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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Well, he's obviously wrong because we have it now and it does work. I've tried the Vive an Rift and while some things made me feel a bit sick, it was mostly when the camera moves without your direct control (e.g. in Lucky's Tale).

His section about momentum is stupid - the Vive especially allows 1:1 mapping from VR to real life so that isn't an issue.

Also, this comment is probably the most stupid thing in there:

> Sadly, the $80,000 googles we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick - so this seems unlikely.

Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones.

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He's wrong because he's worked with the tech for decades, but you tried it and didn't get sick? The friendly article notes that only about half of users get sick within a few minutes, although most of the rest do as well within an hour.

1:1 mapping from VR to real life is fine if you're walking around a small room (and not puking all over the place). However, it's not fine if you want to anything that involves a more interesting range of motion: driving, flying, even walking in a straight line for more than a few meters.

> consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones

Remember Google Glass, which was all revolutionary and state of the art in 2013? DARPA had these in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display#M...

>The friendly article notes that only about half of users get sick within a few minutes, although most of the rest do as well within an hour.

Practically no one gets sick from Vive in 1-1 experiences, which is all the parent said. The article says VR won't work, but really he just means artificial vection won't work.

There are also plenty of ways of making vection work by limiting certain things. For example with Vive allowing easy 360 tracking of hand and headset, you can avoid all artificial rotation. Some people only get sick from artificial yaw.

Also there are things like FOV restriction you can do during movement which limits vection. Then you can snap back to full FOV once the artificial movement is done and let the user walk around the room again with full FOV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY

I would guess the article author is bound by non-competes locked into ancient military contracts and can't get in on the startup action in consumer VR and is just bitter. People are probably asking him what he does at parties, and they say in response, oh I know of Vive and the Rift, and it is getting on his nerves so he is just sort of trolling to lash out.

Flight sims with visible horizons do indeed cause tons of motion sickness in a lot of people though. But that doesn't say anything about VR in general.

Film made everyone sick when it first came out as well.

People will get used to the sensation, and get over it, especially as they grow up with it from childhood.

>Film made everyone sick when it first came out as well.

i am really surprised by this. Do you have source for this claim perhaps?

Well I for one know that the head bob back in DOOM made me nauseous, in a fun way.

As did another commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796367

"moving images on the screen aroused a physiological feeling of horror in the audience (shots of an onrushing train) or physical nausea (shots taken from a great height or with a swaying camera)" -Jurij Lotman

You could research the Lumiere Brother's films, and probably find some material on the matter pretty easily.

See also, the history of IMAX (70mm film). Originally invented in 1929, named Fox Gradeur,they cancelled the product for decades because it was too realistic, and was making audiences profoundly uncomfortable.

I even recall reading recently that color film and television caused lots of nausea when they first hit the market.

More recently, you may recall that the Blair Witch project was making audiences around the country vomit, because they were not yet accustomed to jerky handheld-style cinema: http://amarillo.com/stories/1999/08/13/usn_LA0713.001.shtml#...

No, it didn't -- not in the same "against evolution" way.

It was just a new an unusual experience, which is something different.

Else they wouldn't have gotten over it without millennia of adapting to it.

> In 1997, MicroOptical demonstrated the eyewear display in which the viewing optics were incorporated in the eyeglass lens. The eyeglasses display provided a 320x240 pixel resolution with 8 bit greyscale and a field of view of approximately 8 degrees (horizontal).

And a Ford T is basically the same thing as a modern car. The modern car is just better in every category, but basically it is the same and it was there first.

I've used both the MicroOptical HUD in 1999 (by which time it was full-color and around 640x480) and Google Glass in 2013. The display was essentially identical (which is unsurprising, since Google acquired many of the patents involved), the main change was in the power supply: the original MO required lugging around a huge box clipped to your belt, while Glass had an onboard battery.

> He's wrong because he's worked with the tech for decades, but you tried it and didn't get sick?

Well.. yes? He says it's impossible to make VR that doesn't make people sick. We now have VR that doesn't make people sick. He's wrong. He decades of experience probably cloud his judgement because until now VR was terrible.

SO VR works, but simply some content with motion characteristics like driving or flying won't work (yet) on VR. That's a limitation, but it doesn't mean that VR - there are many genres that don't really work on some platforms. You don't generally play RTS with a console controller, you don't play FPS on smartphones, and you won't play driving/flying sims on (current) VR - that doesn't mean that VR doesn't work as such, simply it's currently suited for very different types of content, content that doesn't involve world wildly moving around you without you moving.

>>> Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones.

Any argument for this statement, or just 'I tried Vive and it was great'? It doesn't say anywhere that $80k was a budget but it's rather clear that it was cost of the unit.

Sorry, but you just make loads of big claims and all with nothing backing them.

Yeah I meant budget as in 'budget to make one of them'.

The argument is obvious - consumers are the biggest market for displays by a huge margin. The military don't have super-advanced displays that LG and Sony can't match. The military didn't make a 4K 5.5" screen before Sony. They don't have huge display research divisions.

I feel like the original author should have to show this $80k low latency, high res VR system before I can disprove it. All I could find was this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-rFLlvdD4

It looks shit compared to the Vive. Look at how bad the field of view is! No numbers on latency or resolution but come on. There's almost no chance they're as good. Hell, the technology to get really low latency, like G-Sync and OLED displays didn't even exist until really recently.

Just because it's 'military' doesn't mean it is the best.

I'm also very skeptical that the military units are as good as the consumer versions we have now.

We have predictive tracking and timewarp to reduce the felt latency to virtually zero, does the military unit have that? Full positional audio?

I'm sure the military have fine engineers, but do they have John Carmacks, Mike Abrashes, JMP van Waverens, Cass Everitts, etc.?

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