Virtual Reality in the past and the birth of OculusVR

What is Virtual Reality?

• Virtual reality can be defined as an artificial environment generated by a computer and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment.

• It is most effectively achieved with the use of a head-mounted display.

HEAD-MOUNTED DISPLAY

• A head-mounted display or helmet mounted display, both abbreviated HMD, is a display device, worn on the head or as part of a helmet, that has a small display optic in front of one (monocular HMD) or each eye (binocular HMD). A pair of lenses is used in order to help the eyes focus on the screen and cover a wide field of view.

VIRTUAL REALITY AND

AUGMENTED REALITY

• It is important to differentiate augmented reality (AR) from virtual reality (VR).

• Virtual reality cancels and replaces our normal vision with computer generated images.

• Augmented reality is a live direct or indirect view of a real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated data. This means, for instance, that we can add an imaginary dartboard to the ground in the street while still seeing the real world normally.

PRESENCE• Michael Abrash (game programmer and Oculus Chief Scientist) defines

presence as the sense of being someplace else while in virtual reality; many people feel as if they’ve been teleported.

• It shouldn’t be confused with immersion, which merely means that you are surrounded by the image of the virtual world. Presence means that you feel like you are in the virtual world. It is an incredibly powerful sensation and unique to virtual reality.

• The whole point of VR that enables presence is that it engages the perceptual system well enough to deliver what it feels like a real experience. It happens at a level below consciousness, and requires suspension of belief, in order to remind yourself that the simulation isn’t real.

• It can only be understood by experiencing it

• Palmer Luckey (born 19 September 1992) founded OculusVR in 2012 along with Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell, amongst others, in order to develop a head-mounted display (HMD) after he realised that nothing in the market at the time was compelling enough for him to be totally immersed in virtual worlds. He developed a prototype he called the “Rift”, based on the rift that the HMD creates between the real and virtual worlds.

• John Carmack, a game programmer known for titles like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom, which started the 3D First Person Shooter genre, asked Palmer if he could buy one of his prototypes when he found out about his activities in an internet forum. As Palmer admires Carmack, he just sent it to him for free.

• At E3 (the biggest trade fair for computer games) 2012, John Carmack showcased Palmer’s prototype getting the attention of thousands of people after he mentioned a Kickstarter campaign would be launched to get the product he was showing, to the consumer market.

Palmer Luckey, founder of OculusVR

John Carmack, CTO at OculusVR

BIRTH OF OCULUS VR

• Kickstarter is an American crowdfunding platform, which consists on the collection of finance from backers all around the world to fund an initiative via the Internet.

• Oculus announced that the "development kit" version of the Oculus Rift would be given as a reward to backers who pledged $300 or more on Kickstarter, with an expected shipping date set of December 2012 (though they did not actually ship until March 2013).

• Oculus secured its intended amount of US $250,000, and in less than 36 hours, the campaign had surpassed $1 million in funding, eventually ending with $2,437,429 coming from 9,522 backers.

OCULUS RIFT KICKSTARTER

OCULUS RIFT DK1• The Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 (DK1) is the first version

that was available for anyone to purchase for $300• It was targeted at developers, in order to create content

that can be used in the future consumer version (CV1) of the Rift

• It had 2 major problems: motion blur and screen-door effect.

• Specifications

Resolution 640 x 800 per eye (LCD)Refresh Rate 60 HzPersistence fullViewing Optics 90° Field of ViewSensors Gyroscope, Accelerometer, MagnetometerUpdate Rate 1000 HzWeight 0.379 Kg

MOTION BLUR• Motion blur is the apparent streaking of rapidly moving objects in

a still image or a sequence of images such as a movie or animation. It results when the image being recorded changes during the recording of a single frame, either due to rapid movement or long exposure

• Obviously this doesn’t happen with our normal vision, so replacing our normal perception with a virtual one that suffers from motion blur, is likely to induce nausea

SCREEN-DOOR EFFECT• The screen-door effect or fixed-pattern noise (FPN) is a visual artifact of the

projection technology used in digital projectors, where the fine lines separating the projector's pixels become visible in the projected image.

• Because the screen is so close to your eyes, you can see the spaces between individual pixels, so it almost looks like you're viewing the world through a grid or a screen door. This effect should be negated with the improved screen that Oculus VR plans for the consumer version.

OCULUS RIFT DK2• The second version of the Rift Development Kit was first

shown as a prototype at CES 2014 with code name “Crystal Cove”.

• Its new features include 6 degrees of freedom positional tracking, and a low persistence display

• On March 19, 2014 Oculus VR announced the Oculus Rift DK2 was available for pre-order at a price of $350, and again it was intended for developers. The expected ship date was July 2014.

