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John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

244 pointsby otibomalmost 13 years ago

20 comments

drzaiusapelordalmost 13 years ago
There's something very pleasing to know that guys like Carmack aren't just punching out tomorrow's FPS engines, but doing out of the box stuff like this. I wonder if we're entering some kind of tech golden age. The post-PC stuff, SpaceX/Tesla, Kindle/Nook, Win8, Smartphones, etc things have gotten weird quickly.<p>I'm still waiting to wake up one day and see a $999 home robot that can do everything from clean the bathroom to walk the dog. If this happened tomorrow I wouldn't be that surprised.
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dmarcosalmost 13 years ago
This is the forum thread where Carmack and others have been discussing the project for a couple of months. Interesting read:<p><a href="http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&#38;t=14777&#38;sid=a8d3e6cc4e8d94c6d6d0d0e907cdbeb9&#38;start=195" rel="nofollow">http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&#38;t=14777&...</a>
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nrpalmost 13 years ago
No, John Carmack is developing software for the Oculus RIFT being developed by Palmer Luckey. <a href="http://oculusvr.com/?page_id=2" rel="nofollow">http://oculusvr.com/?page_id=2</a><p>It is a pretty amazing piece of hardware though. Over 90 degree field of view for $500, rather than the $10000+ it still costs from anywhere else.
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Arjunaalmost 13 years ago
Nice interview with John demoing and discussing his work:<p><i>"So the way this has gone, is, I decided to treat myself after Rage on there, I bought a, you know, a head mount for $1,500 or so. It's a little cottage industry, there's a few places that do these things with integration, and... it sucked. It was really bad. It was everything that I expected it to be, that it, it didn't look like there had been any progress in 20 years, since... or 15 years since I had looked at these things last.<p>But, when I got that, then, I started taking it apart, both literally and figuratively, to go ahead and see what are all of the aspects on here, on the sensing side, where, when I wrote my own test software for this, using their library to go ahead and get the head-tracking, it had 100ms of latency, and this just didn't make any sense to me. Why is it so bad, did they need to have so much filtering?<p>And, I wound up, I took the software that I wrote for Armadillo Aerospace for our rocket control with fiber-optic gyros, I took that gyro integration software and took raw values from the micro-machine sensors on there, and all the sudden it got way better. You know I can only guess that they may have filtering from 10 years ago when they had really noisy sensors, and they're a lot better now."</i><p>[...]<p><i>Resolution is gonna get better. We're gonna get to 120Hz displays, I'm haranguing all the display vendors about this. [...] Removing the latency, one of the cases that I've been making that shows the ridiculousness of it all, where, I can measure 50ms of delay on this, and I do that by, I have a program that switches colors when I hit a button, and you put a high-speed camera here, you mash it, and you wait, you count frames until it switches, and it's 50ms for that over a very fast display. That's more time than it takes to send a packet from America to England, you know. That's just ridiculous! But it's because router people and switch people care about latency, they know it's important so they don't pile it up. Display people don't know yet, but I'm trying to educate all of them about that."</i><p>[...]<p><i>"And this field of view (90 degree horizontal field of view, 110 degree vertical field of view), you couldn't get in a $10,000 head-mount display; actually, you still can't today, it's that much higher."</i><p>[...]<p><i>"The head mount display stuff is, it makes even this 8 year old game a fundamentally different experience. It really is like nothing you've ever played liked that... 10 times more graphics power doesn't give you that level of intensity."</i><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg</a>
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scott_salmost 13 years ago
Oh! That explains why he lamented that a transatlantic ping is faster than pushing a pixel to screen: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3914638" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3914638</a>
bryanlarsenalmost 13 years ago
Here's another interview by kotaku with more detail on the hacking process Carmack went through:<p><a href="http://kotaku.com/5916210/carmack-being-carmack-a-dozen-minutes-with-one-of-video-games-smartest-people" rel="nofollow">http://kotaku.com/5916210/carmack-being-carmack-a-dozen-minu...</a>
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StavrosKalmost 13 years ago
Wow, Carmack looks like a passionate, geeky 16 year old. It's very endearing for such a legend.
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TazeTSchnitzelalmost 13 years ago
I don't think it's the author's job to tell the reader he can't understand what Carmack's saying.
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keeranalmost 13 years ago
The hardware kit hes talking about - Oculus RIFT. Kickstarter coming this month!<p><a href="http://oculusvr.com/?page_id=2" rel="nofollow">http://oculusvr.com/?page_id=2</a>
tchock23almost 13 years ago
Here's to hoping someone with a name in the industry can finally push through decent consumer VR, and that this will get some attention at E3...<p>I bought the Sony HMZ-T1 earlier this month hoping that it would be what I was always looking for in terms of home VR (despite the lack of headtracking, which I was going to add with trackIR). However, it was horribly uncomfortable to wear and just didn't give the immersive feel I was looking for.<p>In looking at the Oculus site it mentions that there is a Kickstarter campaign, but then when I click through to a forum post on it the date he mentioned that was back in 2009. I'd be first to contribute to a decent HMD Kickstarter campaign...
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hwillisalmost 13 years ago
VALVe is also working on something similar: <a href="http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...</a>
bltalmost 13 years ago
Can someone filter out the low-frequency noise in these videos?
JabavuAdamsalmost 13 years ago
So, imagine you've got acceptable VR HMDs? What software would you write for them? Why not start today?<p>I want an IDE that's like the Bubbles from _Signal to Noise_<p>I want seamless telepresence for driving mechs<p>I'm learning faster now because I can have multiple physics and math books along with note-taking software on my iPad. What do good HMDs do for education?<p>...
exDM69almost 13 years ago
Oh man, the memories. I remember playing the original Doom game with a virtual reality helmet at a gaming convention back in 1994 or so when I was a little kid. It was a tiny convention at a small Finnish town, but I remember seeing same kind of helmets in photographs from CeBITs and E3's in computer magazines.<p>Does anyone remember a consumer VR helmet circa 1993? It had a helmet with displays of roughly "mode 13h" resolution and a hand held hockey puck with a few buttons? The helmet and the puck had accelerometers and/or inclinometers and/or gyroscopes or something to detect movement.<p>Head turning affected in-game camera turn and tilting the puck was movement. Puck buttons were fire, change weapon, etc. Proper FPS aiming would have been difficult but Doom's projectile collision detection is 2d anyway :)
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nlalmost 13 years ago
So now Carmack is working on headsets, and Valve is working on wearable computing[1].<p>That's some pretty interesting support.<p>[1] <a href="http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...</a>
meyalmost 13 years ago
If you follow Carmack's twitter feed, you'll see him mentioning his frustration over the last year at some of the display tech under the hood as he was exploring the space.<p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack</a>
marknutteralmost 13 years ago
Virtual Reality is really the only thing I've been looking forward to in gaming. Once this becomes a reality, I will be genuinely excited about it again.
gavanwooleryalmost 13 years ago
For those of you who follow his Twitter account, this is nothing new, but still cool that its getting some official coverage. :)
jpeg_heroalmost 13 years ago
why does this flash player peg my cpu at 100% ??
cheatercheateralmost 13 years ago
Like the VFX1 I have?<p>I have been wondering for quite some time how much better the thing would be if I just swapped out the puny 640xwhatever lcd for something that's 1080p, or better yet had 1080p per eye. I think the focusing adjustments seem to be the coolest part of carmack's stuff that older projects didn't have. I just hope someone quickly comes up with a gyro based control scheme, and a new Descent.