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The road to 100% immersive virtual reality

Rifts
Adventurer
The goal of virtual reality is evidently to transport you into modified worlds that are either more visually appealing, exciting or horrifying than the real one. With an Oculus Rift we're tricking two out of five senses into thinking we're somewhere else (sight and hearing). But how do we immerse our selves 100% into virtual reality? Below I'll try to explain each part in detail and how far we've come. I'm going to skip sound in this post as it's very easy to replicate, and no further advances are really needed.
 
Sight - This is probably the most important sense to manipulate, and even though we've come very far, there are a lot of progress to be made. Most importantly higher resolution (16k+), wider FOV, and eye tracking. But also lighter HMD's that eventually could transition into bionic contact lenses, although this might take a while.

Touch - Full body haptic feedback suits like the Teslasuit are currently in development and will bring virtual reality to new heights. These suits would have to mimic all kind of touch sensations like heat, cold, wetness, vibration, breezes and feather light touches. Eventually the technology would have to expand beyond fabric suits into something you could really 'coat' your body with, like a conductive paste sprinkled with sensors to reach parts of the body otherwise not accessible, and I mean ALL the parts  B). This could prove tricky for places like the the eyeballs or most importantly, the insides of your mouth (very important when simulating eating).

Taste and smell - Advances have been made and these senses seem quite easy to replicate artificially. Electrical stimulation and thermal changes can produce several major taste sensations like sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness, mintyness and spiciness. Although the technology have to develop into something you could wear on your tongue comfortably. Regarding smell there is already a device called "FeelReal" that can produce 7 odors so far, attachable to the Oculus Rift DK2. 

So lets say there's enough progress that we can artificially create all of these sensations using various technologies, will it feel exactly like reality? Sadly no. There are still other 'senses' like balance, acceleration, proprioception (position of the body parts), hunger, thirst, internal pain, nausea (why you would want those two I have no idea) and others that are near impossible to replicate with today's technology. The only way to influence these senses would be to surgically manipulate the brain, which we are very far from accomplishing. 

Another aspect, and possibly the most important one, is how do we create worlds that are as believable as the real one? I'm not just talking about the visual part, but how do we overcome the boundaries of digital environments like everything having to be precisely coded and planned in advance? Firstly there'd have to be advancement on the AI field, with the outcome of our actions being randomized within certain boundaries. Interaction would have to be unpredictable yet logical, with reactions seeming real and not picked out of an array as the response that made the most sense. I believe quantum computing will eventually let us create 'real' humans in virtual space, but that might also take a while.

In conclusion, virtual reality has come a long way in the last ~25 years, mainly in the visual aspect and new technologies are emerging to make digital worlds seem even more real. I'm certain that humanity will eventually move into virtual space to never return, and that we've found the answer to the Fermi Paradox, but that's just me  😄

I'm done rambling and would love to hear what other people have in mind regarding the future of Oculus Rift and virtual reality!
28 REPLIES 28

Map63Vette
Adventurer


I absolutely can understand your hesitation. I personally have dreamed of something like this for ages, so I am ready to click on the buy button as soon as I can.

We´ll see what it actually feels like, but I think this could help with motion sickness. Maybe it could even get rid of it completely. I seriously can´t wait to sit in assetto corsa with that thing on my head and actually FEEL how hard an F40 accelerates when the turbo kicks in 🙂

Or sitting in a cockpit in ED or Star Citizen and actually feel the ship rotate, feel the thrusters.

I think this could be absolutely amazing. Well, I hope so at least 🙂


I think it would still be interesting to "tune" it for each person though.  It still seems like you'd have to have some kind of adjustment between people to account for different perceptions.  What might feel like 1g to one person could come across differently to someone used to more or less than that, though who knows what technology will come up with.  I'm looking at building a simulator rig to get similar effects though, so I'm as much a dreamer as other people in a certain sense.

TwoHedWlf
Expert Trustee
Having to adjust some of the settings when changing users would be one of the most trivial issues. Just tie the settings to an individual profile on the system and done.

AdKiuCM
Expert Protege
Agreed with many of previous posters. Only proper BCI will give you full immersion.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
This is an older thread, but today I came across an article referencing the VR Teslasuit:

http://teslasuit.io/





When the entire body becomes this immersed (successfully), we will have taken ourselves to an impressive new height in human development!

Greyman
Superstar
Now, all i need is for them to do it in XXL  🙂

Anonymous
Not applicable
Yup, just got done playing a bit of COD in vr:

LZoltowski
Champion
Hellloooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Core i7-7700k @ 4.9 Ghz | 32 GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance @ 3000Mhz | 2x 1TB Samsung Evo | 2x 4GB WD Black
ASUS MAXIMUS IX HERO | MSI AERO GTX 1080 OC @ 2000Mhz | Corsair Carbide Series 400C White (RGB FTW!) 

Be kind to one another 🙂

LZoltowski
Champion
As long it has blue lights on it im sold


Core i7-7700k @ 4.9 Ghz | 32 GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance @ 3000Mhz | 2x 1TB Samsung Evo | 2x 4GB WD Black
ASUS MAXIMUS IX HERO | MSI AERO GTX 1080 OC @ 2000Mhz | Corsair Carbide Series 400C White (RGB FTW!) 

Be kind to one another 🙂

feelreal
Protege
Found this thread mentioning Feelreal Multisensory Mask  😉 Glad to announce that life has changed since 2016, and if you are still interested in full immersion, consider checking out Feelreal.com - we're going on Kickstarter very soon!
Virtual reality will feel so real...
...with Feelreal  ❤️ 

Pre-order World's First Multisensory VR Mask on Indiegogo now:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/feelreal-the-world-s-first-multisensory-vr-mask--2