Speaker 1: Didn't touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Obama. And today we're going
Speaker 1: to take another look back on an older episode. You see,
Speaker 1: we got a lot of news about the Oculus Rift
Speaker 1: that's been piling up since March of two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: and we did an episode called the Oculus Rift Story
Speaker 1: as the story so far, so there's enough information to
Speaker 1: kind of update that, but not so much that we
Speaker 1: can do a whole new episode. Right that original episode
Speaker 1: published on August. If you want to, well, you don't
Speaker 1: need to go looking for it, because we're about to
Speaker 1: play it. We're about to play it, however, just to
Speaker 1: give you an idea in the timeline of where this occurred. Yes,
Speaker 1: so since August two thirteen, a lot has happened. So
Speaker 1: once we have played through that episode, stick around. We
Speaker 1: have a lot to say about what's been going on
Speaker 1: since then. So, without further ado, here's the original episode. Today,
Speaker 1: we wanted to talk about something that, uh technology that
Speaker 1: really made a big splash in late two thousand twelves
Speaker 1: and really in two thousand thirteen, something that got a
Speaker 1: lot of people excited. I guess you could say it
Speaker 1: kicks started the virtual reality craze again in the US.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. The Oculus Rift. So yes, and as
Speaker 1: of June they announced that they had just raised sixteen
Speaker 1: million in private funding. Sixteen million dollars, which isn't shabby
Speaker 1: for a company run by a twenty year old guy. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's not focus on how young this guy is. Now,
Speaker 1: that's amazing, that's that's this is a tinkerer, who is
Speaker 1: who is of the people? And uh in eighteen years
Speaker 1: younger than I am. Yeah, no, he really is. Though.
Speaker 1: He's one of those guys who worked out of his garage,
Speaker 1: messing with stuff that interested him and was able to
Speaker 1: leverage that into something that is really taking at least
Speaker 1: one section of the gaming world by storm. So we
Speaker 1: were will be talking a lot about video games, but
Speaker 1: in this case, it's a it's a peripheral for video games.
Speaker 1: So all of you people out there who hate video
Speaker 1: game topics, this is still cool. It's virtual reality. Now,
Speaker 1: before we get into a discussion about Oculus Rift and particularly,
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention just sort of a history of
Speaker 1: virtual reality. Uh, kind of Jonathan's history of virtual reality.
Speaker 1: So this isn't in our notes or anything. This is
Speaker 1: from my own personal, completely unofficial. He is making it
Speaker 1: up as he goes along. Dinosaurs will be involved, Okay,
Speaker 1: well actually yes, well technically it's not a dinosaur. Pterodactyl
Speaker 1: is not a dinosaur, but it's close. Um so virtual reality.
Speaker 1: For those of you who were alive in the nineties
Speaker 1: and remember this kind of stuff that it started to
Speaker 1: really kind of get buzz in the early to mid nineties.
Speaker 1: This was one of those terms that was promising to
Speaker 1: turn computing on its head. It was changing the way
Speaker 1: we thought about computers. It was gonna be immersive. You
Speaker 1: were going to be surrounded by the computer data. You
Speaker 1: would be part of this experience. It would no longer
Speaker 1: be this separation that was created by a screen and
Speaker 1: a keyboard and a mouse. And this was partially due
Speaker 1: to science fiction. It was largely due to science fiction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because because the actual technology at the time was not
Speaker 1: not up to part none, none, up to the expectations
Speaker 1: that were generated as a result of both science fiction. Also,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously Hollywood had a big deal with how
Speaker 1: this was portrayed and and it was never really realistic
Speaker 1: in the Hollywood version. Also, if you watch any of
Speaker 1: those movies that had a lot of virtual reality elements
Speaker 1: to them, they look awful by today's standards. When you
Speaker 1: talk about the graphics quality, well, there were showcases of
Speaker 1: that early computer generated right, but it was still even
Speaker 1: though they look horrible by today's standards, they still looked
Speaker 1: amazing compared to what was capable what we were capable
Speaker 1: of doing with virtual reality at that time. Also, it
Speaker 1: was really expensive because this was all a technology that
Speaker 1: had to be built from the ground up, specifically for
Speaker 1: the purpose of virtual reality. Now here's a hard, cold
Speaker 1: fact about technology. If you're designing something that is brand new,
Speaker 1: as in no one has built this kind of stuff before,
Speaker 1: there's a huge amount of money that goes into that
Speaker 1: to to build them development enormous amount of money, and
Speaker 1: virtual reality did not you know, it generated a lot
Speaker 1: of buzz, which was good in the early days, but
Speaker 1: then the reaction to what was actually possible was such
Speaker 1: that a lot of that interest and a lot of
Speaker 1: the support drained away very very quickly. So you're left
Speaker 1: with these people who were doing valuable work in the
Speaker 1: field of virtual reality. But because there was this bubble
Speaker 1: that burst early on in the development of the technology
Speaker 1: itself and the industry, they were left with very little
Speaker 1: to work with once that bubble went away. So also,
Speaker 1: I feel like at the time, people we were focused
Speaker 1: on the entertainment issues of it and weren't really thinking
Speaker 1: forward to UMU, to the possible medical purposing and and
Speaker 1: therapy purposing. At least anyone outside the actual industry was
Speaker 1: not seeing those that. You know, there were people who
Speaker 1: were working in the industry who's actually saw some really
Speaker 1: cool applications, some of which we have actually seen happen
Speaker 1: over the course of the several years that have in
Speaker 1: between when virtual reality was a buzzword and today. But
Speaker 1: people who were looking at it from the outside, the
Speaker 1: general consumer, they were looking at it as video games
Speaker 1: or sometimes you know, I think it got pigeonholed, is
Speaker 1: all I'm saying. Yeah, there were there was a smaller,
Speaker 1: smaller segment who were thinking virtual sex and uh, but
Speaker 1: I mean those were like the those were like the
Speaker 1: two applications. It was either you were playing a game
Speaker 1: or you were having some sort of weird virtual romantic
Speaker 1: internal Yeah. Yeah, that that's scene in Demolition Man happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a thing. Yeah, yes, it was a thing.
Speaker 1: Uh if you if you haven't seen that, I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily recommend it for for a snipe Sander Bullock picture.
Speaker 1: You know it's it's it's fun. It's a fun film.
Speaker 1: I'm not anyway. So anyway, getting getting back into virtual
Speaker 1: reality so to speak. Uh So, as time went on,
Speaker 1: the virtual reality community began to really like the people
Speaker 1: who are really working on trying to develop things like
Speaker 1: sophisticated head tracking technology, sophisticated display technology, and input various
Speaker 1: user interfaces. Uh. What they began to do was they
Speaker 1: began to appropriate stuff from other industries, mostly the video
Speaker 1: game industry, because video games were progressing and they were
Speaker 1: starting to introduce new types of controllers. So, for example,
Speaker 1: when the Nintendo WE launched and they had the WE
Speaker 1: control with the multiple access gyroscopes in it that allowed
Speaker 1: for very specific kinds of interaction with the console, the
Speaker 1: video or the virtual environment. By now it's called virtual
Speaker 1: environment's not virtual reality. Because virtual reality had sort of
Speaker 1: a stigma attached to it. The virtual environment. People were thinking,
Speaker 1: why don't we take that, like literally, We'll go out
Speaker 1: and buy a Nintendo WE and take apart the controller
Speaker 1: and use the technology in the controller to help develop
Speaker 1: our stuff because it's less expensive than developing one on
Speaker 1: our own or buying one of these very specific types
Speaker 1: of parts that are only made for virtual reality. So
Speaker 1: that kind of sets the scene for what happens with
Speaker 1: the Oculus Rift. So let's go and first we'll just
Speaker 1: talk about what the Oculus Rift is. It is a
Speaker 1: headset that has two screens in the headset, one screen
Speaker 1: for each eye. The two screens both render a very
Speaker 1: similar image from a from a game. Yeah, on casual glance,
Speaker 1: you would think that it's the same picture, but they're
Speaker 1: from very very slightly different angles, just like your eyes
Speaker 1: are to right right to to give the illusion of
Speaker 1: depth when your brain puts the two inches together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk more about what's actually going on there
Speaker 1: a little bit later in the podcast. So it's this
Speaker 1: headset and it has motion tracking. Uh so essentially your
Speaker 1: head's motions are interpreted by by hardware in this headset
Speaker 1: sent to a computer that is taking that as input
Speaker 1: and then processing it within a game engine of some
Speaker 1: sort and sending back the response so that the images
Speaker 1: you see are based upon the movements you're making. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean that's basic head tracking technology. But it was,
Speaker 1: and it's this is this is what's interesting to me.
Speaker 1: This is not new, Like I said this, this started
Speaker 1: way back in the nine needs, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the software side was very primitive, and so the pictures
Speaker 1: you would get would be very very basic. Like when
Speaker 1: I said that whole pterodactyl thing. One of the early
Speaker 1: games was your this blocky figure moving around a blocky
Speaker 1: landscape being chased by a blocky pterodactyl and you had
Speaker 1: to just kind of run around and try and shoot
Speaker 1: other people using a blocky gun that fired get ready
Speaker 1: for it. Blocks. Uh, it was not it was not
Speaker 1: that immersive. I mean, it was interesting that your head
Speaker 1: could move, you know you it did track your motions,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't immersive in the sense that you felt
Speaker 1: anything was realistic. And there was a latency issue. And
Speaker 1: we'll talk about latency later. To latency is like the
Speaker 1: death sentence for virtual reality systems. So, uh, it wasn't
Speaker 1: a new idea, but this was a new way of
Speaker 1: of approaching it, and it was all made possible by
Speaker 1: other industries. It wasn't the fact that the virtual reality
Speaker 1: industry had advanced to a huge degree. It was because
Speaker 1: of things like smartphones and tablets. So let's talk about um,
Speaker 1: kind of one of the most famous failures in virtual
Speaker 1: reality first, because because this is one that uh the
Speaker 1: founder of Oculus Palmer Lucky has mentioned before, which is
Speaker 1: also from Nintendo. Yeah, the Virtual Boy. Back in nine.
Speaker 1: This was one that the little headset would display red
Speaker 1: vector graphics. I think maybe not the first, but one
Speaker 1: of the first games to feature Warrio was on the
Speaker 1: Virtual Boy. Uh, so he was able to survive Virtual Boy,
Speaker 1: even if the product itself did not survive very long.
