I read that as "stimulate all five senses to bring you the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and even feel of ancient Egypt, the Serengeti or Victoria Beckham"

Pull my finger?

The final headset will be light and comfortable,

im going to wait and see first

I've spent far to much time creeping around sewers to want one of these for gaming.

Obviously it'll be a good few years before that is even considered anyway.

Call my cynical, but I don't particuarly *want* the smells of ancient Egypt (mummified corpses?), the Serengeti (lion crap and half eaten animals?) or Victorian Britain (icky sewer systems, cholera in the streets etc etc)

Also, they need to make it smaller...

"A device will be placed in the user’s mouth to stimulate a texture sensation, while "tactile devices" will help generate touch. Sight is - clearly - the easy bit."

yeah right, VR LOOKS so damn real doesnt it? video WILL be the hardest to do in REALTIME to fool us imho. remember cinema sfx (which almost look real now, its hard to see the joins in films like ironman in BR) take months to do...

And you know which one of those 3 will be the most lucrative app for this technology.

Wonder how long it is before the first case of someone's wife etc catching them wearing just one of these.

Tim#3

For the feel of Victoria Beckham you could try grabbing a bundle of sticks

One step closer to "Better Than Life" (TM)

they come out with a crotch atachment for it?

"universities of Bangor, Bradford and Brighton" ...

or as I like to say

Bullshit baffles brains.

Just remind me never to visit 18th century london during the time of the plague, might not quite like the smells and tastes of that

does it come with the baggies you find in an airplane. I think the smell of a medieval london will make me puke.

"A device will be placed in the user’s mouth to stimulate a texture sensation, while "tactile devices" will help generate touch."

Is this being bankrolled by the pron industry? What about the other body part attachments?

(Am I the only one here with such a dirty mind?)

Then they can play back people's experiences a la Brainstorm movie

Very ambitious claims being made for this project. It will fail. But version 15 or 16 should be pretty good and by the time we get to v 20, we genuinely will not be able to distinguish between real and virtual; not without contextual clues at least...

Why's this version going to fail? Primarily because it's an external device. V 15 (or thereabouts) will be internal. But also if the developers agree with this report that "sight is easy" then they don't yet understand the problem. Why d'you think VR helmets haven't already taken off? Because anyone using them for more than about 20 minutes tends to throw up or get a massive headache. Why? Because sight aint easy at all. The problem is that they insist on presenting prefocussed images to each eye at about 3 inches.

The brains "accommodation" algorithm knows it's focussed on an image 3 inches away, but the data in the image only makes sense to the brain if the objects are several feet away (or more). This produces real cognitive dissonance and the nasty side effects.

Solving that problem aint easy; it requires abandoning prefocussed images and somehow presenting the eye with exactly the same data it would get in real life, forcing the eye to focus naturally instead of too short. There's a fortune waiting for whoever cracks that little conundrum...

Now we see that Sauron was simply a misunderstood beta tester for this daft device.

...the smells of Victorian Britain. Hold me back.

Geeks could learn to wash, get some style and pony up for drinks and dinner.

And the girls might throw away their proven VR toys.......

There's enough space on the front of the helmet for someone to walk (no need to sneak, if the user's hearing is pre-occupied) and spray something rude on the outside.

It could also be a training aid to teach geeks to wipe their mirror as they squeeze their zits.