Oculus Rift...

[Raiden]

WARNING: Video is more or less NSFW, because there are mostly-naked human 3D models in it.

This video clearly shows the ability of the Oculus Rift to create realistic models of bipedal organisms.

I think that this could produce some interesting results when coupled with material from the Avatar universe, because of how easy it would be to combine it with motion capture technology.

What do the rest of you think?

[Clarke]

Raytracing is hard and expensive, so you can't exactly record Avatar live. However, this is pretty much identical to the "virtual camera" Jim has in the original recording, apart from the fact that its mounted in front of your eyes rather than on a screen.

[Crickett]

Im very much looking foward to the Oculus rift hoping I could watch 3d hd movies.

Weeeeelllllllll.......,

brb, I'm off to go save $300 (allegedly what they're hoping it'll cost).

[Human No More]

Impressive, I haven't been following this too closely but it's an excellent demo, I thought it would be a lot more simplistic than that.

[Raiden]

Yeah, I was about ready to blow it off as another frivolous attempt at "real" VR.

But that video shows that we're actually "getting somewhere" with it. The only question I would have would have to do with controlling the perspective. Is that guy looking around and moving with a controller/gamepad, or a keyboard?

I wouldn't consider it to be true VR until it can be controlled with some kind of neurological interface instead of a physical human/machine interface.

[allroock123]

BMI (Brian machine interface) is posable, systems like the "Emotiv headset" can do this allready "But" it takes a lot of focus to try drive actions with thought in real time
distractions can make this "focus" very hard achive, the emotive can also read face motion like lifting ones eyebrows , this can be driven to an action as well,
any headset capable of stereoscopic viewing can show 3D films add headtracking and 3D graphics hardware and one can imersive ones self quite deeply "But" if there is any motion lag or fast panning of deep 3D images there is a real issue of motion sickness as ones
inner ear and visual experence don"t add up it was a real issue with past VR headset
systems , so I know they are working on resolving the issue.

[Moco Loco]

Hopefully there won't be huge uncanny valley issues or dizziness.

[Raiden]

I think the mythically disturbing "uncanny valley" is increasingly becoming a thing of the past, but motion sickness problems could happen.

I remember when I was about eight and my parents got me super mario kart for my birthday. My dad tried to play it with me and he could barely even look at the television without becoming nauseated.

[Human No More]

I don't think uncanny valley ever actually existed.

It's much like how some people still believe that humans can't see differences over a certain framerate (generally 30 or 60) when every test has proved they can*. In the past, there was a long running joke, with perhaps some truth behind it, that those people happened to almost perfectly coincide with people with less powerful gaming systems - although perhaps that myth is finally starting to die out as even filmmakers look into better frame rates.

*Most monitors/TVs only refresh at 50/60Hz due to limitations from the AC power supply, effectively capping framerate they output, which is a built in limitation, but that's different to actual perception of higher rates certainly being possible.

Uncanny valley is just the same - if what you produce is less realistic, of course you're going to want to claim it's actually 'better' somehow unless you're going for a stylised (e.g. spirites, isometric, cel shading or pixel art) look

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Human No More

I don't think uncanny valley ever actually existed.

It's much like how some people still believe that humans can't see differences over a certain framerate (generally 30 or 60) when every test has proved they can*. In the past, there was a long running joke, with perhaps some truth behind it, that those people happened to almost perfectly coincide with people with less powerful gaming systems - although perhaps that myth is finally starting to die out as even filmmakers look into better frame rates.

*Most monitors/TVs only refresh at 50/60Hz due to limitations from the AC power supply, effectively capping framerate they output, which is a built in limitation, but that's different to actual perception of higher rates certainly being possible.

Uncanny valley is just the same - if what you produce is less realistic, of course you're going to want to claim it's actually 'better' somehow unless you're going for a stylised (e.g. spirites, isometric, cel shading or pixel art) look

Better than what? The whole point of the uncanny valley is that it's not good enough to pass as a human, but still close enough to trigger all the human-recognizing machinery in the brain, to disconcerting effect.

[allroock123]

In looking at what is being done to address the "Uncanny valley" issue its amasing just
how much effort it realy takes to create a digital charter that will pass the scrutiny of
face to face emotive comunication we can see right through most life like digital charters
because of how there skin interacts with light.
there are some great examples here that explain this technoligy
Nvidia Face Works Tech Demo; Renders Realistic Human Faces - YouTube

[Sight Unseen]

Personally, I believe that we're almost to the point technologically that the uncanny valley will cease to be an issue. (at least for rendered graphics. Robots? Not so much. )

Originally Posted by Human No More

*Most monitors/TVs only refresh at 50/60Hz due to limitations from the AC power supply, effectively capping framerate they output, which is a built in limitation, but that's different to actual perception of higher rates certainly being possible.

This is not true, sorry. In an LCD monitor, the clocking for the interfaces as well as the panel refresh is done with a quartz crystal oscillator and a PLL to divide or multiply the resonance frequency of the crystal by integer values. The incoming AC is turned into DC in the power supply before reaching the signal electronics. In addition, even if there was a 60/50Hz recovered clock coming from the power supply, the frequency wouldn't be near stable enough to PLL up to the hundreds-of-MHz clocks needed for LVDS and TDMS buses. A .01Hz difference over a scaling factor like that would be a huge drift.

The actual limitation of the refresh rate is due to a large number of factors. Display interfaces are pushing the limit of what's possible with cheap cabling and epoxy PCBs, The LCD cells in the panels themselves cannot respond fast enough for rates above about 120Hz, and even then the ghosting is unacceptable. (This is why I wish plasma screens were the dominant display technology instead of LCDs)

That said, the vertical scan rate of the television was actually based on line frequency in the early 1930s on some experimental broadcast systems. Mechanical television - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia