Gadgetwise: With Disney Infinity, a Virtual Toy Box

When the executives at Disney conceived of Infinity, they imagined a video game that resembled a toy box: random toys could be pulled out for any adventure.

The Disney Infinity game, which was released last week, embraces that “anything goes” attitude with vigor. Initial properties include “The Lone Ranger,” “The Incredibles,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Monsters University” and “Cars 2,” and more are scheduled to follow. Disney has said that anything from its vault, including movies, TV shows, theme parks and animated shorts, could eventually show up in the evolving platform.

But Disney Infinity is more than just a video game. Like Skylanders from Activision, Disney Infinity incorporates physical toys, which unlock characters, powers, vehicles and other features when the toys are placed on the Infinity base, which is connected to a game console (Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii).

Once a figure is on the base, its digital doppelgänger appears in a “play set,” a virtual realm based on each character’s respective world. Changing characters and play sets is as easy as swapping the toys on the base. Or characters can come together in the “toy box” mode, in which players create worlds and adventures of their own.

The game itself is simple but engaging. The characters inhabit their worlds and can go on missions, collect objects, build energy and earn points, pretty much as in any video game. But the toy box mode offers the opportunity for real creativity, giving players the ability to design a 3-D world from scratch using landscapes, buildings, vehicles, characters and other objects from the Disney universe.

The Disney Infinity starter pack, which includes the game, three figures and three play sets, costs $75. Add-ons include single figures at $13 apiece, sets of three figures for $30 and a pack that includes two figures and a play set for $35. In addition, power discs, which provide special abilities, toys and themes, are sold in packs of two for $5 (but they are in blind packaging, which means you don’t know which discs you will get.)

Paying extra for additional characters and content is nothing new to video games. But Disney is starting with five play sets, 17 figures and 20 power discs, with much more to come. This game has the potential to fill up your toy box as quickly as it empties your wallet.

Tool Kit: Virtual Currency Gains Ground in Actual World

A type of digital cash, bitcoins were invented in 2009 and can be sent directly to anyone, anywhere in the world. You don’t have to go through a financial institution, which means no fees and no one tracking your spending habits. With a current market capitalization of $1 billion, bitcoins are beginning to be more widely accepted. You can use them to pay for a pizza or make speculative bets that could end up financing your child’s college education.

But bitcoins, and other digital currencies, have also come under scrutiny. Liberty Reserve, an online payment system, was shuttered in the spring by New York authorities, who said the company used its digital currency, known as LRs, to launder up to $6 billion. And law enforcement officials have voiced concerns that bitcoins could also abet illegal transactions. Bart Chilton, a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, suggested that bitcoins might be ripe for regulation.

Moreover, some critics say the bitcoin infrastructure is insecure, as hackable as any other computer-based system.

“The way the basic bitcoin system works is both incredibly solid and incredibly clever from a technical standpoint,” said Nicholas Weaver, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, which studies and advances a range of emerging technologies. “The system’s security is fragile, however, and the economic model behind bitcoin is, well, crazy stupid.”

Nonetheless, paying with bitcoins can be a weirdly fun way to make transactions. Here is a primer on how to do it.

Like gold, bitcoins, which are both a currency and a commodity, are in limited supply (there is a cap of 21 million total) and have to be “mined” before they are put in circulation. Anyone can mine for bitcoins by downloading software, known as the bitcoin client, which algorithmically crunches a bunch of numbers to legitimize or authenticate a sequence or “block” of past bitcoin transactions. So bitcoins are basically minted as a reward for contributing to the smooth operation of the system. Validating a block yields 25 bitcoins, which are currently worth $2,675.

The fluctuating price of bitcoins, also like gold, is a function of supply and demand, as well as psychology. “Bitcoins have value because people say they have value,” said Andrew White, a former I.T. manager for the Wikipedia Foundation and now a digital currency entrepreneur in San Francisco.

Unlike fiat currencies like the United States dollar and virtual currencies like Facebook credits and the one invented by Liberty Reserve, bitcoins are not created or controlled by a central authority. But with the blistering rate of bitcoin transactions these days, you need a pricey and complex computer rig to effectively run the bitcoin client and procure some bitcoin bounty. An easier way to get bitcoins is to just find someone willing to sell them to you.

Julian Tosh, an I.T. systems administrator in Las Vegas, for example, lets friends and family buy items on his Amazon wish list and pays them back in bitcoins. “This works well as long as I need stuff,” said Mr. Tosh, who also presides over a Wednesday “Bitcoin Lunch Mob” in Las Vegas, which gathers to discuss and trade bitcoins.