Speaker 1: Time magazine gave it a review that was not positive.
Speaker 1: They actually said that, uh, that it was migrain inducing
Speaker 1: and uh and so there was a lot of bad
Speaker 1: press about the Virtual Boy and it didn't sell terribly well.
Speaker 1: It was one of the tech's biggest flops. I remember
Speaker 1: it being a blip on on on my radar and
Speaker 1: then almost immediately disappearing right up there with the Nintendo
Speaker 1: Power Glove. Oh yeah, if you had the Power Glove
Speaker 1: and a Virtual Boy, you are a huge Nintendo fan.
Speaker 1: You look like a cyborg, but you're probably throwing up
Speaker 1: a lot and you maybe had two games to play. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's also true, so Palmer Lucky. He looks back on
Speaker 1: this history of virtual reality and he is absolutely fascinated
Speaker 1: by it and wants to get involved in it. But
Speaker 1: let's learn a little bit more about who he is. First,
Speaker 1: Like you said, Lauren, he's twenty years old right as
Speaker 1: of right this very moment. Um He's uh, he's he's
Speaker 1: from Irvine, California. Um, he self identifies as a hacker
Speaker 1: maker both both at the same time. Probably. Um. He
Speaker 1: was homeschooled. His dad's a car salesman, I believe. Okay,
Speaker 1: he went to as you know, he for school for
Speaker 1: for college. He was actually studying journalism. He in fact
Speaker 1: said that one of the things he wanted to do.
Speaker 1: He was always interested in taking things apart and learning
Speaker 1: how they worked and then trying to put them back together.
Speaker 1: And you know, he had kind of typical smart kids
Speaker 1: success rate at things still working when they were put
Speaker 1: back together after he had taken him apart. But he um,
Speaker 1: he said that he wanted to go to journalism school
Speaker 1: to learn to become a writer so that he could
Speaker 1: tell people he could write articles, like really good articles
Speaker 1: to explain how stuff works. He wanted my job, Palmer
Speaker 1: Lucky wanted my job. Well, I'm really glad that he
Speaker 1: took his own job instead of ours. Yeah, because we'd
Speaker 1: be all of a job and neither of us would
Speaker 1: have invented the oculus rift fact. Yeah, because he his
Speaker 1: plan b ended up ended up being a lot more successful.
Speaker 1: Being pretty okay, Um, but yeah, he was. He was.
Speaker 1: He was into some some interesting pursuits as a child. Yeah,
Speaker 1: originally it was all about blowing stuff up, shocking stuff
Speaker 1: or setting it on fire, like like like Tesla coil guns.
Speaker 1: I read about some way coil guns. He built coil
Speaker 1: guns as a kid. He actually said at one in
Speaker 1: one interviews, it's a miracle I am still alive because
Speaker 1: he was building stuff like anything that would involve destruction
Speaker 1: through electronics was really fascinating to him. Typical kids can't
Speaker 1: can't blame him, you know, like probably like some little
Speaker 1: I don't want to be an armchair psychologist. But in
Speaker 1: general I notice that kids and I do not I
Speaker 1: don't separate myself from here, have occasionally power fantasies because
Speaker 1: so much of their life is Hell's determined by other
Speaker 1: people exactly, So this is sort of a self determination,
Speaker 1: self empowerment kind of things. Some of us focus on
Speaker 1: dinosaurs because dinosaurs are bigger than our parents and therefore
Speaker 1: are more powerful. Some of us focus on tesla coil
Speaker 1: guns that can melt our parents faces off if we
Speaker 1: ever had that desire, which, by the way, he did not.
Speaker 1: Let's be clear, he was not. He was not planning
Speaker 1: on on zapping people. He just wanted to build stuff anyway,
Speaker 1: well as far as we know, but he did. He
Speaker 1: did wind up doing something constructive as well. He uh,
Speaker 1: he started up an iPhone repair business, didn't he. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he sure did. As a teenager, he began to eat
Speaker 1: when the iPhone came out, he was fascinated with that. Immediately,
Speaker 1: he took one apart and learned really what made it work.
Speaker 1: And so he because of his his practical knowledge of
Speaker 1: electronics that was, you know, largely self taught, he ended
Speaker 1: up having a successful iPhone repair business. He also would
Speaker 1: jail break people's iPhones, so if they wanted to have
Speaker 1: an iPhone that could run other types of stuff on
Speaker 1: it that rather than just what Apple would allow you
Speaker 1: to run a boot with whatever. Yeah, he would actually
Speaker 1: do that for a fee, and apparently it was pretty successful.
Speaker 1: So so successful that he might have made around thirty
Speaker 1: six thousand dollars in a single year, which you know,
Speaker 1: as a teenager is a pretty good many humans. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty good salary for for for something like this
Speaker 1: is this is his version of a lemonade stand. That's
Speaker 1: a pretty successful lemonade stand. Yes, as of two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: when he was sixteen, I believe that was when he
Speaker 1: began looking into purchasing virtual reality equipment. That's when he
Speaker 1: kind of had had had been online and had seen
Speaker 1: some stuff and was getting interested in the subject, right
Speaker 1: and and that was also he's done interviews where he's
Speaker 1: talked about how the industry changed dramatically, Like back in
Speaker 1: the early days. Besides things like Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which
Speaker 1: were really the exception, those were the few. There were
Speaker 1: only a few things that were ever consumer based technologies
Speaker 1: that the average person was would be expected to purchase
Speaker 1: right right, even today a few years later, the very
Speaker 1: low end virtual reality equipment runs around a thousand bucks
Speaker 1: of pop I think um and and a lot of
Speaker 1: it um. A lot of the more professional gear was
Speaker 1: running up near a hundred thousand bucks. In fact, one
Speaker 1: of the things he found he found a piece of
Speaker 1: virtual reality equipment that was pretty rare at the time
Speaker 1: it was first produced cost ninety seven thousand dollars. He
Speaker 1: bought it for eighty seven bucks because, again, the VR
Speaker 1: industry just kind of out. Yeah, so he was really
Speaker 1: interested to seeing, you know, in seeing how these things worked,
Speaker 1: how did they track head head motion, how did they
Speaker 1: feed video in? And a lot of these early early
Speaker 1: VR equipment pieces are enormous, right, They require things like
Speaker 1: some kind of rig exactly, they require a rig so
Speaker 1: that their support because if you were to just wear
Speaker 1: it yourself, it would be so heavy as to be uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Some of them would be too heavy for you to
Speaker 1: even effectively move your head. So a lot of them
Speaker 1: would have these rigs that would allow you to have
Speaker 1: suspension from from like uh uh, not the ceiling, but
Speaker 1: it would the rig itself would extend beyond where you
Speaker 1: would stand, and there'd be chords that would help support
Speaker 1: the weight of the helmet, so you wouldn't have full
Speaker 1: three sixty degree motion either. If you were to try
Speaker 1: and turn all the way around, eventually those those cords
Speaker 1: are start to wrap up, yeah, and you'd have to
Speaker 1: turn back the other way. So he was interested in
Speaker 1: purchasing as many of these as possible to learn what
Speaker 1: made him tick. Yeah, he he was thinking about creating
Speaker 1: more immersive game interfaces and uh and and experiences and
Speaker 1: but but none of this stuff was really what he
Speaker 1: was looking for. He was he was kind of hoping
Speaker 1: to to salvage something together for himself, honestly, and um,
Speaker 1: and none of it was working, right, So, but he
Speaker 1: learned a lot during this period, Yeah, and um. And
Speaker 1: as of twenty eleven, he was working at the University
Speaker 1: of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, which I believe
Speaker 1: is in military associated facility from a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff they did was for the military Specifically, he was
Speaker 1: working in the Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Program UM, sometimes
Speaker 1: called virtual IRAQ, which helps veterans who have PTSD use
Speaker 1: VR therapy to to get over their post traumatic stress disorder. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, this is one of the most fascinating uses
Speaker 1: for virtual reality. And I've I've actually talked to there
Speaker 1: was Um, there are people over at Emery, and there
Speaker 1: are people over at Duke who run labs that use
Speaker 1: this kind of approach, and I've talked about it for
Speaker 1: use with PTSD have also talked about it for use
Speaker 1: with things like phobias, and the idea is it's this
Speaker 1: immersion therapy where you immerse a person into certain situations
Speaker 1: that might trigger anxiety or stress, but they are they
Speaker 1: know that they are in a safe environment. They know
Speaker 1: ultimately deep down that they are perfectly safe, that they
Speaker 1: are not really in that. But it's immersive enough for
Speaker 1: people who have a severe fear of flying. I've heard
Speaker 1: that it's extremely successful, something something along the lines of
Speaker 1: you could do a virtual visit to an airport. And
Speaker 1: the interesting thing here is that the scientists have discovered
Speaker 1: that the graphics do not have to be photo realistic
Speaker 1: at all. They don't have to be you know, to
Speaker 1: the point where you would look at something and think
Speaker 1: that's identifiable as Dullest International Airport, for example. You look
Speaker 1: at and just say, there's a building and there's the
Speaker 1: representation of a plane next to it, that's the airport.
Speaker 1: And once you get into the immersive environment, which usually
Speaker 1: takes around half a minute to a minute long for
Speaker 1: you to really get acclimated, assuming that everything is working
Speaker 1: properly on the technical end, then you start to have
Speaker 1: the actual physical reactions you would if you were in
Speaker 1: the real situation. So, for example, one about a fear
Speaker 1: of heights. I remember specifically reading about this, actually talking
Speaker 1: about this to some of the people at Duke and
Speaker 1: Emory Um. You might have a simulation where you're on
Speaker 1: the top of a tall building. The building does not
Speaker 1: necessarily look like a real building. I mean, it might
Speaker 1: look like almost a cartoonish example, but the person would
Speaker 1: start to have that same physiological response as if they
Speaker 1: were in the real situation. And it was part of
Speaker 1: this this uh, this therapy to expose oneself to these
Speaker 1: situations in a safe environment to get acclimated. It's the
Speaker 1: psychological principle of facing your fears. Essentially. There's there's a
Speaker 1: lot more technical terminology I won't go and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of other elements to this therapy.
