Before the reading, I did not know
much about VR, 3D vision, and Head-Mounted Displays. It amazed me that the
design for these products remained same today from the 1980s. I am interested
in specifications and how to built head mounted displays. I began to look up
some of the oldest and newest to compare the characteristics. The old and new
versions both have a single display optic in the front or one for each eye.
Most HMD’s have semi-transparent mirrors inside the helmet, data glasses, a
visor, and some way to emit light (CRT, LCDs, LCos, OLED).
I also found that there are many
different uses for HMD’s. In 1997, Charles J. Murry, Midwest Regional Editor, posted
an article about ways that head-mounted displays simplify surgery. Before the
introduction of head mounted displays, surgeons often had to take a lot of time
squinting their eyes to look up at television monitors. This not only
distracted them, but made surgery times much longer. With the new
high-resolution images projected directly to doctors, surgeries are much more
efficient. For example, during a knee operation instead of trying to look back
and forth to the monitor to determine which part of the knee is being operated
on, doctors can position themselves as if they were looking directly into the
knee with the mounted display. I found that these displays are used in other
areas also such as aviation, sports, training/simulation, and engineering.
After watching many videos, I would
like to try out the Oculus Rift during gaming. I am surprised that with such
high tech of a device, the estimated price was not more than what was posted
online. I think that in the next year or so, everyone will be using this type
of device in gaming. After playing with the Oculus Rift, I do not think that
people will want to play much without it. It gives that real life, in-game
feeling that you would not be able to experience on a regular television.
There were many problems with the
first developments of the Oculus Rift. When first created, the device had
issues with latency, response times, and tracking. One of the newest devices,
the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2, eliminates most of those issues. With
positional tracking, the headset quickly tracks all of your head movements in
the right direction. One of the coolest features that I liked was the low
persistence OLED display. I know that when I have played a game in the arcade
with head mounted displays, a big issue is while moving your head the picture
is blurred momentarily. With the low persistence display, the picture is stable
and there is no motion blur when turning your head. It is also very light, so
you wont have to worry about getting tired while playing.
Watching Placeholder made me think
about all the different things that go into actually creating virtual reality.
I think the hardest thing would be to get the correct point of view in an
environment. It would be hard to portray what we see with our eyes through a
screen. The entire 360 view would be recorded and pieced together. Last week,
we went to the Planetarium in our Interactive Storytelling class. It was
interesting to see the fish eye point of view that surrounded us. I think the
same recording settings would probably have to be used to create virtual
reality. One very cool element about VR that was shown in Placeholder was point
of view from different animals. Since we do not know the actually viewpoints of
an animal, I do not think that we will ever actually get a correct POV but we
can get close. I think that many of the techniques used in Placeholder and
technology such as head mounted displays and motion tracking is all still used
today. The only difference is that there is higher definition and more improved
technology.
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