Augmenting Elite Dangerous : 30 Years on from the original : AR ,VR and AVR HMD gaming with Dual head trackers , Dual mode single head tracking, Oculus Rift, Cinemzier OLED , smd ST1080 TriDef 3D, native 3D and Rift Warp 3D ..

Augmenting Elite Dangerous 

Many of us will chose to play the likes of Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen at 8K and 12K resolutions when they arrive .. Great ..but what happens when we introduce VR and AR Displays, dual head trackers and dual head tracking modes to augment one of the greatest game series of all time..?  ( or two when Chris releases the combat module )

30 years on from first playing Elite, I am about to play/experience Elite Dangerous in ways my generation dreamt of decades before the cotton was picked for young Palmer's/my  EYE love VR Oculus Rift T-Shirts ..

6 Degrees of HMD Elite Dangerous 

We are going to explore playing Elite Dangerous in AR , AVR and VR  with 3 different Head Mounted Displays, 2 Different head trackers, 3 different 3D modes in total 6 different ways .. in summary these are 

1. Elite Dangerous at extreme resolution (5120 by 1600 ) played on the smd ST1080 over the cloud : 2D 

a 5120 by 1600 res capture of Elite Dangerous which I intend to test on a head mounted display, extreme resolution HMD gaming using the cloud is the future ..I will be looking at one way of getting there sooner .. and why we should be trying..

of course in the future we will also experience

2. Elite Dangerous played in Holographic Augmented Virtual Reality on smd ST1080 sbs 1080p 3D

in use this is a razor sharp 1080p per eye 3D Holographic image ..you see on a 180g 100 inch transparent wearable display and I am going to take a look at playing with the most hi res AVR HMD in existence the smd ST1080

as the ST1080 can be transparent and or opaque we also get to play:

3. Elite Dangerous on Siliconmicrodisplay ST1080 HMD  with dual mode Zeiss head tracking sbs 1080p TriDef 3D  and in game side by side 3D 

4. Elite Dangerous on Cinemizer OLED HMD with dual mode  Zeiss head tracking 1080p TriDef 3D  

5. Elite Dangerous on Oculus Rift : played with Dual head trackers : Rift POV + Zeiss Pitch and Yaw head tracking

6. Elite Dangerous on Oculus Rift Dual Mode Zeiss Head Tracking 1080p side by side  non warp 3D 

All of the above future and present ways of playing this old game, which I am about to go TLDR on, serve to provide me with valuable data for developing my future Brain Internet Display Interface ( BINDi) ...as well as answer questions re present HMD tech .. chief among these is 

Can we actually play a space combat sim with  AR and VR  tech ?

Outside a 4 minute show demo, or is the only option to have 4 minute battles followed by 10 minute  Katee Sackhoff debriefs .. erhh cut scenes ... to allow you to recover from the nausea or a valid reason to faint.. 

How can we evolve HMD and head tracker hardware to best to suit players as well as promoters?

And how do we best use head tracking to actually play rather than just demo a space combat sim?

The answers to these questions and yet more questions re HMD gaming  .. lie in the playing of Elite Dangerous ..which unlike Star Citizen or the combat fest that is EVE Valkyrie will not live or die on the quality of it's cut scenes or celeb voice overs .. but on how it lives up to its 30 year pedigree as one of the most influential games of all time : 

Hx:

Elite is one of gaming's most legendary names, it's influence as well as the wait for this instalment resonating across three decades  ...So out of respect and for the edification of those journos whose space combat experience began with Rebel Assault on Gamecube and or EVE Valkyrie at a game show they were flown to by the developer of EVE Valkyrie,  let's look at a little historical context as to why this is so, before getting onto to detail of augmenting how we play the future of this most hallowed of space sims (  oh and HDTFU Chris.. where's my combat module?) ..

1984

Here in the UK ..in those bleak Cold War winters ....when not worrying about WW III ... we took the power of the computing available to us and did the obvious : we played games ... one game in particular .... Elite...

Thus it was in that most Orewellian sounding of years 1984,  a generation of British school kids found themselves leading the merry life of a privateer, slave trader, financial Empire builder and boasted of first contact with elusive and mysterious exotic races before attempting to wipe them out or exploit them which ever was more profitable ...Many of the pass times our illustrious ancestors had engaged in ..without the benefit of or need for computers..

Moral quandary was just one of the genius touches that David Braben and Ian Bell managed to imbue into the core of Elite ...... get rich quick off dubious slave trading .. or work an honest wage hopping to and from every system making scraps .. and depending on the path you chose ..there were consequences.. that affected your real world status .. in the school play ground.. 

Elite quickly became THE reason to justify (for educational purposes) the purchase of a very expensive BBC Model B Microcomputer .......alongside Chuckie Egg...  Upper middle class children possessing the parents with funds to do so suddenly became very popular in school and after school .... Elite was way more than just a game .. but what a game it was: 

Entire galaxies and star systems, limited start up fuel and credits,  space combat that encouraged genuine skill and killed you more than all the Demon Souls, Dark Souls series put together (30 years later)  but still kept you coming back for more ..  insanely addictive in game status chasing, decades before anyone would think of using "achievements" or "loss"  as Pavlovian gaming triggers..endless playground discussions on where to best dump your arms or illegal slave cargo ..  all in 32 KB .. the entire game taking up less space than one of these paragraphs ( take note Chairman Roberts)

The trouble with Elite, was the game itself was perfect.. playing it never felt like an engine with a game mechanic tacked on, it felt like an entire whole universe..or enough of one to fully immerse you in it's game .. and you thought that came with VR ? The novella that came with the game could immerse you more in it's world than all of today's VR tech..  