Speaker 1: Obviously that you don't want it to just be cruel
Speaker 1: and be like, hey, I heard you're scared of spiders.
Speaker 1: Here's a big harry spider. That's not that's not therapy.
Speaker 1: That's cruelty. It's it's extremely guided therapy and and there
Speaker 1: are many parts of it and uh, but but but
Speaker 1: it's excellent, really interesting work. Yeah, and so Lucky was
Speaker 1: working on this. He was, this was part of the
Speaker 1: stuff that that he was involved in. And he he
Speaker 1: will be the first to tell you, by the way,
Speaker 1: he's a hardware guy, he's not a software guy. And
Speaker 1: in fact, there's some great interviews that he's done with
Speaker 1: other members of the software community, of the video game
Speaker 1: community where he says the success of the Oculus Rift,
Speaker 1: the early success that has had before, it's not even
Speaker 1: a consumer product yet as of the recording of this podcast.
Speaker 1: It's there's developer kits that are out and that's about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you cannot you cannot as a consumer by this and
Speaker 1: expect to use it. With a ton of games there
Speaker 1: right now, there are two games that are really I
Speaker 1: think I think three as as of this podcast. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the third one has has recently joined in the
Speaker 1: past week. But it's not like you can't plug it
Speaker 1: into your console either. This is PC only right now,
Speaker 1: with the hope that maybe one day it'll it'll be
Speaker 1: available for multiple platforms any rate. He he actually says, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, point blank. He says, the success of this
Speaker 1: would not exist without the software side. But that's not
Speaker 1: my world. I can't program I can build this hardware.
Speaker 1: So uh he he really was using that expertise while
Speaker 1: working over at the Southern California's Institute for Creative Technology, right,
Speaker 1: and he threw I think that he was a member
Speaker 1: of a couple of forums, the names of which I
Speaker 1: am completely forgetting. So somebody right in and tell me
Speaker 1: correct my complete lack of a word to give you,
Speaker 1: Mr Lucky. First of all, I object to have to
Speaker 1: call you Mr. You're eighteen years younger than I am.
Speaker 1: But if you're listening, just to just right in and
Speaker 1: tell us what they were. Um. And he developed this
Speaker 1: plan um too. You know, he really wanted to to
Speaker 1: build a kind of kind of a personal hobbyist kit
Speaker 1: of VR headsets and do it yourself. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: so he planned a Kickstarter to just create a hundred
Speaker 1: enthusiast kits. Um you know that that you know, contributors
Speaker 1: would would get the pieces of a virtual reality headset
Speaker 1: and put it together themselves and be able to play
Speaker 1: around with it. And um. But but this got the
Speaker 1: attention of John Carmack. Yeah. And if you don't know
Speaker 1: that name, then you haven't been playing a lot of
Speaker 1: ID Softwares games. Yes, he's the co founder of ID Software.
Speaker 1: He was the lead programmer on like Wolfenstein three D
Speaker 1: and games Okay it was a series and was just
Speaker 1: the first one. Wasn't a very good quake player. So like,
Speaker 1: once multiplayer got into introduced and I realized that, hey,
Speaker 1: people react very differently than computer controlled bad guys, my
Speaker 1: my kill death ratio was out the window. Oh I'm not.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying is I'm not good at these games,
Speaker 1: and what and what and furthermore, that you don't like
Speaker 1: games that you can't be better than other people at.
Speaker 1: Oh I hate that. That's just in general. By the way,
Speaker 1: if you ever have the opportunity to play a game
Speaker 1: with me, just turn it down. Just and I'm including
Speaker 1: like board games, card games, maybe a role playing game
Speaker 1: that did I mean, if you're playing clue, do you
Speaker 1: just flip the table at some point? Actually I'm very
Speaker 1: good at Clue. I am really good at Clue. But
Speaker 1: so he got the attention of John Krmack, um and
Speaker 1: uh and and and and Karmack was kind of like, hey,
Speaker 1: so this is pretty cool. Can I buy one of
Speaker 1: these kids from you? And and Lucky was like, I
Speaker 1: can give you one of those, no problem. Um so
Speaker 1: so Lucky said him a prototype, and Karmac just ran
Speaker 1: with it. He demoed it um with a Doom three
Speaker 1: b f g at E three right, and that that
Speaker 1: made everybody think, Wow, I have never experienced doom like this.
Speaker 1: This is a really immersive first person shooter experience. The
Speaker 1: VR is working. Uh, it is exciting. Where can I
Speaker 1: get one of these? Right? It exploded and I mean
Speaker 1: everyone was excited about it. Yeah. So uh, you know,
Speaker 1: getting back to this idea of the developer kit one units,
Speaker 1: what that reminds me of is Wozniak in jobs, because
Speaker 1: the very first Apple computer was essentially the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing, like we'll send you the parts, you build
Speaker 1: a case, and you've got yourself a computer. That was
Speaker 1: the Apple one. So that's exactly what Palm are Lucky was.
Speaker 1: He that was kind of like that was He was like,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be like a little side hobby for me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do this. And at this point where
Speaker 1: the press gets a chance to see it and Karmack
Speaker 1: he sees the potential for this well beyond a hobbyist
Speaker 1: you know, tiny tiny project. He sees this has potential
Speaker 1: to be a legitimate video game peripheral and this was
Speaker 1: a goofy prototype. I mean there, you know it's I'm
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that he was like duct taping straps
Speaker 1: to it so that people could demo it at E three.
Speaker 1: So right, this was a little jankie. I like to say, yes,
Speaker 1: that is the technical professional term. So what was Lucky's
Speaker 1: reaction to this sudden increase and interest and the possibility
Speaker 1: of actually having a feasible company as a result. Um,
Speaker 1: basically he dropped out of the journalism program at Cali
Speaker 1: State University. Not a surprise. That's following in the footsteps
Speaker 1: of so many giants in the technology industry. By the way,
Speaker 1: staying school kids, not all of us can be Palmer Lucky,
Speaker 1: right right. If you are Palmer Lucky, go ahead. But
Speaker 1: I mean, if you have a genuinely terrific idea that
Speaker 1: has gotten someone of the ilk of John Carmack interested
Speaker 1: in you, that by all means with life's responsibilities like
Speaker 1: I am. But but so from from this response at
Speaker 1: E three, um, you know a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the industry started getting into it, and um, and as
Speaker 1: soon as they did, he started Lucky started taking prototypes
Speaker 1: to other folks like like the people at Valve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Gabe Newell example, and uh and and got people like
Speaker 1: Gabe Newell to participate in this new Kickstarter project that
Speaker 1: he was putting together for what we know as the
Speaker 1: Oculus Rift today. Yeah, so this is really the founding
Speaker 1: of Oculus as a company. So Oculus is the company
Speaker 1: that is creating the Oculus Rift. And in fact, you
Speaker 1: can think of the Oculus Rift as being their first
Speaker 1: product and um and so now the plan had changed.
Speaker 1: It was no longer going to be let's offer up
Speaker 1: one hundred dev kits that this one guy is personally
Speaker 1: putting all the pieces together, putting them in a box
Speaker 1: and shipping them off to the hundred or so people
Speaker 1: that have backed it. Now it's let's put together a
Speaker 1: plan to create a more um slightly not a consumer
Speaker 1: level product, because it's still like if you take a
Speaker 1: look at one of the Oculus Rifts headsets, it does
Speaker 1: not look like like a finished product. Yeah it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It's not sleek and sexy. It's exciting to use, but
Speaker 1: when you look at your like, wow, it looks like
Speaker 1: a black box that you strapped to your face. It
Speaker 1: is because it is, Yeah, that's what it is it's
Speaker 1: not it's not something that you would think, oh, this
Speaker 1: is something that you could easily market beyond this niche audience. Right.
Speaker 1: The Kickstart fund was for development kits, right. So the
Speaker 1: goal of that Kickstart fund was about two was exactly
Speaker 1: two D fifty thousand dollars, two hundred fifty dollars. So, Lauren,
Speaker 1: tell me did they make it? They made it times ten,
Speaker 1: approximately twenty four hours they had already made the god
Speaker 1: and then went went on to raise precisely two million,
Speaker 1: four D seven thousand, four hundred dollars. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a lot of money they brought in and that yeah,
Speaker 1: so's it makes it one of kickstars big success stories,
Speaker 1: right right up there with some of the I mean
Speaker 1: clearly not on the level of say the pebble, but
Speaker 1: it's it's way up there. It's it's on the it's
Speaker 1: on the Holy Cow, look at what's possible into the
Speaker 1: spectrum as opposed to the ah. So that's what really
Speaker 1: happens when you yes, yeah, they they wind up having
Speaker 1: UM nine thousand two backers, over seven thousand of those
Speaker 1: where development kit purchases. Right, So it was only at
Speaker 1: certain levels or above that you would actually get a
Speaker 1: developer receive a k R. Yeah, the first one hundred
Speaker 1: people to pledge at the two level to understan five
Speaker 1: dollar level would receive a developer kit at at a
Speaker 1: discount because the developer kits in general go at three pop. Right,
Speaker 1: that's how much they are currently selling for on on
Speaker 1: their side. If you go to oculacy, you can, by
Speaker 1: the way, if you want to, you can buy one
Speaker 1: of these anyone, but you don't have to have some
Speaker 1: kind of paperwork. You don't need to know that the
Speaker 1: password is sword fish. You know, you don't need to
Speaker 1: know what do you still recommend receiving a Rabies shot? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm kidding. No, No, Rabies is associated with oculus raft
Speaker 1: that I'm personally where so far when we get that
Speaker 1: to the eight Days Later video game, you know they'll
Speaker 1: be rage. But at any rate, Yeah, get some stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know in here, uh plug Yeah,
Speaker 1: the three So you can actually buy one of these yourself.
