It looks like there might be a bright future in store for those faithful to the the church of Virtual Reality, but it’s been a rough road to get here. While Oculus and Samsung may be promising the future, some hobbyists are not willing to wait. Back in the 90’s In the beginning, things were clunky We were promised the future. It was a vibrant high-tech promise of 3d rendered virtual worlds stretching as far as the imagination. While we were still skulking around the dingy digital back rooms of BBS systems on 486s, we were also watching shows like Beyond Tomorrow and movies like Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic that showed us this virtual future. In those days virtual reality only existed in the lab. Scientists and engineers created a number of prototypes that looked extremely promising. Head mounted displays and data gloves allowed users to interact with computers and virtual environments in ways never before imagined, and the articles and TV segments that covered it made it look incredibly slick and effective. What they didn’t show however where the rough edges of a technology that was in it’s infancy. While movies and TV showed us futuristic hackers sliding on a pair of VR goggles or even eye glasses to see into the neon frontier, the actual hardware being developed in the labs was far more bulky and heavy. Early head mounted displays still used cathode tubes to display images, the emitters were heavy and resolution was extremely limited. The tubes could be hung in front of the users face, but it made the helmet extremely front-heavy and required a counterweight in the back. Alternately they could be placed on the sides or on top of the users head and redirected to the eyes through a series of reflectors. Either way, it was heavy, huge, and required a lot of cabling. So the display wasn’t ready for prime time, but neither was the hardware to run it. The machines most labs were using were a bit ahead of our average desktops at the time, but even with the added power virtual worlds were slow, ugly, and unresponsive. We were told however that all of this was momentary, that science would clean these rough edges off any day now and have these virtual worlds ready in time for Christmas. Attempts were made to scale it down to a consumer level, but they were either too expensive or too clunky for real use, usually both. At the high end of the spectrum there were VR pods using early LCD displays and run on Amiga 1000s. At the low end we had the Nintendo Virtual Boy, a table mounted unit with red monochromatic low res displays that filled us with headaches and nausea. The tech wasn’t ready to fulfill the virtual promises of the future, and consumers lost any interest. Flash forward to the 21st century After years of only existing as over priced fad gadgets that didn’t work well and were poorly supported, a new hope appeared on the horizon. The Oculus Rift exploded on the scene and made the promise of virtual reality seem real again. Modern light displays, high resolution head tracking, and fast computers add up to virtual reality that finally seems to deliver an immersive experience that captures our imaginations and takes us to far off worlds. At the moment it’s not yet available as a commercial product, but enough people have been using developer kit versions of the Rift to capture the interest of the tech industry. Once Facebook decided to buy Oculus for a giant pile of cash it seemed certain that business was behind this movement as well as hobbyists. Some people though are not willing to wait for that future, a future that can be pretty expensive. As well as Oculus, Samsung Sony and other companies are promising us consumer VR products, but they tend to be a bit pricey. Oculus is expected to cost around $500, Samsungs Gear VR costs $200 and requires a Galaxy Note 4, Sony’s current VR headset will run you a cool $1000. However if you have a good smart phone you can try VR for yourself on the cheap. Homemade VR devices in use VR on the Cheap It started with the company Durovis offering a headset called the Dive. It was a cheap plastic set of goggles and lenses that you could clip your phone right into. A good modern smart phone already has a pretty tight display, hell the Oculus DK2 prototype used the screen from a Galaxy Note 3. It’s also got built in accelerometers and enough processing power to do some pretty impressive 3d for such a small size. So there’s ¾ of your VR goggles. Just clip them into a set of goggles and you are off to the races. As far as goggles go, Durovis was only the start. Google decided to dip their toe in the VR waters and released a DIY kit called Google Cardboard. This let users make their own goggles from a sheet of cardboard, a few magnets and a couple lenses. It turns out that it’s really not hard to make your own VR goggles these days. Guys started taping together foamboard, cardboard and even repurposed ski goggles and welding goggles. China, never one to be left out of a good thing, has even started making a number if cheap Durovis style knock offs with universal mounts for any phone. Once you’ve got your cheap goggles there’s a lot of software available for them. Between Google and Durovis there was already a number of offerings in the Google Play store, but now hobbyists and independent developers have started creating a flood of VR games and demos for the hungry goggled masses. Most of the software is pretty low quality, but there are definitely some diamonds in the rough. Phone based VR has some limitations though. One of them are those cheap accelerometers in most phones. Using accelerometers for head tracking is pretty effective, but it’s just not as precise as we’d like. This can lead to a POV that drifts with use and the occasional nausea producing latency. Oculus gets around this by using a camera to track IR LEDS built into the frame of the headset, it produces