Oculus Rift – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

July 26, 2014

Is Virtual Reality Too Real?

I found myself at The Daden Virtual Campus in Unity Web Player thanks to a mail to a mailing list asking whether virtual reality is too real. This was my first visit to a virtual world in Unity, more on that later. However the reason I was there in the first place was due to the Daden July 2014 newsletter (PDF link), which talks about virtual reality. The news letter talks about the Daden Virtual Reality campus at the top but at the bottom moves on to virtual reality.

Virtual reality seems to be back in vogue, to some of us, it never really went away whereas to others, they are still waiting for the great leap forward when it arrives. However the Oculus Rift development, largely led by Facebook’s purchase of Oculus has made virtual reality a topic of discussion again. Whereas I still have very grave misgivings about Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, you can’t help but admire the way that Facebook’s name has helped to make virtual reality a newsworthy item once again.

So back to the mailing list, Dr Michael Vallance ponders :

One of the frustrations I constantly come up against at university conferences is the use of the term “virtual”. I have been involved developing and researching virtual worlds for the past 6 years so to me “virtual worlds” seem the most appropriate “meme”. It seems that the term virtual “reality” has baggage from previous attempts of similar technology. The older academics associate “Virtual” with “virtual reality” and consequently they deem that anything ‘virtual’ is an attempt to replicate “reality” complete with real-world physics such as gravity and form. To some computer science academics, if a development of a virtual space does not have real world replication then it is not virtual. They call it “artificial” which, to me, is incorrect. I argue that a virtual world can be a simulation and it can also be fantasy. It is not necessarily virtual “reality”.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was Gene Roddenberry Jr’s visit to Second Life back in the summer of 2009. Good grief was it really that long ago? As well as describing Second Life as a “cool cool area” and being impressed that there were furries present, he was also impressed by the physics defying fact that he could fly in Second Life. This is something I’ve seen mentioned before regarding virtual worlds, that the laws of physics do not apply, that they are indeed, very different from reality and how cool that is.

However here I realised that all of my thoughts are indeed about virtual worlds, the discussion is rarely about virtual reality, so I think Dr Vallance is onto something when he says that virtual worlds seems the more appropriate choice of words. This may seem a little pedantic but I definitely do think of these spaces as virtual worlds rather than virtual reality.

In many ways it’s a waste of opportunity to stick to the laws of real life physics in any virtual space, be it virtual worlds or virtual reality. This is part of the beauty of going virtual.

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July 4, 2014July 4, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 26 – Tony Parisi Virtually Anywhere

“We will see a 3D web in the next five years, there’s no doubt in my mind about that, Drax listeners you heard it hear first” – Tony Parisi on The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 26.

So opens the July 4th edition of The Drax Files Radio Hour. I should note at this point that Tony Parisi, like a lot of 3D web enthusiasts, always predicts that the 3D web will be here in five years time but you have to admire his enthusiasm. I should also note that this show was produced and published before Germany beat France in the World Cup quarter finals, so Draxtor had not been near any Paulaner at this stage, whether that’s still the case I cannot verify.

Tony Parisi is a co-creator of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) and has also penned books on WebGL as well as being a founder of Vivaty, more on that later. The interview itself is yet another excellent production from Draxtor Despres, coming in at around 42 minutes it packs a lot in. The core of the interview centres around the concepts raised in a blog post from Tony Parisi back in June : Virtually Anywhere. This post argues that VR applications using devices such as Oculus Rift should not be looking to be part of downloads and walled gardens, they should be integrated within the web using technologies such as WebGL, CSS3 and HTML5. The blog post is well worth reading.

However let’s rewind a little, Tony talks of his early work with VRML and also points out the reasons why he feels that it didn’t quite take off. VRML came at a time when the web was in its infancy in terms of mainstream acceptance. VRML was powerful, possibly a little too powerful because to use it to its full potential back then would have required decent bandwidth and decent computing power. Now at this point you may think “Patience young Padawan, Patience“. However the computing world isn’t known for its patience and at a time when the 2D web was exploding, people didn’t quite have the patience to wait for the VRML revolution. Indeed plenty of people were happily trying to creating garish Geocities sites for the 2D web, 3D web concepts were a long way off widespread acceptance.