But maybe you don’t personally know any bitcoin enthusiasts like Mr. Tosh or the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, who own around $11 million worth and have filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to form a bitcoin investment trust. If so, you might try localbitcoins.com, which lists people in your area who are willing to exchange bitcoins for cold hard cash. The market price Tuesday afternoon was $107 for a bitcoin. Be sure to check out sellers’ profiles and reviews to make sure they are reputable. And, of course, it’s always a good idea to meet in a public place to make the transaction.

Bitcoins can be easily transferred and stored using a digital wallet app on your Android mobile device. Popular wallet apps include BitcoinSpinner and Bitcoin Wallet. There are no iOS bitcoin wallet apps and Apple did not respond to e-mails seeking an explanation. But Blockchain has an online wallet service that you can access using any Internet-connected desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

You can also get bitcoins through Mt.Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange and where the currency is traded as a commodity. But it’s a cumbersome and lengthy process, requiring wire transfers and scanning identity documents. The company, which is based in Japan, also charges a 0.6 percent fee for all transactions.

Keep in mind that the United States Department of Homeland Security in May seized Mt.Gox’s United States accounts, saying it misrepresented the full extent of its financial operations. The company did not respond to requests for comment but continues to function as before the seizure.

Another option is Coinbase, a bitcoin transaction platform, which recently announced a $5 million infusion of venture capital. While it’s still a nascent venture (not even a year old), the service hasn’t had any major hiccups yet and is relatively simple to use. You just enter your bank account and routing number, how many bitcoins you want and click “buy.” You can also send bitcoins to others through your Coinbase account. Just know you’ll be charged a 1 percent transaction fee.

Once you have your bitcoins, the fun part is spending them. Bitcoin. travel, BitcoinsInVegas.com, Spendbitcoins.com and Reddit have directories of businesses that accept bitcoins as payment. And Bitpremier.com lists high-priced luxury items (cars, jets, yachts, etc.) you can buy with bitcoins.

To make a purchase, all you have to do is type the receiver’s key code or scan their QR code into your bitcoin wallet and you’re done. Like cash transactions, you can’t cancel payment later, so be sure it’s what you want before you click “send.”

Brewster Kahle, a founder of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, said he routinely used bitcoins to pay for lunch at a local sushi restaurant. He’s interested in the technology and appreciates the libertarian aspect of it. “Bitcoin used to be just in the land of computer geeks, but not anymore,” he said.

More businesses are accepting bitcoins lately thanks to Bitpay, which supplies software for processing bitcoin payments. The merchant pays a 0.99 percent fee per transaction versus the 2 to 4 percent fees charged by credit card companies. Bitpay will also immediately convert bitcoins to dollars if the merchant desires.

“Bitcoin users are pretty enthusiastic, so you get instant loyal customers,” said Adam Penn, owner of Veggie Galaxy, a restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., which began accepting bitcoins through Bitpay in May. “So far, it’s been a no-risk revenue generator.”

Also last month, Bitpay announced a partnership with the mobile gift card app Gyft, which will allow people to use bitcoins to purchase gift cards from hundreds of retailers including Brookstone, Lowe’s, Gap, Sephora, GameStop, American Eagle, Nike, Marriott, Burger King and Fandango.

“It’s a huge development,” said Mr. Tosh in Las Vegas, who predicts Gyft’s embrace of bitcoins will lead to widespread use of the alternative currency. “Pandora’s box has been smashed.”

Or maybe not. The legal trouble at Mt.Gox sent a shiver through the market as did S.E.C. charges last week that the founder and operator of the lesser-known Bitcoin Savings and Trust in McKinney, Tex., was running a bitcoin Ponzi scheme.

Still, bitcoin advocates point out that, despite some bad actors, the actual system has not had a major security breach. Nevertheless, even the most ardent bitcoin boosters urge caution. Bitcoins have appreciated more than 700 percent since this time last year — an increase some have compared to a bubble bound to burst.

“It’s supervolatile, so I’d tell people to go slow,” said Peter Vessenes, chairman and executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the currency. “Never hold more bitcoins than you’re prepared to lose.”

Link by Link: Bubble or No, Virtual Bitcoins Show Real Worth

When Mr. Grinberg, now a lawyer in the financial institutions group of the Manhattan law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, first learned about bitcoins, they were selling for 10 cents. Now, after the latest price surge that began in January, the cost of a bitcoin on an exchange that converts them to dollars is something like $140, and the collective value of all bitcoins has passed a billion dollars.

