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John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

pcgamer.com

21–30 of 69 posts

Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

#23
post #19

There's something very pleasing to know that guys like Carmack aren't just punching out tomorrow's FPS engines, but doing out of the box stuff like this. I wonder if we're entering some kind of tech golden age. The post-PC stuff, SpaceX/Tesla, Kindle/Nook, Win8, Smartphones, etc things have gotten weird quickly. I'm still waiting to wake up one day and see a $999 home robot that can do everything from clean the bathr…

Sounds like you may not be familiar with Armadillo Aerospace yet...

Yeah, Carmack has a rocket company: http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/

Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

#25
post #24
post #22

This is the forum thread where Carmack and others have been discussing the project for a couple of months. Interesting read: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14777&...

Wow, how did you find that?

Lots of procrastination :)

Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

#26
post #15

Oh man, the memories. I remember playing the original Doom game with a virtual reality helmet at a gaming convention back in 1994 or so when I was a little kid. It was a tiny convention at a small Finnish town, but I remember seeing same kind of helmets in photographs from CeBITs and E3's in computer magazines. Does anyone remember a consumer VR helmet circa 1993? It had a helmet with displays of roughly "mode 13h" r…

I had one years ago that came from an IT auction for the princely sum of £40. That included basically everything but the PC including the big nest thing you had to stand in. I set it up to work with AlphaWorld on a windows 95 machine. It required a bit of work to get it to accept straight VGA signals and it wasn't the stereoscopic variant. It sat in my living room for a year and mainly collected junk.

The experience both rocked and sucked. The setup was dialled into UUNet at 14.4k and you could count the pixels but it was still slightly cool. It made your eyes and neck hurt badly though.

Ended up on eBay in '00 and sold for £1 because "buyer collects".

Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

#29

Here's to hoping someone with a name in the industry can finally push through decent consumer VR, and that this will get some attention at E3... I bought the Sony HMZ-T1 earlier this month hoping that it would be what I was always looking for in terms of home VR (despite the lack of headtracking, which I was going to add with trackIR). However, it was horribly uncomfortable to wear and just didn't give the immersive…

Carmack's been pushing companies like this for nearly two decades. In particular, he has been a significant force in the evolution of the video card industry. The hardware companies know and respect him. If anyone can do it, he can.
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