The part of the interview where Tony talks of Vivaty is interesting in many ways and it really resonated with me. There were arguments at Vivaty as to whether they should try and appeal to Second Life users, those who created content and spent a lot of time in Second Life spending money in particular. However others thought this market was, to paraphrase, a little weird. Tony does not say this, but that’s what it seemed to amount to. Those people felt there was larger mainstream market to attract that would prefer not to be associated with Second Life style users. Now before we all turn our noses up, let’s remember that this came in the period around and after Second Life was at the top of the hype cycle, Anshe Chung was on the cover of Newsweek and virtual worlds seemed to be the place to be. We should also remember that Linden Lab themselves seemed to be having exactly the same debate. Philip Rosedale had been quoted as saying : “Bad weather, oppressive regimes, poor economic conditions — that’s what makes an SL user” as well as saying “I estimate we’re at 1 percent of total use in 5-10 years“, suggesting a more mainstream market was there for the taking.

Mitch Kapor rubbed Second Life users up the wrong way with his SL5B speech when he said : “The pioneer era in Second Life is beginning to draw to a close. It has been five years and we are at the beginning of a transition and I think it is an irrevocable transition“. Some users, quite possibly incorrectly, felt that this was a statement that Linden Lab did not want their current users, that they were chasing that elusive mainstream audience.

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July 1, 2014

Gizmodo Reporter Experiences A Less Than Immersive Experience Of Second Life With The Oculus Rift

Jordan Kushins of Gizmodo has a refreshingly honest report on using Second Life with an Oculus Rift : I Explored Second Life’s Forgotten Worlds With An Oculus Rift. The report has a realistic review of life with the Rift, demonstrating that work needs to be done to incorporate the technology not just into Second Life, but into pretty much any experience.

The report also has some excellent pictures of Second Life, but Jordan confesses these were provided afterwards by Peter Gray and looked a lot spiffier than the scenes he witnessed live. This isn’t a trick, Second Life is extremely capable of displaying some excellent graphical representations of the virtual world, but you need a damn good graphics card to pull it off.

The report starts with some positive commentary on Second Life :

You’d think Second Life is a ghost town by now. And yet! One million people still actively inhabit the digital universe, a number that’s stayed impressively consistent since its early heyday. Over the past decade, those loyal early adopters have created over a petabyte of user-generated content in the form of—well, anything and everything you could possibly dream up: replicas of real-life locations where it’s possible to fly, triple-X adult zones where it’s possible to get filthy, and detailed scenes inhabited by avatars who may or may not resemble their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Personally I was quite enamoured by this opening, there is still plenty going on in Second Life and there is content of an extremely wide range. Obviously Peter Gray didn’t take the reporter on a grand tour of Zindra. However Peter Gray did allow Jordan Kushins to take control of his avatar to experience Second Life via an Oculus Rift. However there is evidence Linden Lab missed a trick here, because Jordan wanted to create his own avatar to enter the world. However he was happy enough to explore as Peter.

Now at this point I should point out that Jordan’s experience of Second Life via the Oculus Rift wasn’t smooth, but that’s fine because it’s early days for the Oculus Rift and early days for Second Life via the Oculus Rift. The issues absolutely do need to be pointed out.

Jordan donned the Oculus Rift and then found himself stuck in the corner of a mansion, with a plant between him and the wall. Jordan tried turning around but ultimately needed to take off the headset to get a better view of his surroundings to work out why he was stuck.

Jordan explains how he had difficulty with viewing the world whilst wearing the Rift, looking inside his body, instead of outside at the world and then he talks of an issue that I’ve seen repeatedly made regarding Oculus Rift usage :

Also: When you’re wearing something over your eyes that completely obscures your vision, you can’t see the keyboard. When you can’t see the keyboard, you have to be a super solid touch-typist to manipulate your avatar, which requires tapping the arrows and spelling out sentences to chat (if you’re not using vocal commands). It’s obviously not impossible, but there is a fundamental disconnect that seems important to address with a work-around.

