Session 2: A Small Booth
1300 Eastern Standard Time, 6 December, 2012 .
I/ITSEC, the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, is the largest international conference of its kind. Vendors and customers from around the world converge on Orlando, Florida to see the latest in simulation technology. I’ve never attended as a customer, but the experience as a vendor while rewarding, is exhausting. It’s a good problem to have if you are busy and hoarse from talking all day. The downside, among a few, is that it is hard to step away from your booth to “walk the floor”, and go see what others are showing. It was the last day, and it was getting near the end of it. My colleague and I put our feet down, and we were adamant we needed fifteen minutes away from the booth for professional development. I had one vendor to visit at the top of my list, a tiny booth manned by one man: OculusVR.
For a ten by ten booth put in the less trafficked area of the exhibit hall, there was a queue. That’s a little unusual. My colleague wanted to move on due to time. I insisted we needed to wait. This was a big deal. Why? He asked. I said one name to get him to wait: John Carmack; he’s thrown his support behind this headset. My colleague wasn’t a VR nerd, but he knew his gaming history well. He relented. If the creator of DOOM had a hunch, it was worth the wait.
Slowly, the queue moved forward and the person before me removed the headset, widened his eyes, blinked, and thanked the man for the demo. I stepped forward and shook the hand of a man named Joe, and I related how happy I was to finally get to see this headset. He was professional, but clearly exhausted from the week. We took a moment to explain what the business did, and then Joe asked me to sit on a stool and wear the headset. It was a 3D printed plastic casing with dark gaffers tape on it. It held to your head with a ski-mask strap. It was wet and warm from the previous wearer and a mix of disinfectant. The convention hall loved to turn the air conditioning off before the end of the show. My eagerness quickly overcame my disgust.
OculusVR prototype as shown in 2012 at Evolve London. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/grill CC 2.0
He fired up a demo and asked me to look straight forward for a calibration. As the phosphors came to life the point of this technology was obvious. It’s the field of view! It’s the refresh rate! Before this HMD’s development, at least the ones I had experienced, had a distinct feeling of being disconnected from the content. The screens often lagged a bit from your head movement, which was unbearable for many, swearing them off of VR forever. Also, in an attempt to have a higher pixel density, the display panel was often focused to a very small field of view that made it feel like you just had tiny monitors in front of your eyes. That was fine--if you accepted that limitation. Playing my Playstation 2 while deployed overseas with a Vuzix AV920 was a godsend for morale. This early model took a completely novel approach. For now, resolution didn’t matter. Responsiveness was the priority. The field of view was the widest I had ever experienced up to that point. The individual pixels were loud and separated, absolutely ugly. Joe began telling the story behind this prototype assuming I held the notions many industry moguls had at the time: fulfilling the ridiculous list of requirement requests from the military that were effectively a death by a thousand cuts. “No, no, I get what is going on here, Joe” I shouted over the din of the crowd. “I completely understand what you are doing here. I get it. I know where this is going. You are on the right track.”
eMagin Z800. This was the least expensive, most capable, HMD offered at the time. World of Warcraft looked compelling in it, if you had the stomach for it.
Before then, HMD’s, those that could attain all the requirements set before them, were woefully expensive. They often had a trade off somewhere that favored the task in which they were used. This prototype was a different bird. It had a panel sourced from a cell phone, optics bought bulk from a jeweler supply, and a commercial off the shelf inertial measurement unit. It was meant to be cheaper! It was meant to be mass produced! This meant that VR might have a chance of leaping from enthusiasts and professionals like me to the wider population. The metaverse, a term I would learn after reading Snow Crash, would be accessed with this..
Kickstarter video of the movement and field of view of the Oculus Rift. Source: Oculus.
I don’t recall much about the demo content. I think it was a tour on rails through a robotic space station and a fly through of a medieval castle. What mattered is that I felt a bit more like I was there in that space, then looking at it with a remote camera viewfinder. The view updated immediately, and every bobble of my head matched the picture.
As soon as the DK1 was available, I begged our image generator partners to support it--even if it wasn’t a finished product, even if it didn’t meet all the published requirements for the next request for proposals. It was a taste of things to come, and for that taste didn’t break the bank. Later, Joe even sent me a DK1 to leave with a customer so they could use it with their deployable simulator. By day, I worked on the DK1 as much as I could. By night, I was trying all the apps listed by “Cymatic Bruce”, a.k.a. Bruce Wooten, on his podcast. That’s when I found a peculiar app that turned existing websites into virtual places.
Cymatic Bruce reviewing the application called Firebox. Source: YouTube.