And then in the best of British tradition, all subsequent versions that followed and attempted to improve Elite .. failed ..in fact as computer tech advanced, every new version of Elite released was worse than the last ... with the exception of the Archimedes version..which you can get from Ian Bell's page here 

The schism of Bell and Braben as well as the frankly poorly executed though richly ambitious and bugged to infinity and beyond sequels ( anything with the word Frontier in the title check them out here  ) left fans doubting there would ever be a true successor to Elite .. Till sometime last year Dave started asking us for money for Elite Dangerous ..  And so we Jump Drive forwards to 

2014... Elite 30 years late(r)  

Tragically the creators of Chuckie Egg still have not gotten round to making an update but one half of the Bell and Braben duo is funded and back with an update of Elite..

Can VR do for Elite Dangerous in 2014 what hidden line removal did for Elite in 1984?
Or could the current state of VR actually hinder the Elite Dangerous experience? 

I will be looking at the differences between LFOV ( Low Field of View ) and WFOV ( Wide Field of View)  HMDS, display tech LCOS, OLED and LCD panels and for the first time combining two forms of head tracking, as well as using dual mode head tracking..  and freely making up more VR acronyms as I go along .. for unlike poor JC ..no one pwns my ideas ..yet.. 

These 6 options of HMD gaming with  Elite Dangerous are only some of the eventual ways that will be open to us to play the game using head mounted displays and VR leaning controls :

By the end of 2014, we will have a myriad of HMDs to chose from when playing games like Elite Dangerous .. we will also be able to play in extreme resolutions  4K , 8K and 12k ... where will HMD use fit in all of this ..? Right now VR compatibility ( what OVR and Sony class as VR) is touted as a promotional tool for every consumable product going .. +/- Hollywood starlet to do the voice over and rattle the fan base from a safe distance of 4000 miles.. in a  geek proof recording bunker in LA...

What we laughably ( in some cases all the way to the bank) term as VR is only one use or application of HMD tech when it comes to video gaming...

Note I said play, the aim of HMD design should be to allow players to play, rather than promoters to promote..

3D setup and options 

Elite Dangerous already has several in game 3D settings, but I will also be using TriDef 3D .. We can use different forms of 3D generation to mitigate Rift nausea .. that part of it that comes from the Rift distortion or Warp code..at least...

NB Elite Dangerous is very much an Alpha (even at this Beta stage)  expect to see improvements over time ..Don't worry though, even in this state Elite Dangerous is about the best £100 I have spent all year on gaming .. but then I am spoiled for ways of playing it .. 

The first thing to take on board  is 3D/VR is not the only way to play Elite Dangerous on a HMD :

1. Elite Dangerous at extreme resolution (5120 by 1600 ) played on the smd ST1080 HMD over the cloud : 2D 

This is my baseline, for the real competition to VR, AR and HMD gaming comes from your desktop display .. which if you are a space combat fan will already run at far higher res than than Oculus Rifts, ST1080s and Cinemizer OLEDs .. I have been gaming at 5120 by 1600 for nigh on 5 years now .. in a few months we will be able to game in 8K and 12K  with the possibility of at least 4K 3D .. At this point will anyone prefer a 960 by 1080 limited VR Redux version? And how do we get to experience extreme resolutions (for now ) on HMDs?

If you were wondering, Elite Dangerous plays at a decent speed using a 5120 by 1600 res even on 5 year old hardware.. as these gifs show .. ( impossible to capture with FRAPs!) 

Extreme resolutions are very,very  important to sim gamers and developers, this is the means by which they generate large fields of view, intricate and functioning cockpit chrome as well as making sure that objects being simulated maintain perspective and the illusion they are objects and not Tetris blocks .. I looked at the feasibility of HMD flight sim gaming here over a year ago:

Oculus Rift dev kit review part II : Why flight sim gaming in VR ain't like dustin' crops kid..

So what if you want to throw a 4K or 5K res at your HMD .. is this possible .. well it depends on your HMD .. and getting round it's native display resolution limit .. 

I found it is possible to stream an extreme resolution to a HMD as long as it has the correct screen ratio and a suitable pixel density .. in an earlier experiment with 5120 by 1600, what I will call 5K on the ST1080 HMD: 

2014 HMD Display Design Theory & Practice : Taking Mobile Head Mounted Display design and use to 5K res and beyond using Asymmetric Cloud Scaling

Having solved the problem of displaying an extreme resolution on an existing retail HMD can we really play at 5120 by 1600 ? Well it depends on your GPU and above all wifi speed ..  The software I use to stream can comfortably handle 1080p 3D ..  but not extreme res .. even with a 120 meg Wifi N connection   .. not yet .. we can still get a glimpse of what we will be able to do .. as our wifi speeds increase.. so will that frame rate .. at some point soon we ( or I ) will be playing 4K content on a HMD and hopefully be able to make a better video of it than the one below:

Solutions : 

Stream acceleration: for us to be able to exploit asymmetric cloud scaling and push extreme resolutions to HMDs bypassing the need for native 4K and 8K res HMD panels , hardware has to accelerate streaming in the same way hardware now accelerates graphics, we need Cloud Stream Processing Units .. 

If we can accelerate that cloud stream or develop a HMD that is built for streaming .. then we can reach a point where we achieve parity with desktop resolutions in HMDs through wireless asymmetric cloud scaling .. far sooner than expected .. or predicted ...  when we do this we eliminate the need for distortion, warps and nausea.. and a new branch of HMD design develops alongside the current obsession with FOV2GO derived WFOV VR HMDs.. 

