Hi everyone. So I've remained
reasonably quiet on this subject for
a fair while, mostly because we haven't really reached a point where we're
talking about
close to final-ish hardware. There are still quite a lot on the display side of
things to be locked down.
We didn't really know what either Sony with their Morpheus or Facebook with their
Oculus Rift
how weird does that sound when you say it ? was really going to mean from a technical
standpoint for developers.
Now with much more information out in the wild from both
Sony and Oculus there's some things I really want to talk about. Now
some of this is going to be slightly uncomfortable for some of you and
when I say some of you, I mean pretty much everybody who doesn't have a high
end PC
and I am including the Sony guys in that statement
as well. OK let's first discuss
what VR is. Virtual reality. Now virtual reality is the idea that you put on a
headset
and you have a screen that is so close to your eyes that effectively
it encapsulates all of your vision. Now in doing so
that gives you a sense of immersion. When we add head tracking technology,
gyroscopes, accelerometers, and so on, we're able to then
do tilts to our head. When we move our head the world moves
around us and this gives us this incredible feeling of immersion.
Now virtual reality is nothing new. It's been kicking around
in labs for a very long time, since the 70s from what I can tell.
But my first interaction with VR happened in the
mid 90s. Visiting some of the larger shopping centres with my parents
I would always spend quite a bit of time in the arcades.
One particular year they had a virtual-reality machine
that a particular company had put together and brought down and was I think
charging about £1.50 for five minutes of VR -
quite expensive for the time when we were used to putting in, you know, 20p
for a good sort of three or four minutes worth of game play on something like
Street Fighter.
But interestingly that experience did leave a mark with me.
It also left me with incredible nausea for about two hours and feeling like my
legs were going to fall from under me.
But it did leave a massive impression that at some point in the future this
immersive VR would actually work properly
and it's taken about another 20 odd years for us to actually get to that point.
But let's talk about something that's quite important when we deal with modern
VR and it was something that actually first came to prominence with
3D, modern 3D. You know, Avatar. What directors and movie studios discovered
was that if you wanted to do 3D properly you actually needed to
double the frame rate. Effectively you have to deliver 24 frames a second
to both eyes simultaneously. But actually the higher the frame rate you target
the better it is for the audience. That's why
the Hobbit was originally released in high frame, double frame rate,
so that Peter Jackson could deliver a suitable number of frames to both
eyes simultaneously thus giving a feeling of smooth motion.
But what does this have to do with virtual reality?
Well the same principle applies here. Because we dealing with left and right
eyes and we're having to
try and push a lot of information down the retina and into the brain
we need smooth motion. We can't have frame rate dips
and at no point can we allow the frame rate to drop
anything under around 45 frames a second. That essentially means
we need 90 frames a second to maintain smooth motion
without causing nausea and other kind of problems. Effectively we need 45
frames a second for
each eye as a minimum. That's our sweet spot and that's something that Oculus have been
talking about.
Now, as you can imagine, if we need to deliver
90 frames a second of information from our games console or our PC
to the VR headset that is quite a high bar to
hit when the vast majority of computers out there can't do
even 60 frames a second stably. Now what we need to kind of understand here is VR
is a different beast for a development point of view. The worlds
are not going to be as big and vast as we would expect in say something like
The Witcher 3. What we'll find is to be able to actually deliver that high frame
rate that we need compromises will have to be made.
Smaller worlds potentially. Texture size not
a big problem
because at the end of the day that's more of a video memory issue. But really it's all
about here it's about what we can draw on the screen and how quickly we can draw it without
dropping that frame rate.
More importantly that frame rate must never drop under that
90 threshold. But that brings me on to why Sony
people may not be all that happy with this video. Because there's a big problem
here for the consoles which I think might be why Microsoft is taking a
different approach. I'll talk about that in a moment.
So, the PlayStation 4 and Morpheus.
Sony have taken the decision to go with a 120 frames per second
display. Effectively they're going to drive 120 frames a second into your eyes. You know,
not physically but, you know, you get what I mean.
Tthe point here is that to do that on
a PlayStation 4 they are having to do a software
cheat in some respects to double the frame rate coming out of the framebuffer
on the PS4 to 120 frames a second. Now
why is this a potential problem for the PlayStation 4 and for VR
when it's seemingly in the PlayStation ecosystem? Well
here's the issue. How many games do we have on PS4 that are
capable of doing 60 frames a second stable, with never a dropped frame
and crucially are able to produce
large worlds three-dimensionally? There's actually not that many.
And when we look at the ones that there are, we see that there are limitations
there. Call of Duty springs to mind.
If you think about the way the world works within Call of Duty's engine it's very small.
The worlds are not big and expansive. They don't have long draw distances or high
level of detail.
For me, I think this is the key indicator as to certainly how the first
generation of VR is going to work, bearing in mind that VR
headsets themselves, the technology we've got there will progress very quickly but they
are
absolutely reliant on the processing power of their host system.
