Whatever happened to virtual reality?

[V Knid esq]

You don't hear much about it these days, unless it's 'heads-up' military apps. I was just thinking yesterday how great a VR wave-editing app would be, where you can see your waveform in 3-d, zoom in and out on it, and manipulate it by literally grabbing it and pulling it around... different FX could be represented by different colours or visual effects... sequencing could work the same way too... it would make music-making very intuitive, and it could make electronic performance a whole lot more interesting too. Has this kind of thing ever been done?

[thomas hooked]

knids been sucked into the noon-sphere

[thomas hooked]

definately.

[Sheridan]

I edit waveforms using colors here at work. in adobe audition I turn on spectral view and it shows me the waveform in colors. and I can spot out artifacts by the discoloration. for example there can be a range of dark red or purple and then a little spot of bright yellow. that spot of bright yellow is usually a pop or click in the audio. I go in and highlight that color and edit it out. I hardly ever look at the actual waveforms any more.

but as for virtual reality, it has droped off hasn't it? it used to be the next big thing and there were virtual reality video games at arcades. but you don't even see those anymore. it probably has gone more to military/space applications.

[V Knid esq]

Oops, I deleted this:


Actually I reckon the reason that no-one talks about VR is that they got pissed off with Noon's incomprehensible gibbering.

[thomas hooked]

i blame it on when red dwarf disappeared up its own arse.

[Yer_Maw]

well funny you should mention it, but there was a virtual reality experiment carried out this week where users put on a headset which superimposed pacman onto the actual world with folk running about the streets collecting virtual pills.

i think the main problem with vr is the fact that by superimposing visual info onto the eyes without involving other sensory data like muscle feedback position is just completly pointless and shite.

check out "steve grand" who likes to think our atomic information will be copied in to computers, with crazy results. i like steve grand.

[bencodec]

I wonder if technology companies found that it's probably easier to sell their products when they don't appear to remove you from your surroundings as much?

[thomas hooked]

Originally posted by Yer_Maw
well funny you should mention it, but there was a virtual reality experiment carried out this week where users put on a headset which superimposed pacman onto the actual world with folk running about the streets collecting virtual pills.

i think the main problem with vr is the fact that by superimposing visual info onto the eyes without involving other sensory data like muscle feedback position is just completey pointless and shite.

check out "steve grand" who likes to think our atomic information will be copied in to computers, with crazy results. i like steve grand.

are you sure thats a VR thing? they've been doing live action pacman games rond central park for a while now?

[Hagbard]

It peaked too early, it was shit, too expensive and made people feel ill, so theres a stigma attached to it.

I went to a game developer conference a few years ago and there was a talk from some sony fellar who reckoned no one dares call anything virtual reality anymore cos it has instant negative reactions. I think the Sony iToy thing is probably the start of the slow VR healing process...

[Yer_Maw]

Originally posted by thomas hooked


are you sure thats a VR thing? they've been doing live action pacman games rond central park for a while now?

nah its not that, its completely different. thats what i thought too. do a search. bbc and new scientist had it. i would get it, but im just about to go home.

[thomas hooked]

i think people are quite hooked on reality at the moment. i am.

[bitch one]

i always thought it would be good for flight sims or driving games, where you are in a fixed sitting position.

[grobelaar]

The (US) military is indeed proceeding apace with a variant of this technology. Some people may have heard about a computer company being paid to create an 'Earth Simulation' for the US military.

There are also white papers on advanced communications technology, that use 3D graphics, head-up display and GPS technology to create a mixed reality. So you can overlay reality with information gained and processed in the equivalent virtual reality. Using a head-up display - the two would be 'mixed' together on a soldier's helmet head-up display.

for example, an enemy combatant runs behind a wall, but the soldier can still 'see' him, because he has an infrared camera that picks up his trace in real-time and returns an image to the head-up display that goes overlaid the actual reality.

Or perhaps an aerial surveillance unit has tagged the enemy soldier - this info can be fed into a central battle computer, or Earth Simulator and relayed to relavant forces in the field...

Don't ask how I end up getting to know this rubbish, my job allows me lots of time to read up a lot of, usually military rubbish.

But here's an entirely more friendly application of mixed reality technology... PACMAN

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/16/explorers.pacman/index.html

[JE:5]

That pacman thing looks excellent, the only problem would be that you would look like some cyber schizophrenic running around the streets with those goggles on.

[wheezer]

Looking at a gaming market which is rather dominated by 3d first person perspective engines, the huge emphasis we've been putting on 3d hardware both audio and video in the last couple of years, it's hard to see how virtual reality doesn't exist, or went anywhere.

We don't have the 80ies/90ies view of VR, i.e. put on a hacked Nintendo Power Glove (tm) and some goggles and fistfuck your first Idoru online while your peers look on, but our virtual realities are getting ever more complex every year, nay, every software-release cycle.

