Well in VR, a few edge-lighting led's around the periphery can do all the work that thousands of real display pixels could for edge vision... but at a tiny fraction of the rendering cost. 20-30 pixels per eye. That's it. There's your extension of the peripheral vision.
That's actually a pretty cool idea. I wear corrective lenses with a pretty high strength (-7.25 in my worst eye), and when I'm wearing glasses which is 90% of the time, the experience I have is very blurry peripheral vision outside of my sleek and modern rectangular frames. I think having some light, or some blurred image in my peripheral vision will help with the perceived FOV, but I think it'll also come as the natural byproduct of wider displays. I can see this easily being achieved by letting the light bleed through the areas outside of the optics, just make the plastic frosted clear instead of black. I'm afraid that might visually expose some of the inner-workings of the headset though, instead of it feeling like wearing goggles. If someone with a 3D printer is brave enough to teardown their Vive for science and print clear replacement parts for the front inner frame and the two display housings to create that ambient light effect, that would be a fun experiment.
I don't know that much about optics, except that it is primarily
the study of trade-offs, and because of physics you can only do so much without putting a display right to your eyeball. A curved display would be nice, but I'm not sure how well curved optics will help. Light still has to do a lot of bending the further from the principal axis you get, and more extreme angles means more refraction (which you can see with normal high-strength lenses in prescription glasses) and more god rays in Fresnel lenses. I don't see the Fresnel lens going away, but I would be interested in knowing if a curved Fresnel lens will help create super wide FOV without getting in the way of users wearing glasses. Oh yeah, in the future, I see prescription VR lenses. Just as expensive as current lenses, but if becomes an important part of society, I can see it happening.
Within 5 Years
Eye tracking inside of the headset would be great for foveated rendering on lower hardware (someone brought this up earlier), but also
eye tracking would be great for UI purposes: looking at a button to press it, having characters react to your gaze, and great for data collection and training. In about 2-5 years I could easily see this becoming standard in VR headsets.
Eye tracking could help with one of the limitations of optics which is that pesky lens center. Contact lenses work so well because they (through contact) track perfectly with the lens of your eye. In my glasses the image is blurrier the further from center I'm looking. If the optics inside of the HMD can track with your eye movement, rotating with your eye to always be in your center of vision, I think the optics will improve a lot. Of course the problem with that is how explosively fast your eyes are, and a motor won't be able to catch up. But I'm curious if even a little bit of assistance in that regard, helping the lens track to where you are looking, would help improve the overall optical experience, because again, I don't see the Fresnel lens going away because of physics until the display is attached to your eye.
Inside-out tracking. No lighthouses, no Rift cameras, just the wireless HMD. Totally doable. I see this and wireless headsets being
the standard in 3-5 years, maybe sooner. The use of a camera for head tracking can also be used for hand tracking (similar to what Leap Motion is doing), so your hands are shown in VR. I'll get to seeing your hands in VR in a second.
Haptics. I see an emerging market for VR peripherals to help with haptics in a practical sense, but I don't see full haptic systems being possible in the near future. (By haptics I don't mean mere rumble packs, I mean force feedback.) I've used some very cool haptic systems at SIGGRAPH over the years, some involving cables to pull on an object in 3D space, some using electromagnetism to move an object in 3D space, both systems had such great detail that you could feel the wood texture through the object you were holding in 3D space. It felt perfectly real. However, to move an object in all those axes required so many cables that you can only hold the object one way, and the space where you could hold the object was very small.
A full body suit? Eh...I just don't see that happening for consumers. We do have exoskeletons though (think military ones), which I could see easily in training and VR arcades for sure. But holy crap the damage a fully force feedback body suit could do to a human would be immense if it has a bug in the software. The ranges of movement would have to be mechanically limited to prevent injury, but I could see it being robust enough to have a walking-in-power-armor or a mech simulator.
Arcades are coming back. Next year. Seriously. You can thank VR for that. Not everyone can afford VR or has the space for it, and more expensive peripherals can be used at arcades than at home.
Peripherals. Because haptics are not cheap, and if full-body haptics are not feasible for consumers (even if the tech is there, it's just not practical to have in a home, and the budget will always be too high), I think peripherals are going to be the main source of haptics in games. With unified tracking solutions for peripherals, I think they'll become more common and more varied. You'll need many different kids of peripherals to have many kinds of VR experiences. The best VR experiences I've had were not with touch controllers, they were with a HOTAS or a wheel and pedals. But there's so much more than that. In the near future, I can easily see there being a peripheral marketplace, an easy way to rent peripherals for whatever kind of game you want to keep these kinds of interesting VR experiences flowing for people. People will get tired of VR games that need them (think about all those abandoned Guitar Hero controllers) so lets make it part of the VR gaming economy and embrace it. Encourage it, and not make it seem like a waste if you want to switch to something else. I'd also like to see these kinds of peripheral rental places available locally at a store. Probably more cost effective for big box or game stores to do this instead of a dedicated VR peripheral store, but you never know.