Now this potentially for me combined with the extra data that the
systems have to handle coming from VR, not only their positional tracking
data
but also the actual interactions from the controls themselves,
I get this very serious sense that we are not going to see
the PlayStation 4 deliver convincing VR in comparison to something like the
Oculus Rift
or even what HTC and Steam are doing, and Valve are doing.
But for my mind this is kind of the bottleneck that Sony have got here.
They've not proven their console can do 60 frames a second
absolutely rock solid stably and yet they're still having to then push
to the 120 frames a second. Why didn't they go for 45 frames a second and then
double it to
90 which is what effectively Oculus is aiming for
only without the doubler? It strikes me as a little odd
that essentially Sony might be about to gimp developers
and the performance envelope of the PlayStation 4 with VR
purely to hit a really big number. This seems a little odd to me and I
cannot escape the fact that the PlayStation 4 is not going to deliver
the expansive worlds
that I think VR people are going to be interested in.
It's going to be an interesting one and again what does this mean for VR on consoles
from a point of view of every game? Is it going to be a case that we can take say
Battlefield
and put it on a PlayStation 4, stick our VR headset on
and just enjoy the game? I don't think that's going to be possible
because it's all about achieving that solid 60 frames a second so it can be
doubled to 120. If you've got the frame rate drifting up and down or you've got
effectively slow frame times or anything like that that's going to mess
up that software interpolation that's boosting frame rate to 120.
I just can't see how this is going to work for Sony without limiting
something somewhere. There's going to have to be a draw down on power and
I can't see personally that it's going to be every single game on PlayStation 4
that can make use of VR.
It's going to have to be custom-built applications and services effectively
to make use of this power envelope which is constrained because of what Sony are
trying to do here.
Now things are obviously different for Microsoft. If you actually look at what
Hololens is doing
they're taking a much lower resolution display for starters. Not wide screen,
lower frame by the looks of it as well and because they're painting on top of a
video layer as it were, of the environment around them, essentially it's kind of like a
cut down version of VR. Obviously theirs is more an
AR based system, artificial reality rather than virtual-reality
but I still think it's interesting the way Microsoft has kind of pegged this. They
haven't gone down the VR route because quite frankly
the Xbox One can't handle it. And again, I think the performance envelope
that the Xbox One has,
PlayStation 4, they're not too dissimilar in their architectures.
Little bit more GPU power in the PS4 which is going to help it
but as we've seen in benchmarks, the difference isn't great enough to make
me think that
hitting 60 frames a second stable, doubling it to 120 on PS4
is not going to, is going to work particularly well.
It's a strange thing isn't it really? Now for my mind, if we're talking about VR
in the future we are really going to be talking about
where Sony Microsoft go next. It's not
this current generation hardware. For my mind Sony
jumped on the bandwagon of VR. It wasn't something that was really
intended for the PlayStation 4 not until they started seeing what Oculus is doing.
Then they realised, quite quickly and easily, that this was something that was very
cheap to produce.
What you have to bear in mind is all of the cost of VR goes into R&D
not actually into the physical hardware that we end up getting
because we're dealing with smartphone displays, at the end of the day. If you
look at what's running in the Oculus Rift they are Samsung note displays.
It's as simple as that. So there's been a great way here for the mobile manufacturers to
also jump into this new market which is why there's been this bit of a stampede
around it
and lots of sharing of technology. They see this as a great way to attach a new product
not only onto consoles but to smartphones to PCs and then to
kickoff a new wave of content generation. At the end to the day
content then tends to sell devices and so on. It's one of those
interesting problems for the industry where
you kind of have this opportunity to create a whole new marketplace but actually
I don't think the technology we have is suitable yet
for what we're trying to do. I think we're actually talking at least three
more years before
VR is able to do 120 frames a second stable,
natively, no doubling and it's at that point that the
idea of immersive VR is really going to happen.
That's also probably the point where the slightly scary singularity starts to
happen we all just jump into a virtual world and
abandon our real world bodies but hey, at the end of the day
VR is an incredible opportunity for everybody.
Not just the technology companies but for us as consumers
of content, for people who are working in medical fields or engineering fields
it changes the, well, entire way we view and interact with the world
and our technology and I don't think it's ready yet.
When you look at Oculus Rift's very high benchmark requirements to get
that 90 frames a second, you're talking a 970 GPU
and obviously quad core processors there for the win.
It just feels to me that actually we're talking three years out
when the power of a 970 is actually available
in around £100-£150 graphics card. At that point
the market will explode. But of course we have to ask ourselves
if Oculus and for general consumers we're talking
three years what the heck is the point in trying to put it on to a Sony
PlayStation 4
which is hopelessly underpowered to maintain those 60 frames a second stable
without compromising what developers are going to actually be able to do.
Let me know in the comments what you think. I know this has been a longer video,
it's been a bit of a
discussion as it were. So let me know what you think of VR. Do you think it's going to be
the next big thing? Do you think it's going to happen
in 2016 or do you really think we're talking maybe three to
five years before this becomes viable technology
that you could just plug in and play with a great range of content that runs
at that stable frame rate lock we need.