Michael Abrash has a wonderful deck he wrote while at Valve about what it will take for VR to create Presense in the viewer. It's worth a read if you care about how we'll navigate past the uncanny valley of VR you describe: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...
https://i.imgur.com/avVTybvh.jpg
The brain is actually fairly easily tricked.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/05/2...
Imagine playing a hack and slash game. A user is not reacting every time their character is hit. They may have an initial reaction to a surprise attack that catches them off guard, but no more. There is some level of immersion but there is no level of presence. They never feel like they might be in danger and their body does not react as if it is in any danger.
Presence would be having a feeling of discomfort anytime your avatar was injured. The brain having tricked itself into thinking it is the avatar. When the avatar gets hit by a weapon, the user's body sweats and tenses up, believing it was just hit by an actual weapon.
Air-pressured tactile gloves can help develop a sense of presence. For example, pressure when grabbing a rock may trick your brain into believing the rock is real.
I wanted to focus more on the studies than the .gif. Having a mannequin stabbed and the participant's body reacting is a sense of presence and not simply a jump scare. The brain couldn't tell its own body from that of a mannequin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cML814JD09g&feature=youtu.be
(The bit with the spider webs especially registered with me as something that might be a trigger for making your brain go wonky.)
The audio cues are there - the visual cues are there. Add in some haptic feedback and maybe even smell (ie. make a room full of dead bodies and blood smell rancid) and you've hit every sense but taste. I can easily imagine it would cause a state of presence if done right.
Obviously their graphics will have to be "good enough" (although sadly it won't reach their CGI'd video editing level anytime soon :( )
What really matters though is persistence of engagement. Outside of those of us who've drank the koolaid or have a vested interest, how often the general public will come back to VR and how long they will stay inside it will be the critical factor for success.
That rate is still well below the threshold needed.
Note: This jpg is actually a gif (?)
Like an 8-bit guillotine vs this one.
I;m not entirely sure if this is adding to or disagreeing with the points you make…
A few weeks ago I commented on some thread about robot maids and such. My point was and is that when we picture a far off idea that we suspect is coming (AI, VR, human-less hotel-resorts) we need mental placeholders where people go now. Technology tends to replace people in the way reddit replaces librarians but we can’t picture reddit in advance until the world wide web or something similar exists. So, flying cars, robot mades and sexy female AIs. They’re placeholders for future automation or changes that make the need go away rather then meeting the need.
Back to Jump. Our starting point is a made up idea of what VR entertainment looks like. Game of Thrones in VR. Jerry Springer in VR. Xuxa in VR.
You make a valid point that this won’t work. I totally agree. But, I’m fairly optimistic about the ingenuity of artists. Lots of things run into these kinds of problems. A conversation between two actors pretending to be doctors is not uncanny, but there are arts to making it palatable. They will figure out POV issues. Should you be a character or an invisible eye like in flat films? Maybe they could use filters to make it look like ‘A Scanner Darkly’ to get over the issue you describe.
This is what art does. They’ll figure it out.
That's an incredibly interesting point. I've never seen 'future' technology like that before, but it's certainly an excellent analogy. Looking back to how people saw the future in the 20th century, you can see that many things did not come to exist in the way they were imagined, but do exist now in some other fashion.
It's incredibly difficult to predict what will be the next reddit, or the next anything. It remains to be seen if/when VR will take off, and how it will differ as we see it right now. Certainly what's interesting is that we're watching our VR dreams being turned into tangible products that can bring real VR experiences.
I do like that way of looking at future technology, but I think we're close enough to VR "happening" that we don't need that sort of thought experiment.
A few months ago I was walking around the Unreal 4 Paris Apartment demo [0] with a Occulus DK2. The resolution isn't quite there, but it definitely felt real. I think that VR can definitely provoke feelings of reality, at least if the people working on it keep going forward in resolution like they have been.
There were similar outcries at the advents of colour movies and "talkies". Once people have watched a few HFR movies, I'm sure they'll get used to it and learn how to suspend their disbelief again.
But, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now - 3D was kinda crappy too at first, but some years later the movie makers have improved the technique to make it far less annoying. It's become more than just a gimmick now.
It is a fascinating talk where he provides a number of interesting demonstrations regarding how the brain interprets information, including depth perception, color interpretation, movement, auditory cues [2] etc. Highly recommended.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDu-cnXI8E8&t=2540
[2] Absolutely fascinating. What you hear depends on what you are looking at, not just on what you are hearing. This demonstration starts at approximately 01:02:00 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDu-cnXI8E8&t=3720
I had fun, but what the article in this thread is talking about is a 'holodeck' feeling. The uncanny valley is where the space between where your brain registers the image as imaginary and is ok with it (3d cartoons) and where it rejects the image as if its offended at being lied to (polar express).
The rift is very much in the former, my brain knew it was a game.
Genuinely though, I found it a far less engaging, far less immersive experience than a normal 2D screen. Maybe the later models are better, I don't know, but I definitely don't see what the fuss was about.
What I'm trying to say with this mp3 analogue is that it is very much a matter of habit and preference. Technically lower quality video does not lead to better immersion if it is not something you have learnt to expect.
I could see a movie with no CG (or careful use of it) being very enjoyable in 48FPS.
I think it has more to do with what we're accustomed to.
High FPS on large panning scenes is amazing, and the conversion back to low fPS is just as noticeable and jarring.
A friend of mine staunchly opposed high FPS until the 60fps NSFW reddit changed his mind.(well, for HD porn anyway).
TL;DR - We are approaching what we might want in a captured live experience, where early 48fps3d movie experiences may have passed what we want in a filmed one.
You should see some Oculus demos in person before making claims that VR is easily rejected by your body. There are some roller coaster demos that can make you nauseous within a minute.
It does not refer, as you suggest, to the general case of VR not seeming real. There is a special thing that happens when we see fake beings trying to pawn themselves off as real. It think it's worth preserving the distinction.
It's like going from 2D/24FPS to 3D/48FPS. You'd think it would be a huge increase in perceived realism but it's quite the opposite. What you want is magic window, which is what you get when a film or even a game really pulls you in and your perception sort of synchronizes with something completely out of step with your physiology and totally unbelievable for many other reasons. Instead, you get a feeling of unreality or surreality, and the final gap between the media and your perception is unbridgeable.
I think that's part of why VR/3D/HFR stuff has always been so unconvincing, and why it's no coincidence that it's finally only catching on when we pair it with totally unrealistic games and demos. You need the fantasy. Because it's so clearly not reality, and anything that attempts to replicate reality too closely will be rejected.
Anyway, cool tech though, and I'm sure I'll enjoy using it some day. But for now I think the foreseeable future of VR is in virtual environments, not in the duplication or capture of real ones.