All The Good VR Ideas Were Dreamt Up In The 60s

January 4, 2021 by Donald Papp 39 Comments

Virtual reality has seen enormous progress in the past few years. Given its recent surges in development, it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that the ideas underpinning what we now call VR were laid way back in the 60s. Not all of the imagined possibilities have come to pass, but we’ve learned plenty about what is (and isn’t) important for a compelling VR experience, and gained insights as to what might happen next.

If virtual reality’s best ideas came from the 60s, what were they, and how did they turn out?

Interaction and Simulation

First, I want to briefly cover two important precursors to what we think of as VR: interaction and simulation. Prior to the 1960s, state of the art examples for both were the Link Trainer and Sensorama.

The Link Trainer was an early kind of flight simulator, and its goal was to deliver realistic instrumentation and force feedback on aircraft flight controls. This allowed a student to safely gain an understanding of different flying conditions, despite not actually experiencing them. The Link Trainer did not simulate any other part of the flying experience, but its success showed how feedback and interactivity — even if artificial and limited in nature — could allow a person to gain a “feel” for forces that were not actually present.

Sensorama was a specialized pod that played short films in stereoscopic 3D while synchronized to fans, odor emitters, a motorized chair, and stereo sound. It was a serious effort at engaging a user’s senses in a way intended to simulate an environment. But being a pre-recorded experience, it was passive in nature, with no interactive elements.

Combining interaction with simulation effectively had to wait until the 60s, when the digital revolution and computers provided the right tools.

The Ultimate Display

In 1965 Ivan Sutherland, a computer scientist, authored an essay entitled The Ultimate Display (PDF) in which he laid out ideas far beyond what was possible with the technology of the time. One might expect The Ultimate Display to be a long document. It is not. It is barely two pages, and most of the first page is musings on burgeoning interactive computer input methods of the 60s.

The second part is where it gets interesting, as Sutherland shares the future he sees for computer-controlled output devices and describes an ideal “kinesthetic display” that served as many senses as possible. Sutherland saw the potential for computers to simulate ideas and output not just visual information, but to produce meaningful sound and touch output as well, all while accepting and incorporating a user’s input in a self-modifying feedback loop. This was forward-thinking stuff; recall that when this document was written, computers weren’t even generating meaningful sounds of any real complexity, let alone visual displays capable of arbitrary content. Continue reading “All The Good VR Ideas Were Dreamt Up In The 60s” →

Tired Of The Cat-and-Mouse

November 7, 2020 by Elliot Williams 49 Comments

Facebook just announced their plans for the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. You probably won’t be surprised, but they want more of your user data, and more control over how you use the hardware. To use the device at all, you’ll need a verified Facebook account. Worse, they’re restricting access to the wide world of community-developed applications by requiring a developer account to be able to “sideload” non-Facebook software onto the device. Guess who decides who gets to be a developer. Hint: it’s not the people developing software.

Our article suggests that this will be the beginning of a race to jailbreak the headset on the community’s part, and to get ahead of the hackers on Facebook’s. Like every new release of iOS gets a jailbreak within a week or two, and then Apple patches it up as fast as they can, are we going to see a continual game of hacker cat-and-mouse with Facebook?

I don’t care. And that’s not because I don’t care about open hardware or indie VR developers. Quite the opposite! But like that romance you used to have with the girl who was absolutely no good for you, the toxic relationship with a company that will not let you run other people’s games on their hardware is one that you’re better off without. Sure, you can try to fix it, or hack it. You can tell yourself that maybe Facebook will come around if you just give them one more chance. It’s going to hurt at first.

But in the end, there is going to be this eternal fight between the user and the company that wants to use them, and that’s just sad. I used to look forward to the odd game of cat and mouse, but nowadays the cats are just too well bankrolled to make it a fair fight. If you’re buying a Quest 2 today with the intent of hacking it, I’d suggest you spend your time with someone else. You’re signing up for a string of heartbreaks. Nip it in the bud. You deserve better. There are too many fish in the sea, right?

What are our options?