Speaker 1: But if you do that, you do that knowing that
Speaker 1: your your actual use of it's going to be pretty
Speaker 1: limited if you're not a developer. If you are a
Speaker 1: developer and you want to practice, you know, try and
Speaker 1: create stuff that works with the Oculus Rift. Clearly, that's
Speaker 1: an investment that would make sense for you if you're
Speaker 1: an average gamer, unless you are intending to play one
Speaker 1: of the three titles that is currently compatible with the
Speaker 1: Oculus Rift, it doesn't make sense because it's not, like
Speaker 1: we said, it's not at consumer product level yet. This
Speaker 1: is this is on the way to becoming a consumer product. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so after after one d people could back at the
Speaker 1: two level, that was it. It was sort of an
Speaker 1: early bird special and if you weren't part of that,
Speaker 1: then you had to go at three hundred dollars or
Speaker 1: higher to get at least one headset. At the higher
Speaker 1: levels you could actually get more than one headset at
Speaker 1: a discount. So the solution here to to creating a
Speaker 1: viable product is the partnership with developers, the partnership with
Speaker 1: game companies, because this is kind of like a specialized
Speaker 1: video display that only works with stuff that's been built
Speaker 1: to work with it. So it's not again, it's not
Speaker 1: like you can just plug it in and run any
Speaker 1: kind of software and then you are in the middle
Speaker 1: of it. It has to be optimized for it. And
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about why when we get into how
Speaker 1: it's actually working. But always important to remind people because
Speaker 1: it is an exciting thing. But I don't want everyone
Speaker 1: running out and dropping three dollars and then being disappointed
Speaker 1: that they can't play you know, Super Mario and be
Speaker 1: running through and knocking the blocks. Although that would be awesome,
Speaker 1: That would be awesome. Uh So moving on, Uh, the
Speaker 1: Kickstarter campaign was a success. We could say that, I
Speaker 1: think that's safe to say, it's safe to call it that,
Speaker 1: and he Lucky would continue to show this off at
Speaker 1: various conferences and conventions. I first heard about this when
Speaker 1: they showed it off at C E S. I might
Speaker 1: have heard about it once or twice beforehand, but I
Speaker 1: I knew that it was present at the showroom floor
Speaker 1: at C Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to play
Speaker 1: with it. Then. I didn't get a chance to play
Speaker 1: with it until three played the heck out of it. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah that that that kick started campaign had run from
Speaker 1: August to September. So yeah, so so moving up to
Speaker 1: when um, they were they were just going like, we
Speaker 1: have all the money, and we have all the support
Speaker 1: and and let us let us and then they got
Speaker 1: then they ended up getting that the additional private support,
Speaker 1: as well as more orders that came in after the
Speaker 1: Kickstarter was complete. Um atteen they beat out both the
Speaker 1: PS four and the Xbox One for the Best Hardware
Speaker 1: Peripheral Game Critics Award. Not surprising, it's it's got a
Speaker 1: lot of potential, and beyond just the virtual reality realm,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people who are interested in
Speaker 1: in appropriating some of the same sort of technologies that
Speaker 1: Lucky used to create augmented reality headsets. So this would
Speaker 1: be more like the what we hear about the potential
Speaker 1: for Google Glass or other various glasses that are supposed
Speaker 1: to incorporate augmented reality. At some point they're talking about
Speaker 1: using something along the same lines as the technology used
Speaker 1: for the Oculus Rift. Not clearly the way the Oculus
Speaker 1: Rift is created with these these screens, the solid screens
Speaker 1: in front of your face, that's not ideal for augmented
Speaker 1: reality glasses. If you're gonna be moving around in the
Speaker 1: real world, because you're not gonna see you're gonna see
Speaker 1: a video representation of the real world directly in front
Speaker 1: of you. I think most people would imagine that the
Speaker 1: augmented reality version would include clear display that you could
Speaker 1: see stuff printed on I could I could see a
Speaker 1: very similar set of technologies going towards that kind of display. Um.
Speaker 1: But but but we'll get into the factual technic stuff.
Speaker 1: And just so some other interesting developments happened that one
Speaker 1: of them absolutely tragic. That happened just before E three
Speaker 1: June one. Yeah, that's when Andrew Rice, who was one
Speaker 1: of the graphics engineers, one of the original team members
Speaker 1: at Oculus, was involved in a car accident. He was
Speaker 1: it was actually the car was fleeing a police chase
Speaker 1: when it collided with him, and uh and he passed
Speaker 1: away as a result of that accident. And I mean
Speaker 1: that was obviously this was a very tight small development team,
Speaker 1: right It's it's still, um I believe under thirty people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's tiny. Or when you're talking about something
Speaker 1: that has it's raising sixteen million dollars and has this
Speaker 1: kind of reach, right exactly. So that obviously that was
Speaker 1: felt deeply within their their own company and across the community.
Speaker 1: And this was the other thing about Oculus, was that,
Speaker 1: uh and and something they continued to do. They update regularly,
Speaker 1: They blog about the development process, they blog about the
Speaker 1: people involved, So there were backers who felt, you know,
Speaker 1: personal connection, So that was that was a very tragic
Speaker 1: moment um. They also on August seven, so not too
Speaker 1: long before we record this podcast. We're recording this in
Speaker 1: on August fifteen. Um. And uh, but on August seven,
Speaker 1: John Carmack stopped becoming just an evangelist for the company
Speaker 1: and started to work for the company as the chief
Speaker 1: technology officer in fact, yep ct O. And uh he
Speaker 1: also is uh still continuing his work with other companies
Speaker 1: as well. It's not like he's quit everything just to
Speaker 1: work exclusively for Oculus, but now he is on the
Speaker 1: company payroll. And yeah, as of July, they had seventeen
Speaker 1: thousand developer kits out, so they were actually delivering upon
Speaker 1: the backing. That's thing else I should point out. Because
Speaker 1: their Kickstarter Kickster has a little bit of a I
Speaker 1: don't know if if you could say that Kickster has
Speaker 1: a tarnished reputation, but certain the idea of having a
Speaker 1: Kickstarter campaign has a little bit of a tarnished reputation
Speaker 1: only because there have been cases, particularly when it comes
Speaker 1: to something like promising a particular type of technology, where
Speaker 1: the delivery has either been delayed or even canceled, and
Speaker 1: it has caused, uh, people to kind of have a
Speaker 1: negative reaction to Kickstarter in general. So this is actually
Speaker 1: a positive story in the sense that here's a company
Speaker 1: that held the Kickstarter campaign unless than a year later
Speaker 1: according to their website, like yesterday. If if you buy
Speaker 1: a dev kit right now, it'll be shipping sometime in September.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty quick turnaround considering that this is still
Speaker 1: I'm sure this is still one of those things that
Speaker 1: doesn't have a truly seamless manufacturing process yet because it's
Speaker 1: still in the developers um and and they are set
Speaker 1: to open a Dallas office very soon. Ye possibly right now.
Speaker 1: Go check you're in Dallas. Let's know if it's open yet. Yes.
Speaker 1: So now let's talk about how this crazy thing works.
Speaker 1: We mentioned a little bit about it already. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: way that you see in three D vision with your
Speaker 1: eyeballs is that is that you know they're they're slightly offset.
Speaker 1: They are not in the exact same place on your face.
Speaker 1: Because we can't be a cyclops. You could be if
Speaker 1: you really tried, yeah, or film the misfortune befel you. Yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: this this does happen to to to some people. There
Speaker 1: there are many medical conditions in which you only have
Speaker 1: the use of one eye, and and that is where
Speaker 1: you do not get stereoscopic stereo. You know, in can
Speaker 1: duel yes, um and uh and yes so so so
Speaker 1: combining two images that are very slightly offset, your brain goes,
Speaker 1: I can, I can see this in three dimensions. Right,
Speaker 1: So instead of us both getting two sets of images,
Speaker 1: that remain two sets of images in our brains, which
Speaker 1: would be kind of an interesting experience, I'm sure, but
Speaker 1: also maybe disorienting. Uh. This this two sets of data
Speaker 1: get combined into one set, and that's what we think
Speaker 1: of as the world around us as far as vision
Speaker 1: is concerned. So this helps us judge things like how
Speaker 1: close or far away an object is. There are other
Speaker 1: things that helped to like like just just comparing the
Speaker 1: size of something, Like I know that that Josh Clark
Speaker 1: is taller than Lauren. So if I look and I
Speaker 1: see that Lauren appears to be taller than Josh, I
Speaker 1: know that Josh is approximately a mile away and Lauren's
Speaker 1: probably in front of me. Uh, that's just la that's
Speaker 1: a science fact. Actually, you make old jokes. I make
Speaker 1: short jokes, uh um and and and this is also
Speaker 1: how how a lot of special effects end up working
Speaker 1: by by tricking your brain into into thinking of the
Speaker 1: force perspective perspective. So Lord of the Rings in the Hobbit,
Speaker 1: obviously those are ones that you would think about where
Speaker 1: where because because the video itself is being shown to
Speaker 1: you on a two dimensional well until we get to
Speaker 1: the three D movies, and on a two dimensional surface,
Speaker 1: you can trick people by having this forced perspective thing.