That is a lot of coin in any form, and the billion-dollar milestone has turned the once-obscure online currency into a media sensation. Had Mr. Grinberg invested just $100 back then, today his investment would be worth ...

Ah, but that way madness lies. “People are buying bitcoins because the price is going up,” he said in an interview. “That is the classic indicator of a bubble.”

The question of whether the increase represents real value or is simply evidence of a bubble is at the heart of the current media frenzy. Bitcoin began in January 2009, a project introduced by a programmer or group of programmers who worked under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

The project represented a breakthrough in using software code to authenticate and protect transactions without resorting to a centralized bank or government treasury. In that way, Bitcoin became a peer-to-peer system. That comes in pretty handy for people who do not want their transactions monitored.

In conversations about the project with scholars who study it, the word that comes up as often as “bubble” is “genius.”

For one thing, though bitcoins are software code, you can’t simply copy them like a music file. The process of creating the coins — “mining” them in the project’s allusion to something tangible like gold or silver — involves computer work that, crucially, verifies Bitcoin transactions.

“It is the most successful digital currency already right now,” said Nicolas Christin, the associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Even if bitcoins become worth nothing, it has succeeded more than any academic proposals for a digital currency,” he said in an interview from Okinawa, Japan, where he was attending a conference on financial cryptography that included a number of papers on bitcoins.

People buy the coins for cold hard cash on exchanges. Completing those purchases, as well as cashing out, typically involves re-entering the world of traditional financial transactions, with fees and loss of anonymity.

But Bitcoin’s managers say the currency has proved so secure that despite the fact that exchanges and virtual wallets, where people keep their bitcoins, have been hacked, the coins themselves have not been forged.

So why the sudden run-up in value? Some point to the recent crisis over Cypriot banks, which made a currency beyond the control of governments more tempting. And as with a run-up in anything tradable — tulip bulbs, dot-com shares — there is also the hypnotic logic that says the price went up today, so that means it will go up tomorrow.

Some observers and investors also make the case that bitcoins are in fact undervalued. Their argument goes like this. The total value of the world’s economic activity is enormous. There are certain transactions that are ideal for bitcoins because the currency is relatively anonymous and does not need to be processed by a financial organization or a government.

If bitcoins become the dominant currency in some small niche of the world economy — that is, those people who do not want their transactions easily tracked or who want to send money back home from abroad — then they will become quite valuable indeed. This outcome has been neatly summarized by the financial blogger Felix Salmon as making bitcoins an “uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency.”

The price increase becomes a question of supply and demand. Unlike other currencies that can adjust the money supply depending on economic conditions, bitcoins have a supply that is fixed. The amount of new coins that can be minted was plotted at the outset with a finite number of coins at the end, roughly 21 million in the next century. Today, the rate is 25 new coins every 10 minutes; for the first four years, it was twice as many, 50 every 10 minutes.

The slowdown in the rate new coins are added, which was programmed into bitcoins, may also help account for the spike in prices.

So far, excluding investors and day traders, the main use of the currency appears to be illicit activity. There are the online gambling sites that use bitcoins. And the anonymous online marketplace Silk Road, which accepts only bitcoins, is “overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics,” according to a paper on Silk Road written by Mr. Christin of Carnegie Mellon.

Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life

The boxes housed thousands of microchips, each programmed to act like a brain cell. Cables carried signals from microchip to microchip, just as cells do in a real brain.

In 2006, Dr. Markram flipped the switch. Blue Brain, a tangled web of nearly 10,000 virtual neurons, crackled to life. As millions of signals raced along the cables, electrical activity resembling real brain waves emerged.

“That was an incredible moment,” he said, comparing the simulation to what goes on in real brain tissue. “It didn’t match perfectly, but it was pretty good. As a biologist, I was amazed.”

Deciding then that simulating the entire brain on a supercomputer would be possible within his lifetime, Dr. Markram, now 50, set out to prove it.

That is no small feat. The brain contains nearly 100 billion neurons organized into networks with 100 trillion total connections, all firing split-second spikes of voltage in a broth of complex biological molecules in constant flux.

In 2009, Dr. Markram conceived of the Human Brain Project, a sprawling and controversial initiative of more than 150 institutions around the world that he hopes will bring scientists together to realize his dream.

In January, the European Union raised the stakes by awarding the project a 10-year grant of up to $1.3 billion — an unheard-of sum in neuroscience.

“A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain,” Dr. Markram wrote in Scientific American, “would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials.”

