VR, a New Frontier in Computing
November 13, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Brendan Iribe from Oculus VR postulated that the drivers for more immersive man-machine interfaces is changing gaming. The pieces for a full virtual reality interface are falling into place.
Through time, hardware has driven and enabled software innovations. These developments then create a demand for better hardware, and the cycle continues. The first games could barely handle a simple 2-D playing field filled with sprites and designated pixels. Atari released Space Invaders.
The game graphics improved with second generation consoles and the Mario Brothers franchise from Nintendo started. Next came 3-D textures and in ’93, Doom became the first 2.5-D game. Other advances helped the controllers and graphics evolved to photorealistic images on the screen.
The interfaces are still primitive. PCs use a mouse and keyboard for inputs and control for objects on the flat screen. Nintendo, followed by Sony and Microsoft added gestures to the controllers, and Microsoft used cameras to capture the gestures.
These new controllers changed the way we think about interacting with our devices. Following the consoles, Apple introduced the iPhone, which added multiple touch control to a screen, but the screen on a smart phone is too small, and not very immersive. The new modes of motion control and multi-touch introduced a new mode of interactions.
The next stage will be in virtual reality. Full motion control and head tracking will put the person into the frame, and no longer looking into a window. There are other attempts to make enhanced vision computers, with Google Glass as one potential for an artificial reality enhancement, but not even close to a virtual reality.
The Oculus system currently has 3-degrees of freedom, but that will increase in the near future. The internal GPU drives separate smart phone screens for a wide stereo 3-D view, and the two eyes are rendered separately. Additional processing eliminates most artifacts and the full screen shader corrects for distance errors. Future versions will increase resolution from the current HD to 4k, 8k, and even 12 k.
The viewer applies motion to photons. The integrated sensors and optical screens allow the screens to follow head and screen motion with a target accuracy of less than 5 degrees. To get sufficient performance, they need to separate the game and render threads, so they are looking at OLED screens for faster responses. The headset is CPU and GPU limited at present. Adding more compute power will allow the addition of additional sensors, cameras, etc. which will provide hand and body part insertion into the displayed images.
VR is pushing the compute resources for more performance. As the compute performance increases, the resulting display headsets will provide greater immersion and engagement for its users. Emotion is a part of VR.
The first VR game EVE, Valkyrie released recently and many indie developers are working on other titles. Although VR requires a lot of compute power, it is coming and will be a game changer.
