June 30, 1998

This is the gadget that inspired the series of 'What's it Like?" articles. I've always been interested in VR, and I've dissected Quake enough to know that it could provide a robust and exciting total immersion environment if I only had the right sensory interface, i.e. a stereoscopic head-mounted display (HMD). However, the two 'carnival' VR experiences I've had were sadly lacking, and even a $400 price tag seemed high for what could easily have turned out to be a half-assed and disappointing throwaway peripheral.

Carnival VR

Some years ago I was working in a computer store in downtown San Francisco when a guy came in to buy some cables or something and gave me his business card. He owned a 'Virtual Reality Themepark' nearby. He signed the card and said I could get a few free rides with it. Well, I never used it, but his 'Themepark' was in a local shopping mall, the Embarcadero Center, and I went in a few times to check it out before finally putting down five bucks to play a shooting game. That experience qualifies as the biggest waste of five dollars to date.

The problem is that the gameplay is so urgent that you don't have enough time to 'just look around'. Every time I tried, the assistant who helped me into the headset barked instructions to face forward and shoot at the bad guys. Plus, the games themselves are horrible. They seem like hastily designed shooters that are way below commercial grade software. Like the only free game you get when you buy a game console, except you'd think the game you get with a $10,000 VR machine would be better. Texture Mapping? What's that?

Why-oh-why, I thought, doesn't someone just hook one of these things up to Quake? A few weeks later I found that someone had, almost. There was a four PC LAN down at Fisherman's Wharf running, not Quake, but Duke Nukem. That wasn't better, but they had the thing running a milk-baby deathmatch arena - a single circular room with all the weapons in the middle. This time I was playing against some little kid, so I just blew him up a few times to get my frags up to a respectable figure and took some time to look around while he worked out how to unstick himself from the wall.

Prognosis: Negative.

The headtracking sucked. I got neck-strain, the helmet was so heavy, and the display was really low-res - my eyes kept focussing on the rgb pixels that make up the image rather than the image itself. It looked like it looks when you get up super-close to your TV and discover that even white light is composed, inexplicably, from three different colored lights. More subtle problems were that the display was not stereoscopic and the field of view was set all wrong. The overall effect was that of playing a video game while wearing a TV on your head. Virtual Anything it was not.

On a side note, I kicked the little kid's ass. Poor guy was probably hospitalized from whiplash, wearing that huge thing on his head for 10 minutes.

More than just a game.

Let me talk a bit about quake. Anyone in the programming community who digs this game, knows that it's more of a 3D development environment than just a game. It's such an open design you can get in there and really push the engine around. I'm not even talking about writing your own QuakeC. Just bring down the console and type r_drawflat 1 or v_idlescale 1 or fov 150 and you'll know what I mean.

Quake - the ultra-flexible 3D graphic game engine.

Normal

r_drawflat 1

That last command is important. FOV stands for field of view, or field of vision, I can't remember which. It sets the size of the virtual 2D area that the engine draws the 3D image onto. It's set, by default, to 90, which means that the engine crams one quarter of the world (45 degrees on either side of your player) onto your little screen. If you hit the zoom-in key (F11, I think) it shoots the FOV up to 10, and then back down to 90. For Berkeley-acid-like effects, try it at 150.

Changing the Field of View.

fov 150

fov 45

Okay, but your monitor is a much smaller window than 90 degrees. It's closer to 45. The FOV is set to 90 because it makes the game more playable - you can see more, so you have a bit more peripheral vision, which makes it harder to be attacked from the side. Crank FOV down to 45 and you see that things change quite a bit. Play with it for a while. You can get some nice effects with FOV, almost cinematic. The PlayStation game Gran Tourismo does some gorgeous things with FOV in its replay attract mode.

Back to Duke Nukem. In the helmet, things didn't look right because they were cramming 90 degrees (or whatever DN defaults to) onto those tiny little screens. Being based on a prior generation of game engine (no flames, please) the Duke finds himself painfully unable to either change his FOV, or to look too far up or down. He certainly can't enjoy the benefits of stereoscopy.