Speaker 1: But in in an actual world situation, because you've got
Speaker 1: these converging lines of sight on objects, you can use
Speaker 1: what is called parallax. That's the idea of these two
Speaker 1: lines that eventually do converge onto something that give you
Speaker 1: an idea. Yeah, and and that's your focal point that
Speaker 1: gives you an idea of how how close or far
Speaker 1: away something is. The further away an object gets, the
Speaker 1: more parallel these two lines become, so that it becomes
Speaker 1: less of a useful um tool for things that are
Speaker 1: really far away. So if you're talking about two buildings
Speaker 1: that are way off in the distance, you might not
Speaker 1: be able to tell which one is larger just based
Speaker 1: on that alone. Without you know, previous knowledge of building
Speaker 1: A is twice the size of building B. But if
Speaker 1: it's closer to you, parallax comes into play. So that's
Speaker 1: the idea, right. Each screen gives a slightly different view
Speaker 1: of whatever it is you're looking at in the realm
Speaker 1: of the virtual environment, which in this case are games
Speaker 1: and uh and that way, it gives you the illusion
Speaker 1: that it's that you are right there and that the
Speaker 1: world you are in actually has depth. Now, there's no
Speaker 1: eye tracking software here, but there is head tracking hardware, right,
Speaker 1: So it's not it's not keeping track of where your
Speaker 1: eye motions are so you can look around. It's not
Speaker 1: like if you're wearing just goggles. The goggles themselves aren't
Speaker 1: tracking your eyes, but they will move as you know,
Speaker 1: if you as you move the direction of your face,
Speaker 1: same sort of thing. So it's using sensors to detect
Speaker 1: that kind of motion, whether it's pitch, roll yaw, tilt,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. It's detecting all of that
Speaker 1: as as input for changing the way the display appears
Speaker 1: in front of you. This display being an LCD screen
Speaker 1: in a plastic mask, it's it's about an inch away
Speaker 1: from the user's eyes. And um and right that that
Speaker 1: that screen is is divided by a small berry. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty big screen. I think it's like a like
Speaker 1: a hundred and ten degrees diagonally. We'll get into that
Speaker 1: in a second. But it uses a few other tricks
Speaker 1: to create realism as well, Like it warps slightly the
Speaker 1: edges of the images and corrects that in the goggles
Speaker 1: a little bit. So, uh, you know, the digital rendering
Speaker 1: I'm saying is is warped a little bit at the edges,
Speaker 1: and then the goggles correct for it, which is basically
Speaker 1: how how your eyeballs work because they're curved, right. The
Speaker 1: idea here being that you don't want it to just
Speaker 1: look like you are, yeah, that you're looking at a
Speaker 1: flat world that has depth behind it, but there's nothing
Speaker 1: around you. It also packs the pixels more tightly directly
Speaker 1: in front of your eyeball than around the edges, which, again,
Speaker 1: because our eyeballs are curved, um, it gives a human
Speaker 1: like round nous to an image. It also helps you know,
Speaker 1: it keeps keeps you motivated to focus directly straight ahead
Speaker 1: with your eyes as opposed to keeping your head still
Speaker 1: and moving your eyes around because it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: mimicking that sense of when I look ahead that whatever
Speaker 1: clear whenever I'm looking at his folk is in focus,
Speaker 1: and then everything else is kind of in peripheral vision,
Speaker 1: petering out a little bit. Sure, Um, there there are
Speaker 1: a few limitations that are currently being addressed. There's a
Speaker 1: certain screen door effect which in which right now users
Speaker 1: have been finding that they can see through the pixels
Speaker 1: of the LCD screen because they're not there's not enough
Speaker 1: of them. They need more needs higher resolution, yes, um
Speaker 1: and uh and I think that they're trying to add
Speaker 1: gays tracking, which would be really interesting. That would allow
Speaker 1: you to actually uh dynamically change these elements we talked
Speaker 1: about where you've got those pixels that are uh in
Speaker 1: the that are concentrated right in front of the eyes.
Speaker 1: If you could be able to move that dynamically so
Speaker 1: that the you would have this effect where if I'm
Speaker 1: I'm walking and I'm not turning my head, but I
Speaker 1: dart my eyes to the left and it is able
Speaker 1: to move in real time with that. Uh. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about prediction software in a bit
Speaker 1: that kind of helps with that. Then that could make
Speaker 1: it even more immersive and more and feel closer to
Speaker 1: being natural in fact. And again, while it's hard to
Speaker 1: say that being in a virtual environment is ever kind
Speaker 1: of a natural thing, after that initial adjustment, you do
Speaker 1: start to feel, you start to move within that virtual environment.
Speaker 1: You don't really necessarily think about your real world surroundings
Speaker 1: as much unless you know something changes that that diverts
Speaker 1: your attention. Say that you have a anxious Jack Russell
Speaker 1: terrier who jumps on your lap. That might you know,
Speaker 1: unless that also has happened at the exact same time
Speaker 1: in the video game that could pull your attention away, right,
Speaker 1: Or let's say that you bang your knee into a
Speaker 1: table because you were walking forward as your character in
Speaker 1: the game Forward. And by the way, there are people
Speaker 1: who are working on various setups that are not meant
Speaker 1: for consumer use either, but they were interested in combining
Speaker 1: the oculus rift with other things so that you would
Speaker 1: have even more immersive control in various games like the
Speaker 1: was the group that did the virtual paper Boy, where
Speaker 1: they had it hooked up to a resistance bike training
Speaker 1: bike where they by peddling the bike, they would propel
Speaker 1: the video game character forward. They had a first person
Speaker 1: perspective as if they were playing paper Boy, but from
Speaker 1: the paper boys point of view, and then they had
Speaker 1: a connect sensor protecting their arm motions to be when
Speaker 1: you fling of newspaper. So what they did was they
Speaker 1: hooked up the Oculus Rift to a an exercise bike,
Speaker 1: resistance training bike, and by peddling the resistance training bike,
Speaker 1: they propelled the virtual character forward. And then they had
Speaker 1: a connect censor that would detect arm motions so that
Speaker 1: when you throw the papers, yeah, that would be the control,
Speaker 1: that would be the indicator for the game to throw
Speaker 1: the papers. And you're seeing it all from the paper
Speaker 1: boys perspective as opposed to that side view that you
Speaker 1: had in the original Arcade game. So that's just one example.
Speaker 1: There are other people who have kind of developed the
Speaker 1: multidirectional treadmills so that you could walk on the treadmill
Speaker 1: and this would propel you forward within a virtual environment.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of already, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of talk already about incorporating the Oculus Rift into other
Speaker 1: types of setups of this nature. Now, granted, that goes
Speaker 1: beyond what the average video game player would experience. Sure,
Speaker 1: so we don't recommend you get up on your feet
Speaker 1: and walk around while you're wearing one of these things,
Speaker 1: because you're not going to see your actual environment, you're
Speaker 1: seeing a virtual environment. I I've heard a few, a few, um,
Speaker 1: you know, not sob stories, but but just stories of
Speaker 1: of of like caution, you can totally knock over wine
Speaker 1: glasses while you are flailing about with this thing. Kind
Speaker 1: of similar to the to the warnings you would hear
Speaker 1: from the original WE Remote. People were flinging them into
Speaker 1: their television sets and you would see a picture of
Speaker 1: a WE remote emerged from an old TV set and
Speaker 1: you think mistake, Yeah, wrist strap. So um. But interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: you can still use the oculus rift even if you
Speaker 1: have poor or no vision in one eye. M yeah,
Speaker 1: the screen will still work. Sure, Sure you won't again,
Speaker 1: you won't get the stereoscopic three to national effect. Um.
Speaker 1: But Richard Eisenbey's writing for Kotaku recently described what it's
Speaker 1: like playing with a single eye because he had a
Speaker 1: bad laser surgery experience. But um, yeah, the doctor's expectaful recovery. Um.
Speaker 1: But he said that the three D effect was slightly
Speaker 1: flattened and that his depth perception was off, like you
Speaker 1: do when you only have one eye work, um, and
Speaker 1: that motion blair was increased, but that it was still
Speaker 1: very immersive and actually didn't cause any queasiness. Right. And
Speaker 1: one of the big causes of queasiness is this idea
Speaker 1: of latency which I mentioned earlier. Latency if if you know,
Speaker 1: the name kind of gives it away. What latency is
Speaker 1: is it's a delay between when you take an action
Speaker 1: and when that action is displayed to you. Now, in
Speaker 1: the case of head tracking software, that would mean that
Speaker 1: if I turned my head to the right, the display
Speaker 1: would reflect that turn on the screen. But if there's
Speaker 1: a delay between when I turned my head and when
Speaker 1: it happens on the screen, my brain thinks, woe, something
Speaker 1: is mess up you. Right, Because it's it's actually better
Speaker 1: than instantaneous when you're seeing it in in real life
Speaker 1: because your your your your brain is filling in information
Speaker 1: that it doesn't already have yet. Um, it's there's some
Speaker 1: predictive stuff going on in your brain already. It's and
Speaker 1: it's handling a lot of input from a lot of
Speaker 1: different sources, everything from your inner ear to what's coming
Speaker 1: into your eyes to what you're you're sensing like by touch.
Speaker 1: So All of these things go into telling your brain
Speaker 1: what is going on around you, and when those things
Speaker 1: don't match up, your brain is like, something's not good.
Speaker 1: Let's trigger the stomach to empty all of its contents
Speaker 1: as rapidly as possible, or at least that seems to
Speaker 1: be the case. It seems like a bad reflex. But
Speaker 1: but if you've ever been, say on a boat, and
Speaker 1: you have that sensation of you know, the ground you
Speaker 1: are on is moving, but because you're moving with the ground,
Speaker 1: your vision isn't reflecting that, right, You're not, Especially if
Speaker 1: you're on the inside of a boat and you can't
Speaker 1: see the outside at all. Your brain is just saying,
Speaker 1: this is weird because everything it looks still from micro expected.
Speaker 1: But I'm feeling like you're moving all over the place.
Speaker 1: Let's turn on the vacate the stomach flip switch and
Speaker 1: see maybe that will make it better, right, somehow that
Speaker 1: will fix things. I don't understand the physiological part of this,
Speaker 1: but this is what seems to happen. So that one
Speaker 1: while we're plugging out shows Yeah, stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: Listen to it. It's awesome. But yeah, the this idea
Speaker 1: of the mismatched data that comes into you. It often
Speaker 1: ends up making you feel a dizzy, nauseous, you know
Speaker 1: there's or nauseated I should say, I mean you might
Speaker 1: be nauseous as well, but nauseated, um, then you you
Speaker 1: you know it's it's unpleasant. And so latency is a big,
Speaker 1: big contributor to that. So getting latency down where there
Speaker 1: is as little delay as possible is a goal. Now.
Speaker 1: Oculus says that they developed a reduced latency technology that
Speaker 1: got it down to two milliseconds to send the information
Speaker 1: from the headset to the software. Now that's a one
Speaker 1: way trip there. Remember there's a round trip that we
Speaker 1: have to take into account here. It's not just the
Speaker 1: trip to the software. The software has to crunch the
Speaker 1: numbers from whatever data it's receiving and send back the
Speaker 1: appropriate response to the screen. So it takes longer than
Speaker 1: two milliseconds for all that to happen. Oh and humans
Speaker 1: can detect the latency of around fifty milliseconds, maybe even
Speaker 1: fewer than fifty milliseconds. That's no time at all. I
Speaker 1: mean we're talking a fraction of a second. Now. According
Speaker 1: to Steve Lavelle, using the rift and playing a game
Speaker 1: at sixty frames per second. Latency is right around thirty
Speaker 1: to fifty milliseconds, so just right below or at that threshold.
