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Lots of people are investigating the use of exoskeletons or treadmills to help a user move in space as they wear the Oculus. What do you thinkis there a solution you like?

So something like an omni-directional treadmill? I think its a really difficult problem to solvelocomotion in VR. For one, you really need to have everything wireless or youre going to get all tangled up.

Lets say you want to simulate running around. Moving in placeit looks a lot like running but its really different. When you run in place, you dont get any cues of acceleration and you dont get any cues from decelerating because your body doesnt have any momentum. And thats a problem. When you start running your body is trying to fight as it gains momentum, and when you stop your body instinctively leans and braces your feet and hit the ground in a different way, trying to slow you down. Its not just running. Even when youre walking, your body has balance and momentum. When you take that to a system where you remain in one spot and you dont walk around, all the sudden you dont have any momentum, so the walking motion youre doing is always going to be different than when you actually walk, and its not always in a good way.

The one way to solve that is if you had a really large omni-directional surface where you had enough time to actually run, gain the cues, and slowly start washing out to bring you slow enough so you didnt notice it. But that takes a huge amount of space. Theres one called the Torus. Its a bunch of treadmills made into one treadmill, and its a gigantic machine about the size of a trailer.

The other problem is if you have active treadmills. A lot of things have dropped in price. Electronics have dropped in price, drugs have dropped in price. Weve figured out how to make food cheaper. We have not figured out how to move heavy things mechanically cheaper. If you look at what industrial machinery cost decades ago and adjusted for inflation now, we actually havent moved that much. Its just big heavy things to move big heavy things, and people are heavy. You cant mess that up because you cant mess up moving a person around on a mechanical device.

Other than gaming, what are some other exciting applications of VR? Has the military been interested at all?

Ive worked in a military VR research lab, so I know a little bit about it. Whats interesting is that VR disappeared in the consumer market these past few decades, but it has always remained in the professional industries, especially the military. Thats whats kept it going. That industry never died, but it was always expensivehundreds of thousands of dollars per unit. The performance really wasnt up to par because they were dealing with custom components that were built specifically for the job, which often made them expensive and not the best solution. Now you have billions of dollars being poured in the mobile phone market, and that money is driving research and development around displays and sensors that no VR company could have done in the past at any price point.

So sometimes cheap consumer tech can be better than expensive military tech?

That can be true, and thats one of the reasons that a lot of the different military programs are actually shifting toward using more off-the-shelf systems, like using normal Android phones with custom builds of Android that make them more secure, but its still consumer hardware. Its easy to replace and cheap to build, as opposed to systems of the past like the Land Warrior program where they were using customized, specialized mobile computing hardware. It was expensive, it was heavy, and it didnt have this huge force of consumer R&D behind it. They develop them internally, so it takes very long for these products to come out. The consumer market is much faster than that. You dont have seven years to come out with a product, you need it out by next quarter, and you need to make it better than anyone elses that quarter. That drives innovation faster. Our Crystal Cove prototype were showing is better than most if not all professional units out there, just because technology has moved so fast in the consumer space.

So you have military clients then?

We already have people in the military that are buying. Were focused on gaming because its very demanding and its a large market. If we can get everyday gamers to accept our productmeaning we make it lightweight, comfortable, and easy to usethen certainly the military, whos been putting up with much more expensive and much more clunky, bulky low-performance systems, is going to latch on.

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What about the medical fieldwill we see doctors virtually walking through CT scans soon?

There are already people doing that. Thats been one of the big uses in VR in research. Over the years, its been obvious. The idea is that youd take a 3D scan, and youd look at it at scale inside the body but youve cut everything away except for whatever area of interest you have. There are a couple of people doing that. Theyre starting to move to the Rift. Instead of these systems causing hundreds of thousands of dollars and being in only the top research hospitals with only a few people working with them, its now only a few hundred dollars worth of gear that any medical student can start experimenting with. Theres one university for their medical school that bought 20 Rift development kits because they have a class on 3D medical imaging and they bought them for that class. Not just the Rift, but VR in general is what they see as the future of diagnostic tools.

Now that the development kit has been available for a while, what have you seen that you werent anticipating?

I wasnt anticipating nearly the kind of quality and content weve seen, and the amount of content. We ran a game jam a few months back and it got over 200 hundred entries. All of them were completely different. There werent many repeating concepts, and I think thats because on a traditional game there are certain mechanics that work well. Developers know they work well, and so you have people retreading a lot of the same ground over again. With VR, you cant do that. Even if you use all the old game mechanics, they dont translate necessarily well with VR. People are trying totally new things.

There was this game called Dumpy: Going Elephants, and its this crazy cartoon world where youre an elephant and you have this giant trunk and you can swing and smash stuff. Thats the type of thing you wouldnt be able to do in a normal game, and you definitely didnt expect to see it. Then theres people doing really weird things. One guy had a character in VR that has a giant nose. They rendered it as a giant nose, so you can look down and see this giant bulbous nose. So many different things.

Also, architecture visualization. I expected to see it, but I didnt expect to see how fast it was taken up. Thats one of the fastest developing industries.

With the Crystal Cove prototype that we tested and youre showing at CES, can you describe in detail what steps youve taken to help combat users' complaints of motion sickness while wearing the Rift?

Two of the things were showing today actually make a huge difference. One is full-position tracking. With the original dev kit, we could figure out where you were looking, but we couldnt figure out if the orientation was due to your head or to your body, so we just assumed it was due to your head. For the best experience youd have to keep perfectly still, and that would be accurate. If you wanted to lean or do micro movements like shift your balance or leaning forward at a table examining something, none of those movements were accurately reflected. That disconnect is one of the things that made people get sick so easily. Now we have a full 6DoF (degrees of freedom) system that can track movement in all directions and orientations. We also have low-persistence. Its a technical technology, but the long and short of it is it allows us to make motion blur. Everything in the environment remains perfectly stable. You dont turn your head and see any blurring of objects. It doesnt seem like your head is swimming at all. Weve also reduced the latency a lot. Its about half of what the HD prototypes had at E3.

So using the low-persistence technique, quickly cutting the image in and out, youre able to cut down on image delay. How did that idea come to you?

That didnt even just come to us. Weve been researching and collaborating with a lot of people. Valve has been really helpful in researching that technique, and its been around for awhilethe idea of using a pulse backlighter, a very low-persistence display. Theres some old CRT monitors that were designed with very fast-decaying phosphorous so you could do low-persistence but it never really caught on.

So its a feature, not a bug? Not just bad TVs?

Well, they were bad TVs, but its only recently that technology has made this viable for a consumer device. You couldnt have a made a low-persistence VR headset five years ago at all and certainly not well. Its going to be mandatory for a good VR experience going into the future until we can get displays that run so fast that a single full-persistence frame is as short as our low-persistence flash. Youd need to get up to 1000 frames per second to do that. Until we have 1000 Hz displays, 1000 fps rendering, and some hypothetical, crazy video link with hundreds of more bandwidth than HDMI, were going to be stuck with other solutions.

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