April 2016 – The Imaginative Universal

The ReadRe Project: Ready Player One

April 24, 2016February 28, 2017 James Ashley

This is the first of a multipart blog series covering re-reads of popular media about Virtual and Augmented Reality. In future installments, I plan to cover classics like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the anime series Ghost in the Shell. The worn premise of the series is that our collective vision of the future was formed long ago in the past and we are, in many ways, simply walking the path others have set for us in their imaginations. That being the case, the best way to navigate our own futures is by raiding popular fringe culture in order to find the blueprints. In other words, this is an excuse to revisit some of my favorite books, movies and anime. Each entry in the series will provide a summary of the work, an overview of the AR or VR technology represented, and an analysis of the impact of the work on contemporary virtual world technology – in other words, what lessons can be drawn from the work.

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Non-spoilerish summary of the work

Ernst Cline’s novel takes place in a dystopic 2044 where the world economy has collapsed, corporations have taken over, and the hacker hero, 17 year old Wade Watts, spends most of his life plugged into a virtual reality world called the OASIS while waiting to graduate from high school. He has also spent the past five years of his life as a Gunter – someone on a quest to find the video game easter egg left behind by the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, somewhere inside his massive online virtual universe. To whomever discovers his easter egg, James Halliday has bequeathed his vast fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The secret to solving Halliday’s puzzles turns out to be an understanding of Halliday’s love for the 80’s, the decade in which he grew up, and an encyclopedic understanding of the popular movies, music, and video games of the 80’s as well as a decent familiarity with D&D. Wade, along with a motley band of friends, fights an evil mega-corporation for control of Halliday’s inheritance as well as control of his online world.

adventure

How it works

The VR hardware consists of a hi-rez virtual reality stereoscopic headset and haptic gloves connected to a custom game console. Basically the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive with much higher resolution. An internet connection is required. Instead of servers, the shared simulation runs using some sort of peer-to-peer networked computing system that borrows compute time from all the machines of all the players. The virtual world itself is a single shared world rather than a series of shards. Everyone who plays, which turns out to be almost everyone in the world, is in the OASIS at the same time.

Monetization turns out to be a major aspect of the plot. The OASIS is not subscription based and does not have ads. Instead, Halliday’s company makes its income through in-app purchases and transportation fees for teleportation from one part of the OASIS universe to another.

This is because the OASIS universe is huge and consists of thousands of planets filled mostly with user created content. To get from one planet to another requires an in-game spaceship or travel through a transporter. Different worlds, and even sectors of OASIS space, are governed by different themes. This is perhaps the most interesting part of Ernst Cline’s VR universe. The OASIS is ultimately a pastiche of imaginary worlds from science fiction and fantasy. The Star Wars sector is just next door to the Star Trek sector of space. Firefly has it’s own area. The Lord of the Rings, Dragonriders of Pern and World of Warcraft each have at least one planet devoted to them. Different sectors of VR space even work under different physical laws, so magic will not work in some while technology will not work in others.

Cline’s VR universe doesn’t involve world-building, as such, but rather a huge mash-up project to recover and preserve all past efforts at world-building.

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Ponder the lessons to be learned at your own risk!!!!

The eighties were my decade and a book devoted to recovering obscure details about it is inherently fun for me. In fact, it feels like it is written for me.

That said, the notion of a future overwhelmed by nostalgia is troubling. Not only is the OASIS effectively a museum for retro-futurism, but the quest at the center of the book is an attempt by a Howard Hughes figure to make others obsess over his teenage years as much as he does.

What if virtual reality is an old man’s game? We all hope that future technology will create new worlds and open up new possibilities, but what if all the potential for VR and AR is ultimately overwhelmed by the obsessions of the past and guided by what we have wanted VR to be since Star Wars movie first appeared on movie house screens?

What if this is the ultimately paradox of emerging technologies: that new technology is always created to solve the problems and fill the appetites of yesterday? We can make our first lesson from the history of VR a paraphrase of George Santayana’s famous saying.

Maxim 1 – In the virtual world, those who can’t let go of the past are doomed to repeat it.

HoloLens Surface Reconstruction XEF File Format

April 23, 2016February 28, 2017 James Ashley

[Update 4/23 – this turns out to be just a re-appropriation of an extension name. Kinect studio doesn’t recognize the HoloLens XEF format and vice-versa.]

The HoloLens documentation reveals interesting connections with the Kinect sensor. As most people by now know, the man behind the HoloLens, Alex Kipman, was also behind the Kinect v1 and Kinect v2 sensors.

One of the more interesting features of the Kinect was its ability to perform a scan and then play that scan back later like a 3D movie. The Kinect v2 even came with a recording and playback tool for this called Kinect Studio. Kinect Studio v2 serialized recordings in a file format known as the eXtended Event File format. This basically recorded depth point information over time – along with audio and color video if specified.

Now a few years later we have HoloLens. Just as the Kinect included a depth camera, the HoloLens also has a depth camera that it uses to perform spatial mapping of the area in front of the user. These spatmaps are turned into simulations that are then combined with code so that in the final visualization, 2D apps appear to be pinned to globally fixed positions while 3D objects and characters seem to be aware of physical objects in the room and interact with them appropriately.

