billy say this not exactly unclassified stuff..
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From:
[email protected] (Allan Pratt)
Subject: Mac OS X Public Beta pricing scheme
Organization: Logistics
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 04:28:35 GMT
Mac OS X Public Beta - CSP.00403X
Today (8/30/93) I experienced the Sega Genesis VR game. It was in the context of a test conducted by Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for Sega, regarding players' reactions to the game: does your vision get worse when you play? How long before it gets better? Do you get sick? Dizzy? Headaches? That kind of thing.
Background: I'm a 29-year-old software professional. I don't work in VR or graphics, but I've followed VR on and off for the past seven years. I've seen several VR setups: Virtuality, several different demonstrations in 1992 at the Meckler VR conference in San Jose, and some others.
Since I was at SRI, not Sega, I didn't get to talk to any real Sega people. So everything here is either my experience, my conjecture, or what I got from the people at SRI, which may be THEIR conjecture, etc. They didn't ask me to sign any kind of nondisclosure, which sort of surprised me.
THE TECHNOLOGY
First, the HMD. I won't say too much about the parts of the setup which were specific to the prototype I was using. The HMD was a prototype, not the molded plastic model seen on the cover of Popular Science. I will say that it was front-heavy, which was a serious detraction: it made me want to play the game by staring straight down at the floor, so the center of gravity of the device went through the center of gravity of my head.
The device has two backlit, color LCD displays. The optics in the prototype were glass, but the real thing will use plastic lenses. The backlight was fluorescent, but the real thing might use incandescents. This may help the weight distribution.
I didn't get a good answer on the resolution of the displays, but they might be 320x240. The guy did say a pixel covers about 15 minutes of arc as it hits your eyes (which is a measure of resolution they use in the VR world, I guess). I'll talk about the quality of the pictures I saw later.
The device I used was built onto the same plastic hat-frame they use in welders' helmets. The adjustments on that were a knob that tightened the hat band around my head, and a dots-and-holes adjustment like the back of a baseball cap, only across the top of my head from ear to ear. The eyephones let me adjust the interocular distance (between the eyes), the distance of the lenses from the eyes, and the angle relative to the hat band. I don't know if the real thing will have all this.
The head tracking was MUCH more limited than descriptions for the Sega VR that I've read in the past. There is NO position sensing. The tracker ONLY measures yaw and pitch: you can turn your head from left to right (through 180 degrees), and you can nod your head up and down (through about 45 degrees), and THAT IS ALL IT TRACKS. There is no separate piece, like the three-point emitter/sensor for the PowerGlove or some VR head trackers.
There were stereo headphones, too. That's it for the head: LCD's, the motion tracker, and the headphones.
There was no TV: you play the game completely in the HMD. The system I saw was a standard Sega Genesis, with a prototype game plugged in (a PC board with no case, with eight EPROMS in sockets). Connected to this was a box that drove the HMD, and another box that received the head-tracker signals. I didn't see how these things were connected to each other, but they were all prototypes: PC boards nailed to wooden bases, hand-crimped cables, etc.
The guy said that when you play the game in mono-video mode, you can hook the machine up to a TV and your friends can see what you see. In stereo mode, your friends see both frames: not very useful unless they have synchronized-shutter glasses, which Sega probably doesn't plan to make.
THE GAME
What I played seemed like it was just the game they use to demo & test the VR, not the game they're going to ship with it. It had better be. It was like Battle Zone, with more enemies and without the geometric pylons. The world is a vast, nearly featureless plain with mountains in the distance, always infinitely far away. There's a radar scope, weapons-status views, and your score. The joypad controls your tank: forward, reverse, turn left, and turn right.
The enemy consists of flying things and a ground-based nasty which you must kill to move on to the next group. You lock in on a target and fire; button B cycles which of the enemies you can see is the one you're locked onto.
It's not that good a game, and it definitely doesn't show off the VR very well. When I first put the thing on, it seemed tiny somehow. After a while I got used to the scale of things and it wasn't so bad.
The ground tended to be a solid color (like red), and on a color LCD this emphasizes the pixel size, because you see "RED nogreen noblue RED nogreen noblue..." Also, the stereo vision was not helpful. The distance effects were never very convincing or useful. The game actually comes up in mono mode, and if I weren't deliberately trying to give it a chance, I'd pretty much have left it there.
But mainly, even though you can turn your head, there's no reason to! It's always easier to turn the tank. There's nothing interesting to the left or right -- just more barren landscape.
There was even less reason to nod your head. The "neutral" position is pretty much the bottom of the tracking arc. You can look up, but there's a lot of latency, and then there's nothing to see. If an enemy flyer is close enough to be off the top of the normal frame, he's too close and moving too fast to follow with your head anyway.
Speaking of latency: it really wasn't too bad. It was bad, sure, but once you started moving your head it got the idea and tracked pretty nicely. Some of the initial delay might have been deliberate software "debouncing" so your viewpoint isn't constantly jittering.
As for the quality of the graphics: I didn't really notice the sizes of the pixels when I was actually playing. During lulls, I amused myself by trying to determine the horizontal resolution by counting pixels individually. I could have done it, with enough patience. Things are grainy in that color-LCD way; fellow Atari Lynx owners know what I mean, and Sega Game Gear is probably the same. Fields of a solid color really stand out as dots, as I mentioned earlier.
CONCLUSIONS
I think the system is better than the game I played. The game doesn't show off VR very well. I don't think I was playing the game they'll ship; at least, not in its final form. I think the $200 HMD is a breakthrough for VR. With better software to showcase it, it'll really be a winner.
I forgot to ask if you can play regular games in the VR helmet. That is, if it uses the standard video out from the Genesis, or if there's special information coming from somewhere. If you can play any old game, it would save you from being tied to your TV for your regular games, and it would add an "immersive" quality to them.
billy say hope that helps!
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