Virtual Sword Fighting

Faeton writes "SIGGRAPH is on, and Extremetech has the scoop on it. From Nvidia's N30 to ATI's monster 4x Radeon 9700 render board, the coolest thing was the virtual sword fighting simulator. With a VR headset and a gyroscopic force-feedback "sword", you could really be the badass knight you've always dreamed of. I want this at a local arcade soon!"

Good Concept but too much equipment

[ApheX]

It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me. I think the VR industry needs to step back and worry less about pretty graphics and more about making the hardware more user friendly to help add to the experience.

You can..

[Anonymous Coward]

..actually do it in real life, too.

Aside from the fact that you have to a) leave yer basement and b) take some bruises. :p

The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH

[green pizza]

SIGGRAPH exhibits closed on Thursday evening, but here are some of the biggest highlights:

SGI [sgi.com] annouced their Infinite Reality 4 [sgi.com] option for the Onyx series... comes standard with 1gbyte of texture ram and 2.5gbyte of buffer, expandable to 10gbyte of buffer for a total of 11gbyte of onboard gfx ram. Up to 16 IR4 subsystems can be installed in a single machine. Each subsystem can drive up to 8 monitors... or all subsystems can run in parallel for greater performance. The Virtual LA Urban Simulation project [ucla.edu] demoed part of their 3D LA using IR4 and the older IR3. They currently have over 1TB of texture and geometry data from Los Angeles, mostly in downtown areas... though they have 20,000 square miles mapped out, 4,000 of which are quite detailed.

Sun [sun.com] was showing off their XVR-4000 gfx option, a cardset that uses the IPA slot found in most Ultra-series machines. It has about 8x the geometry performance of IR3 and about 50% of the fill performance of IR4... for a fraction of the cost. 1gbyte of texture and 144mbyte of buffer. Different market targets, but interesting none the less.

Real-Time raytracing....

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno. I think that ATI's demostration of REAL TIME RAYTRACING ON THEIR RADEON CARDS was the coolest thing at SIGGRAPH.

Some nice possible application

[salimma]

I've always wanted to learn kendo, but the nearest club from my university, is, alas, 50 miles away. And I don't have a car.

Would be nice to know that in the future one could just don a VR headset and practice any sort of exotic martial arts :p

Probably safer for getting initiated into using sharp weapons as well..

Nice,

Michel

Re:You can..

[Planesdragon]

I think bruises would be the least of one's concerns in swordfighting...

Not really. The science of armor advanced to the point where it was quite equal to the sword, and an opponent has to work pretty darn hard to actually hurt someone wearing it.

I understand the SCA has quite a good safety record, considering they have guys in armor swinging swords at each other as a recreational activity.

Oh, and then there are *training swords* that don't have the sharp edges. And boffers. (toy "swords" made from some things easily obtainable at a hardware shop, that are far less effective than a fist when it comes to hurting someone.)

Not at a local arcade near you

[wackybrit]

I want this at a local arcade soon!

This might be slightly off-topic, but it has to be remembered that since the 80s, arcades have REALLY had tough times.

Back in the 70s and 80s, the cost of the best games and technology was prohibitively high, so arcades did good business. Since the mid 90s (pretty much since PlayStation), however, you can buy something just as powerful as an arcade machine for home use and you don't need to go to the arcade at all.

I am somewhat saddened by the 'fall' of the arcade, and think they add a great social aspect to gaming. Imagine modern day arcades with 16 player Quake 3 style shoot-em-ups.. but it ain't going to happen for most arcades. Most arcades these days still have their crappy early 90s games (Test Drive, Sega Rally, etc) along with a bunch of lame shooting games.

Arcades are for tourists nowadays, not serious gamers. And that is sad.

Go to Disney World.

[Night Goat]

You can play this virtual sword-fighting game at Walt Disney World's Disney Quest [go.com] area in the part of the park called Downtown Disney. It's pretty fun, and a good value, since you pay around $15 and get to play unlimited arcade games, pinball, and weird cool things like the sword fight. I don't think you need admission to the park, either. You could just do this if you wanted. I got sort of bored of the sword fight once I did it once. The gyroscopic sword is a really cool way of simulating an actual sword though. It's sort of funny to see 10 people wearing headsets and waving these handles around! There's also this incredibly cool thing at Disney Quest where you make your own rollercoaster and ride it. How that works is you lay out the track, then once you get all that good to go, the track is rated based on how severe it is. The attendant told me that if you're only going on it once, make it as severe as possible. Then you get into this rotating cabin that can spin a full 360 degrees in any direction. You look into this screen that takes up your entire view and the combination of the spinning, the video, and the fact that you have no idea which way is up makes your body feel like it's actually on a rollercoaster. It's a better feeling than a real rollercoaster, people have gotten sick on it. Amazing.

Re:My one-and-only shot at live action role-playin

[Lord_Slepnir]

There are actually groups that do this frequently. There is the origional, Dagorhir [dagorhir.com], The rescent spin-off called Belegrath MCS [foamfighting.org], and if you want more role-playing, Amtgard [amtgard.com]. I've never participated in Amtgard, but I have in Dagorhir and Belegarth, and while the concept of dressing up in medeval clothing and fighting with foam swords and sheilds on central campus seems strange to some people, it it actually a lot of fun, and it's completly safe...doing it several hours a week for a year, the worst injury I ever sustained was a bloody nose.