This is going to be a challenging issue for any virtual world going forward. Keyboard communications are extremely important and many people aren’t ready to switch to voice or voice to text solutions yet, many will never want to switch to such solutions.

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June 4, 2014

The Challenges Of Oculus Rift Usage In Second Life

Digital mischief maker Loki Eliot recently posted an excellent blog post : Mapping a Gamepad to Second Life & OculusVR with Voice to Text. This post highlights quite a few issues and challenges for the usage of Oculus Rift within Second Life as well as highlighting issues with Oculus Rift and that level of immersion in any virtual world.

In the post Loki explains how he mapped an old game controller that is compatible with the xBox and mapped the buttons on that to control some of the menus within Second Life. Loki also used a voice to text dictation application to allow him to send voice to, well text, and therefore communicate with other Second Life users in text. I’ll embed Loki’s video at the end of the blog post but you should really read Loki’s post to get a good grasp of the issues.

Loki makes some points I’ve heard before, such as this one regarding the field of view and keyboard usage :

Instead they wrapped EVERYTHING around your field of view and expect you to be able to touch type which i know some superhuman SL users can do. Im not one of them unfortunately.

This emphasises a problem with trying to make Oculus Rift compatible with existing experiences, not just Second Life by the way but Second Life has an additional challenge that many games don’t face because communicating via text in Second Life is massive. That’s why people complain about Group Chat not working as well as they would hope.

However Loki’s use of a game controller reminded me of people I know who swear by game controllers. I actually have one but hardly ever use it, although it’s a chicken and egg situation because I’m sure if I used the game controller more often, I would be far more impressed by it. However the people whom are fans of game controllers in general are, gamers. No surprises there but as Second Life isn’t well known for attracting gamers, it highlights another challenge for Oculus Rift and Second Life harmony.

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May 29, 2014May 29, 2014

Palmer Luckey Unsure Of Second Life Future In VR Age

I’m not Palmer Luckey’s biggest fan, this largely stems from the lack of understanding and lack of giving something back to the Kickstarter community after Oculus landed on their feet with the Facebook deal. In the wider scheme of matters this wasn’t exactly a huge let down and certainly didn’t merit the level of vitriol the decison received, I mean he’s certainly not in the Nick Clegg league when it comes to being a complete and utter let down and let’s face it, the future looks extremely bright for Palmer Luckey and Oculus Rift, the same definitely can’t be said for Nick Clegg, the future doesn’t even look as if it will be orange for him.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has managed to get some really interesting comments from Palmer Luckey regarding Second Life:

I think that virtual worlds are going to play a big role in the future of Oculus and VR on the whole, but it remains to be seen how big of a part of that future Second Life will be.

Second Life is of course approaching its official eleventh birthday and is therefore an older platform, it’s not young and exciting but I still believe Second Life can be a platform that takes advantage of technology such as Oculus Rift because Second Life is a very dynamic platform. Second Life is a platform whereby you can wipe the slate clean on a parcel or sim and start again, therefore I believe that people could create builds that are optimised for technology such as Oculus Rift, but being Second Life, that would also mean vast swathes of Second Life aren’t optimised for the technology and that could very well prove to be a stumbling block for widespread adoption of the technology in a virtual world such as Second Life.

Oculus Rift will probably be better served by a virtual world that is created with Oculus Rift in mind from the start. Hamlet asked Palmer Luckey what Second Life most needed in order to transition to the Oculus/VR age, and be relevant in it? Palmer replied:

I don’t think anyone will know for sure until VR has more time to mature, lots of poorly understood problems right now.

This brings us back to the point I was making earlier that Oculus Rift will probably be better served by a virtual world built with Oculus Rift in mind. This is a point that I’ve seen Adeon Writer make time after time regarding existing games and virtual worlds, the advice is that trying to fit existing virtual worlds and games into the Oculus Rift umbrella is likely to be more pain than its worth.

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