Even at this experimental stage  I still find it way cool to be using a 100 inch 180g display replacing my  60 inch dual desktop display , without any physical connection to the source PC .. 

NB I would have no issues streaming a 1080p 3D game of Elite Dangerous to the ST1080 or Cinemizer OLED and play without any physical connection to the source PC . But  that's so 2012 .. I want to push how we game ...use and design HMDs to game.. 

Whilst this way of using or designing HMDs is not the present, it is THE future .. which is why I decided to go on about it before getting on to the more obvious ways of playing Elite Dangerous on HMDs .. One of which is not : 

2. Playing Elite Dangerous in Holographic Augmented Virtual Reality on smd ST1080 sbs 1080p 3D

The first HMD I used to play Elite Dangerous was the siliconmicrodisplay ST1080, from experience I know this is THE go to HMD for serious flight sim gaming .. The only true native 1080p per eye HMD in existence .. 

Playing with the smd ST1080 HMD affords us unique opportunities 

We can play in both 2D and 3D .. and this is currently the only HMD we can scale a 5120  by 1600 res game to : 

Staring at the spinning Sidewinder or Cobra MKIII ( it's 30 years Dave and I lost my ship chart) gave me an idea .. 

Why play in bog standard VR ... when a transparent HMD like the ST1080 allows us to play in Holographic Augmented Virtual Reality .. ?

a very poor capture of the the true 1080p per eye ST1080 LCOS HMD .. but one that should allow you to see the wood for the AVR trees... just like I can .. wearing the HMD .. 

in AVR that ship is a hologram .. floating on a 100 inch true 1080p native per eye resolution screen : Well that's what it looks like to me .. this is what it looks like filmed very poorly through the left eye piece of the ST1080 ...

This demonstrates the effect of using a black display background with a transparent HMD display .. a very simple way for creating an AR or Holographic display .. 

I look forward to testing this with the Atheer One, CastAR and Meta Pro too .. but only the ST1080 has a true native 1080p per eye LCOS display and that 1080p per eye is crucial to allow work and play...

Also only the ST1080 is confirmed to allow sbs, tab and frame packed 3D...and let you do this now...

The  native 1080p res of the ST1080 is what makes flight sim gaming feasible. Using the ST1080 you are able to replace a 100 inch 1080p 3D monitor .. and play not just demo or tolerate the game...every panel, text menu is legible .. every ship shoots off into the distance and remains a ship not the pixel blobs of the Rift.. or other WFOV HMDs

For this is not some semi 1080p WFOV HMD res, but true 1920 by 1080 per eye.. My 1080p Rift Dev kit Too when it arrives will be 960 by 1080 per eye with a bizzare 8:9 screen ratio.. more on this later..

I use the ST1080 in transparent mode all the time, in use I find it takes a powered source of light to penetrate or begin to effect what you are seeing on the transparent HMD display. 

This white background for instance would still look solid enough to be not far off  the experience you get from using the opacity shield ..

So one of the reasons apart from showing off, for the above video is to demonstrate what natural light does to a transparent LCOS HMD.. 

As Elite Dangerous runs with a black star field, when looking through up to the sky in daylight I can see through the display .. if look down or straight ahead away from the window I see the black star field of the game as normal .. 

The LCOS display is bright enough to obliterate a lit room, and it looks pretty awesome when used on a plane in the dark too ..

When designing, developing for and using an AR HMD, we can exploit the way external light sources affect the on HMD experience to further augment the way we work and play .. 

From creating holographic effects in multiple forms of 3D to coding on the HMD whilst looking through it to the results happening on a second larger monitor behind .. we are just at the beginning of what is possible with transparent HMDs like the ST1080 .. 

If Elite Dangerous were to have a retro vector graphics mode .. akin to the intro ship .. we could play in AR .. As it stands I can still play with asteroids and ships flying out of my real world background ..but this is not all ...

Imagine designing your ship with your hands .. Iron Man Style in AR ..  So that spinning Cobra MKIII is something I can take apart and attach items to in AR ..  

With an AVR HMD .. like the ST1080 ...a transparent HMD .. you can see your hands through the display handling the ship on the display ...

You don't need to imagine .. you can do that now ..  I have been doing so for nigh on a couple of years..since I got my first Leap Motion prototype

AVR or augmented Virtual Reality with HMDs that can be both transparent and opaque depending on your needs is the future of HMD design.. solo VR is it's past .. AVR gives us a multipurpose HMD not consigned to seeing your presence in some VR redux version of your favourite game ... but allowing you to augment how you play your favourite game ..speaking of which 

Time to explain what dual mode head tracking brings to Elite Dangerous and show some game play...

The Zeiss head tracker is taped to one of the arms of the ST1080 .. it weighs < 8g the whole HMD weighs around 180g with the head tracker attached.. 

This is the max or optimum weight for a gaming HMD ..one that is designed for movement , rapid movement for prolonged periods of time.. how would I know ? 1000s of hours of testing on 1000s of people  years worth of time comparing multiple weighted HMDs.. 

Dual Mode Head tracking ?

I use head tracking in two distinct modes : neither requiring one line of code

Mode 1: the Zeiss head tracker controls Pitch , Yaw and Aim : when you see the arrow move in the videos below I am looking in that direction. The Zeiss head tracker will let you stop within a pixel and hold your aim , two things I told Mr Luckey were essential to being able to play a game with a HMD and not just see your friends in it.. 

use your head son ..