Re:The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH

[foobar104]

You got most of your info about IR4 right, but I just wanted to clarify some things in greater detail. IR is confusing at first, and very different from the typical single-board graphics systems that most people are familiar with. All the details can be found here [sgi.com], but here's an executive summary.

InfiniteReality (be it the original IR on Onyx, or IR2, IR2E, IR3, or now IR4) is comprised of a set of boards. In order to function, the set has to include one geometry engine (or GE), one raster manager (or RM), and one display generator (or DG). The GE board is where the graphics coprocessors live, and it's responsible for most of the 3D math. The DG converts the frame buffer into an analog RGB signal, or a CCIR-601 SD video signal, or, recently, a digital signal.

The RMs are the interesting part. The RM board holds both the frame buffer (80 MB on IR3, 2.5 GB on IR4) and the texture RAM (256 MB on IR3, 1 GB on IR4). A graphics pipe can include one, two, or four raster managers. When you add RMs, you increase frame buffer size (or the size of the raster you can render), but texture cache.

So a four RM graphics pipe will have 10 GB of frame buffer and 1 GB of texture cache, but that 1 GB of texture will be on each of the four RMs. So each texture you download will be stored, in parallel, on each of the four RMs. This keeps texture operations nice and peppy even when you're rendering into a 3840 x 2160 buffer. (That's four times more resolution than HDTV, if you're interested.)

Note, also, that these memories aren't combined. The TRAM and the frame buffer RAM are isolated in hardware. You can't store textures in the frame buffer, and you can't render in texture RAM. So saying that IR4 has a combined 11 GB of graphics RAM is not quite true, and slightly misleading. But only slightly. ;-)

The whole thing adds up to an incredibly flexible system. You can configure the graphics pipe as a relatively small raster of 2,048-bit-deep pixels, or an 8-million-pixel raster of 256-bit-deep pixels, or almost anything in between. You can render a truly giant image-- about 3K by 2K pixels, progressive scan, or even more than that if you're willing to live with interlacing-- with full antialiasing, multi-buffered. It's pretty.

(If all you want is pure geometry performance, for viewing giant CAD models and stuff in real time in a VR environment, SGI also has their InfinitePerformance line of graphics hardware for Onyx. But that's another topic.)

Okay, that's enough "Rah-rah, IR" for one night, with just one more little piece of trivia. InfiniteReality graphics has remained fundamentally unchanged since 1996 or so. The only exception is the change from an Everest bus host to an XIO host system. Every few years, SGI has increased the speed of the GEs, or the texture capacity on the RMs, or the performance of the DACs in the DG, but the system itself hasn't really changed at all in six or seven years. That's pretty amazing.

Tried It

[tux-sucks]

I actually tried this at sig a few days ago. It's interesting, but not as good as advertised. While it's fun, the feedback is slightly buggy, and chopping at the enemy occasionally would not register as a hit. The sword device uses a fast-rotating weight that must start up again every time you are "hit" by an enemy, which takes a few seconds and feels unnatural. Users would sometimes get tangled up in the wires and one user got so into it that the device flew off of his head.

As far as the graphics are concerned, we're back to VirtaFighter 1. If high poly high texture models are your thing, this wont interest you. But,the graphics didn't worry me as much as the animation. I counted about 5 different cycles of animation from the enemy, which include predicable routines of slicing vertically, horizontly, the spinning cyclone of um, death, and the backward leap. Your enemy is no samuri. :)

I also found it intesting that everyone who played won. It was that easy. I long for realistic, fun vr experiences, but this was hardly much of a step forward.

We played it - it wasn't that great.

[sbaker]

My 11 year old son and I tried this exhibit at the 'Emerging Technologies' section of SigGraph.

The headset doesn't fit well and moves around all the time. This would be OK for the usual sitting in a chair looking around" kind of VR, but when you are jumping around and spinning to see where he bad guys are coming from - it's hopeless.

Your field of view is *WAY* to narrow for fighting.

The graphics were very 1995 - it looked like they were almost an afterthought. Hardly any texture, plain green floor, crude enemy animation with red triangles for blood splotches and yellow triangles for sparks when the swords hit.

The spatialised audio didn't help in locating your enemies. People watching the show were forever shouting "He's Behing You!!" to players who couldn't see that they were being chopped to bits by enemies they couldn't see. The narrow field of view wasn't helping any.

The fancy "force feedback" sword was about as effective as a Nintendo 64 rumble-pack in conveying that you had or hadn't hit something - but that was about it.

It was a brave effort - and fun for a short time, but definitely *NOT* earth-shattering VR.

Re:Good Concept but too much equipment

[Christopher Thomas]

It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me.

Graphics have always been the easiest part of building a VR rig; it's the user interface that's the hard part.

Radio links would indeed work for the control devices, but shoving full-motion video through the link with acceptable resolution and low latency would be trickier (recent wireless kits can likely do it, with difficulty). Also bear in mind that many of these rigs use EM-based position sensors. Nearby radio transmissions could quite possibly screw this up if it's being used.

Biggest killer of current VR technology for me (besides the price)? The display. I like having a decent field of view with decent resolution. Current head-mounted displays aren't there yet (and a CAVE-type solution is a bit bulky/costly).

Historically, fast and accurate head-motion tracking has been a problem as well (even a slight lag causes simulator sickness). This may have improved in recent years (haven't kept up with the field).

VR rigs are really cool toys, but nobody's figured out how to build a really _good_ one yet that I know of.