Two Eyes are better tha - oh enough with these glib headers.

Let's talk about stereoscopy. Briefly, this means that if you show a slightly different picture of the 3D world to each eye, (just like happens in real life because your eyes are a couple of inches apart), it tricks your brain into seeing a world that's as truly 3D as real life. That's right - it gives you true depth perception. You're no longer just looking at 2D pictures up really close, you're looking at 3D polygonal models stomping about a 3D world. Near walls look close, far walls look distant, blood-spattered men with guns look really menacing, fat trolls with chainsaws throwing grenades cause you to duck instinctively. In a word - TOTAL IMMERSION.

Okay, that was two words. One last quake console command for you: Type version and it will tell you what version of Quake you have.. If you have version 1.08 or later, try lcd_x 1.5 and now you're looking at what's known as line sequential steroscopic mode. Quake is now drawing those two magical images, only it draws them one line at a time and interleaves the lines. Play with this mode for a bit and go up close to something. Okay, you're right, that was two commands.

Quake's Line-sequential StereoScopic Mode.

lcd_x -1.5

Incidentally, Descent v1.0 had a stereoscopic mode where it draws a different image on each side of the screen. You could almost get a stereoscopic view by crossing your eyes, but your opthalmologist wouldn't recommend it.

What StereoScopic mode looks like with the right hardware

Left Eye

Right Eye

The Hardware.

So, I was thinking, if I had one of these things, you could really immerse yourself in quake in a big way. I looked at HMD's (Head Mounted Displays) everywhere and found that the VFX1 looked the best for the money. Plus it claims to support Quake, WinQuake, and Quake 2. But when I looked deeper, there was very little in the way of what the experience was like, and most of the data was old. Plenty of stats, but no user commentary.

One of my main problems was that the VFX1 requires an ISA card, and I only have a laptop. I killed two birds with one stone by utilizing the desktop computer and network resources of a company in downtown New York, and also persuading them to pay for the thing. Don't ask me how I did it. I'm good like that.

Installation.

Installation was a snap. No it wasn't, I'm lying. It was a complete nightmare and I still haven't got it to install. Check the end of the document for updates. I'm bound to get it to work perfectly one day. As it is, I'm almost there. Let me just talk about what a bitch this thing was to get going.

First of all, this is a pre Windows 95 product, and '95 support was a long time coming. It's definitely DOS, baby. Hardcopy documentation is HORRIBLE. It's Minimal and what there is is very out of date. There was no mention of Windows 95 in the printer docs, so I just assumed I had to boot to a DOS Prompt to get started.

The DOS installation program worked fine (standard A:INSTALL stuff) and loads a VFX1.COM TSR. Then it selected an IRQ and Port address and let me test the helmet.At this point, the head tracking worked, but the color palette was all screwy. The PC had a no-name brand SVGA card that did not appear on the compatibility list on the IIS website. On the bright side, it did have a VESA feature connector, but the IIS site mentions that some cards come with broken or half-broken VESA connectors.

So I installed SciTech's Display Doctor and it claimed to have enabled all sorts of VESA functionality on the card. No joy with the headset colors. Eventually I checked the machine's BIOS and found a palette snooping option was disabled. This fixed the colors.

Next I tried the win95 install. There was a setup program, which seemed to work fine, but every time I restarted the machine, it reported that the headset was not assigned a joystick and asked if I wanted to assign it. I clicked on Yes, and... nothing happened. Every time I restarted, I got this same box, asking me to assign the headset to a joystick. I click Yes... nothing. Very frustrating. Dead in the water.

I dug around again and found nothing, but a reference to DirectInput raised suspicions. The 95 install requires DirectX, but the drivers install without it and the software makes no checks for DirectX once installed. It tries to run the Game Controller Applet in Control Panel (which doesn't exist unless you install DirectX) and doesn't report anything when it can't find it. No error, nothing.