An equally ambitious “big brain” idea is in the works in the United States: The Obama administration is expected to propose its own project, with up to $3 billion allocated over a decade to develop technologies to track the electrical activity of every neuron in the brain.

But just as many obstacles stand in the way of the American project, a number of scientists have expressed serious reservations about Dr. Markram’s project.

Some say we don’t know enough about the brain to simulate it on a supercomputer. And even if we did, these critics ask, what would be the value of building such a complicated “virtual brain”?

Henry Markram traces his fascination with the brain to a school assignment in his native South Africa. He was 14, and as he sat in the library reading about depression, he was astonished to discover there might be “molecular explanations to mental illness” that could be treated with drugs.

That set him on a path to medical school, where he planned to become a psychiatrist. But as a medical student, he realized that we know next to nothing about what prescription drugs really do to the brain.

To understand mental illness, he reasoned, we need to understand the brain first. “So I dropped out of medical school,” he said, “and got on a plane to do some real neuroscience.”

He went to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to earn a Ph.D., followed by a stint at the National Institutes of Health in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship. That work led to a position with the Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

At Dr. Sakmann’s lab, Dr. Markram made his most famous discovery.

He was pondering how the brain learns cause and effect. He set up an experiment to record the electrical activity from two connected neurons in a slice from a rat’s brain, and discovered that the neurons required a precise sequence of voltage spikes to change the strength of their connections. He speculated that the mechanism might be at the root of our notion of causality.

That work has now been cited thousands of times. Yet as Dr. Markram’s reputation grew, so did his impatience.

Neurons are organized into interconnected circuits that can number in the millions. Dr. Markram realized that to make real progress linking neurons to behavior, experimenting on two neurons at a time “just wasn’t enough.”

In his first faculty position, at the Weizmann Institute, he set up a wildly ambitious new experimental rig that could record data not just from 2 neurons in a rat’s brain but also from 12.

“His rig made NASA look tame,” recalled Dr. Markram’s postdoctoral adviser at the N.I.H., Elise F. Stanley, who visited him at the Weizmann in 1995. “There was so much equipment that you couldn’t even see the brain tissue.”

Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.

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Next Wave of Asian Exports to U.S. May Be Virtual Goods

SAN FRANCISCO — A decade ago, a developer from the South Korean game maker Nexon threw a few lines of code together to create an image of a flower to present to his girlfriend, buying himself more video game time as she sat impatiently by his side at an Internet cafe.

And, so the industry legend goes, the “virtual good” was born. In the years since, digitally created items for games and social media — from beers on Facebook to weapons in role-playing worlds — have grown into a $15 billion globe-spanning business. They helped generate the likes of Zynga and underpin a fast-expanding online gaming industry.

Now, companies like Nexon that pioneered the model across Asia are muscling onto Zynga’s turf, hoping to cash in on fast-growing U.S. spending by bringing their distinct Asian brand of fast-paced “freemium” games — free with optional in-game purchases.

With PC sales stagnating even in China, the industry’s heavyweights are increasingly doubling down on mobile services and targeting the Western market as more smartphones and tablets land in users’ hands. Pushed also by slowing growth in casual games on Facebook, they have stepped up their investments this year.

“The emphasis of the Asian publishers is to successfully set foot in Western markets, and that gives you a blueprint of what’s to come,” said Joost van Dreunen, managing director of the digital goods intelligence firm SuperData Research. “The free-to-play games for mobile are where we identify huge growth.”

Asian gaming bigwigs began exploring the Western market a few years ago with high-engagement, addictive and often hard-core Web-browser titles. But this year has brought a spike in activity that threatens to undermine Zynga’s own efforts to diversify into mobile gaming and wean itself off Facebook.

The Japanese social gaming powerhouse DeNA aims to enlarge its social and mobile gaming network Mobage in America. It is releasing games based on the Marvel superhero and Transformers franchises. Gree, another Japanese company, has bought two San Francisco-based mobile game developers since May and is spending heavily to lure American users.

Nexon, which went public in December, also wants to be a prominent American player and is gearing up for a big introduction of Epic of the Three Kingdoms in 3D.

The new competition comes at a bad time for Zynga, the $2 billion company behind FarmVille. Zynga gets more than 90 percent of its revenue selling virtual goods that are offered for small amounts, often less than $1, as enhancements in games that are free to download and play.

The company helped convert large numbers of nongamers into players through colorful, less time-consuming casual games like CityVille, but is now struggling to make money from mobile games, stanch executive losses and resuscitate a stock that has dropped steeply since the beginning of the year.

