BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: GUEST,John O'Lennaine
Date: 20 Jan 05 - 07:51 PM

Virtual reality replaced actual reality years ago.
The fact that you ask "What happened to VR" is testament to the seamless efficiency with which the eratic and unpredictable world we knew was replaced by this prefabricated world in which all is understood.
Shows like The Matrix and Ace Lightning keep us believing that the outside is still outside and the inside still safely inside.
"Now there's a world of illusion and fantasy in the place where the real world belongs" - Jackson Browne saw it coming years before it happened.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Cluin
Date: 20 Jan 05 - 04:42 PM

I remember Telstar Pong. We had one. It left a ghost image on our old TV.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Bert
Date: 20 Jan 05 - 02:25 PM

Ah well!!! remember those Moonlander programs from early PCs and programmable calculators?

I feel OLD.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Greg F.
Date: 20 Jan 05 - 10:38 AM

Virtual Reality is alive and well! Take a look at the "Red States" in the U.S. Or at the clusterfu$k in Iraq.

Republicans perfected seamless virtual reality some time ago.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 20 Jan 05 - 08:22 AM

Virtual reality is very much alive and growing. It just doesn't always require the headset now. The principles have been incorporated into great bunches of similators, mostly for training purposes; and they can be "very real" or just "very virtual" depending on how well everything gets put together.

One very obvious use, aside from the games, is in pilot training. Most of the airplane makers of any significance have training simulators that are very realistic for any of their current models. Many airlines have their own, separately designed and built, to teach slightly differently. Some of these simulators require a full crew: pilot, copilot, navigator, gunner, loadmaster, etc., and coordinated simulation for each crewmember is part of the deal.

You don't see the headsets because wearing a headset is, itself, different than "real world" for most. Flat screen and back projection screens (and large rooms for the simulators) present a "more real world" experience. Many of the larger simulators include "motion" (actually acceleration) simulation.

The exception for the VR headset is for a few combat pilots/gunners/navigators/tankers who actually wear a "VR headset" (often with IR and/or false color) in combat, and "in the real world" only see the VR images of what they're shooting at (or running from). It has been suggested that commercial airline pilots might "fly safer" if they didn't see the "real world" but instead used the headset and flew in a "simulated world" that only showed them "what's important about the real world." "Virtual Image" projection is now in use in many commercial aircraft to project portions of the "VR Image" in front of pilots so they can see both.

I think I'll stop there. It's too real. It's making me tense.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: hilda fish
Date: 20 Jan 05 - 07:11 AM

I shouldn't remember this but I do - remember in the '70's? or was it the '60's? - oh sometime a long time ago - anyway one paid someone $10, a lotta money, and popped this bit of blotting paper or pill, or some such, and then bammo the brain exploded; things were so realistic the bad guys would make you pee in your pants or you interacted with a travelogue program in your brain, so intimately that not only would you think you had actually been to Fiji, you'd think you had flown the 747 that took you there to slightly more than paraphrase Bee-dubya-ell.
Now we have to pay huge bucks and really, it's the same thing but we're expected to function in 'real time' as well. What happened? With the ten buck one I was told it was no good - drug stuff and facing reality and all that. Now I got my computer and my DVD's and my CD'S (all interactive if I want) and I'm told that this is reality.   Wha tha?????????????

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Grab
Date: 19 Jan 05 - 11:17 AM

Dave, you want to check out the Doom File Manager. So far I believe it only has a "delete" function (using the shotgun)... :-)

Graham.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 19 Jan 05 - 04:54 AM

It was Really just Virtuality...

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 19 Jan 05 - 04:47 AM

It does sort of 'trickle down' to us. The 3D effects, like shadowing and parralax correction, we see on our 2D screens were once designated as 'VR'. As Donuel says look at the film industry as well - Do you think Shrek is real? ;-)

Out of interest is there anyone out there (apart form me!) who thinks that virtual system or network admin would be good? I read 'Headcrash' by Bruce Bethke many years ago. By night the hero cruised the 'superhighway' on his virtual Harley but his day job, as an administrator, involved him tidying up stacks of files with his headset and gloves!

I think it would be good if network admin, for instance, could involve wandering round the virtual campus looking for leaks of bits coming out of virtul pipeline and applying puncture repair patches:-) Or is that just sad..?

Cheers

DtG

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Bert
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 03:30 PM

What do you think THIS IS? You need to take the RED pill next time.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 02:47 PM

Industrial Light and Magic graphic departments create virtual reality for virtually every film you see today. VR is steadily evolving. Interactive VR is nearly at the Vanilla Sky level already.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 01:56 PM

Hah! I knew somebody around here would have an answer that made sense. Thanks, Graham.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Grab
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 12:07 PM

It never really worked the way it was intended, because they forgot about how sophisticated people are.

The point of VR is total immersion. But if you play any first-person shooter with any regularity, you get total immersion anyway, just using a monitor. At the time VR was at its height, I was plugged into Doom regularly. And Doom was practically a real place - realistic physics (explosions and stuff), intelligent monsters, all the rest. I couldn't count the number of times I flinched in my chair when something roared. And these days, Everquest is known as "Evercrack" because of its immersive/addictive qualities.

Then you look at the VR headset thing. First of all, it relies on you having 20/20 vision in both eyes - my experience is that if you're short-sighted then you don't get the 3D effect. So the only immersive element is to be able to look around and see stuff to shoot. But the games never came anywhere near to the realistic-ness of Doom - the physics was crap, the monsters were dumb and the graphics were hopeless. So you never got any illusion that this was a real place, total immersion just fell down, and the whole thing never got started.