So I installed DirectX and got a little farther. Now the Control Panel applet exists, so when I click Yes it pops up, but the VFX-1 game controller doesn't show up in the list. It's there if I go to the device manager tab in the System applet, but it stubbornly refuses to appear in the one place it needs to. Without assigning the headset to a joystick, the Win 95 configuration software won't run, so I can't get it to work. One thing I discovered was that the DOS install had assigned the IRQ of the ISA card to be 7, which was conflicting with the IRQ of the printer port, LPT1. I changed the IRQ to 5. Still no joy.

At this point, let me say that I haven't yet contacted IIS for tech support. I'll let you know when it comes to that. Check below for details. I'm hoping I don't have to wait for my registration card to work through the U.S. Postal service before they'll honor my calls. For now, let me talk about the DOS support.

Bad News:

The head tracking sucks. The yaw (looking to the left and right) is fine - you can spin round 360 degrees and the display pretty much does the same, though a little shakily. The Pitch (looking up and down) is horrible. The tracking goes up at a severe angle (up and left, down and right) when you look up, and if you look down it can flip immediately right round to a point behind you. Ugh. Before I get sued, I want to say that this will be the first thing I talk to IIS about once I get a tech person on the phone. This unit may be defective. I hope it is. I hope the pitch is supposed to work much better than it does.

While it's possible to manually set the tracking, this only works for yaw, which already worked fine and didn't need any further calibration. As a proud owner of the VFX1, I now hold one piece of technical data I couldn't find anywhere online - the head tracking uses a localized magnetic field to track the movement of your head. The only advice the manual gives in the event of poor head-tracking is to not stand close to any large metal objects. How large it didn't say. My computer is relatively large, and generates what I would think is a pretty complex and active magnetic field, as does the monitor. Without the optional extension cable, I can only retreat so far from it.

Better News:

The displays are pretty good. When I finally patched Quake to work with headset tracking, and flipped FOV to 45, I felt a bit better about the whole thing. Pixellation is easily lost in the action, and the immersive effect is enough to make you feel kinda strange when you flip fly mode on (type fly 1 at the console) and zoom straight up. I'd also recommend notarget 1, which makes all the people regard you with total indifference (until you start pumping rounds into their dog).

Still Working on it:

Like I said, getting Quake to work was the goal here, so windows 95 support isn't imperative. The patched version of Quake (get it from the IIS website under Title Support) works well with tracking, but I'm a bit frustrated that I still can't get stereoscopic mode to work. This will be the second thing I talk to IIS about. You're supposed to turn the headset's line-sequential mode on by reinvoking the TSR with a command-line argument thus, vfx1 +t, but doing this seems to have zero effect on the display, and when you run quake, it shows you the same screwy line-sequential image in both eyes.

The thing is, there's a diagnostic program that ships with the unit (vfx1diag) that demonstrates stereoscopic mode by painting a different colored image in each eye (which really hurts to look at) and it works fine. Incidentally, this utility also warned me SNOOPING NOT ENABLED, a somewhat ambiguous message that led me to search for, discover, and enable a palette snooping mode in BIOS.

Overall, I'm not suffering from the dreaded buyer's remorse, and it's not entirely due to the fact that I didn't pay for it. The displays are good, and I think that the effect will be exactly what I was expecting once I can get the sterescopic mode to work, i.e. very immersive. If the tracking can be improved, things will be Very Good. I may even shell out for a desktop PC of my own so I can take the thing home and play with it in the comfort of 89 Bleecker Street. That's probably when my girlfriend will leave me for good.

Check back for updates on my progrss. I'm going downtown now to fight with it some more.

July 1st, 1998

Success!!

Anyone who works in this crazy industry (programming) knows how often the brain moves in mysterious ways. If you have a problem on your mind and you feel like you've completely exhausted all the possibilities for solving it, you'll find that another solution, possibly the solution, can just pop into your head when you're swimming, or playing pool, or at a concert, or swinging like mad in the fast lane of the batting cages at Chelsea Piers.

Well I had one of those moments, but when I went downtown to try it out, I found that the problem had 'fixed itself', which also happens, though much less frequently.