“Zynga and other American game companies are already feeling some pain from the marketing and advertising side from Gree in particular, but also DeNA, in terms of the significant amount that they are spending on acquiring users in the U.S.,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at the asset management firm Robert W. Baird.

Asia’s gaming titans hope the United States will be the source of the industry’s next phase of expansion, perhaps at Zynga’s expense, in a reversal of how Western companies typically rely on emerging markets to bolster growth.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, the worldwide market for virtual goods will surpass $20 billion by 2015, according to SuperData Research. U.S. gamers spend much less than Asians, but their expenditure is growing faster.

Revenue from U.S. virtual goods is expected to grow 36 percent to $3 billion this year and to double to about $6 billion in two years, versus shrinking sales of traditional video game products, according to Bonnie Ho, lead research analyst at Inside Network. The Asian market is more than $10 billion.

Lower Internet speeds in the United States pose a challenge for free games that stream on browsers or on mobile devices. For instance, the average Internet speed of 16 megabytes per second in South Korea is more conducive to the online gaming business than the U.S average rate of about seven megabytes per second.

But with expanding infrastructure — Google introduced a one-gigabyte-per-second service in Kansas City, Missouri, in July — that barrier is gradually dissipating.

The trick is to give U.S. gamers reasons to spend via more immersive games. Analysts say the casual crowd is less likely to spend for that extra edge and stay absorbed than the intensely competitive action-gamers that Nexon and others draw.

In the United States, conversion rates for transforming a casual player into one who will splurge on virtual goods have doubled to about 3.1 percent since last year, according to Mr. van Dreunen.

To keep up sales of virtual items, Zynga may need to introduce more immersive titles — strategy games, even action-shooters — and capture robust growth in the mobile segment.

“When you deal with a noncore, nondedicated, nonloyal segment, it’s almost like you have to treat them like they are 10-year-olds with attention deficit disorder,” said Jesse Divnich, an analyst at the video game research firm Eedar.

That means constantly designing new games, introducing fresh elements into existing ones, and otherwise giving players a reason to keep coming back and hopefully spring for items.

Zynga said last month it would buy the digital game studio A Bit Lucky to offer “midcore” games — titles that sit between slickly produced, addictive video games and basic casual games like Zynga’s popular Words with Friends.

“In Asia and beyond, this model is here to stay, and it’s definitely not a fad,” Allison Luong of the video game analysis firm Pearl Research said of the free-to-play model.

The Future of Gaming in Virtual Reality

Standing next to id Software’s John Carmack, I almost lost my balance and fell over during the first few seconds of playing Doom 3 on a prototype Rift virtual reality headset, an ugly wad of electronics attached to an elastic ski goggle band.

While wearing the headset I still had to press buttons on an Xbox 360 controller to switch weapons, move forward and fire, but aiming and looking were accomplished simply by turning my head. It was surreal and surprisingly responsive. After the initial disorientation and dizziness dissipated, I was entirely immersed within the world, with the game’s visuals wrapping around my entire field of view.

The Rift is the best headset of its kind Carmack has ever seen. After id Software shipped Rage, Carmack decided to check up on the status of virtual reality, something he hadn’t looked at since the early 1990s. “We did a bunch of deals with people way back with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and they were all loser deals with companies that went bankrupt. That was not the right time,” he said. He assumed there’d been a lot of progress in the meantime. He bought a few headsets and was disappointed.

“They just sucked really bad. They were not at all what I wanted to see.” He started disassembling the models and trying to solve problems the manufacturers hadn’t. “It was getting to the point where there were a few people questioning ‘what’s John doing playing around with all this stuff in the office? He should be working on Doom 4 all the time.’”

An opportunity to legitimize his tinkering with headsets at work came up when id Software decided to revamp Doom 3 and handle development internally. “How do you get people to give a damn about an eight year old project? Yes, it’s got higher resolution, looks nicer. We did lots of things to make it a better game, but it’s still not something lots of people are going to care about.” He initially wanted to use the VR angle as a way to grab the press’ attention, and continued to make progress turning Doom 3 into a virtual reality experience.

For hardware, he initially focused on the Sony HMZ-T1, which outclassed all other sub $10,000 models and which was “in many ways a big advance over the crap that was there before. It has nice displays, excellent resolution, a decent field of view. Sony brought it to the level of just barely bordering on interestingly acceptable at about a forty-five degree field of view.”