Speaker 1: So um, that includes the time it takes with the
Speaker 1: sensors to pick up the motion, send that motion out
Speaker 1: the port, go into the game engine as a command,
Speaker 1: and then yeah, so I mean that's that's the full trip,
Speaker 1: that's the whole round trip. And if it's able to
Speaker 1: do that reliably at that speed, that's good. And we
Speaker 1: you know, I expect that that's some thing that they're
Speaker 1: going to work on improving to make sure that there
Speaker 1: is as little latency issue there as possible, especially as
Speaker 1: video games start to push that limit of sixty frame
Speaker 1: sixty frames per second. Uh, if they are pushing to
Speaker 1: make it even more frames per second, then clearly you
Speaker 1: have to worry about that latency issue because that's more
Speaker 1: data that's going through these ports. Like we said, the sensors,
Speaker 1: the motion sensors detect yaw, pitch, and roll, and they
Speaker 1: use what is called sensor fusion, which is not a
Speaker 1: type of cuisine as I first thought, but it's actually
Speaker 1: a technique to combine all the data that's gathered from
Speaker 1: these various sensors into virtual virtual actions within the context
Speaker 1: of the environment you're in, the game you are in
Speaker 1: UM and then Steve Level also wrote an incredible blog
Speaker 1: post that is really really technical if you are interested
Speaker 1: on the software side of this and about how to
Speaker 1: reduce latency to to the minimum levels. I highly recommend
Speaker 1: it because it's it's fascinating, but it's way too technical
Speaker 1: for us to go into here. But this is where
Speaker 1: he was talking about predictive techniques. So prediction is exactly
Speaker 1: what it sounds like. The game engine starts to predict
Speaker 1: what you are going to do based upon what you
Speaker 1: are doing right now, oh wow, and and so so
Speaker 1: it starts to render out what you're going to need
Speaker 1: to see next before you actually need it. And and
Speaker 1: the goal of this is not to give you a
Speaker 1: vision of the future, but rather to remove that latency,
Speaker 1: to make it as small as possible. So if the
Speaker 1: predictive techniques are good, then it means that you have
Speaker 1: a very smooth experience, very little motion blur, no latency.
Speaker 1: If it's bad, it means that like if you suddenly
Speaker 1: turn left, but it starts to go right because it
Speaker 1: thought you were going to go right, then that's going
Speaker 1: to just exacerbate the problem, so predictive technology has to
Speaker 1: be really sophisticated for it to do more good than harm.
Speaker 1: His blog post goes into great detail about how they
Speaker 1: are using this to try and create a really immersive,
Speaker 1: comfortable experience with the Oculus rift, and like I said,
Speaker 1: it's really really great. The Oculus blogs in general fantastic read,
Speaker 1: but they are very technical, so read at your own risk.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what the actual hardware has. So
Speaker 1: the according to what's in the developer kit right now,
Speaker 1: keeping in mind the consumer version is going to be
Speaker 1: different from what is out there right now. It will
Speaker 1: very likely change indeed. Uh so, um yeah, so so
Speaker 1: we've got we've got six degrees of freedom that that yeah,
Speaker 1: um for for the head tracking. Um that hundred degree
Speaker 1: diagonal screen that we were talking about, which is um
Speaker 1: nine degrees horizontal, ninety degrees horizontal field of view. So
Speaker 1: you know those the screens are are Physically they're small,
Speaker 1: but because of their proximity to your eyeballs, they look
Speaker 1: pretty big. It builds your vision. Um. It's a d
Speaker 1: v I video input Digital visual interface ACE input. So
Speaker 1: this was that that INUT interface, by the way, was
Speaker 1: originally developed by the Display Working Group. Uh. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of interface that allows you to hook up a
Speaker 1: display to a computer. So a lot of computer monitors
Speaker 1: and displays have this. However, it does have HDMI adaptation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can get an HDMI adapter to convert from d
Speaker 1: v I to h d M I, but you do
Speaker 1: need to have that adapter. Does not have natively does
Speaker 1: not have an HDMI port to hook up, but you can.
Speaker 1: That's one thing I expect the consumer version would have,
Speaker 1: just because of the drive to move to h d
Speaker 1: M I, especially since a lot of video game consoles
Speaker 1: have that kind of thing. I expect that we will
Speaker 1: see h d m I native support in whatever the
Speaker 1: consumer version is. They haven't announced that, so don't take
Speaker 1: that as you know gospel. That's just that's just my prediction. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you need to have either HDMI or d v
Speaker 1: I video out on your computer or in order to
Speaker 1: run this. Yeah, if you were like, but my computer
Speaker 1: only has FireWire, it is for PC only right now,
Speaker 1: Um that they are again hoping to roll it out
Speaker 1: to UM consoles and mobile platforms. They're also talking there
Speaker 1: there's buzz anyway that they're talking about expanding it to
Speaker 1: watching movies, serving the web, doing programming. Yeah, which in
Speaker 1: the matrix, Yeah right, lawnmower man. Uh yeah, we just
Speaker 1: shows our own frames of reference for virtual environments, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: You say, matrix, I say a lawmore man like, um so, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder about watching movies because again, at that point,
Speaker 1: you're not really even talking about head tracking, right, There's
Speaker 1: no purpose for head tracking if you're watching a film,
Speaker 1: because the film is captured from a single point of view.
Speaker 1: I mean, unless you're presenting only part of a movie screen,
Speaker 1: which I can't imagine being a satisfying experience. You're really
Speaker 1: just looking at something really close to your face. Unless
Speaker 1: you eventually get to a point where you are able
Speaker 1: to create a well, especially if if it's a three
Speaker 1: D animated movie, then this would be much easier to do.
Speaker 1: You could you could create a movie where you would
Speaker 1: be able to change your perspective as opposed to relying
Speaker 1: upon the camera to define what the perspective is. Sure,
Speaker 1: just even even I think you know, if you've got
Speaker 1: one of the digital three D stereoscopic films that you
Speaker 1: just I mean, even without being able to move your
Speaker 1: head around, it would be Yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 1: Where you're talking about maybe watching movies that were designed
Speaker 1: to be in three D in the first place, maybe
Speaker 1: this would give a superior three D experience. I can
Speaker 1: see that. And also it reduces eyestrain from looking at
Speaker 1: a three D screen because the the way that the
Speaker 1: way that these goggles work is, um, you're you're actually
Speaker 1: focusing on your You're relaxing your eyes to a to
Speaker 1: a distant point. You're looking. You're you're kind of looking
Speaker 1: through the screen, which is the default for your eyes looking.
Speaker 1: It's it's any any kind of eye strain that you get,
Speaker 1: you would think, you know, it's an inchway from your
Speaker 1: eye that's going to lead to terrible eyestrain, but but
Speaker 1: actually looking at your computer screen foot away from you
Speaker 1: causes a lot more eyes strain than these The idea
Speaker 1: being that this is like looking through a window as
Speaker 1: opposed to Yeah, but any it's kind of interesting. Um
Speaker 1: so the screen, Yeah, it's um currently eight hundred. But
Speaker 1: that's that's if you combine the two screens, right right, Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's what what what's at six forty? Yeah? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: up six forty by hunder Prye, which is that's close
Speaker 1: to the resolution of seven, which is twelve eighty by
Speaker 1: seven twenty. But but again, this is a thing that
Speaker 1: could change for for consumers, right, And also, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously higher resolution means better pictures in general,
Speaker 1: but there's also something you need to consider that the
Speaker 1: closer you get to a screen, the less resolution matters. Right,
Speaker 1: So unless your screen is getting larger and larger and larger.
Speaker 1: So let's say you've got you stay with a Let's
Speaker 1: say that's your tvOS forty in Right, Depending upon how
Speaker 1: close you sit to that television, seven and ten ADP
Speaker 1: might not be that distinguishable. Now if you sit if
Speaker 1: you sit further closer and closer to it, then you're
Speaker 1: gonna notice. If you sit further away, you're those differences
Speaker 1: fade away into nothing. So if you could have a
Speaker 1: seven twenty P and a ten ADP set side by side,
Speaker 1: but if you're fifteen feet back, they look the same,
Speaker 1: assuming they've both been calibrated for that room and etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But if you're talking about an eight inch screen, first
Speaker 1: of all, invite me over because I want to watch
Speaker 1: movies and play Halo. But then it obviously will matter more,
Speaker 1: you've got more screen space. The resolution is spread out
Speaker 1: over a greater landscape area, so you've got to have
Speaker 1: higher resolution or else you will start to notice it
Speaker 1: at regular viewing distances. Was something that's one inch away
Speaker 1: from your eye. Uh. While they could probably increase the
Speaker 1: resolution and it would be maybe noticeable, I don't know
Speaker 1: that they have to stress it too much, all right,
Speaker 1: I think it's I think mostly the issue right now
Speaker 1: is that screen door effect that I was talking about. Um,
Speaker 1: the headset itself costs costs ways a little bit less
Speaker 1: than half a pound or a little bit less than
Speaker 1: a quarter of a kilogram. Nice, so it's not too
Speaker 1: terribly heavy. Another huge advance over older VR software hardware,
Speaker 1: anything that you're trapping to your head and nice to
Speaker 1: have it light. Yes, Um, and the dead kits right
Speaker 1: now cost three hundred bucks of pop, I've heard. I've
Speaker 1: heard that they're trying to keep it with the final
Speaker 1: commercial product within the three to five dollar range, which
Speaker 1: you know, when you're considering that most consoles cost around
Speaker 1: that much, makes sense. They don't want it to go
Speaker 1: higher than the console that it would sure, Sure, and
Speaker 1: it's still a significant improvement over Again, the thousand bucks
Speaker 1: or so a pop that that current or the hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars if you're talking about the the specifically made
Speaker 1: for the VR industry equipment that was back in the nineties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so it's not like it's it's not going to
Speaker 1: be inexpensive. It's going to be an expensive peripheral. Now
Speaker 1: if you're if you're used to either building or buying
Speaker 1: high end video game rigs, this is you know, two
Speaker 1: small dispense compared to what your ten thousand dollar rig was. Um.
Speaker 1: So this kit is not just the hardware. There's the
Speaker 1: software developer kit too, So this is the software side.