Mode 2: the Zeiss head tracker control point of view , i.e. looking around the cockpit ..enabled through a mouse wheel click and or thumbstick press 

once you have lined up your target with mode 1 , you can switch to tracking him  as he moves off screen , with mode 2 all within a split second...welcome to the era of the augmented gamer .. bring your own skills!

Experience:  A non scaled or warped field of view & True High Res FOV 

The ST1080  is an example  of a raw or high native resolution FOV HMD  .. unlike the Cinemizer or Rift which scale down higher resolutions or magnify a low res to create the illusion of a large fov ..  

Whilst the first gen of HMD users obsessed about FOV angles, what really matters is how much of a native resolution you see on a HMD or how well games scale to that resolution..

On the ST1080 we see the cockpit as we see it on a 100 inch flat screen display , albeit in 3D .. not the back of a tin bath tub scaled down view using Rift Distortion . Every control panel works, is legible, and every HUD detail also is visible as it should be without being shrunk or having to be placed off into the distance/elsewhere to accommodate Rift distortion.. 

What this means is we can actually PLAY the game not just boast about being present in it .. or use said VR bath tub to listen to Starbuck's dulcet tones.. 

Re the efficacy of  head tracking in Elite Dangerous 

1.We are using just one mode of the the Zeiss head tracker .. mouse emulation .. in hardware .. so there is 0 lag perceptible, in fact you will need to slow it down .. And that JC is the truth. It is also possible to introduce full DOF axes head tracking into the game code but in reality .. if you want to play the game this is totally unnecessary 

When people ask why I use Zeiss head tracking  I am reminded of what I always say to Palmer and JC when they are quoting sensor speeds and whatnot at me : I remind them  it just WORKS .. and extremely well with my Rift too...as well as my PS3, PS4 , Xbox 360 , Xbox ONE .. etc, etc...

2. When using Rift head tracking at some random point the camera skews off in a random direction and you HAVE to find F12 to reorient the FOV .. this can happen mid battle or just as you are about to hit an asteroid .. now imagine after 1000 hours of game play you are about to dock your Latinum encrusted Thargoid Dreadnaught , packed with contraband back at Lave station and your Rift DK1 or 2 throws a wobbly .. your ill gotten gains get blasted out of existence by the local constabulary for scratching the station's paintwork.. and in Elite this will happen before you have managed to put your Rift back on after dropping the keyboard trying to find F12 in the cold darkness of Rift VR...

Hmmh what Valkyrie will really need is a way to voice activate Starbuck to hit the F12 key when the Rift tracker throws a wobbly...

With the Zeiss head tracker this NEVER happens, the tracker looks where you look , moves to where you move it and there is NO random screen reorientation.. 

With the ST1080 you have full sight of your 101 keys and the joystick too..as well as the air hostess bringing you a drink on your flight .. 

Versatility is what makes owning a HMD like the ST1080 worth all the issues it has .. 

Versatility and ease of use means multipurpose non VR HMDS have as bright or a brighter future than VR HMDs alone... 

To their credit Frontier have included many options to generate 3D in game, only one of which is Rift exclusive.. other developers really should learn from this .. 

The following videos are the first and last play of  Elite Dangerous I had over the weekend I was testing : Note I said first and last... 

Elite Dangerous Siliconmicrodisplay ST1080 HMD Zeiss head tracking sbs 1080p 3D Test 1 

Elite Dangerous smd ST1080 HMD Zeiss head tracking Test 2 

The ST1080 will allow you to read every line of text or see every bit of detail without distortion or it turning to Rift pixel blob garbage at a set distance .. 

There is 0 nausea using the device playing Elite Dangerous, we can use 3 different forms of 3D generation and adjust the efficacy of that 3D using in game settings as well as TriDef 3D .. 

The 100 inch screen and LFOV view let's you play the game like you would on any 100 inch flat screen 3D display .. only in a USB powered 180g wearable display .. 

Is it perfect .? Of course not, LCOS suffers colour comparisons with the OLED panels of the CInemizer , rapid eye movements can produce red green flash effects . cinephiles really do not like the bright display and .. the breakout box runs seriously hot ..  it is not as comfortable as the Cinemizer OLED ..  but : 

If you need to work or play at 1080p 2D or 3D , 2012s ST1080 is still the HMD to go for .. 

It is the simplest HMD to connect and fire up , supporting the largest number of 3D formats .. here I was playing in sbs 1080p 3D .. it would take seconds to switch to TAB , or frame packed.. and in certain games these additional options offer a strikingly superior 3D experience to the standard side by side 3D that the Rift and some other future HMDs are locked to ..

Note I said this was the first and last HMD I used .. to play .. because this is the HMD you would use to play a 1080p 3D flight sim .. with everything working as it should. 

Now if only I could get my hands on that 4K version.. 

And now onto the Cinemizer OLED HMD, the most comfortable HMD in existence and the 2nd HMD I carry around with me everywhere..because with it's portable battery and carry case it is designed to be carried everywhere .. 

On the Cinemizer I am playing in 1080p TAB top and bottom TriDef 3D : this is a scaled 1080p image to the micro OLED displays of the HMD .. OLEDs naturally give you the best visual experience ,  however HUD text really needs to be bigger in game . 

Elite Dangerous Cinemizer OLED HMD Zeiss head tracking 1080p TriDef 3D test 1 

This is another HMD I can use to play Elite Dangerous anywhere, with 0 nausea, the  Zeiss head tracker I will keep on saying is the finest piece of VR related control tech in existence .. whether you need to play Dark Souls 2 on PS3, GTA V or Infamous Second Son on PS4 .. or Elite Dangerous in 3D on PC .. you can do all that with one device .. without 1 line of code ... and as I stated above it never fails .. 