Carmack stressed the importance of field of view, saying limiting it too much made wearing the headset feel like “looking through toilet paper tubes.” With the Sony headset, the view was good enough for exploring, but not for combat. “The Sony also has a bunch of latency in their processing which is deeply unfortunate and completely correctable and I wish Sony would fix that.” It had potential, and Carmack said others at id were impressed by his progress, but Sony’s headset just wasn’t enough.

So Carmack decided to start building something on his own in an attempt to improve on existing designs and expand the field of view. Though he tried numerous configurations, he kept returning to the idea of somehow incorporating the screen of his mobile phone. “There’s reason to believe all the billions of dollars of effort that goes into developing mobile device technology, that that’s the right train to hitch yourself to. I was heading down this route when I ran across Palmer Luckey and his Oculus company.”

Luckey launched a Kickstarter on August 1 for Oculus’ Rift headset. In a few days over $1.1 million dollars have been offered up by developers and curious technology aficionados. Those who backed $300 or more will receive a fully assembled Rift and its only game, Doom 3.

“There’s a small VR community that talks about homebrew head mount displays, and he was really the star.” Luckey was on the sixth or seventh revision of his Rift headset, and Carmack was impressed. “He had found the right display panel, the right drivers, the right optics and packaged it all together.” Carmack contacted Luckey and mentioned he was going to demo a virtual reality version of Doom 3 at E3 2012. Luckey mailed Carmack his handmade Rift prototype the next day.

Carmack made adjustments on the software side and soon had something he liked, all the while being mindful of response time. “There’s an important threshold around 20 milliseconds of end to end response time, from the time that you move to the time the image changes. If you’re under 20 milliseconds it really feels like you’re moving a window around in a solid world.” The response time on the unit Carmack was demoing had a 40 to 50 millisecond response time. “There’s a subtle sense that the world is pulling behind you.” Ideally, he said, there should be no delay.

Delays in response time are common to all types of gaming, but are especially important to keep at low levels when considering movement in virtual reality gaming because the lag is far more noticeable. “The difference of 20 milliseconds on there, it’s obvious to everybody. Your brain knows for every contraction of muscles in your neck that orients your head into a different way, your brain has a model of what it’s supposed to see as you do that muscular contraction, and that’s measured in a small number of milliseconds.”

While I played briefly, the delays weren’t especially noticeable. If an imp jumped from the shadow of the room, I quickly swiveled my head to aim them pressed the Xbox 360 controller’s trigger to fire. It felt a little floaty at first, but I started to find a rhythm for the control as I turned my head from side to side to look both ways down a catwalk and ensure demons weren’t getting ready to pounce. It was a very natural behavior, and surprising only because checking around corners is usually such an artificial process driven by mouse and WASD movement or rotating thumbsticks.

To make the game really work, Carmack had to make changes. “Even for a [shooter on ] 3D TV you have to take the crosshair out and put in some kind of a laser sight. In 2D we always do head kicks as a directional cue and damage indicator that knocks the head sideways. That’s a good, positive thing to do on a static screen. In a head-mounted display you don’t want to knock the head around.” He noted that cut-scenes were particularly problematic, because control of the perspective would suddenly be ripped away from you, severing a delicate intuitive link between reality and the virtual space.

At E3 2012 when Carmack first demoed the virtual reality version of Doom using the Rift prototype, he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the response. “Things blew up a lot beyond our expectations. It caused some problems internally where everybody had a freakout, this wasn’t really part of the plan, this was a little ancillary thing. So what are we doing about it? Everything has worked out fine, I’m very pleased to say.”

Before E3, Carmack expected Luckey would make around 100 Rift kits essentially for his friends. “At this point now he’s making it for several thousand other people. The price point he came out with was around half of what we thought it was going to be.” Despite the excitement, both Luckey and Carmack are eager to stress that the Rift in its current state is not a mass market device. “There is exactly one game it has support for, you’re not buying this to play games. This is for developers to start building support for the other games that we’ll eventually make a consumer device for. You can’t play movies in it, there are no other applications. All that will come, but it’s not here right now.”

While Carmack has been working on modifying Doom 3 to work in virtual reality, he also gave some hints about what a game designed entirely for a head mounted display might be like. “FPSes are the obvious thing you could do. But there’s a lot of benefit from very subtle motions, from just walking down a corridor, all the little subtle motions that your head’s making, and just being able to look over at a handlebar on the side or something. There’s more value in that than I expected, even in third-person games or god games.”

