Why we're all-in on virtual reality

Re:Why we're all-in on virtual reality by coldpie on Thursday July 23, 2015 @03:34PM (#9937951)

I am really curious about video content in VR. How does it work? Obviously a 360 degree camera lets you look around the scene arbitrarily, but you're still locked to whatever position the camera was at. Moving within the scene requires 3D rendering, which isn't nearly on the level of actual film. So, what gives?

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Re:Why we're all-in on virtual reality by lux on Thursday July 23, 2015 @03:50PM (#9938052)

That's correct. You're stuck as a fixed point, although you can still get a stereoscopic perspective.

Companies like Lytro have started working on solutions to let you move your head around a little bit, but that's about the extend of video for the foreseeable future.

Still, you don't always want to be moving around in a scene. People sit and watch movies all the time, so there's going to be a place for it.

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Re:Why we're all-in on virtual reality by aetherson on Thursday July 23, 2015 @03:55PM (#9938084)

My understanding was that VR was intensely nauseating if you can't at least move your head and have the motion translated (at very low latency!). Is that not the case?

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Re:Why we're all-in on virtual reality by lux on Thursday July 23, 2015 @04:07PM (#9938165)

If you try to move around a lot in a non-positional tracking system like the Gear VR or in a 360 video, you might feel nauseous. But if you're sitting down and just looking around, generally developers are getting better at not making people sick in VR.

The other half of that is when your motion isn't translated 1:1 to your perspective in the game (e.g., exaggerated movements in a first-person shooter), that's when you can really feel simulation sickness.

Valve's "room-scale tracking" actually solves a lot of that by keeping your perspective in sync with your real self. I'd say it's the best VR solution I've tried yet.

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Re:Why we're all-in on virtual reality by tonydiv on Friday July 24, 2015 @02:52PM (#9944314)

Nausea is mostly a solved problem at this point. Oculus and Vive have both done extensive testing on nausea and few report it on the new consumer versions.

The reason Oculus took so long to announce a consumer version was largely tied to the fact they hadn't solved the nausea problem. Now they have.

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Re:Why we're all-in on virtual reality by aetherson on Friday July 24, 2015 @02:56PM (#9944344)

Well... But isn't the way that they solved the nausea problem that they managed to get very, very, very low latency between your head movements and those movements being translated to the image you see?

All the hardware improvements there presumably don't help if there isn't a different image to view when you move your head.

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