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Shooter godfather has advice for developers
The lead designer on some games you might have heard of, like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, has been away from the forefront of first-person shooters for a few years, but he has not been idle. Aside from building rockets that fly into space, John Carmack also been dabbling in virtual reality. In August 2013, he became Chief Technology Officer of Oculus VR, founded by fellow techno-wunderkind Palmer Luckey. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, Carmack tackled the technical underpinnings of the company's purely mobile plans, specifically the Samsung Gear VR headset, which uses the company's mobile phones to act as the brains and display of the device. Today, in front of a packed house of hundreds of developers and journalists, Carmack gave a talk on how that process had worked, and what he expects of the platform in the future. There were no revelations about the Oculus Rift, but a lot of the work that he's putting into Gear VR can spill over into that.
Our story begins at a Samsung R&D facility in Dallas, Texas a few years ago, where the company was working on their first Gear VR (they've just released its sequel, the Gear VR 2). Carmack's base of operations has been in Texas since the early days of id Software, so it was a natural geographic fit. Carmack was enthused by the engineering challenges of VR and found the mobile variant especially interesting. In fact, he sees devices like Gear VR as the primary platform. By definition, they are far more portable than a device like the Oculus Rift; even if you can throw the Rift in a carry-on bag, you still need to bring your PC with you too.
Gear VR, meanwhile, needs only a mobile phone slapped into a headset, though it is admittedly currently limited to a small handful of Samsung phones. Carmack mentioned that you can take the device with you on vacation, giving it more visibility in the headset market than a device that's tethered to a PC. He quipped, "The most fun thing to do with Gear VR is to show it to other people," because their reactions are so entertaining. He called this "an infection vector for virtual reality."
But in Carmack's opinion, the content system needed some work. When Facebook bought Oculus VR, they were able to bring some people over from their new owner who could help with the infrastructure behind purchasing and downloading games over the Internet. Carmack sees the GearVR store as a competitor to Steam, in fact.
With that in place, Carmack seems confident that the hardware itself is suitable to act as a commercial development platform, and they would be aggressively promoting Gear VR to create a user base. There are still some technical limitations compared to the Oculus Rift, chiefly positional tracking. The Rift uses a sophisticated motion sensor to synchronize your head movement with camera movement; so in addition to the Gear VR's ability to detect your head turning, the Rift can tell when you lean forward, lean, back, and tilt your head. When this detail is absent, the result can cause nausea. The Rift is also using the power of your PC, so its visual effects can be a lot more complicated.
For the Gear VR, Carmack encouraged developers to aim for a level of complexity on par with that of a GameCube game. He noted that Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were essentially Gauntlet from a first-person perspective, so it wasn't necessary to re-invent the design wheel or blow people away with amazing visuals to make a compelling game. You could just iterate on an idea in a way that took interesting advantage of virtual reality. He added, "We still don't know what the best application will be."
Even with more modest performance targets in mind, a technique called Asynchronous Time Warp is necessary for the hardware to keep up with the game engine's demands. ATW injects "filler" frames when the device can't maintain 60 frames per second. This avoids judder, which can cause disorientation. Oculus is also getting the word out about their layering system. In a 3D scene, you designate multiple layers for the engine to see as different distances. Tagging these beforehand means that the GPU doesn't have to figure it out in real time, but it also helps with anti-aliasing, especially with text.
They're also working on multi-view rendering, where the same set of 3D engine instructions are sent to both eyes, which also cuts down on the calculations that the GPU needs to make. This raises the ceiling on the things that the CPU part of the phone or tablet can do, such as animation, AI, and some physics.
At the end of the talk, Carmack had a Q&A session, during which he gave us his opinion on augmented reality. He saw the platform as not competing directly with VR, and that the latter would be where innovations happened first. AR also uses cameras to simulate a set of eyes, but since the cameras can't be where your eyes actually are, this spatial gap can create disorientation. Nevertheless, he expressed enthusiasm for Microsoft's Hololens initiative.