Carmack seemed equally interested in the implications of headsets for far more sophisticated interfaces than those available now. He said a pair of cameras attached to the outside of the headset would be ideal, in part for safety reasons so you’re not completely oblivious to the outside world while wearing the device, but also to track the position of body parts. “It would be able to identify your individual digits as you lift up your hand, work out the user interface that you want to do. Kinect user interfaces suck because you position your hand at three o’clock and wait two seconds, and [there are] all sorts of reasons why stuff like that is a bad idea. But when you get down to the point of being able to track digits in front of it, there’s a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do user interfaces. You’ve got your obvious gestures and swipes and pinches, I’m excited to see what people wind up doing.”

Though it’d be years away, having an entirely self-contained product distribution system through the head mounted display is something Carmack sees as promising. “You could buy your stuff there, and it’d just be the equivalent of a tablet that happens to have optics where you could put your head in it.”

Clearly Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are seemingly obsessed with alternate control methods between Move, Kinect the Wii-mote and the upcoming Wii U platform, but will the headsets like the Rift eventually eclipse all those efforts?  “Yes, I think immersive virtual reality is a far more powerful I/O device than all the little things you do with your hands in front of a TV screen.”

So when might we start to get a clearer picture of what the actual results might be? “This is not the promised land, but you can see the promised land from here. We need to figure out what steps we need to do to get there. I think that can happen largely over the next year.”

The Future of Gaming in Virtual Reality

Standing next to id Software’s John Carmack, I almost lost my balance and fell over during the first few seconds of playing Doom 3 on a prototype Rift virtual reality headset, an ugly wad of electronics attached to an elastic ski goggle band.

While wearing the headset I still had to press buttons on an Xbox 360 controller to switch weapons, move forward and fire, but aiming and looking were accomplished simply by turning my head. It was surreal and surprisingly responsive. After the initial disorientation and dizziness dissipated, I was entirely immersed within the world, with the game’s visuals wrapping around my entire field of view.

The Rift is the best headset of its kind Carmack has ever seen. After id Software shipped Rage, Carmack decided to check up on the status of virtual reality, something he hadn’t looked at since the early 1990s. “We did a bunch of deals with people way back with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and they were all loser deals with companies that went bankrupt. That was not the right time,” he said. He assumed there’d been a lot of progress in the meantime. He bought a few headsets and was disappointed.

“They just sucked really bad. They were not at all what I wanted to see.” He started disassembling the models and trying to solve problems the manufacturers hadn’t. “It was getting to the point where there were a few people questioning ‘what’s John doing playing around with all this stuff in the office? He should be working on Doom 4 all the time.’”

An opportunity to legitimize his tinkering with headsets at work came up when id Software decided to revamp Doom 3 and handle development internally. “How do you get people to give a damn about an eight year old project? Yes, it’s got higher resolution, looks nicer. We did lots of things to make it a better game, but it’s still not something lots of people are going to care about.” He initially wanted to use the VR angle as a way to grab the press’ attention, and continued to make progress turning Doom 3 into a virtual reality experience.

For hardware, he initially focused on the Sony HMZ-T1, which outclassed all other sub $10,000 models and which was “in many ways a big advance over the crap that was there before. It has nice displays, excellent resolution, a decent field of view. Sony brought it to the level of just barely bordering on interestingly acceptable at about a forty-five degree field of view.”

Carmack stressed the importance of field of view, saying limiting it too much made wearing the headset feel like “looking through toilet paper tubes.” With the Sony headset, the view was good enough for exploring, but not for combat. “The Sony also has a bunch of latency in their processing which is deeply unfortunate and completely correctable and I wish Sony would fix that.” It had potential, and Carmack said others at id were impressed by his progress, but Sony’s headset just wasn’t enough.

So Carmack decided to start building something on his own in an attempt to improve on existing designs and expand the field of view. Though he tried numerous configurations, he kept returning to the idea of somehow incorporating the screen of his mobile phone. “There’s reason to believe all the billions of dollars of effort that goes into developing mobile device technology, that that’s the right train to hitch yourself to. I was heading down this route when I ran across Palmer Luckey and his Oculus company.”

Luckey launched a Kickstarter on August 1 for Oculus’ Rift headset. In a few days over $1.1 million dollars have been offered up by developers and curious technology aficionados. Those who backed $300 or more will receive a fully assembled Rift and its only game, Doom 3.

“There’s a small VR community that talks about homebrew head mount displays, and he was really the star.” Luckey was on the sixth or seventh revision of his Rift headset, and Carmack was impressed. “He had found the right display panel, the right drivers, the right optics and packaged it all together.” Carmack contacted Luckey and mentioned he was going to demo a virtual reality version of Doom 3 at E3 2012. Luckey mailed Carmack his handmade Rift prototype the next day.

