VR is all about immersion. Everything we talk about - better input, noise-cancelling or in-ear headphones etc - is designed to take us out of the real world and plonk us into the virtual world. That's great and I can't wait to try it out. However, one thought I have is that maybe there should be a way to notify you in the virtual world that real life stuff is going on.
It's very early days for the stuff I'm working on (still feeling my way around 3D engines instead of non visualised simulations in Fortran) but one feature I'd really like to implement is just such a system. However, maybe it could be integrated into the SDK so that everyone's games and apps can make use of it.
The idea is simple. Have your microphone on your computer (or Rift itself) picking up ambient noise. If the noise is above a certain level then display an icon in-game. Obviously you could disable this and might want to be able to tune it to pick up certain frequencies only. The SDK could maybe have functionality built in that just notifies you in-game if it's passed a signal of some sorts from an external source so you could maybe buy a usb or wireless vibration or sound detector and use that in game. A lot of deaf people or hard of hearing people use similar devices that light up so I imagine something like that - e.g. front door bells and phones that light up.
This all comes down to me wanting to immerse myself in VR as much as possible but I don't want to miss the door if someone rings the doorbell and I have in-ear noise isolating headphones in.
Edit: A non-software solution might be to get a wireless doorbell extender and modify it so that instead of driving a bell, it drives a small vibrator motor that you could strap to your chair or arm or whatever. That'd probably be pretty cheap and easy to hack together.
But great suggestion for people who are in the house with me. That would give me warning that I might get tapped on the shoulder. I remember this one time, I had headphones on, and I was totally immersed in Bioshock. My wife tapped my shoulder and it scared me so much, that I will never forget that moment.
I have open-back headphones. The sound they produce is loud enough to drown out pretty much all ambient noise, but anything above that (like my phone ringing) will still be heard through them. Good enough for me.
"oAmadeuso" wrote: Wouldn't a slap on the back on the head be easier and cheaper?
Um, according to almost every movie or television show dealing with VR in the 90's... doing something like this could cause the user's soul to get permanently lost in the virtual world.
Was thinking about this the other day but more in regards to emergencies. What happens when the house starts to burn down while you're happily rifting in the next room?
That Firefighter experience you're in just got a whole lot more immersive 🙂
This is actually a really good idea. I don't think it should be a standardized notification display, however, it should be an SDK that app developers can incorporate into their apps to subscribe to Real Life Stuff™ notifications, and then handle them however they like (custom display methods e.g. a banner, scroller, chat box etc). This is probably best because the black areas of the rift as far as I understand, aren't visible, and that'd make displaying it in a google glass type of way very hard.
Another good idea is a motion sensing camera. This way, if anybody tries to murder you whilst you're in the rift, you'll see them before they know you've noticed them.