extremely fast and accurate head tracking, and even allows software to track leaning and head shifting. Another big limitation for phone based VR is processing power. While a good modern phone can create some pretty VR landscapes, especially if the designer is pretty savvy about hiding their edges and optimizing textures, the phones still can’t compete with a PC in terms of overall horsepower. Phone games need to be somewhat limited in scope, while PC games can be as vast and detailed as a developer is willing or able to imagine. Even with these limitations, cheap hobbyist VR goggles still have a lot of potential. Given the number of independent developers who specialize in minimalist creatively imagined games these days there is a lot of room for talent. We are still in the wild west phase of VR development, with companies coming and going and coders just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, so there’s no telling where all this is going. One thing is for sure though, if you’ve always wanted to try out virtual reality there’s nothing stopping you now. 2 Responses Active Wirehead January 5, 2015 Hey D10D3 I had one reply from Reddit on your post (A guy named Cr0sh) http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2r9pmj/activewirehead_an_excellent_article_from_our/ “Whoever the author of this article is, he obviously was not involved in early VR experimentation. One glaring example – he writes: At the high end of the spectrum there were VR pods using early LCD displays and run on Amiga 1000s. The original Virtuality pods did not use LCD displays, nor an Amiga 1000; rather, they used a customized Amiga 3000, with a CD-ROM drive – which wasn’t a standard peripheral at the time, as well as a custom graphics card using what was – at the time – fairly state of the art 3D graphics hardware. The HMDs used narrow and small color CRT displays – not LCDs. The later Virtuality pods used customized 486 hardware, combined again with the high-end 3D graphics hardware – and higher-resolution (640 x 480 per eye) displays in the HMD. Honestly, though – the Virtuality systems, while great entertainment machines for the time, weren’t anywhere close to “high end” when it came to VR. That was all in the labs and research institutions. You could – for the right amount of money – easily get HMD hardware that, while it might not rival the weight – certainly rivaled and surpassed the Oculus hardware, as far as a display was concerned. Indeed – the LEEP optics system is something that the Rift system only approximates, because those optics were custom fabricated and ground from a single piece of glass, and didn’t consist of multiple stacked lenses. It had the same effect (un-warping an image pre-warped by hardware or software for a larger FOV), but ultimately resulted in a greater quality display. However, that quality came at a very hefty price – a set of lenses alone clocked in somewhere around $25k – and they weren’t exactly lightweight, either. On the homebrew end, though, I will say things were pretty lacking. For consumer level hardware, the best one could buy was a toss-up between the Forte VFX-1 and the VictorMaxx CyberMaxx (not the Stuntmaster – that was a toy, but a fun one to experiment with!). The CyberMaxx had a fairly large field of view compared to the VFX-1 (and was one of the largest at the time), but the VFX-1 had a rockin’ flip-up visor (great for VR world building and testing), awesome over-the-ear KOSS headphones, and great balance with little-to-none nose-weight. Most homebrew HMDs concentrated on using small LCDs from handheld televisions; it wasn’t the greatest display, but it was fairly expensive. With the right lenses, you could build a fairly nice HMD – easily equivalent to the consumer options (if not packaged as well). Tracking was done (usually) via mechanical means (attached potentiometer gimbal systems), electronic means (electronic compass and electrolytic tilt sensors), and sometimes via modding PowerGlove hardware (put the emitters on your head, arrange the L-bar overhead, and voila – an ultrasonic 6DOF head tracker is born). Control was typically done with a mouse (I particularly liked this “ring mouse” trackball thing that you could grip like a gun, move the ball with your thumb, and click left/right buttons with your first two fingers), a joy-pad of some sort, or sometimes (if you had the money) one of the few 6DOF 3D controllers that existed back then (the “holy grail” was the 3Dconnexion SpaceBall controller – not cheap by any means). Logitech and others also made lower-cost 3D controllers. Software on the homebrew end was generally home-grown, or more generally was based around Rend386, VR386, or the later Avril software. All of them had support for a wide range of input and output hardware, and worked on 386 or better machines. Finally – one of the ways people shared info (besides usenet of course) was via the wonderful, if short-lived publication “PCVR” – I keep saying I’m going to scan my copies, but maybe somebody’s already done it and put it up on archive.org? Dunno. Researchers, though – had some really great hardware and software; besides the HMDs, they had access to wonders like the VPL DataGlove, trackers from Polhemus and Ascension, and machines from Silicon Graphics (SGI) – hardware that, back in the early-mid 1990s, basically could give you the speed (if not the quality) of hardware that wouldn’t appear for the consumer for 10 years (heck, Carmack had to develop Quake on such hardware in advance of the PC – figuring rightly that by the time the game was completed, the PC hardware would have caught up). SGI eventually folded, and the some of the engineers went on to form a new company that we know today as NVidia. I think it’s funny – as someone who played around on the low-end homebrew side of VR back in the 1990s, and watched the internet take over everyone’s attention, and VR to fade into the background noise – that so much of what was known by the DIY crowd of the time has been virtually lost. At the same time, that might be a good thing, because it has allowed a new crowd to flourish forth without many pre-conceived notions of the past to hold them back. In that way, these guys have been able to explore new ways of doing things and coming up with unique solutions to some problems that either weren’t possible back then, or were too expensive to even contemplate from a hobbyist perspective.” etonbongwoop January 5, 2015 Thank you!
