Steamworks Development
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2017
27:56 · 128K views · Feb 11, 2014
Michael Abrash of Valve explains what affordable VR hardware will be capable of within a couple of years, and describes a prototype showing what that level of hardware can do.
Cited for his plain-language explanation of how VR convinces the brain and for resolution and pixel-density figures.
3 comments from Hacker News
Michael Abrash of Valve now at Oculus giving a basic description: this video It's parts of your lower brain aligning to convince you you're in a virtual world, and while it is a spectrum you really need a high end headset to experience it. Abrash himself mainly dismissed VR's potential prior to experiencing it.
It's amusing that the same optical illusion has been discussed by Michael Abrash this video and Alan Kay [LINK] in talks on very different topics recently. > Thomas Paine said in Common Sense , instead of having the king be the law, why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just going to invert thousands of years of beliefs". Pfft, tell that to the 13th-century Venetians: [LINK] . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.
Yes. Even the best VR headsets still have incredibly low pixel density. According to Michael Abrash, "the per-degree pixel density of a 1k by 1k, 110-degree VR display is... actually lower pixel density than the original Quake running at 320x200."[0] And when you call the graphics "terrible" do you mean they actually look bad to you from inside a VR headset, or just looking at the screenshot on some other device? Because what looks amazing in a traditional game can look cartoony and fake within VR, and incredibly simple things can look startlingly real. [0] this video