I still haven't spoken to IISVR tech support. This is what I have now discovered - Stereoscopic mode only works when I boot my machine all the way into Windows 95, then shut it down to a DOS prompt. It doesn't work if you short circuit to DOS before the GUI loads by pressing F8 when it says "Starting Windows 95" during the boot process. This is a little odd, because SciTech's Display Doctor seems to load in DOS before you run '95. It also doesn't work in a '95 DOS window. The documentation tells you not to even try this, but for a while it was the only way I could get the colors to work right.

Incidentally, my flash of inspiration was to put vfx1 +t in my autoexec.bat file rather than trying to invoke it from the DOS Window. Ah well, maybe I'll revisit that thought.

Whatever. Let's talk about VR Quake...

When you switch the headset to StereoScopic mode before you start the game, the effect is negligible. I didn't notice at first, but the text becomes a bit harder to read, especially in the left eye, as every other line is sent to the opposite eye. Anyway, I ran Quake and typed lcd_x 1 and cranked the resolution up to 320x480, and there I was, looking down the barrel of a shotgun that was right in front of me, in a room that stretched out to either side. I switched the FOV to 45 and looked around.

Nice. Very nice. Very very very nice, in fact. It's the same kind of 'novelty' 3D effect you get with any other stereoscopic system, really, only you can look around - you're not just facing in one direction looking at one image. I didn't have a problem adjusting to the two different images at all. Stair cases loomed up, walls were right in front of me, then far away. In short, exactly what I had hoped for.

I turned on notarget and went to the bridge over the water on the first level. I was up close looking at the grunt there when I noticed the images were reversed, i.e. the image intended for my right eye was in my left and vice versa. No problem. You can send a negative value to lcd_x to switch the images, so lcd_x -1 fixed it.

Wow again. The guy's rifle swung out right in front of me. The dog was no longer a picture of a dog, it was a dog, a big dog, about four or five feet away. But the best thing is the levels themselves. All that detail, lost to most deathmatch players, but slaved over for endless hours by level designers, really stands out. The beams, pillars and design work all become very noticeable. It's a joy. All you level designers should check this thing out.

The StereoScopic effect in action.

Nice doggy.

Level Detail stands out in true 3D

It's still just a texture-mapped game, obviously, and the chunkiness of the characters makes you think you're stuck in an origami universe, but like I said, it's a great, great novelty and it looks awesome. I'm going out to buy Quake 2 soon to see how it looks with the better engine and higher polygon count, but I'm afraid I won't be able to get it to work without 95 support, so I'll call tech support before I make the puchase.

I mentioned yesterday that pixellation isn't an issue with the VFX1. Let me stress that again. The video mode 320x480 sounds like a weird ratio, but you've probably already guessed why it's ideal for the HMD. Because every other line makes up a single image, the effect is of two images at 320x240. The normal 320x240 setting is the one that fills the displays the best. 320x200 is a bit too 'pillbox'. The pixels in the diplays are easily ignorable when you're in the game, though I did notice a few that seemed to be stuck 'on', like the 'christmas lights' effect known to all you Connectix QuickCam users, except that the pixels in this case are red, green and blue, not white.

Here are a few more details not worth expounding upon:

• I turned the 'brightness' setting in Quake down a lot more than I usually have it set at for monitor play. This helped improve the look of everything a lot.
• The crosshair was broken in that video mode. It was way too high on the screen, so I turned it off.
• I got a great lens flare effect one time when I looked up at a flaming torch. The headset's optics were a little steamed up. It looked cool.
• There is a bug where the view drifts to one side when you pause the game. It drifts slowly and unstoppably, like you have noclip turned on. You drift right out of the level into the grey limbo beyond. Don't know if this was introduced by the VFX1 patch, but I've never seen it happen before.
• Strangely, the vfx1 diagnostic program's stereoscopic test broke. So now quake works, but vfx1diag does not.
• Swimming on the surface of the water is a cool effect.
• I played with wider FOV's, but 45 is best. it makes the game very hard to actually play (believe me, I've played this game to death, I have no interest in actually playing the thing all over again with the HMD on) because you can't see things coming at you from the side nearly as well, but it best suits the display size, which helps the immersive effect.