Active Wirehead January 5, 2015 Hey D10D3 I had one reply from Reddit on your post (A guy named Cr0sh) http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2r9pmj/activewirehead_an_excellent_article_from_our/ “Whoever the author of this article is, he obviously was not involved in early VR experimentation. One glaring example – he writes: At the high end of the spectrum there were VR pods using early LCD displays and run on Amiga 1000s. The original Virtuality pods did not use LCD displays, nor an Amiga 1000; rather, they used a customized Amiga 3000, with a CD-ROM drive – which wasn’t a standard peripheral at the time, as well as a custom graphics card using what was – at the time – fairly state of the art 3D graphics hardware. The HMDs used narrow and small color CRT displays – not LCDs. The later Virtuality pods used customized 486 hardware, combined again with the high-end 3D graphics hardware – and higher-resolution (640 x 480 per eye) displays in the HMD. Honestly, though – the Virtuality systems, while great entertainment machines for the time, weren’t anywhere close to “high end” when it came to VR. That was all in the labs and research institutions. You could – for the right amount of money – easily get HMD hardware that, while it might not rival the weight – certainly rivaled and surpassed the Oculus hardware, as far as a display was concerned. Indeed – the LEEP optics system is something that the Rift system only approximates, because those optics were custom fabricated and ground from a single piece of glass, and didn’t consist of multiple stacked lenses. It had the same effect (un-warping an image pre-warped by hardware or software for a larger FOV), but ultimately resulted in a greater quality display. However, that quality came at a very hefty price – a set of lenses alone clocked in somewhere around $25k – and they weren’t exactly lightweight, either. On the homebrew end, though, I will say things were pretty lacking. For consumer level hardware, the best one could buy was a toss-up between the Forte VFX-1 and the VictorMaxx CyberMaxx (not the Stuntmaster – that was a toy, but a fun one to experiment with!). The CyberMaxx had a fairly large field of view compared to the VFX-1 (and was one of the largest at the time), but the VFX-1 had a rockin’ flip-up visor (great for VR world building and testing), awesome over-the-ear KOSS headphones, and great balance with little-to-none nose-weight. Most homebrew HMDs concentrated on using small LCDs from handheld televisions; it wasn’t the greatest display, but it was fairly expensive. With the right lenses, you could build a fairly nice HMD – easily equivalent to the consumer options (if not packaged as well). Tracking was done (usually) via mechanical means (attached potentiometer gimbal systems), electronic means (electronic compass and electrolytic tilt sensors), and sometimes via modding PowerGlove hardware (put the emitters on your head, arrange the L-bar overhead, and voila – an ultrasonic 6DOF head tracker is born). Control was typically done with a mouse (I particularly liked this “ring mouse” trackball thing that you could grip like a gun, move the ball with your thumb, and click left/right buttons with your first two fingers), a joy-pad of some sort, or sometimes (if you had the money) one of the few 6DOF 3D controllers that existed back then (the “holy grail” was the 3Dconnexion SpaceBall controller – not cheap by any means). Logitech and others also made lower-cost 3D controllers. Software on the homebrew end was generally home-grown, or more generally was based around Rend386, VR386, or the later Avril software. All of them had support for a wide range of input and output hardware, and worked on 386 or better machines. Finally – one of the ways people shared info (besides usenet of course) was via the wonderful, if short-lived publication “PCVR” – I keep saying I’m going to scan my copies, but maybe somebody’s already done it and put it up on archive.org? Dunno. Researchers, though – had some really great hardware and software; besides the HMDs, they had access to wonders like the VPL DataGlove, trackers from Polhemus and Ascension, and machines from Silicon Graphics (SGI) – hardware that, back in the early-mid 1990s, basically could give you the speed (if not the quality) of hardware that wouldn’t appear for the consumer for 10 years (heck, Carmack had to develop Quake on such hardware in advance of the PC – figuring rightly that by the time the game was completed, the PC hardware would have caught up). SGI eventually folded, and the some of the engineers went on to form a new company that we know today as NVidia. I think it’s funny – as someone who played around on the low-end homebrew side of VR back in the 1990s, and watched the internet take over everyone’s attention, and VR to fade into the background noise – that so much of what was known by the DIY crowd of the time has been virtually lost. At the same time, that might be a good thing, because it has allowed a new crowd to flourish forth without many pre-conceived notions of the past to hold them back. In that way, these guys have been able to explore new ways of doing things and coming up with unique solutions to some problems that either weren’t possible back then, or were too expensive to even contemplate from a hobbyist perspective.”