Resolution 960 x 1080 per eye (OLED)Refresh Rate 75 Hz, 72 Hz, 60 HzPersistence 2 ms, 3 ms, fullViewing Optics 100° Field of ViewSensors Gyroscope, Accelerometer, MagnetometerUpdate Rate 1000 HzNear Infrared CMOS Sensor (60Hz)Weight 0.440 Kg

Crystal Cove Prototype

Oculus Rift DK2

LOW PERSISTENCE• Low persistence is a new technology that was included in the second Development Kit (DK2) as

a fix for DK1’s motion blur that was inducing nausea in a large amount of users. It is possible thanks to an ultra-fast Samsung’s OLED display, which shows the image for 0.002 seconds (2ms) and then switches to black until the next image is shown.

• The following example shows how a full persistence display works over nearly 100ms (0.1s) when running at 75Hz. Colors represent different images in a sequence.

The following example shows how a low persistence display works over 100ms (0.1s) when running at 75Hz. The black sections indicate that the screen is off, waiting to receive the next image. This way we just show the image when it’s right, and then turn the display off until the next image to avoid perceiving wrong data.

LOW PERSISTENCE

POSITIONAL TRACKING• With the second version of the development kit, OculusVR implemented

positional tracking.

• This adds 3 more degrees of freedom equivalent to translation movements, in addition to the already existing 3 rotational movements in DK1, making a total of 6 degrees of freedom.

3 DOF, Oculus Rift DK1 6 DOF, Oculus Rift DK2

FACEBOOK ACQUISITION• On March 25, 2014, Facebook announced that it had agreed to buy

Oculus VR for $2.000.000.000

• This included $400 million in cash, $1.6 billion in Facebook stock, and an additional $300 million subject to Oculus VR's meeting certain financial targets in a transaction expected to close in the second quarter of 2014

• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, stated after the purchase that "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate.

• Brendan Iribe, CEO at OculusVR, was also very excited about this agreement: “Facebook shares our vision for connecting a billion people through virtual reality with the power of shared presence.”

• This move created a lot of controversy on internet forums, specially amongst people that had been following the project from the beginning.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO

Brendan Iribe, OculusVR’s CEO

OCULUS RIFT CV1• The Oculus Rift CV1 (Consumer Version 1), is the code name for the first

commercial version of the Rift dedicated to the general public, expected to ship sometime in 2015

• OculusVR has refused to give any estimates on when it will be launched, but CEO Brendan Iribe stated that they would be dissapointed if they haven’t shipped before the end of next year.

• Not much is known about the final specifications of the device, but the confirmed ones include: higher resolution, lower latency, higher framerate, lower weight, eliminated screen-door effect, higher FOV and improved ergonomics.

• This is, according to Iribe, the first Oculus HMD that will be able to deliver presence in a constant basis, as opposed to DK2 that is only able to showglimpses of it.

• Rumors say, that Mark Zuckerberg decided to purchase OculusVR for $2 Billion after trying their internal CV1 prototype.

PROJECT MORPHEUS• Project Morpheus is the codename for an upcoming

virtual reality headset produced by Sony Computer Entertainment.

• It was announced on March 18, 2014 at GDC 2014, a day before Oculus announced their second development kit. It is designed to fully function with Sony Playstation 4.

• It is currently a prototype and there is no release date for the final version.

• It is expected that the quality of the virtual reality experiences given by Morpheus will be lower than Oculus Rift’s due to PS4 hardware limitations when compared to desktop computers.

THE DAWN OF VIRTUAL REALITY• Virtual reality opens up an unlimited amount of possibilities for entertainment

and education. Some of this applications are, but not limited to:

-Virtual tourism: Visit places like if you were actually on them

-Virtual tickets for concerts/sports: You will be able to buy tickets to see your favourite band, or watch your football team like if you were standing in between the crowd

-Virtual home cinemas: You can simulate you are sitting inside a virtual cinema, with a 400’ screen in front of you to watch any media just by putting on goggles in your home.

- Educational experiences: Imagine studying the Solar System while travelling around it in a spaceship, being able to sense the scale of the planets in front of you, or seeing how the human body works from the inside.

THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL REALITY• Virtual reality isn’t even really born yet, but still it has a very bright future ahead.

The technology is still on its infancy, and it is predictable that HMD’s will be reduced to the size of sunglasses at some point.

• When virtual reality and augmented reality merge into an all-in-one device with high enough resolution, TV’s and flat screens as we know them today will tend to disappear.

• We are able to reproduce two senses so far, sight and hearing. More research is being done to implement something as important as touch, as well as motion capture devices to enable the ability to move through the virtual environment in a natural way without the use of a classic controller.

• It is expected that a lot more resources will be thrown into these systems once virtual reality reaches a wide audience.

THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL REALITY

Virtuix Omni Sixense STEM

ControlVR Gloves

Cyberith Virtualizer PrioVR Motion Tracking Suit

TEST TIME!

REFERENCES

• Wikipedia• OculusVR• Tomshardware• http://giphy.com/