An open standard to construct your own peripherals. Peripherals don't need to look good anymore, they just have to have the shape with buttons or switches on them. Anyone can take an Arduino board for controller logic (code supplied by devs for game), a Vive Tracker device, standardized triggers and knobs that you can buy online and wire them to Arduino, and either a 3D printable frame or one you can cut from wood with easy instructions, and you can pretty much create any kind of peripheral you want for whatever game you want to play. And when these are made you can put them into that used peripheral marketplace for rent, or sell them once you are bored of it. This would help explode the type of VR experiences people can have, and allow developers to be more inventive without having to rely on existing mass-produced peripherals.
This is how I imagine seeing all of this inside-out tracking, with hand position, and standardized custom peripheral making coming together for VR. Imaging playing a flight sim that is aware of the peripherals in your room through the Vive Tracker device and the standardized peripheral system. Your hand is rendered in VR because of the integrated camera tracking in the HMD. You've built a wood panel with buttons and switches on it based on plans provided by the developer. In this example the buttons don't need to be connected to anything, because the off/on state is being shown in-game and onClick events are determined by your hand touching it in VR space. But the haptic feedback is perfect because it's a physical (albeit brainless) button you are pressing. Developers can release peripheral designs for their games, or use an existing "compatible" design (because lots of games out there have AR-15s). Use physical objects and buttons for haptic feedback (dummy buttons or buttons wired up to a controller), and VR for the appearance. It would be possible to have modular or configurable frames so that you have the feeling of the object in question (a bow has a similar grip as a hammer for example).
Essentially, in the next 5 years I see
the unholy union between the maker movement and VR gamers, provided that the Vive Tracker is open enough for anyone to make uncertified peripherals. If VR headsets use a purely optical solution, then it should be possible for everyone, no matter the brand, to use these kinds of peripherals.
The Human Element in the next 5 years
I do want to touch on this a little bit. I could turn this into an entire topic (and might need to if this derails the thread), but here's my thoughts on
the most important part of VR: how it affects people.
I grew up with tech. I am by no means a Luddite, but I am always skeptical about new tech and how it will affect people. I believe the way people interact socially online is a double-edge sword. When my adolescent brain was developing, social media wasn't a thing, but BBS's, and IRC were. I grew up primarily interacting face to face, and very little online. With many adolescents today, I think it's getting closer to a 50/50 split. I've talked to parents, educators, and people who are making hiring decisions say that they have seen a notable negative shift in this generation's interpersonal skills. At the same time, it's allowing people to connect with others that they would never be able to before. People are better connected but at the same time being further apart, and would rather post pictures of them appearing to have a good time than actually having a good time themselves. It's seems like a wash. We are still figuring out how to adapt to all this new tech and use it all for what it is best at, and avoid what it is worst at. We are still figuring that out.
As with the study of optics, the way we use technology in society is often a study of trade-offs.
Even though it would be fantastic for training and education, and occasional wish fulfillment,
I think a holodeck could be a very bad thing for society if everyone had one in their garage. But what about VR?
My mom put a VR headset on and I loaded up Google Earth. The first thing she wanted to do was to explore the great cities, places she wanted to visit abroad but hasn't yet. Then she started to visit places she had lived. She pointed out the pond they would play at as kids. She flew to her grandparents old house. She stood on top of the hill they would hike up to as kids, and she got to relive the view on top of that mountain.
As a family we were able to talk and share stories about her childhood that she had never shared with us before, brought back to memory because she was able to see it all again as if she was there.
How many of you playing Elite Dangerous have branched out into flight sims, and enjoyed it well enough that you've thought about taking flight lessons? How many of your have started planning your next vacation based on what you saw in Google Earth? How many have thought about getting into a real race car instead of just a sim after playing Project Cars? I can definitely say that VR has allowed me to get more of a taste of the world out there, and learn some applicable skills like flying and racing.
I think video games are best and teaching us, and even better for things that apply to the real world, like how I learned to land a Cessna in X-Plane or play guitar using Rocksmith. Think about how much artists can learn drawing in 3D in addition to 2D, how much doctors can learn operating on a 3D cadaver. If the simulation was good enough, what kind of new medical procedures could be developed?
For entertainment, if it's something available in the home, I think having it be just real enough to be engaging and immersive, but not so real that it is a substitute for the real thing is the best balance. I think VR will serve humanity best at introducing people to new experiences so that they'll either understand it more, or want to experience the real thing for themselves.
Having a VR headset doesn't make me want to play games more, which is a good thing. My parents always complained about seeing the back of my head growing up, and I don't think VR will really change that for families. In other words, I don't think it'll make the effect gaming has on family relationships worse, assuming that seeing your son with a VR headset isn't less depressing than seeing them staring at a screen. But what it has done is made me want to share it with people more. I got them under the ocean in theBlu, I got them in a sci-fi shooting gallery, I got them in a fantasy dungeon, and I can't wait to get them behind the wheel of a race car or behind the controls of a Cobra MKIII. Have you tried to get parents to hold some weird blob of plastic with buttons on it and instructing them how to make the little character on the screen go? Yeah. But then you get them to wear a VR headset, and
boom, all of the sudden they get it.
In the next 5 years, I think
people are going to understand gaming more now that it's less abstract through VR and motion controllers. That's why I think peripherals are going to be such an important part of VR in these next few years, dumping the abstractness of multi-purpose controllers with the affordance of properly-shaped controllers, both as they are displayed in VR and how they feel in your hands.
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