Deep in the documentation on the HoloLens emulator is fascinating information about the ability to play back previously scanned rooms in the emulator. If you have a physical headset, it turns out you can also record surface reconstructions using the windows device portal.

The serialization format, it turns out, is the same one that is used in Kinect Studio v2: *.xef .

An interesting fact about the XEF format is that Microsoft never released any documentation about what the xef format looked like. When I open up a saved xef file in Notepad++, this is what it looks like:

Microsoft also never released a library to deserialize depth data from the xef format, which forced many people trying to make recordings to come up with their own, idiosyncratic formats for saving depth information.

Hopefully, now that the same format is being used across devices, Microsoft will be able to finally release a lib for general use – and if not that, then at least a spec of how xef is formed.

Rethinking VR/AR Launch Dates

April 10, 2016February 28, 2017 James Ashley

The HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens all opened for pre-orders in 2016 with plans to ship in early April (or late March in the case of the Oculus). All have run into fulfillment problems creating general confusion for their most ardent fans.

I won’t try to go into all the details of what each company originally promised and then what each company has done to explain their delays. I honestly barely understand it. Oculus says there were component shortages and is contacting people through email to update them. Oculus also refunded some shipping costs for some purchasers as compensation. HTC had issues with their day one ordering process and is using its blog for updates. Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged a problem but is using its developer forum to clarify the shipping timeline.

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that spinning up production for expensive devices in relatively small batches is really, really hard. Early promises from 2015 followed by CES in January 2016 and then GDC in March probably created an artificial timeline that was difficult to hit.

On top of this, internal corporate pressure has probably also driven each product group to hype to the point that it is difficult to meet production goals. HTC probably has the most experience with international production lines for high tech gear and even they stumbled a bit.

Maybe it’s also time to stop blaming each of these companies as they reach out for the future. All that’s happened is that some early adopters aren’t getting to be as early as they want to be (including me, admittedly).

As William Gibson said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Sketching Holographic Experiences

April 4, 2016March 17, 2017 James Ashley

These experiences sketches are an initial concept exploration for a pen and paper role playing game like Dungeons & Dragons augmented by mixed reality devices. The first inklings for this were worked out on the HoloLens forums and I want to thank everyone who was kind enough to offer their creative suggestions there.

I’ve always felt that the very game mechanics that make D&D playable are also one of the major barriers to getting a game going. The D&D mechanics were eventually translated into a variety of video games that made progressing through an adventure much easier. Instead of spending half an hour or more working out all the math for a battle, a computer can do it in a fraction of the time and also throw in nice particle effects to boot.

What gets lost in the process is the story telling element as well as the social aspect of playing. So how to we reintroduce the dungeon master and socialization elements of role playing without having to deal with all the bookkeeping?

With augmented reality, we can do much of the math and bookkeeping in the background, allowing players to spend more time talking to each other, making bad puns and getting into their characters. Instead of physical playing pieces, I think we could use flat player bases instead imprinted with QR codes that identify the characters. 3D animated models can be virtually projected onto the bases. Players can then move their bases on the underlying (virtual) hex maps and the holograms will continue to be oriented on their bases correctly.

All viewpoints are calibrated for the different players so everyone seems the same things happening – just from different POVs. The experience can also be enhanced with voice commands so when your magic user says “magic missile” everyone gets to see appropriate particle effects on the game table shooting from the magic user character’s hands at a target.

I feel that the dice should be physical objects. The feel of the various dice and the sound of the dice are an essential component of pen and paper role playing. Instead, I want to use computer vision to calculate the outcomes, present digital visualizations of successful and unsuccessful rolls over the physical dice, and then perform automatic calculations in the background based on the outcome.

The player character’s stats and relevant info should over over him on the game table. As rolls are made, the health points and stats should update automatically.

While some of the holograms on the table are shared between all players, some are only for the dungeon master. As players move from area to area, opening them up through a visual fog of war, the dungeon master will be able to see secret content like the location of traps and the stats for NPCs. It may also be cool to enable remote DMs who appear virtually to host a game. The thought here is that a good DM is hard to find and in high demand. It would be interesting to use AR technology to invite celebrity DMs or paid DMs to help get a regular game going.

When I started planning out how a holographic D&D game would work, there was still some confusion over the visible range of holograms with HoloLens. I was concerned that digital D&D pieces would fade or blur at close ranges – but this turns out not to be true. The main concern seems to be that looking at a hologram less than a meter away for extended periods of time will trigger vergence-accomodation mismatch for some people. In a typical D&D game, however, this shouldn’t be a problem since players can lean forward to move their pieces and then recline again to talk through the game.

AR can also be used to help with calorie control for that other important aspect of D&D – snack foods and sodas.

Please add your suggestions, criticisms and observations in the comments section. The next step for me is creating some prototypes in Unity of gameplay. I’ll post these as they become ready.

And just in case it’s been a long time and you don’t remember what’s so fun about role playing games, here’s an episode of the web series Table Top with Will Wheaton, Chris Hardwick and Sam Witwer playing the Dragon Age role playing game.