Also, when the shambler is running around in a room in front of you (don't try this without notarget!!) his huge spiney hands keep whipping past your head. It's kinda scary. He's a big ol' boy. The knights look killer.

The bad news is that the head tracking still sucks. Forget pitching up and down, but the yaw seems to work in pretty chunky increments, so you don't get a smooth transition when you turn. It's enough to make you want to stop turning, and just use the 'CyberPuck' that comes with the helmet.

Yes, I know I haven't said much about the CyberPuck. I just hate any peripheral, software, article or whatever that uses the super-overloaded psuedo-geek word 'Cyber'. Hate it. It's an adequate gadget - like a 3-button mouse that you hold in mid air and rotate on a couple of different axes to move around. It tracks much more finely than the headset, but it just isn't a very accurate way to do things, especially when it comes to stopping, which can be an extremely important thing in Quake when you're standing in a room full of lava, or monsters with their back turned.

Like I said, I'll call IISVR and talk to their tech people about the head tracking. For now I'm going to look for a way to use the mouse. The VFX1 Quake patch gives you a user-friendly .ini file to edit for that sort of thing.

Well, that's it. Next up is Windows 95 support and then onto Quake 2. The online literature mentions that the patches only work with winquake and dos quake, but I think I should be able to fire up quake world with stereoscopic mode on. That's a true spectator sport and you can fly around much more easily.

Monday July 13th, 1998.

I was playing with the headset again this weekend. It looks like you have to turn the machine off to get certain modes invoked by the TSR to 'stick'. Warm booting, from the keyboard or the reset button doesn't seem to help. I also noticed that the door to the small, windowless computer room I was using the HMD in was made of metal. I closed the door and stood in the center of the room, and the head tracking pitch improved. I should mention that the CyberPuck peripheral works perfectly well.

The problem with head tracking in general is that it uses these big, chunky increments, so the display jumps jerkily and shakes rather than moving smoothly. If you use a mouse to look around, the Quake engine will let you look around very smoothly. This is completely lost with the VFX-1, and the jerkiness and shaking really 'does your head in' after a short time. It's not good. Some technical documents came with the win95 drivers. I'll have to take a look at them and see how many finely the VFX-1 divides space. You would hope it describes it's rotational data with floating point numbers, but it feels, in Quake, like it's bytes!!! I'm hoping this is due to bad software in the quake patch rather than the hardware itself.

I'm also experiencing minor nausea and less minor fatigue. I think the fatigue is caused by the confusion your eyes experience when they try to focus on an object that the stereoscopic effect is telling your brain is far away, when the displays are only three inches from your retina. Then again, it may just have been the jarring effect of the head-tracking.

I tried to turn head tracking off, but I can't get the mouse to work. If head tracking is on, a movement of the mouse crashes the machine. With tracking off, the mouse is detected by quake (you can see it on the console messages on starting the game) but doesn't work. There's no point playing Quake if you can't look around in some way.

I forgot to mention that the CyberPuck plugs into the back of the helmet. There's something satisfyingly Gibsonesque about plugging a peripheral into the back of your head.

When I next have time I need to get hold of tech support and get the thing working in win95. Then I can go buy Quake II.

Wednesday August 26th, 1998.

Technical Support? Pah! Voice Mail, baby, that's all you get, and my messages have yet to be returned. I'll keep on it. As a result, I still haven't picked up a copy of Quake II yet to see if the headtracking support has improved. Further experiments with the headset have shown that the vertical tracking (Pitch) does seem to work fine if you keep far away from metallic objects.

Thursday, November 19th, 1998.

Added the pictures today. Someone emailed me about this page a few days ago and said that they had no problem with IIS's tech support at all. He just recently bought a VFX1 and when he spoke to a live person first time, and they were very helpful. I guess I should try again. I still don't have a desktop machine to try this stuff at home. When I get one, I'll pick it up again and buy Quake II.