Speaker 1: And again remember Lucky is not a software guy, he's
Speaker 1: a hardware guy. Uh. The Software Developer Kit contains all
Speaker 1: the information you would need to be able to develop
Speaker 1: stuff specifically to display on an Oculus Rift and to
Speaker 1: work with this motion tracking hardware. And that contains all
Speaker 1: the libraries you need, the headers, the documentation, the samples
Speaker 1: for integrating the rift with games. It also includes two
Speaker 1: different game engines, the Unreal Engine and the Unity engines,
Speaker 1: and those are widely available game engines that a lot
Speaker 1: of companies use as the basis for the physics and
Speaker 1: uh and number crunching engine of whatever game they're running.
Speaker 1: So there are currently three titles that are compatible with
Speaker 1: the Oculus Rift. One of them is Team Fortress Too,
Speaker 1: which is a squad based first person shooter game moves
Speaker 1: an incredibly frenetic pace. The other one that was originally
Speaker 1: announced as being compatible was Hawking, which is a multiplayer
Speaker 1: mech combat video game by Adhesive Games. The third that
Speaker 1: they just rolled out, um I think, I think in August,
Speaker 1: right before we right before we recorded this podcast, was
Speaker 1: Half Life Too, Half Life Too, because I really want
Speaker 1: I do not at all want actually the experience of
Speaker 1: having a head crab jump at my face. Don't having
Speaker 1: it be more realistic? Don't you want the experience of
Speaker 1: watching a gravity gun work right in front of your
Speaker 1: face and launching things at high velocity? Also, I mean
Speaker 1: that gives me hope that the next title will be Portal.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine Portal first person like you are in
Speaker 1: the world of Portal. That's what I'm waiting on because
Speaker 1: those two, those two universes are connected Aperture Science and
Speaker 1: and and Black Mason, Black Mesa. As we all know
Speaker 1: from the Jonathan Colton song. They are connected, completely connected.
Speaker 1: So come on, guys, let's get our Let's get our
Speaker 1: Oarculus riff version of Portal. I that sounds that sounds
Speaker 1: a little bit sickening, but wonderful. I would love it,
Speaker 1: can you. Yeah? I don't know what that would be
Speaker 1: like once you start moving at those in insane speeds
Speaker 1: where you do the vertical portals. I would need to
Speaker 1: get one of those psychologists to come to my house
Speaker 1: while I played, so that I could turn it into
Speaker 1: a height therapy related I can. I can imagine that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that game wouldn't work out on the long run.
Speaker 1: I'd be willing to play it until I started. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I want that. I want that right now. But I'm terrified.
Speaker 1: But those are the titles available right now, not Portal,
Speaker 1: but Half Life to Team Fortress too and Hawking. So
Speaker 1: we'll see those expand obviously, but even so, like again,
Speaker 1: just to stress yet again, this is of course the
Speaker 1: developer side. Once this becomes a consumer product, you I
Speaker 1: would expect there to be support for at least twenty
Speaker 1: titles because if there's if there's not, then you know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to justify the expense in the mind of
Speaker 1: the game, or like I'm willing to pay three five
Speaker 1: dollars on this piece of technology and I can play
Speaker 1: twenty games on it and that's it, or not fewer
Speaker 1: than twenty, you are that would be if you can
Speaker 1: only do less than ten than that might be like
Speaker 1: why would I pay that much money for that thing?
Speaker 1: Although lots of people, lots of people have, lots of
Speaker 1: people are excited about it UM, there there is no
Speaker 1: official release date. Yeah. Yeah. The company's stance is it
Speaker 1: will be ready when it's ready, which is I think
Speaker 1: the most responsible way to go about it, because otherwise,
Speaker 1: what you'll do is you'll create a deadline that you
Speaker 1: know something will pop up that you could not have
Speaker 1: anticipated that will either cause you to miss the deadline,
Speaker 1: thus inviting the ire of all of the internets, or
Speaker 1: you will start to sacrifice things in order to make
Speaker 1: the original deadline, and the product will be less than
Speaker 1: what it could have been. So I think that taking
Speaker 1: this approach of we aren't announcing a date, We're getting
Speaker 1: it as soon as possible, but we want it to
Speaker 1: be good when it launches, I think that's the right choice,
Speaker 1: especially when you're talking about hardware UM, because I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't. It's it's harder to update that. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can do firmware updates obviously, but but in place
Speaker 1: it's harder. Yeah. Um and and yeah yeah, like like
Speaker 1: we said, there's no official price yet either. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: obviously they want to they want to keep it affordable,
Speaker 1: and we might see it being used in well, I'm
Speaker 1: sure we'll see it being used in virtual reality h
Speaker 1: fields beyond gaming. Yeah, yeah, you know the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that they're talking about it being useful for, like
Speaker 1: like surgery training or um or or architecture and design,
Speaker 1: which is really kind of cool. That's this idea of
Speaker 1: being able to take a virtual tour of a building
Speaker 1: that hasn't even gone beyond the blueprint stage. That's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. And of course the medical uh techniques that
Speaker 1: we've talked about already, this exposure technique. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: the VR industry still exists, although they call it virtual environments.
Speaker 1: For the most part, it still exists. But they do
Speaker 1: go to the video game industry all the time for
Speaker 1: all the equipment, so I expect we'll see that continue. Alright.
Speaker 1: So that was the story as far as it had
Speaker 1: progressed in August of tooths thirteen. But back in March
Speaker 1: of two thousand fourteen, there was an event that really
Speaker 1: shook up the whole Oculus VR world news item. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sent ripples throughout the force, like the destruction of danteen.
Speaker 1: Yeah it was Dantueen. No, no, it wasn't Datu was
Speaker 1: Aldan right, because the Dantueen was too far from an
Speaker 1: effective demonstration. But anyway, so, yes, there was this big event.
Speaker 1: That big event, of course, was when the company Facebook
Speaker 1: decided it wanted the Oculus VR company, and furthermore than
Speaker 1: it wanted it two billion dollars worth. And so they said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'll give you two billion dollars to come and join
Speaker 1: the dark side. And they said, sure, No, I'm just
Speaker 1: being silly. I don't think Facebook is the dark side necessarily.
Speaker 1: But this announcement was met with some pretty extreme responses
Speaker 1: on either side of the spectrum. Yeah, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of enthusiasm. Yeah, because it meant that Oculus rift
Speaker 1: now had an annoy or miss safety net, I mean
Speaker 1: all R and D money that they could possibly want
Speaker 1: a multibillion dollar company supporting them. So it wasn't like
Speaker 1: if let's say that their hardware implementation didn't work out
Speaker 1: the way they had planned. As a small company that
Speaker 1: was dependent upon investment, it might not have been able
Speaker 1: to bounce back from something like this. But with this
Speaker 1: big company, they can afford to take risks, right, So
Speaker 1: that's a big thing. However, there was also a certain
Speaker 1: amount of trepidation. Yeah, because let's face it, Facebook is
Speaker 1: in the business of collecting all of the data about you.
Speaker 1: I mean, we we the services free because we are
Speaker 1: the product. Exactly, if you are using Facebook, you are
Speaker 1: a product that is being sold. And I mean that's
Speaker 1: the way Facebook generates revenue. If it didn't do that,
Speaker 1: then Facebook couldn't stick around, so not without forcing us
Speaker 1: to to pay them. Yeah, so this, this is that's
Speaker 1: the other side of the coin, right. So some people
Speaker 1: like Minecraft creator Notch posted a tweet that said he
Speaker 1: would no longer want to develop a build for Minecraft
Speaker 1: for the Oculus Rift because he found Facebook to be creepy.
Speaker 1: So that, Yeah, there's a lot of pushback, especially among
Speaker 1: I think the hardcore fans of the Rift. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and remember you know, the Oculus Rift off also was
Speaker 1: just going to be a dedicated PC device computer device,
Speaker 1: not a console related device, So that raises a question,
Speaker 1: what does Facebook have planned for the oculus rift. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing that executives have said, and this is something
Speaker 1: that blows my mind. I mean it's it's hard for
Speaker 1: me to imagine what would be required to pull this off.
Speaker 1: But they envision a virtual world with one billion people
Speaker 1: in it, which which is essentially Facebook's user base. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when they had a billion unique users or at
Speaker 1: least unique accounts. You don't know, necessarily significant difference, I suspect.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are quite a few duplicate uh there
Speaker 1: are people who are using different ounce but anyway, a
Speaker 1: billion users, uh more or less, and then putting them
Speaker 1: in this virtual environment as some way of communicating and
Speaker 1: making a social uh social platform that is completely immersive.
Speaker 1: That's that's huge. It's hard to imagine. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean i I'm picturing something like was described in snow Crash. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just picturing like a a busiest day ever at
Speaker 1: Disney World and you're just completely surrounded. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: if you're creating a virtual environment, you can create as
Speaker 1: much space or as little space as you want, so
Speaker 1: assuming you have the computer power to support it. But
Speaker 1: it does make me wonder when we would see such
Speaker 1: an implementation. Obviously, in order for it to be a
Speaker 1: billion users, you would also need to sell a billion
Speaker 1: units of Oculus Rift, and I don't think that's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's that's a sky high dream. But still
Speaker 1: the idea you can have enough servers to Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of issues that we need to
Speaker 1: work out there. There's some there's some steps between where
Speaker 1: we are and where they want to be. But there's
Speaker 1: some other issues that we have to mention too. After
Speaker 1: the acquisition announcement, a company called Zenomax Media, which used
Speaker 1: to be the employer of one Mr John Carmack, you know,
Speaker 1: because he was working for in Software. In Software is
Speaker 1: a subsidiary of Zenomax Media. Well, the company filed a
Speaker 1: lawsuit against Oculus VR, and they said that the Rift
Speaker 1: was based at least in part off of the VR
Speaker 1: work done within Zenomax, and it also relied upon the
Speaker 1: expertise of CarMax, including several systems that Carmack had designed
Speaker 1: for Zenomax projects during his time there. Yeah, and apparently,
Speaker 1: depending upon who you ask, they had some conversations about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Xenomax claims that it tried to work all of this
Speaker 1: proprietary stuff out with Oculus after oculus is big Kickstarter
Speaker 1: success proved that they would be actually bringing a device
Speaker 1: to market um, but that oculust first failed to respond
Speaker 1: then offered Zenomax what they considered an unfair equity share,
Speaker 1: only only three percent, which was one point two million
Speaker 1: at the time or some sixty million dollars after Facebook's purchase.