As Facebook Tightens Their Grip On VR, Jailbreaking Looks More Likely

November 3, 2020 by Donald Papp 57 Comments

The Quest 2 wireless VR headset by Oculus was recently released, and improves on the one-and-a-half year old Quest mainly in terms of computing power and screen resolution. But Oculus is owned by Facebook, a fact that Facebook is increasingly keen on making very clear. The emerging scene is one that looks familiar: a successful hardware device, and a manufacturer that wants to keep users in a walled garden while fully controlling how the device can be used. Oculus started out very differently, but the writing has been on the wall for a while. Rooting and jailbreaking the Quest 2 seems inevitable, but what will happen then? Continue reading “As Facebook Tightens Their Grip On VR, Jailbreaking Looks More Likely” →

Does PHP Have A Future, Or Are Twenty Five Years Enough?

June 29, 2020 by Ben James 54 Comments

In June, 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf made an announcement on a Usenet group. You can still read it.

Today, twenty five years on, PHP is about as ubiquitous as it could possibly have become. I’d be willing to bet that for the majority of readers of this article, their first forays into web programming involved PHP.

Announcing the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0.

These tools are a set of small tight cgi binaries written in C.

But no matter what rich history and wide userbase PHP holds, that’s no justification for its use in a landscape that is rapidly evolving. Whilst PHP will inevitably be around for years to come in existing applications, does it have a future in new sites?

Continue reading “Does PHP Have A Future, Or Are Twenty Five Years Enough?” →

New Year Habits – What Do You Do For Data Storage?

January 20, 2020 by Bob Baddeley 109 Comments

2020 is a year of reflection and avoiding regret, and one of the biggest practices we all know we should do better is back up our data. Inevitably there will be a corruption or accident, and we mourn the loss of some valuable data and vow to never let it happen again, and then promptly forget about good data retention practices.

I believe life is about acquiring memories, so it makes sense to me to try to archive and store those memories so that I can reflect on them later, but data storage and management is a huge pain. There’s got to be a better way (cue black and white video of clumsy person throwing up arms in disgust).

Nice Cloud You Have There; Shame if Something Happened to It

The teens of the century saw a huge shift towards cloud storage. The advantages of instantly backing up files and using the cloud as the primary storage for all your devices is appealing. It’s now easier to transfer files via the cloud than with a cable. With Google Docs and WordPress we have our most important documents and writing stored as database blobs on someone else’s servers. Facebook and Google and Flickr record all of our memories as photo albums. Unlimited storage is common, and indexing is so good that we can find photos with a vague description of their contents.

These things are instantly accessible, but lack permanence. Gone are newspaper clippings and printed photos discovered in a shoebox. When we aren’t in control of those services, they can disappear without any warning. Even some big offerings have packed up shop, leaving people scrambling to back up data before the servers were shut down. Google Plus is closed, Yahoo Groups is closed, MySpace lost all content created prior to 2016, GeoCities closed in 2009, and Ubuntu One closed in 2014. It’s safe to say that no online content is safe from deletion. It’s also safe to say that cloud storage is a difficult location from which to extract your data.

With the risk of data leaks and privacy violations occurring daily, it’s also safe to say that some of your files should probably not be stored in the cloud in the first place. So, how do we do it well, and how do we get in the habit of doing it regularly?

Continue reading “New Year Habits – What Do You Do For Data Storage?” →

Art Project Analyzes Every Public Recording Of Facebook’s CEO Since 2004

June 11, 2019 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Benjamin Grosser] had a simple question: “What does Mark Zuckerberg think about?” The resulting art project is named ORDER OF MAGNITUDE and to create it he researched archives of every public utterance the founder and CEO of the world’s largest social media network has made, going as far back as 2004.

The end product is a nearly fifty-minute film consisting entirely of cuts centered around what [Benjamin] says are three of the Facebook CEO’s most favored and often-used terms:

The word “more”
The word “grow”
Metrics such as “ninety-nine percent”, “two million”, and terms of that nature.

The idea is that the resulting video provides insight into what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about, has focused on, and how that has (or has not) changed between 2004 and now. How well does ORDER OF MAGNITUDE do that? Watch the video below, and judge for yourself.

Continue reading “Art Project Analyzes Every Public Recording Of Facebook’s CEO Since 2004” →