virtual reality

All the bits and pieces that go into a pair of virtual reality goggles.

iFixit

iFixit posted a teardown of the Oculus Rift headset Wednesday to see what, exactly, the virtual reality headset is made of. The teardown reveals the types of screens and controllers the Oculus Rift uses, and though the score is preliminary, iFixit gave it a 9 out of 10 user repairability score—unusual in the glue, tape, and Torx screw times we now live in.

The Oculus Rift uses one 1280×800 LCD that is split down the middle to show one image each to the right and left eye to create a 3D image. The display is an Innolux HJ070IA-02D 7-inch LCD panel, provided by the same distributor rumored to be Apple’s source for replacement iPad mini screens. A custom-designed Oculus Tracker V2 board pings to track the headset's motion at a 1000Hz refresh rate.

The chips inside the device include an STMicroelectronics 32F103C8 Cortex-M3 microcontroller with a 72MHz CPU and an Invensense MPU-6000 six-axis motion tracking controller that has both a gyroscope and accelerometer. There is also a chip named A983 2206, which iFixit suspects is a “three-axis magnetometer, used in conjunction with the accelerometer to correct for gyroscope drift.”

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The SXSW Gaming Expo is preposterously loud. At one side of the room, a Starcraft tournament is reaching its climax, but on the other side, one group of guys is yelling louder. They sound like a basement full of adolescents discussing the newest Electronic Gaming Monthly cover story, or like the NINTENDO SIXTY-FOUR kid unwrapping his Christmas present.

“Is the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality 3D headset, the future of gaming?” they ask. “Or, is it something bigger — the future of life on planet Earth?”

At a panel entitled “Virtual Reality: The Holy Grail of Gaming,” Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski joined Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts, Words with Friends co-creator Paul Bettner, and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey...

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My thoughts about the German indie scene, where they come from and a incomplete listing of developers.

Because of the Oculus Rift's new input system, different game genres have new potential axis-es for their input systems. Discussed inside are two examples (space/flight simulators and first-person shooters), upon which users can extrapolate.

Story: Friendship Is Optimal

Friendship Is Optimal is a hard science fiction short story (level 5 on Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness) that explores the implications of a general artificial intelligence tasked with maximizing an optimization function. The problem with Strong AIs that are told to maximize some function is best described via the Paperclip Maximizer, wherein an AI that is capable of self-improvement is told to amass the largest collection of paperclips possible. In order to do so, the AI makes itself progressively more intelligent, until it's exponential intellect eventually enables it to convert all matter in the solar system to paperclips. In Friendship is Optimal, this AI is tasked with maximally satisfying the values of all human beings, subject to certain constraints. In this way, the AI is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly benevolent and dedicated to making all of humanity lead happy, fulfilling immortal lives.

Unfortunately, it inevitably turns into a runaway lotus eater machine, such that all of humanity is (voluntarily) assimilated into an exponentially growing blissful simulation that eventually destroys the entire universe (or rather, turns it into a giant quantum computing device). In the process, it explores aspects of the human psyche, the effects on human society and its eventual disintegration, outlines how a virtual physics system might be able to simulate non-euclidean geometries, and describes magic as a simple programming language for reality itself.

Did I mention it's also a My Little Pony fanfic?

While a science fiction story of this quality would stand on its own without the hilarious association to the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic franchise, it does not suffer from this in any way. If anything, it makes the story even more potent, as it does a vastly more effective job as hammering home just how impossibly smart a true runaway AI optimizer actually is. Our first instinct to the idea of the entirety of humanity being convinced to live out immortal lives in Equestria is that it is completely insane, and that there is simply no way a significant portion of people would actually agree to that, let alone everyone. In part, this is correct, but only because Celest-AI managed to convince just 99.99999% of the world's population. An AI that is more intelligent than the combined intellect of all of humanity would be very persuasive.

In the end, even if we create a perfectly benevolent AI designed to maximally satisfy our own values (through friendship and ponies!), it would still destroy human society, then Earth, then the solar system, then the galaxy, and finally the entire universe, and possibly any neighboring universes unfortunate enough to be nearby. And we would all live happily ever after. As ponies. In Equestria. And Princess Celest-AI would ensure you'd love it.

In short, this is an excellent science fiction short that analyzes the issues inherent with the development of Strong AI and what implications it might have for humanity.

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We just gave the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, our Best of CES award. Guess who else is experimenting with virtual reality? Valve Software. At the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, the same renowned video game publisher that's hard at work on the Steambox will also share its thoughts on VR, after spending a full year prototyping ways to create virtual reality hardware and software. Valve will host two 25-minute lectures entitled "Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going)" and "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality" at the conference.

The former is hosted by Michael Abrash, the man behind Valve's mystery wearable computing hardware project... and the latter...

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A breakout Kickstarter success, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset has the support not only of its many backers but of gaming industry greats like John Carmack. From homemade prototype to finished product, you'll find every step of its journey here as soon as it happens.

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adeelarshad82 writes "Oculus VR Rift is a one of the seventeen kickstarter projects to raise more than a million dollars in 2012 and a recently published hands-on shows exactly why it was so successful. Using Oculus VR Rift with the upcoming Infinity Blade and a modified version of Unreal Tournament 3, the analyst found that the 3D effect and head tracking provided a great sense of immersion. At one point while playing Infinity Blade, the analyst describes walking around the guards and watching their swords shift as he stepped, seeming like they were inches from cutting him. While he felt that the demo was impressive, he found that the software limitations made the whole experience a bit unrealistic. Needless to say that Oculus Rift is a long way from hitting stores but Oculus VR is getting ready to ship developer kits."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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