Stereo vision in FPS

[Crix]

Don't know if you guys have read about this before but check it out!
guru3d.com/stereo/ I didn't know there was a way to play Quake3 and all other FPS with 3D glasses! The cooler devices look like bulky sunglasses but you need a monitor that supports around 100Hz at your desired gaming resolution. Read more at the site... I just may pick one of these up. :)

I'm thinking that as visual realism increases in these games that the generation of games after Doom III will really be ready for and open up the market for VR products. Don't know about you guys but I'm ready to up the immersion level.

I started talking about this stuff in the D3 vs Unreal WF thread. I'm curious if other people know about this technology, have tried it, are excited about it or hate it / think it has no future, etc. I'm sure we'll have fully immersive VR in our lifetime but sooner than that we'll have these stereoscopic displays giving us depth to the increasingly detailed and convincing worlds of FPS like Doom3. I imagine that the next gen games employing DX10 will look pretty god damn real. Stick a gyroscope in the headset and it'll be able to track our head motion and match the visuals to it.

[Lord FlatHead]

Things like head movement controlling the viewpoint are just small changes, but I guess they'd be pretty goddamn cool if someone got them to work right. But right now I don't see any viable commercial platform to play games in the true "Virtual Reality" sense of the word, with walking around and interacting with the game world and everything. Maybe in 10 years.

[EsH]

I haven't been keeping track of 3D stero glasses, but I think that they're much more viable now than before. Again, it comes down to that situation where the more realism you have, the more the flaws stand out. I think that "walking" using the keyboard when immersed in these stero visuals might be quite disorienting, especially if you are allowed to change the POV with head movement. Has anyone tried tried this first hand? How does it feel? Ironically, for racing games and flight simulators, this would be no problem. Except that these simulations usually do not present small enough proximities to objects to allow the full effect of stero vision. Except when you crash into something ;)

[Crix]

I actually have tried a "true" VR game at an arcade in Picadilly Circus in London. This was on a vacation and must have been about 10 years ago so I'm sure things are way more advanced now.

Anyway, the game involved driving around these little cars where you had to push big ass balls into a goal to score points. You could look around with your head (you had to wear a bulky helmet with two screens inside them) and you drove the car with a steering wheel and pedals. I remember finding it difficult to know if I was looking ahead properly, as your view would change when you moved your head to look around. So I would tend to drive a bit to the side of where I thought I was going. So yeah, the head/eyes motion independent of the body may be a bit confusing but man it could be REALLY COOL. Especially in some scary room in Doom3... imagine looking around trying to figure where that screaming sound is coming from... oh and that would add a whole new level of audio realism too! You could turn your head to try to hear something better.
I remember there was a definate delay in terms of head tracking but there is so much more CPU power and bandwidth to go around these days compared to 10 years ago.

Yeah, using the keyboard takes away from the immersion but none of us are complaining about having to use the keyboard and mouse for Doom3. VR will come in steps. As far as Matrix like VR... yeah, we're talking a couple decades at least but a VR than can totally immerse us visually and phonically(word?) is only a 3-5 years off I would guess.

[Zoost]

He crix, I was in London 15 years ago aswell and experienced my first and oly VR experience. I did not have the time to adjust to the VR, so I thought it was crap. The VR experience was something like a platform game with big balls and no clear objective (not for me).

At slashdot /. I saw this: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/26/1948251.shtml?tid=127

Not expensive and a good review. I don't know if it contributes to the SP Doom 3 gameplay. But it is cheap and cool enough to try.

[Crix]

:) That must have been the same game. Yeah, it was definately crap VR.

I saw that on /. this morning too. It is a review of the one of the two cards described at 3dguru.com. It sounds like he is totally impressed by seeing stuff in 3D but the crappiest part about this tech is the lower refresh rates that cause your eyes to get tired and give you headaches. Most monitors don't offer refresh rates much above 85Hz from what I've seen so this is the major limiting factor of this tech becoming popular.

Maybe it's not too hard to up refresh rate for monitors... I really don't know a lot about how the scanline hardware works. But maybe it wouldn't be too hard to manufacture tubes that work @ 200 Hz.

Hmm... more likely though, we'll see a price drop in high-res LCDs that can be made for each eye and incorporated into some VR goggles.

[Zoost]

Talking about Monitors, I think I will buy this http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/020927.html if it becomes available.

Some time ago I saw a 3d movie in Disney World "Honey, I shrunk the audiance". And damn I forgot how good the brain (my brain) can be fooled. That was pretty amazing.

If you want to try, you can download this for quake 1 http://home.iprimus.com.au/crbean/ or this wicked3d.com for quake 3. All you need is a pair of glasses with a red en green glass.

If you don't have those glasses you can use this mod http://www.planetquake.com/stereoquake/about.html you only have to cross your eyes.

[Katarhyne]

Those stereo goggles aren't all they're cracked up to be. I've got some ELSA Revelators, and they basically suck. It's pretty neat if you ever get it to work right, but you've got to fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck with your settings, both for the 3D driver and for the game, before it'll work right. Not recommended, by me. I'll just wait for DNI, thanks.

[Crix]

From the review of these new glass they sound pretty easy to setup.

What's DNI?

[Katarhyne]

Direct neural interface. Heh.

[Zoost]

Tried DNI once, after that it took me 2 years howto walk and talk again :( They warned me it was still in beta phase.

[AIRmichael]

Zoost said:

Tried DNI once, after that it took me 2 years howto walk and talk again :( They warned me it was still in beta phase.

Thats pretty fucked up

[Katarhyne]

It's also not true.

[Crix]

So I tried out the stereo quake mod. It kinda sucks... it basically works like those "magiceye" pictures where you look at a repeating pattern that has an embedded computer generated 3d graphic in it.

There's the eye-crossing and eye-staightening method to see the pictures. I'm pretty good at the eye-staightening method and can usually see those magiceye pictures instantly... but I can't do the cross eye method (and frankly don't want to cuz that's retarded). The mod only supports the cross eye method currently so it doesn't quite work. And to be able to see these images you have to make them "overlap" to create a "third" image with all the depth cues. So this means you have to play at 320x240 windowed on a 1280x1024 desktop in order to see it right.

Guess we'll have to hold out for the cheap VR goggles with the individual LCD screens to get mega full screen visual-stereo.

I want DNI! Been thinking about getting a Master's Degree in neuroscience... maybe I should design one. :) heh