Carmack made adjustments on the software side and soon had something he liked, all the while being mindful of response time. “There’s an important threshold around 20 milliseconds of end to end response time, from the time that you move to the time the image changes. If you’re under 20 milliseconds it really feels like you’re moving a window around in a solid world.” The response time on the unit Carmack was demoing had a 40 to 50 millisecond response time. “There’s a subtle sense that the world is pulling behind you.” Ideally, he said, there should be no delay.

Delays in response time are common to all types of gaming, but are especially important to keep at low levels when considering movement in virtual reality gaming because the lag is far more noticeable. “The difference of 20 milliseconds on there, it’s obvious to everybody. Your brain knows for every contraction of muscles in your neck that orients your head into a different way, your brain has a model of what it’s supposed to see as you do that muscular contraction, and that’s measured in a small number of milliseconds.”

While I played briefly, the delays weren’t especially noticeable. If an imp jumped from the shadow of the room, I quickly swiveled my head to aim them pressed the Xbox 360 controller’s trigger to fire. It felt a little floaty at first, but I started to find a rhythm for the control as I turned my head from side to side to look both ways down a catwalk and ensure demons weren’t getting ready to pounce. It was a very natural behavior, and surprising only because checking around corners is usually such an artificial process driven by mouse and WASD movement or rotating thumbsticks.

To make the game really work, Carmack had to make changes. “Even for a [shooter on ] 3D TV you have to take the crosshair out and put in some kind of a laser sight. In 2D we always do head kicks as a directional cue and damage indicator that knocks the head sideways. That’s a good, positive thing to do on a static screen. In a head-mounted display you don’t want to knock the head around.” He noted that cut-scenes were particularly problematic, because control of the perspective would suddenly be ripped away from you, severing a delicate intuitive link between reality and the virtual space.

At E3 2012 when Carmack first demoed the virtual reality version of Doom using the Rift prototype, he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the response. “Things blew up a lot beyond our expectations. It caused some problems internally where everybody had a freakout, this wasn’t really part of the plan, this was a little ancillary thing. So what are we doing about it? Everything has worked out fine, I’m very pleased to say.”

Before E3, Carmack expected Luckey would make around 100 Rift kits essentially for his friends. “At this point now he’s making it for several thousand other people. The price point he came out with was around half of what we thought it was going to be.” Despite the excitement, both Luckey and Carmack are eager to stress that the Rift in its current state is not a mass market device. “There is exactly one game it has support for, you’re not buying this to play games. This is for developers to start building support for the other games that we’ll eventually make a consumer device for. You can’t play movies in it, there are no other applications. All that will come, but it’s not here right now.”

While Carmack has been working on modifying Doom 3 to work in virtual reality, he also gave some hints about what a game designed entirely for a head mounted display might be like. “FPSes are the obvious thing you could do. But there’s a lot of benefit from very subtle motions, from just walking down a corridor, all the little subtle motions that your head’s making, and just being able to look over at a handlebar on the side or something. There’s more value in that than I expected, even in third-person games or god games.”

Carmack seemed equally interested in the implications of headsets for far more sophisticated interfaces than those available now. He said a pair of cameras attached to the outside of the headset would be ideal, in part for safety reasons so you’re not completely oblivious to the outside world while wearing the device, but also to track the position of body parts. “It would be able to identify your individual digits as you lift up your hand, work out the user interface that you want to do. Kinect user interfaces suck because you position your hand at three o’clock and wait two seconds, and [there are] all sorts of reasons why stuff like that is a bad idea. But when you get down to the point of being able to track digits in front of it, there’s a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do user interfaces. You’ve got your obvious gestures and swipes and pinches, I’m excited to see what people wind up doing.”

Though it’d be years away, having an entirely self-contained product distribution system through the head mounted display is something Carmack sees as promising. “You could buy your stuff there, and it’d just be the equivalent of a tablet that happens to have optics where you could put your head in it.”

Clearly Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are seemingly obsessed with alternate control methods between Move, Kinect the Wii-mote and the upcoming Wii U platform, but will the headsets like the Rift eventually eclipse all those efforts?  “Yes, I think immersive virtual reality is a far more powerful I/O device than all the little things you do with your hands in front of a TV screen.”

So when might we start to get a clearer picture of what the actual results might be? “This is not the promised land, but you can see the promised land from here. We need to figure out what steps we need to do to get there. I think that can happen largely over the next year.”