William Gibson coined his term cyberspace upon watching teenagers and kids stare at the blank infinity beyond the arcade game screens they were affixed to, somebody please explain to me what's changed so drastically since then for the term "virtual reality" to have lost its meaning entirely.

The truth of the matter has been posted in this thread already, namely that the antiquated VR concept that people tried to peddle decades ago is no more, and that people still associate _that_ with VR - so instead today's buzzwords are "immersive gaming" or what have you.

In order for more "useful" applications to evolve, we need to develop sensible interface paradigms for a 3-dimensional work environment, and so far this has really only been done well in the mainstream for games - otherwise we're still very much sticking to the Xerox Parc inspired concept, with a little bit of 3d stirred in for pizazz.

Something like a Doom-based taskmanager might be cool, technically feasible to implement and all, but personally I feel a 2-dimensional list is still the easier way to manage my running processes. Hence, the timespan needed for technologies like these to take over in a big way in the mainstream OS / App market we really need new applications or new ways of thinking about applications in the least, till then we should just keep selling GTA: St.Andreas to the kiddies so that they will be ready to cope.

[yenorom]

I always think the vr internet you see in films like swordfish and hackers is hysterical

[Scoz]

Originally posted by wheezer
Something like a Doom-based taskmanager might be cool, technically feasible to implement and all, but personally I feel a 2-dimensional list is still the easier way to manage my running processes. Hence, the timespan needed for technologies like these to take over in a big way in the mainstream OS / App market we really need new applications or new ways of thinking about applications in the least, till then we should just keep selling GTA: St.Andreas to the kiddies so that they will be ready to cope.

I remember quite a long while back I read about a linux taskmanager that was based on Doom where each process was it's own character marked with it's PID and in order to kill a process you had to runaround and then shoot dead the relevent process. I imagine though it's was probably a good way of fucking things up if you killed the wrong process though

[wheezer]

Yeah obviously I remember this application ;)
The same thought crossed my mind about its usefulness too...

[bencodec]

there is a really good book called "interface culture" that has some of this kind of stuff in it. apparently microsoft had done research into a 3d GUI that used a house metaphor in place of the desktop. I thik it was called "BOB" though i might be out of my mind.
There was another 3d interface that used to metaphor of solar systems and planets and moons in place of files and folders where the user sort of flew to the info they needed.

[Hagbard]

The thing about 3D Gui's is that only about 0.005% of the worlds population could actually use them without going insane.. you know.. the 99.995% of the world who run about in shooter games spending the whole time looking at the sky, the floor and nothing inbetween ;)

I read that interface culture book, prety interesting.. but still the best book I think anyone interested in art and interface can read is 'The Design of everday things' by Don Norman.

[bencodec]

yeah, i'm pretty happy with my 2d at the moment as i am part of the 99. though i do think it would be very cool to see a computer the doesn't use the desktop metaphor. i became a musician to avoid files and folders.


I'll have to check that Norman book out.

[V Knid esq]

But but but what about 3D sound representations? Music is one field I've never heard of any kind of VR interfaces being developed, and especially for performance it would probably be unlikely to cause the going-mental of long-term immersion... or at least it would send you no more mental than musicians already are, anyway...

[Martin23]

Do you rememeber the Holo-sound stuff PTV did Knid?

[Hagbard]

The problem with 3d sound representation is that doing convincingly it in a performance or social space would still currently require you to wear headphones.

The problem is that every person in the room would need to be transmitting their location somehow and discretely receiving audio relative to that position. So until we get the quantum computers which would be capable of not only doing this but also managing to block out everyone elses sound field with some kind of crazy inversion system then... erm.

Or were you just talking about 3D interfaces to create sound? In which case the current problem is the same as with games, it's all very well having incredible immersive 3D graphics, but ultimately the biggest bottleneck to immersion is the tactile interface I think.

[bencodec]

Originally posted by V Knid esq
But but but what about 3D sound representations? Music is one field I've never heard of any kind of VR interfaces being developed, and especially for performance it would probably be unlikely to cause the going-mental of long-term immersion... or at least it would send you no more mental than musicians already are, anyway...

you might be able to use this:

http://www.sonasphere.com/

with some glasses of some sort to give you odd virtual reality sound shaping.

[Hagbard]

Originally posted by bencodec


you might be able to use this:

http://www.sonasphere.com/

with some glasses of some sort to give you odd virtual reality sound shaping.

I'm trying to find the 'video section' mentioned in the top news item.. anyone find it?

[bencodec]

have a look here:

http://www.sonasphere.com/about_demovideos.php

[bitch one]

Originally posted by grobelaar
The (US) military is indeed proceeding apace with a variant of this technology. Some people may have heard about a computer company being paid to create an 'Earth Simulation' for the US military.



that whole story is just the modern military version of 'in the future we will wear shiny suits'

ie a load of tosh. the military can't even get ordinary radios to work properly

[TEC-HO]

They realised it was crap and couldn’t take it any further than red and blue triangles moving around.

[JE:5]

I believe it was developed in Loughborough wasn't it?