Speaker 1: About that they knew that that was going to happen um,
Speaker 1: which Zenomax claims that they countered, and for the more,
Speaker 1: claims that Oculus refused um, thereby pressing Zenomax into this
Speaker 1: lawsuit now Oculus VR. On their part, they said that
Speaker 1: one uh that Cenomax's demands were outrageous, that they were
Speaker 1: asking for way too much, and too said that there
Speaker 1: were there was there was no technology from Cinemax included
Speaker 1: in the Oculus rift at all. And they also implied
Speaker 1: that it was pretty convenient that the lawsuit only came
Speaker 1: out after Facebook acquired Oculus, in other words, after they
Speaker 1: had all the money. Yeah, this enormous cash flow went
Speaker 1: into the company. So to be fair, there is some
Speaker 1: potential evidence available even to the public. For example a
Speaker 1: tweet from John Carmack in April which said, and I
Speaker 1: quote when you are in a worry and you know
Speaker 1: you wrote the exact needed code well at a previous
Speaker 1: job re implementation. Greats. Yeah. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: they also point out that the Oculus Rift SDK was
Speaker 1: publicly available and doesn't have a single line of Cinemax
Speaker 1: code in it, so you know, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: lot of conflicting information. The lawsuit is currently being considered,
Speaker 1: so we don't have any any results for that, certainly
Speaker 1: not yet. We we will not rerun this episode again,
Speaker 1: but we all tried to update you guys. When that
Speaker 1: comes to ahead, maybe we'll just do an episode where hey,
Speaker 1: guess what, it's just a bunch of updates on a
Speaker 1: bunch of unrelated things. Here are fifty topics we've talked
Speaker 1: about in the past, and two sentences updating on each
Speaker 1: of them. Oh why did you that's a terrible number
Speaker 1: never talked about. It would be a pretty awful episode.
Speaker 1: It would be the most non sequitary, field filled episode
Speaker 1: we've ever done, and we've done some doozies. But also
Speaker 1: back in March two thousand fourteen, another thing happened that
Speaker 1: that excited folks. Oculus unveiled the d K two Developer headset.
Speaker 1: So keep in mind, all the headsets the Oculus Rift
Speaker 1: has produced so far have been for developers who want
Speaker 1: to create games or other applications using the headset. There
Speaker 1: are no consumer versions of the hardware on the market yet,
Speaker 1: but this one increased the resolution of the two screens
Speaker 1: inside the headset to nine sixty by ten eighty. They
Speaker 1: are O lead screens and they are supposed to reduce
Speaker 1: motion blur and also increase clarity, color, and contrast the
Speaker 1: three big cs that you want with your your screens. UH.
Speaker 1: It also includes a a external camera which is designed
Speaker 1: to help the headset track your your head movements, giving
Speaker 1: the wearer the ability to like look out over a ledge,
Speaker 1: or around a corner, yeah, or underneath a table. So
Speaker 1: because the external camera can track the the orientation of
Speaker 1: the user's head in relation to their real world environment,
Speaker 1: it can translate into the perspective you would need in
Speaker 1: the virtual environment to UH to mimic that motion. So
Speaker 1: if I were to walk up to a table in
Speaker 1: a game and I wanted to look underneath it, to
Speaker 1: see if there were any clues. I could actually squat down,
Speaker 1: been my head over and the because the external camera
Speaker 1: could track how my head was changing in orientation in
Speaker 1: respect to my real environment. I get that reflected in
Speaker 1: the virtual one. Pretty awesome, and there was some talk
Speaker 1: for a while about whether or not the the d
Speaker 1: K two would incorporate this. They showed it off at
Speaker 1: c e S and there wasn't any guarantee that the
Speaker 1: d K two would have it. There's still not a
Speaker 1: guarantee that the consumer model, once it comes out, we'll
Speaker 1: have it, but there's a lot of hope because it
Speaker 1: does add to the significantly improved the experience exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: other companies have also announced since the time we we
Speaker 1: did that podcast that they are going to launch their
Speaker 1: own competing headsets. The two big ones would be Sony,
Speaker 1: which has the device called the Morpheus in development. Obviously
Speaker 1: that would be important because again the Oculus rift is
Speaker 1: meant for PCs. If you wanted to have something that
Speaker 1: had a console experience, you would have to go somewhere else,
Speaker 1: and so Sony Sony's approach is the Morpheus. Then you
Speaker 1: also have Samsung getting into this. They have produced a
Speaker 1: prototype headset, and they have not, at least as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, there's been no release of an
Speaker 1: actual name for the prototype. They do hope to bring
Speaker 1: it out to market before either Morpheus or Oculus Rift
Speaker 1: go to the consumer market, so they're they're really fast
Speaker 1: tracking this to try and beat them to the punch.
Speaker 1: So I'll be exciting to see what happens. Yeah, definitely. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there are some more serious applications of this technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking military applications. And uh so here in the
Speaker 1: United States, darpas using the Oculus Rift to help train
Speaker 1: soldiers in new techniques to fight cyber warfare. I read
Speaker 1: the story three times from Wired uh and uh called
Speaker 1: arepas using Oculus Rift to prep for cyber war and
Speaker 1: I don't get it. The idea is that they would
Speaker 1: actually be able to visualize things like a cyber attack
Speaker 1: on a network. So if you remember, like any movie
Speaker 1: from the nineteen eighties where you have a hacker try
Speaker 1: to hack a system, half the time it would show
Speaker 1: a like a three D first person shooter kind of
Speaker 1: model where you're going through a maze and then you
Speaker 1: see a skull and crossbones, Like, oh, you don't want
Speaker 1: to go through their hacker take the door to the right,
Speaker 1: which for some reason isn't protected, and that's how you
Speaker 1: hack into the system. Because Hollywood wanted to have and
Speaker 1: a visually entertaining way to represent this this process. Never
Speaker 1: mind the fact that hacking doesn't involve wandering through three
Speaker 1: person our first person shooter kind of environments, except now
Speaker 1: I totally could, which is weird. So it's making all
Speaker 1: of our nineteen eight streams come true. Yeah, well most
Speaker 1: of them. I've got a couple that you know, I
Speaker 1: still don't. They don't have my DeLorean. But anyway, pretty awesome,
Speaker 1: interesting implementation. Have no idea if it's ever going to
Speaker 1: catch on, but it is an interesting approach. Then you
Speaker 1: also have another one. This is the Norwegian Army looking
Speaker 1: into using the Oculus riff to improve, uh, the the
Speaker 1: situational awareness of people who are inside tanks. Now, as
Speaker 1: you can imagine operating inside a tank which is designed
Speaker 1: to protect the crew as much as possible, it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of windows. Yeah, I don't. You
Speaker 1: don't want a lot of views to the outside world
Speaker 1: in a heavily armored vehicle. It tends to be a
Speaker 1: point of vulnerability. So what the way some of these
Speaker 1: UH tanks work is that they have cameras mounted on
Speaker 1: the outside and usually what you would have to do
Speaker 1: is you have a monitor and you would switch between
Speaker 1: camera feeds to see what was going on around the
Speaker 1: perimeter of the tank. Now, this is important for you
Speaker 1: to be able to assess the situation, see if there
Speaker 1: are any enemies or even friendlies near you, because obviously
Speaker 1: you know you're an enormous vehicle. You have to be careful. Well,
Speaker 1: what they're looking at is using the cameras that these
Speaker 1: four cameras that would be mounted to the outside of
Speaker 1: tanks and digitally stitching together all the camera feeds because
Speaker 1: when you when you add all of them together, you
Speaker 1: get a full three D sixty degree field of view
Speaker 1: around the tank. So if you digitally stitched them together
Speaker 1: and then feed that through the headset by by sitting
Speaker 1: down and facing forward in respect to the tank, so
Speaker 1: you're facing the front of the tank, you would be
Speaker 1: looking forward. If you turn your head to the right,
Speaker 1: it would start to pan your view over to the
Speaker 1: feed that's coming from the right side. And you could
Speaker 1: do that in three hundred sixty degrees create creating a
Speaker 1: hypothetically real time digital world that's actually the real world
Speaker 1: surrounding you. Yeah, so it's really it's really more of
Speaker 1: a video feed than a than a virtual representation. So
Speaker 1: you're actually seeing that what's really out there, but you're
Speaker 1: doing it as if there isn't an enormous tank all
Speaker 1: the way around you, which is kind of interesting. It did.
Speaker 1: I think that would also take some getting used to, because, uh,
Speaker 1: your perspective would be that you are the size of
Speaker 1: a tank, because when you look around, like the thing
Speaker 1: that's in front of you and the thing that's behind you,
Speaker 1: obviously that would be separated by the length of the tank.
Speaker 1: That's that's got to cause some cognitive dissonance. There's probably
Speaker 1: some some training you have to do in order to
Speaker 1: really get good at it. But that's super cool use
Speaker 1: of this technology too. I mean, obviously I want to
Speaker 1: see uses that don't necessarily involve warfare that would also
Speaker 1: be cool. But anything that can can improve people's ability
Speaker 1: to have situational awareness in various types of scenarios, to me,
Speaker 1: is an interesting application of something that's meant to be
Speaker 1: for playing games. Um, this is something we see over
Speaker 1: and over with virtual environment technology. In general, we see
Speaker 1: a lot of repurposing. Either we see it repurposed from
Speaker 1: some other field to be in virtual environments, or we
Speaker 1: see virtual environment technology repurposed for some other industry. Now sure,
Speaker 1: and hey, since military funding does frequently um jump start
Speaker 1: given technology, maybe it's good that these kind of projects
Speaker 1: are going on right now. That's true, all right, So
Speaker 1: that wraps up this update to the Oculus Rift. If
Speaker 1: you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, let us know,
Speaker 1: send us a message our email addresses tech Stuff at
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Speaker 1: When we come back, we will be running new episodes. Uh.
Speaker 1: This for interest of full disclosure. If you were wondering
Speaker 1: why are you doing updates, well two reasons. One, we
Speaker 1: wanted to update these episodes. They really did seem like
Speaker 1: interesting news stories that we wanted to tell you guys about.
Speaker 1: And too, uh I was, I was, I was not
Speaker 1: in the office, so we had to we had to
Speaker 1: do something since I wouldn't be able to record. Yes,
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