Palmer Luckey had not been born when The Lawnmower Man was
released in 1992, but the movie, with its vision of computer-generated
sensory immersion, helped seed his interest in virtual reality as soon
as he saw it. He dreamed of playing video games in simulated 3-D
worlds—a dream that led him to amass one of the world’s largest
collections of head-mounted displays and, eventually, inspired him to
attempt to make his own. With no formal engineering training, Luckey
designed his first working prototype in his garage at the age of 16.
Oculus VR had already attracted more than $91 million in venture funding, a near-fanatical following, and team members like the game programmer John Carmack, who led the development of influential video games such as Doom, Quake, and Rage. But the Facebook deal is a sign of faith that virtual reality is now sharp enough and cheap enough to have huge potential for more than video games. The idea of merging immersive virtual reality with social communications is intriguing. It could also be a compelling tool for teleconferencing, online shopping, or more passive forms of entertainment. Some filmmakers are, in fact, already experimenting with movies designed just for the Rift.
Virtual-reality headsets could be found in some arcades when The Lawnmower Man was in the theaters. But the technology wasn’t good enough to catch on widely. This time around, Luckey realized that cheap smartphone components could be combined to stunning effect, rendering bright, crisp worlds much more compelling than the blocky graphics often seen through earlier virtual-reality headsets.
When you use the Rift, you feel as though you’re actually inside these worlds. The technology follows the movement of your head in real time; lean in to take a better look at a virtual flower or look to the skies to gaze at a virtual cloud, and your mind is drawn into the simulation. You can almost believe you are fully there.
The vast audience for home video games appears hungry for the device. In August 2012, Oculus VR set out to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter and met the goal in a matter of hours. It surpassed $1 million within two days.
Luckey started shipping a version of the Rift for software developers in March 2013 for just $300, and in the past year, the hardware has improved significantly. The retail version, which is expected to launch later this year or early next, will offer resolution higher than 1,920 by 1,080 pixels per eye. Such stunningly sharp definition has only recently become possible at such a low price.
While video games are where this improved virtual-reality technology is likely to take off first, it could also have applications in telepresence, architecture, computer-aided design, emergency response training, and phobia therapy.
Indeed, in some niches, older VR technology has been in use for years. Some surgeons routinely practice operations using VR simulations, while some industrial designers use the technology to view their designs as if they had already been constructed. But 30 years ago, when Jaron Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual-reality goggles, such products were too expensive for the consumer mainstream (a single head-mounted display cost as much as $100,000).
There were other reasons, too, that earlier versions of virtual reality failed commercially. Players of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, a low-end VR game system launched in the mid-1990s, complained of nausea after extended play. For other players, the keen sense of wonder and presence they felt inside a virtual world soon dissipated. “Your first time playing a game in a virtual world is incredible,” Lanier says, “but the 20th time is wearying.”
Things may be different now. Though some testers have experienced nausea using the Oculus Rift, the company says the latest version has almost eliminated this problem. And today’s virtual environments offer so much more fidelity that they could remain captivating for much longer. Artists have been able to create a more stimulating range of worlds, from the rigorously realistic to the more abstract and painterly.
Already Oculus has inspired imitators. Acknowledging the Rift as an inspiration, Sony has demonstrated a VR headset that players will be able to use with the PlayStation 4. Sony is also working with NASA to create a virtual-reality simulation of Mars using images pulled from the Mars Rover. A more mundane but potentially useful application that Sony is exploring would let travelers visit virtual hotel rooms before booking the real thing. Assuming they ever want to take the headsets off.
—Simon Parkin
Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/526531/oculus-rift/
How it Works?
The first VR demonstrations will probably be
games. Imagine titles that plunge players into realistic war zones or
rich Tolkien-inspired worlds. But VR’s true impact will only become
clear later, when artists, filmmakers, researchers, and educators begin
to use it in ways no one has thought of yet. Palmer Luckey, the
co-founder of Oculus VR, and Nirav Patel, an engineer at Oculus VR, gave
Popular Science a crash course on the principles behind the platform.
How It Works
1. Lenses
Establishing a focal point is critical to
perceiving depth. “You’re looking at a virtual image plane in each eye,”
says Patel. In essence, the user’s eyes are staring beyond the display
and into the virtual environment.
2. Display
A high-resolution screen that sits just a few
inches from a user’s eyes projects a stereoscopic image—or two warped
images on each half of the screen. “We’re just using the normal way that
humans use binocular vision to perceive depth,” Patel says. “There are
horizontal offsets between objects visible in the left and right eyes,
which the visual cortex can process to perceive depth.” In other words,
when the warped 2-D images are viewed in close proximity, users are
tricked into believing they’re standing in a virtual world.
3.Tracking Technology
The headset comes equipped with more than a dozen
sensor inputs. For example, a gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass
track the location of a user’s head. Designers also added external
infrared sensors and a camera to increase positional accuracy and
monitoring. Software running on a nearby host PC analyzes that data and
renders images of a virtual world that adapt to head position. Luckey
says that the system’s low latency enhances realism.
4. 3D Audio
To be fully immersive, you need great sound, and
Oculus has some of the most spatially accurate. “All you need is to
simulate two microphones in the game, and you can simulate audio in the
real world,” Luckey says. But the truth is that the software is slightly
more sophisticated. “We can generate a good approximation of what each
ear should hear at its location in virtual space,” says Patel, “which is
much better than what you could do with a typical surround-sound
setup.”
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