? Yes, it’s got higher resolution, looks nicer. We did lots of things to make it a better game, but it’s still not something lots of people are going to care about.” He initially wanted to use the VR angle as a way to grab the press’ attention, and continued to make progress turning Doom 3 into a virtual reality experience.
For hardware, he initially focused on the Sony HMZ-T1, which outclassed all other sub $10,000 models and which was “in many ways a big advance over the crap that was there before. It has nice displays, excellent resolution, a decent field of view. Sony brought it to the level of just barely bordering on interestingly acceptable at about a forty-five degree field of view.”
Carmack stressed the importance of field of view, saying limiting it too much made wearing the headset feel like “looking through toilet paper tubes.” With the Sony headset, the view was good enough for exploring, but not for combat. “The Sony also has a bunch of latency in their processing which is deeply unfortunate and completely correctable and I wish Sony would fix that.” It had potential, and Carmack said others at id were impressed by his progress, but Sony’s headset just wasn’t enough.
So Carmack decided to start building something on his own in an attempt to improve on existing designs and expand the field of view. Though he tried numerous configurations, he kept returning to the idea of somehow incorporating the screen of his mobile phone. “There’s reason to believe all the billions of dollars of effort that goes into developing mobile device technology, that that’s the right train to hitch yourself to. I was heading down this route when I ran across Palmer Luckey and his Oculus company.”
Luckey launched a Kickstarter on August 1 for Oculus’ Rift headset. In a few days over $1.1 million dollars have been offered up by developers and curious technology aficionados. Those who backed $300 or more will receive a fully assembled Rift and its only game, Doom 3.
“There’s a small VR community that talks about homebrew head mount displays, and he was really the star.” Luckey was on the sixth or seventh revision of his Rift headset, and Carmack was impressed. “He had found the right display panel, the right drivers, the right optics and packaged it all together.” Carmack contacted Luckey and mentioned he was going to demo a virtual reality version of Doom 3 at E3 2012. Luckey mailed Carmack his handmade Rift prototype the next day.
Carmack made adjustments on the software side and soon had something he liked, all the while being mindful of response time. “There’s an important threshold around 20 milliseconds of end to end response time, from the time that you move to the time the image changes. If you’re under 20 milliseconds it really feels like you’re moving a window around in a solid world.” The response time on the unit Carmack was demoing had a 40 to 50 millisecond response time. “There’s a subtle sense that the world is pulling behind you.” Ideally, he said, there should be no delay.
Delays in response time are common to all types of gaming, but are especially important to keep at low levels when considering movement in virtual reality gaming because the lag is far more noticeable. “The difference of 20 milliseconds on there, it’s obvious to everybody. Your brain knows for every contraction of muscles in your neck that orients your head into a different way, your brain has a model of what it’s supposed to see as you do that muscular contraction, and that’s measured in a small number of milliseconds.”
While I played briefly, the delays weren’t especially noticeable. If an imp jumped from the shadow of the room, I quickly swiveled my head to aim them pressed the Xbox 360 controller’s trigger to fire. It felt a little floaty at first, but I started to find a rhythm for the control as I turned my head from side to side to look both ways down a catwalk and ensure demons weren’t getting ready to pounce. It was a very natural behavior, and surprising only because checking around corners is usually such an artificial process driven by mouse and WASD movement or rotating thumbsticks.
To make the game really work, Carmack had to make changes. “Even for a [shooter on ] 3D TV you have to take the crosshair out and put in some kind of a laser sight. In 2D we always do head kicks as a directional cue and damage indicator that knocks the head sideways. That’s a good, positive thing to do on a static screen. In a head-mounted display you don’t want to knock the head around.” He noted that cut-scenes were particularly problematic, because control of the perspective would suddenly be ripped away from you, severing a delicate intuitive link between reality and the virtual space.
At E3 2012 when Carmack first demoed the virtual reality version of Doom using the Rift prototype, he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the response. “Things blew up a lot beyond our expectations. It caused some problems internally where everybody had a freakout, this wasn’t really part of the plan, this was a little ancillary thing. So what are we doing about it? Everything has worked out fine, I’m very pleased to say.”
Before E3, Carmack expected Luckey would make around 100 Rift kits essentially for his friends. “At this point now he’s making it for several thousand other people. The price point he came out with was around half of what we thought it was going to be.” Despite the excitement, both Luckey and Carmack are eager to stress that the Rift in its current state is not a mass market device. “There is exactly one game it has support for, you’re not buying this to play games. This is for developers to start building support for the other games that we’ll eventually make a consumer device for. You can’t play movies in it, there are no other applications. All that will come, but it’s not here right now.”
While Carmack has been working on modifying Doom 3 to work in virtual reality, he also gave some hints about what a game designed entirely for a head mounted display might be like. “FPSes are the obvious thing you could do. But there’s a lot of benefit from very subtle motions, from just walking down a corridor, all the little subtle motions that your head’s making, and just being able to look over at a handlebar on the side or something. There’s more value in that than I expected, even in third-person games or god games.”
Carmack seemed equally interested in the implications of headsets for far more sophisticated interfaces than those available now. He said a pair of cameras attached to the outside of the headset would be ideal, in part for safety reasons so you’re not completely oblivious to the outside world while wearing the device, but also to track the position of body parts. “It would be able to identify your individual digits as you lift up your hand, work out the user interface that you want to do. Kinect user interfaces suck because you position your hand at three o’clock and wait two seconds, and [there are] all sorts of reasons why stuff like that is a bad idea. But when you get down to the point of being able to track digits in front of it, there’s a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do user interfaces. You’ve got your obvious gestures and swipes and pinches, I’m excited to see what people wind up doing.”
Though it’d be years away, having an entirely self-contained product distribution system through the head mounted display is something Carmack sees as promising. “You could buy your stuff there, and it’d just be the equivalent of a tablet that happens to have optics where you could put your head in it.”
Clearly Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are seemingly obsessed with alternate control methods between Move, Kinect the Wii-mote and the upcoming Wii U platform, but will the headsets like the Rift eventually eclipse all those efforts? “Yes, I think immersive virtual reality is a far more powerful I/O device than all the little things you do with your hands in front of a TV screen.”
So when might we start to get a clearer picture of what the actual results might be? “This is not the promised land, but you can see the promised land from here. We need to figure out what steps we need to do to get there. I think that can happen largely over the next year.”
Charles Onyett is an Executive Editor at IGN, leads PC game coverage and used to think Pugna was his favorite Dota 2 hero, but recently decided it was Disruptor. You can follow him on Twitter and My IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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