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The lead designer on some games you might have heard of, like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, has been away from the forefront of first-person shooters for a few years, but he has not been idle. Aside from building rockets that fly into space, John Carmack also been dabbling in virtual reality. In August 2013, he became Chief Technology Officer of Oculus VR, founded by fellow techno-wunderkind Palmer Luckey. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, Carmack tackled the technical underpinnings of the company's purely mobile plans, specifically the Samsung Gear VR headset, which uses the company's mobile phones to act as the brains and display of the device. Today, in front of a packed house of hundreds of developers and journalists, Carmack gave a talk on how that process had worked, and what he expects of the platform in the future. There were no revelations about the Oculus Rift, but a lot of the work that he's putting into Gear VR can spill over into that.
Our story begins at a Samsung R&D facility in Dallas, Texas a few years ago, where the company was working on their first Gear VR (they've just released its sequel, the Gear VR 2). Carmack's base of operations has been in Texas since the early days of id Software, so it was a natural geographic fit. Carmack was enthused by the engineering challenges of VR and found the mobile variant especially interesting. In fact, he sees devices like Gear VR as the primary platform. By definition, they are far more portable than a device like the Oculus Rift; even if you can throw the Rift in a carry-on bag, you still need to bring your PC with you too.
Gear VR, meanwhile, needs only a mobile phone slapped into a headset, though it is admittedly currently limited to a small handful of Samsung phones. Carmack mentioned that you can take the device with you on vacation, giving it more visibility in the headset market than a device that's tethered to a PC. He quipped, "The most fun thing to do with Gear VR is to show it to other people," because their reactions are so entertaining. He called this "an infection vector for virtual reality."
But in Carmack's opinion, the content system needed some work. When Facebook bought Oculus VR, they were able to bring some people over from their new owner who could help with the infrastructure behind purchasing and downloading games over the Internet. Carmack sees the GearVR store as a competitor to Steam, in fact.
With that in place, Carmack seems confident that the hardware itself is suitable to act as a commercial development platform, and they would be aggressively promoting Gear VR to create a user base. There are still some technical limitations compared to the Oculus Rift, chiefly positional tracking. The Rift uses a sophisticated motion sensor to synchronize your head movement with camera movement; so in addition to the Gear VR's ability to detect your head turning, the Rift can tell when you lean forward, lean, back, and tilt your head. When this detail is absent, the result can cause nausea. The Rift is also using the power of your PC, so its visual effects can be a lot more complicated.
For the Gear VR, Carmack encouraged developers to aim for a level of complexity on par with that of a GameCube game. He noted that Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were essentially Gauntlet from a first-person perspective, so it wasn't necessary to re-invent the design wheel or blow people away with amazing visuals to make a compelling game. You could just iterate on an idea in a way that took interesting advantage of virtual reality. He added, "We still don't know what the best application will be."
Even with more modest performance targets in mind, a technique called Asynchronous Time Warp is necessary for the hardware to keep up with the game engine's demands. ATW injects "filler" frames when the device can't maintain 60 frames per second. This avoids judder, which can cause disorientation. Oculus is also getting the word out about their layering system. In a 3D scene, you designate multiple layers for the engine to see as different distances. Tagging these beforehand means that the GPU doesn't have to figure it out in real time, but it also helps with anti-aliasing, especially with text.
They're also working on multi-view rendering, where the same set of 3D engine instructions are sent to both eyes, which also cuts down on the calculations that the GPU needs to make. This raises the ceiling on the things that the CPU part of the phone or tablet can do, such as animation, AI, and some physics.
At the end of the talk, Carmack had a Q&A session, during which he gave us his opinion on augmented reality. He saw the platform as not competing directly with VR, and that the latter would be where innovations happened first. AR also uses cameras to simulate a set of eyes, but since the cameras can't be where your eyes actually are, this spatial gap can create disorientation. Nevertheless, he expressed enthusiasm for Microsoft's Hololens initiative.
More...