Fast forward to 2012, almost 20 years after the term "virtual reality" was popularized by Jaron Lanier, and enter the Oculus Rift. Announced at E3 in 2012 it promised a future where VR technology will revolutionize everything from the way we consume movies and video games, to the way we communicate and educate. But what it really promised was cheap hardware and easy development. Up until the Oculus Rift the investment required to enter VR was way too high for the average consumer, making it impractical to design for anyone other than large arcades and amusement parks. Disney for example has had some success with VR.
At the SXSW 2014 Gaming Expo some of the Oculus Rift team sat down for a Q/A session. Including Ryan Brown (Hardware Architect), Nate Mitchell (VP Product), and Palmer Luckey (Founder).
What changes do you see coming in UX because of the rift?
Generally we want the interface to be the same way you’d interact in real life. We try and put things inside the “world”. It’s similar to AI. Tracking perfectly with the real world. You want to make them as close as possible. We like to conserve energy as people, we don’t like to make sweeping movements and big cinematic movements most of the time. Hence why the mouse caught on, it makes it easy, it’s precise and you make very small movements. We tried to do the iron man type interactions, but it’s just too much.
What’s the difference between now and 20 years ago?
Basically cost. It’s possible as a consumer product now. Disney was using carbon fiber and very mechanical/magnetic movement tracking. Now we have optical tracking and cheap components. Also the computing power available, today the average persons computer power can handle the graphic processing required for VR.
You mentioned it’s the future of education, how so?
Well field trips for example. They cost money, take time, you spend so much time on the bus and in lines and eating and things like that. VR let’s us take people to the learning instantly and then come right back.
Once it gets good enough there’s almost little reason to see people in real life on a regular basis. We drag ourselves to business trips for example, and we dream of long distance meetings. Assuming perfect virtual reality where you can communicate the same way you do in real life, how can you justify taking the trip and the costs when you can replicate it in VR?
How do you deal with motion sickness and the cross-eye effect?
Well cross eye let’s knock that right off because calibration can take care of that and a lot of people don’t have the benefit of using the hardware properly calibrated, like at a convention like this.
As far as simulator sickness, we just put out an oculus best practices guide for how to fix it at the developer level. There’s no “silver bullet” but it really depends on content creation and educating content creators on how to use the hardware properly.
Kotaku wrote an article saying that you guys are running out of parts, is that true?
Yes, it is. And we have to decide if we want to reengineer the product to work with new parts or try and source the same parts from somewhere else. Stay tuned for more!
What’s the biggest remaining challenge for VR?
Something may look really good in isolation on the bench or in a demo, but we have to try everything in VR to know if we’ve made an improvement or made a step back. Creating a holistic approach for determining if something’s improved is very complicated.
It’s hard to evaluate some of these failure conditions, they’re very hard to predict. And the QA processes are still being defined.
The next big obstacle is going to be input. VR input is a challenge, which is why Oculus should be the one to tackle it.
Yes. And we don’t think that any of the solutions right now in the market are good solutions, and we’re working to come up with new solutions, but we’re not ready to share.
Mobility is the future. Embedded chip sets, embedded into mobile devices so that they don’t rely on a direct connection to hunky hardware. As mobile chip sets and VPUs get closer to the power we have on desktop sets today, we’re definitely going to move towards mobile. It’s not going to happen for the 1st consumer rift, but it’s close. We are looking at android and optimizing it for VR. We do see mobile as the long-term future. Dropping into a mobile movie theater, like multiple people watching a movie together in a VR movie theater, we have that today working on an iPad. We are going to consume all the GPU and CPU power that you will let us have. VR just needs it and consumes it.
What’s one title for each of you that you would like to see using the oculus?
Nate: Telltale titles, the way you can connect with characters in VR, it feels like another person. There’s a weird connection. You just have to experience it to understand, but when you can do all that interactive story telling becomes so much more powerful.
Ryan: Minecraft. It is amazing to look up at your creation at scale and say OH MY GOD.
Palmer: I have a life long dream. I’ve always wanted to be a Pokemon master. I want to play an incredible VR Pokemon MMO.
What’s the deal with virtual retina displays?
Unfortunately no one has made one that works in any consumer capacity. The idea of having a coherent light beam displayed on the back of your eye would enable high fields of view and eye tracking. But we’re many years away from technology like that becoming practical.
You can follow along with what’s going on with Oculus Rift project on their website at http://www.oculusvr.com/. They’re also hiring and asked me to let anyone know why may be interested to go to the site and apply.
(Me testing out the Oculus Rift on Paperboy redeveloped in 3D using the Oculus Rift, an Xbox Kinect sensor and a motion sensor on the bike. It wasn't calibrated perfect. I got a little of the cross-eye effect. But it was pretty fun. I would play it again.)
