In the market for a virtual reality headset? You might want to wait.
That seemed to be the consensus of industry insiders who gathered at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., this week. The first mainstream consumer VR headsets, among them the HTC Vive and Sony PlayStation VR, just hit the market last year, and a new crop will likely be ready for shopping carts before the 2017 holiday season. But the quality of the experiences they'll offer isn't quite what many in the industry are striving for.
Deficiencies persist in the hardware that powers the headsets as well as the games and other apps that are designed to run on them, experts say. One of the most egregious in terms of how it affects the health of the headset wearer is latency, or the amount of time it takes a nod of the head or other movement to be recognized by the headset's motion processors and displayed on the screen. For Achin Bhowmik, Intel's general manager of perceptual computing, the latency of the first crop of VR devices is better than that of the last, but still leaves a lot to be desired.
"I think that we are on this verge of something exciting about to happen, and yet virtual reality has been there before, where it didn't live up to its promises," Bhomik said at the Expo on Wednesday. "There's a lot of work for us to do."
Intel expects the first headsets based on its Project Alloy reference design to hit the market this year. Like other companies, it is striving to get latency below 20 milliseconds, but even that isn't good enough, according to Bhomik.
"I can guarantee that [20 milisecond latency] will not be enough" to eradicate vestibular mismatch, or the feeling of losing your balance, he said. Of course, whether or not you'll get motion sickness in VR depends a lot on the app, too, and Bhomik implored game developers not to include scenes of, say, a character flying above the Earth at jet-like speeds.
But if you are interested in VR because of the potential to experience flight or something else that's impossible in real life, you'll also likely be disappointed with your current options, since programming those experiences requires a different mindset than what is needed for a conventional video game.
"In the virtual world, there are no tricks, there are no shortcuts," explained Zvi Greenstein, General Manager at Nvidia's GeForce team. "All the objects must be collidable." In other words, chain-link fences must rattle when you shake them and you should not only see the movement but hear the rattle, too. That's something that you don't often find even among the most heavily-produced first person shooters today.
Greenstein is hoping for a VR headset that can power extremely realistic apps. While Nvidia isn't known for software, the company has taken to writing code for things like its recently-unveiled HoloDeck as a way of demonstrating its vision. HoloDeck is a collaboration platform that allows multiple people to examine and manipulate an object—a car, for instance—in virtual reality. It's a good first step, but it's far from perfect, according to Greenstein.
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"We're nowhere near the limits of human perception," he said of the VR industry.
Still, there is reason to be excited for the future, even if it means holding off on a planned headset purchase. The next crop of devices will be completely wireless and have better eye tracking, according to HTC Vice President Rikard Steiber.
"This is the year where PC-powered VR will go wireless," he said at the Expo. Such incremental hardware improvements may seem minor, but they're worth waiting for because they could prepare the VR industry for its iPhone moment. If that happens, Steiber said, "it's not just a different computing platform, it's an evolution of how we interact with computers."