Here I am calibrating it using in game settings .. the free look in Elite Dangerous needs working on , it needs to be a complete free look ..at the moment I get distinct x and y movements mapped to areas of the cockpit ...what I need is to be able to look around freely and have the POV follow .. still I managed to adjust the settings .. at this stage there may be too many settings we are able to adjust .. 

 

Regardless .. Zeiss head tracking never fails .. As for TriDef it is always superior to in game 3D .. and can also work at extreme resolutions ..

By the end of 2014 I will not be playing in 1080p 3D , I will be playing in 4K per eye 3D .. and scaling that to a HMD is going to be fascinating.. 

Elite Dangerous Cinemizer OLED HMD + Dual Mode Head Tracking 1080p TriDef 3D test 2 


By this point I have better calibrated the head tracker to my tastes.. and should therefore fair better in the game .. this paragraph is of course a justification for the fact that I could not stop playing Elite Dangerous .. after waiting 30 years for a proper sequel.. 

The in game 3D generation in Elite Dangerous does not allow for TAB 3D, it also at this point alters resolutions,  with TriDef 3D , I can set a true 1080p per eye res and test it , like I said above we are fast moving towards 4K 3D in PC gaming .. PC GPUS aren't just for rendering 4K video .. they are for playing 4K 3D games ..  When we reach this point around December this year .. 3D generation through apps like TriDef will be crucial to maintaining a decent frame rate.. 

I haven't really begun to tune a TriDef profile for Elite Dangerous .. it took seconds to set up a generic profile and play .. 

Any game set in space looks stunning on the Cinemizer OLED, the real issue is those attitude markers .. they need to be bold and HUD text needs to be adjustable .. this appears to be a TriDef issue , apart from that this is still the most comfortable HMD to use to play this game ..  you will not be coming down from  nausea when playing or after playing ..  even if you are on a flight ....whilst playing.. 

And now for JC and Team Oculus/Facebook ...

Let's take a look at the issues with Elite Dangerous played with two different methods on the Oculus Rift with dual head trackers and dual mode head tracking..

Issues

1. the Rift warp view gives a back of a tin bath tub view ... the bath tub takes up half the screen .. I can understand how this is used to attempt to counter Rift Nausea  and compensate for FPS loss due to the Rift warp/distortion+additional code .. as only half the screen is actually moving compared to the normal view ..but 

2.the dash is too far off ..placed in  the centre of the screen

3. at 640 by 800 or 960 by 1080 display resolution per eye ( the native res per eye of Rift Dev Kit 1 and 2 as well as several emerging Wide Field of View FOV2GO derived HMDs)  , some text becomes illegible .. most panels are non functional ..the radar can throw up garbage .. especially as the in game resolution adjusts to resolutions non suited to Rift distortion ..

These are not faults with the game per se .. they are characteristics of the present Rift design..and as I noted in that article on flight sim gaming in VR, developers are going to have to rejig how objects distort .. it is no longer a case of just upping the native resolution to create perspective.. you have to scale your entire universe to that weird 4:5 or 8:9 screen ratio and then factor in what geometrical and optical transformation do to it .. 

If however you use a true high resolution HMD  say 1080p native, as above where  I tested up to  5120 by 1600 on a traditional multi monitor set up .. text actually becomes large and clear  enough to read as you look round the cockpit .. as in the picture below .. because we are using a native resolution and not warping or scaling ?

this is a 5120 by 1600 native res experience non warped .. possible to scale to the ST1080 HMD without the low res and warping issues of  the Rift .. HMDs are  way off reproducing the experience you get with a legacy multi monitor set up ... and scaling to low res distorted ratio HMDs presents unique problems.. no HMD can reproduce or match a true high res pixel counted field of view ... this is the difference between actual and claimed FOVs.. magnifying a low res image can never compare to a true 5K , 8K or 12K set up .. this is the challenge facing HMD devs.. 

Rift VR Elite Dangerous is then a redux version where ...

4. Near objects look fine .. large asteroids, ships close up ..however when they move off into the distance .. they can turn into to those Tetris blocks I first noted when testing Rise of Flight  last year... 

You can find yourself staring at stars not able to tell the difference between them and a ship .. is that yellow Tetris block or group of pixels a star or that ship I was chasing? Is it moving?

At resolutions of 640 by 800 and 960 by 1080 we are still conscious that we are looking at magnified pixels on a tablet screen and the spaces between them ... this is what can make a joke of so called "presence" and "VR" ... at this stage in it's evolution.. 

5. Rift Head tracker fail .. the epic Rift head tracker wobbly that haunts every game you play but seems to be absent from every sycophantic show review, demo or celeb tagging their brand to VR .. is present and accounted for in Elite Dangerous .. and VERY annoying when you are in the middle of a battle .. I cut those bits out of the vids below .. most of them .. for JC ! But this is THE issue with Rift tracking at the moment .. and remember you are going to have to find F12 on your keyboard , to do this you need to lift the Rift .. wrecking your presence in VR Elite Dangerous .. 

Interestingly when I combined Zeiss head tracking with Rift head tracking I did not notice any screen orientation fail.. as you can see in the videos below..