You can still get VR-type headsets, but no-one uses them for gaming. Why? Because outside of their stand area they can't register movement (so turning your head does nothing), the 3-D effect isn't that effective, and most importantly they can't be produced with anything like the resolution that a monitor can. So gamers still use monitors. As arcade games go, the VR headset game was only a novelty item, like the R360 Afterburner setup, or maybe more like those shooting games that were popular in the 90s that had a plastic revolver and a screen showing video of real people shooting at you that you had to plug.

So really VR-type headsets are only useful for "head-up displays" for people who need to be able to see reference material while they're working. They're used a bit in industry for that, especially in aerospace where assembly is a complex and manpower-intensive job and getting it wrong isn't an option. There isn't really any other use for them - they're a cool technology lacking in any significant application.

Re the trickle-down effect, who says it hasn't worked? The point of VR was total immersion, and the games today show that the principle was sound, even if you don't need a fancy headset to do it. I've seen games where you really couldn't tell whether it was a game or not - car racing games being a good example, but first-person shooters aren't too far off. And there are a whole bunch of house/garden design programs that let you "walk around" what you've designed, making use of the 3D environment for productive stuff for Joe Average. But the VR headset was a red herring that never went anywhere.

Graham.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: TheBigPinkLad
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:42 AM

I think if you'd fallen asleep 15 years ago and suddenly woken up today you'd feel the impact more acutely. Because it's crept in slowly I think we've become desensitised. And while I agree the fantstic promises of a headset that transports one from reality to virtual reality hasn't materialized ;o), a lot of the technology has been utilized by the entertainment industry in things like movies; have you been to an IMAX production/presentation lately? Wow. They make me puke (in a good way, if that's possible ;o)

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Fibula Mattock
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:31 AM

Well, another problem is that with the advances in technology people expect more and more sophistication from the output...

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:26 AM

Hell, Bruce, I dunno why it hasn't taken off. Sometimes the best technology lies around for years waiting for some half-blind monomaniacal marketer to jam it into the public view.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:22 AM

Sure, there are commercial applications like DtG mentions. But that's the point. The only people using VR technology are city planners, automotive designers, pilots, military personnel etc. The technology hasn't trickled down to you and me.

What's ironic, to me, is that a friend was telling me of having a couple of VR developers demonstrate their system to his high school science classes so many years ago that they ran it on a Commodore computer (remember them?). The hardware has gotten a zillion times better, so it's gotta be easier to do VR technology than it was back then, but it's still only available to a very specialized few.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Fibula Mattock
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:08 AM

The computer graphics community still has people working towards a goal of virtual reality (Problem 1: First define reality). There's a lot of different parts that need to go together to create the whole (software, hardware, psychology, interface, equipment, etc.) and things are still clunky looking and not very exciting at the moment. VR might not eventually look anything like our first anticipations, but it's still around, though often with new goals (augmented or mixed reality instead of the immersive virtual reality, for example). The old VR is dead, long live the new Virtual Environments, which I believe is the new term. And so on.

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:01 AM

Son #2 works exensively with virtual environments. Seems to be being used a lot for 'visualisations' of city developments to help 'sell' the plans. A virtual tour of Liverpool or Chester City centres with some remodeling thrown in is quite an experience! The only place I saw them use head and handsets though was a virtual bar!

Cheers (apt...)

DtG

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jan 05 - 11:43 PM

It is the great paradox -- anything for the common good, but not profitable, should not be done because it is socialism!!:D


A

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Teresa
Date: 17 Jan 05 - 11:19 PM

It's true that a lot of technological advances have come from the military. I have mixed feelings about that.

No technological advance was ever seen on such a scale as the Manhattan Project.

I believe Velcro was developed based on military inspiration.

The structure of this society doesn't encourage R&D for its own sake. Pity.

Teresa

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 17 Jan 05 - 11:11 PM

Oh no !!!

eric

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jan 05 - 11:08 PM

Most of the intensive spending on simulation -- 2D and 3D -- was focused in the military R&D area, and that has been choked off in the interest of killing real people.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Teresa
Date: 17 Jan 05 - 10:51 PM

Hmmm, interesting question. I don't think the term has, but now you have motion rides that feel like they're moving, etc. I'm still waiting for the tactile simulations. :)

Of course, it could be like the term "robot". sure, we have robots now, and smart appliances, but are they anything like the ones envisioned in the '50s?

That's one subject that's always interested me: past visions of "the future". It's kind of interesting. :) I mean, watch the movie _Forbidden Planet_ :)

We still have a way to go yet. I think computers have to become as usable out of the box as stereos have. remember Heath kits? :) We aren't there yet. we have computer techs in the same way there used to be TV techs who came to your house to repair the set.

Teresa

Subject: BS: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 17 Jan 05 - 10:23 PM

Seems like it wasn't that many years ago that Virtual Reality was being touted as "the next big thing". I was assured that it wouldn't be long before I would be able to buy my own VR console and play video games that would be so realistic the bad guys would make me pee in my pants. Or that I would be able to interact with a travelogue program so intimately that not only would I think I had actually been to Fiji, I'd think I had flown the 747 that took me there.

So, it's 2005 and where the hell is my console? Did the developers decide the technology just couldn't be done cheaply enough? Did they decide the things were dangerous? Were they not able to make them user friendly enough to work without trained technicians? Or did John Q. Public just not fall as deeply in love with the idea as had been hoped?

I know there are still some VR type things around, but it's certainly not penetrated the mainstream like its proponents expected. What happened?