6. Nausea .. Space Combat and Flight sim games are on the face of it games you would want to play in VR .. in the practical reality of the current state of VR WFOV HMDs they are epic fails ..... as wise a choice as a roller coaster sim to show off CV1 ... like I tease JC from time to time .. when launching your WFOV faux VR head set .. all of which inherently suffer from varying degrees of nausea .. as confirmed by the cancellation of the Morpheus version of Sony's PS4 driving game  .. it may be better not to rely on a game with fast  moving star fields, 6 degrees of freedom , ships flying off in one direction , missiles firing off in another with POV head tracking that means you will be smiling at the ship to the left of you whilst crashing into the asteroid in front of you ..   similar logic and experience eliminates driving games as VR launch titles .. or independent head tracking in FPS games .. I lost count how many people I had run into trees on Arma III using independent head tracking and don't get me started on TF2! 

I would put money on Katee Sackhoff's voice over script for EVE Valkyrie containing a line referring to " remember to take a FRAKKING break.. nugget " to counter Rift nausea.. 

Around 3 years of using WFOV HMDs and I am well experienced in experiencing nausea, for starters it is cumulative .. it begins before or without any 3D image appearing , simply donning the HMD can set it off.. The geometrical Rift Warp absolutely contributes to the nausea, both the software and the hardware of the display and lens array contribute.. the longer you play the worse it gets . And it continues after you stop playing .. a heavy Rift session can lead to a day of post Rift gaming nausea .. mitigating it through whatever means is NOT eliminating it and asking developers to reinvent the game development wheel is not financially possible even if you could persuade every dev  to scrap elements of their game that someone thinks perhaps maybe responsible for nausea .. even when that someone is wearing shorts and packing a couple of billion dollars of facebook dollars.. 

the Rift design is the cause of nausea .. the same game on any number of HMDs can be played without nausea...

It is vital for HMD developers to understand that nausea is a function of WFOV HMDS and is NOT PRESENT in ALL HMDS .. 

Nausea is inherent in ALL WFOV HMDS .. from the micro OLED design of the HMZT series, to the subset of HMDs  that are  FOV2GO derived which includes both Sony's Project Morpheus and the Oculus Rift ( Hail Hydra!)  .. 

It is incorrect to state that nausea is inherent in ALL VR.. and then expect devs to adapt to your version of VR ..

So we can HMD game Elite Dangerous in true native 1080p 3D and beyond without nausea .. you just cannot do this on a WFOV HMD .. based off a FOV2GO design .. 


A gaming HMD has to be designed for motion, it just so happens LFOV HMDs manage to do this whether through their non warped , non geometrically transformed or optically distorted displays and display panel technology, through the virtue of being light weight or mimicking the way we are used to viewing 2D and 3D content without nausea.. as flat screen displays.. 

That's not to say we cannot evolve HMD design.. to solve this issue..How ? That would be telling..  

Will JC and OVR be brave enough to dump the FOV2GO based VR generation they rely on .. we will have to see .. I can see the promo hounds typing "this will be fixed in the second consumer version ..(CV2) .. ".. but the future of HMDs is not locked to WFOV FOV2GO derived designs alone ... if it is then VR is doomed in a retail space...

7. screen door and visible pixels .. on a WFOV high magnification large screen (tablet sized) HMD, both these issues are present even with 1080p panels and beyond 2K panels .. With Elite Dangerous being set in space this is not too bad.. in a game like Rise of Flight , the 3D effect was shattered for me by the screen door and visible pixels .. What hurts the perspective or depth generation more is the lack of resolution .. combined with visible pixels and screen door ..  

So that star field just does not have the depth it has on higher res LFOV HMDs like the ST1080 .. it cannot .. because your brain readily interprets a flat star field being magnified at a low res as a magnified 2D canvas .. with screen door and visible pixels .. like the flat stage set background in a play that you look at through binoculars .. without them from a distance you see a sky and experience perspective, using them you start to see the paint up close and all the 2D ugliness ruins the illusion of perspective .. this is another advantage of LFOV HMDS which have there displays set into the distance ... note you also need to have a display ..it is essential to have a display that has 0 visible pixels and 0 screen door to maintain perspective in a flight sim game .. or sky and foreground and ships merge.. 

8. Everything I noted about flight sim gaming on the Rift long ago here, still holds true .. which leaves you wondering if the likes of Elite Dangerous , Star Citizen and Eve Valkyrie are more promotional than practical or playable examples of so called VR gaming .. 

Playing Valkyrie for instance might be the first time seeing or hearing Starbuck  gives some of us nausea since seeing or hearing Starbuck in the 80s..  

Non Issues & possible solutions :

1. The Rift Warp does not hurt the FPS count to any great degree in this game .. a testament to the coding of Frontier and JC !

2. The Rift Head tracker when it is not throwing a wobbly works well, with one caveat .. independent head tracking can mean you are not looking where you are going ..with all it's real world repercussions..ever tried look left whilst walking or driving forward...? DON'T!

3. Solving Rift Head Tracker fails & screen reorientation issues and that back of tin bath tub view with non functioning dash...

Rift head tracker fail solution 1: combine 2 head trackers 

The video below records the first example of Rift gaming with TWO head trackers  : I am using the Rift head tracker to control Point of View (POV) .. and the Zeiss head tracker is used to control pitch, yaw and aiming ..  This is a combination of in hardware mouse head tracking which does not suffer from random drift or lag ( Palmer) with full on VR  Rift head tracking  which without the Zeiss head tracker, suffers from random screen orientation  fail.. present in all games but absent in all show demos ..so that's why Zuckerberg was sold on the Rift by trying out Project Morpheus...allegedly...

In this scenario I can augment how I aim with the Zeiss head tracker, look around the cockpit with the Rift head tracker, chase a target with the Zeiss head tracker and still use the joystick .. Adjusting the balance of each could give you the ultimate head tracking solution ... 

Playing this way with two head trackers, I never had to reach for the F12 key to correct the Rift.. maybe the Zeiss head tracker does something to prevent the Rift head tracker from throwing it's usual wobbly.. ? Maybe JC and Palmer fixed mine to stop my attempts at Rift humour .. serious business VR ..

Elite Dangerous Oculus Rift : Dual head tracking Rift POV + Zeiss Pitch and Yaw 

 

Though the Rift warp/distortion does not hurt the FPS rate, it does mean at this early stage many of the in game panels are non functional.. and used alone the Rift head tracker will randomly fail, requiring you to reset the view with F12 .. there is a simple solution to this ..  use a different head tracker..

A second solution for Rift head tracker fail + mitigating Rift nausea + actually being able to play a game like Elite Dangerous:  

Elite Dangerous Oculus Rift Dual Mode Zeiss Head Tracking 1080p sbs non warp 3D 

Elite Dangerous has an in game side by side 3D option we can use with the Rift in addition to using the Rift specific setting .. and there is also a TriDef 3D  side by side option .. In these scenarios the Rift tracker is eliminated .. and I use the Zeiss head tracker in dual mode to control the POV and the pitch/yaw/aiming.. 

Playing this way we lose the back of the tin bath tub view and of course some of the neuro physiological symptoms thrown up by your visual cortex having to cope with a fast moving image that is generated through both optical and geometrical distortion.. and keep up with your vestibular system swishing all that fluid around  .. with the momentum of a heavy HMD ..

Rift nausea is not a function of the HMD hardware you use alone ... it is a function of the wetware in you brain also .. and the mismatch between the two, each of which themselves run multiple overlapping and parallel processes to make you think that 2.5/3 inch cross eyed image scaled from 1080p down to semi 720p or 1080p in each of your eyes is combining to form so called virtual reality which the movements of your head and neck and all it's complex set of muscles and tendons and "sensors" are feeding back into also ..

Elimination of Rift nausea is going require, the application and knowledge of neuroscience, optics, anatomy as well as engineering .. to start with someone has to admit that all wide field of view HMDs throw up nausea issues  both the Rift and Project Morpheus .. and the great number of 3D printed WFOVs that are out there right now .. 

When tested on humans at least, you common garden/jungle Preying Mantis seem to have a whale of a time viewing 3D content through it's own personalised 3D headset..

We can reduce Rift or WFOV HMD nausea, but it is still present in AMOLED panels , 1080p panels .. let alone the LCD of the original Rift DK1 .. 

This is why I wrote that article over a year ago on why flight sim gaming in VR ain't like dustin crops kid .. 

In a game like Elite Dangerous .. or Star Citizen whenever it turns up .. currently Rift head tracking cannot be used in a normal gaming session without issue .. this is not the game's fault .. you can use other head trackers.. as I have been for the last 11 months and will be with Rift Dev Kit Too.. 

The question of why a LFOV HMD like the ST1080 and the Cinemizer OLED does not cause nausea , either through latency in display, head tracker fn or momentum is really something OVR should not have tried to laugh out the ball park ..but studied over the last 12 months.

Those 12 months I have been playing Rift games without the distortion and also without head tracking issues and Zeiss head tracking .. which solves two of the niggling issues with WFOV HMDs for me .. and works better than expected in Elite Dangerous .. 

There two independent head trackers being used to play this game even at an alpha stage there is no perceptible lag ( as long as your head and neck muscles are strong enough to heft the Rift around) ..

Using the non distorted side by side 3D view also lets us mitigate Rift nausea .. (and JC may prevent your former employees from attempting to allege you used their code to do so) 

What it comes down to in the end is our physiology and anatomy are not designed to cope with the faux VR display that current FOV2GO designs are using .. In 12 months of promotion and funding inflation .. what has changed.. the display panel, the head tracker the design? All still throw up issues ..the same issues..

Why single mode POV head tracking in VR flight sims and driving sims is an epic fail

The latency with Rift tracking comes from the display, weight and momentum of the Rift ..it is attached to .. a butterfly attached to a brick is how I describe this present design .. a gaming HMD designed for VR is in constant motion, it needs to be designed for speed and movement . 

In actual reality, which VR intends to mimic and make you feel "present",  when driving your car, or flying your Rocket ship (JC) although you CAN look round in all directions, you tend to keep your eye on the road/space highway in front , plus you have an insanely high res to look around in actual reality .. you rarely move your head or actual view in any great angle .. you use your eyes.. to look round ..not a highly magnified and distorted low res display.. of a WFOV HMD

When gamers first play a flight sim, space sim or driving gaming with such head tracking .. they tend to over react .. looking left whilst driving or flying in another direction, in Elite this will mean you hit an asteroid whilst looking left at a ship .. In driving games, if people can make it past the nausea they again tend to make sharp head turns forgetting the direction they are looking in is not the direction they are travelling..

 .. so dampening head tracking or limiting it's effect is going to be necessary to allow you to play a game or head tracking remains a 4 minute show demo, or a mode you use to mess around with before switching off and playing on your 12K 3D set up instead where you really can see your hands ,pedals yokes and keyboard... 

Breaking the 4 minute VR tech and game show VR barrier 

The real epic fail when it comes to VR technology is tolerance , yes you just sat at the game show playing Valkyrie for 4 minutes.. then they came and tapped you on the shoulder .. there is a reason for this .. and it is not the size of PewDiePies entourage or the rest of the queue behind you ..  a year on from using the Rift , it is fact that very few people can tolerate playing a real gaming length session on the hardware.. and that objectively includes you too Palmer, JC , Nate and Mark... doesn't it?

So if you are an architect, engineer game developer or gamer .. right now 1 year into it's public prototype evolution WFOV HMD tech still has tolerance issues and usage limits .. 

Until this 4 minute VR tech show barrier is broken ... WFOV HMDs are still not viable commercial products .. they do make for great promotional tools ... for sci fi authors, actors,conventions, traditional media and social media companies.. 

Is there a kid out there who doesn't believe the future is VR ? No 

Is there a kid out there able to experience VR in a useful and tolerable manner ? No

But this will all be fixed in the future cos JC told us so ?

Why isn't it fixed now?

HMD design, use, testing, hardware and software development is a new frontier ( pun not intended Dave)  As I write I am a year older in all of these fields  .. And as some prominent figures  and the Reddit hordes are learning NO ONE PWNS VR..or the directions that the HMD field is moving in,  which is what makes it such a fascinating prospect..

The future of HMD use is not set along the easiest cheapest most popular route, it could be if the tech worked like it says on my Oculus Rift Tin box .. but a year on it does not .. two years ago it was possible to see it would not .. and two years from now HMDs will look very different.. and serve many different purposes .. more on this next time! 

What JC,  OVR and game developers have to do is move Rift and WFOV HMD use beyond promotional tools .. I need to be able to play Elite Dangerous without the nausea, without the tracker fail .. optimised to the display res of the Rift panel and not trying to scale a desktop res.. even when all of this falls into place .. I might just go play in 4K, 8K or 12K 3D on a tri monitor set up.. the cost of which is going to fall ... to reasonable levels by the time Elite Dangerous and certainly Star Bling/Citizen's combat module finally release .. 

I had a great time playing with both Oculus VR and the Rift over the last 12 months and playing Elite Dangerous ..but there are still serious outstanding issues.. and  the reality is that current non HMD legacy ways of displaying games are far out stripping the VR novelty presented by the present state of technology.. 

Developers like Frontier are savvy and aware ... and I found it stunning that many 3D modes not just the usual Rift Warp Cam view were available in game 

RE the Elite Dangerous Beta /Alpha : 

I was most impressed by the sound, this is vital for playing using HMDs , e.g you get audio cues for each thruster axis, engage the z axis thrust and you hear it .. it sounds elementary but when you are locked in VR with 2 head trackers and two joysticks controlling the whole experience, sound giving you feedback as to what you are trying to do ...like orbit that asteroid to come round the other side above and behind the Cobra MK III on the other side is as essential to creating that Abrash magic called presence as the head set you are wearing  .. 

As is tight control .. playing in VR it is easier to use a Xbox 360 pad than your usual flight stick .. and even at this stage the control is near perfect and I had two head trackers , the joypad, mouse and keyboard all working in conjunction .. 

Combine all this and you can augment how you play Elite Dangerous, with POV, pitch, yaw aim head tracking, Z axis thrusters , strafing thrusters and get into your game like you could only dream of 30 years ago .. 

Right now that cockpit is too big .. I need to find that full screen key .. if there is one .. 

I know it's sacrilegious to say so, but the old Elite radar needs to be moved to the centre of the screen or replaced with a Freespace style radar, this is essential for playing in VR .. not so much for LFOV HMDs ..which mimic a 3D flat panel display...

All in all this is the best £100 I spent all year on games, playing them for 3 decades can make you jaded as some of the developers who have been at it for 3 decades and it takes a great game to keep you playing .. Elite Dangerous already is shaping up to be one such game.. Last year when the Kickstarter was announced I feared for what would materialise .. Elite is much more than a game .. 

With playable code being released ahead of time and without having to ask Dave 10 questions every week to feed his ego ... 

David Braben is listening though,  to your feedback on playing the game .... how cool is that .. ? For people who were there 30 years ago at Elite's launch , a time before there were genres to define games ...this is rock n roll ..with you riffing with the band...

The alpha truly becomes a Beta around May 30th at which point I will return with more ways of augmenting and playing  Elite Dangerous using HMDs ...

I also have 12 months of Rift experience so time to take apart the reality of Virtual Reality, objectively and subjectively ...

Right now though I am off to play through all the old classic versions of Elite , one of which runs on my phone connected to the Cinemizer and ST1080 HMD  ? 30 years on and I have a portable BBC Micro Model B in my pocket linked to a 100 inch wearable display .. maybe I will find those elusive Generation ships... though it may just be a Rift nausea induced hallucination ...lucid dreaming ...indeed...

Epilogue and Thanks 


1. David Braben and Frontier .. never thought you would or could but you did and way before Chairman Roberts too ...

2. Carl Zeiss 

3. siliconmicrodisplay 

4. Oculus VR : JC keep calm and carry on .. ! How about a Carmack VR engine built from scratch?  Remember no one PWNS VR!

5. DDD for TriDef 3D 

6. The dude who placed 3D glasses on a Preying Mantis ..http://youtu.be/bXls0gitMjU  I can see Oculus Interns running out to catch the beasts as I type .. a cure for Rift nausea ... hallelujah...go on laugh Palmer you know you want to ..

7. and last but not least for outstanding contribution to VR in 2014 ..and just because ....... the awesome..Katee Sackhoff.. 

Refs 

Ian Bells Elite Page go here if you need to try out the classic Elite games 

Frontier Developments : where you can get your Beta/Alpha for Elite Dangerous as well as learn what Zarch was .. 

see also 

Oculus Rift dev kit review part II : Why flight sim gaming in VR ain't like dustin' crops kid

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