Joe Rogan | Is VR Like Ready Player One Possible? w/John Carmack

The other thing I was thinking of in terms of martial arts is that, I know you have a background in martial arts, grappling martial arts, right? Yeah. Judo. Judo. Yeah. That wouldn't be so good for that unless you had some sort of a working dummy that was programmed that I think could be possible. Yeah, I actually made a pitch that what I would like to see from a martial arts standpoint there is immersive instructionals. Yes. When you set up the modern cameras right for the 180 stereo VR, it does give you this extra sense of depth that for a lot of things, if you're looking at instructional sometimes it's a little hard to see exactly where the hands are in the different areas. I think that there's some value for a lot of training aspects for virtual reality. In fact, that's like Walmart's you doing a ton of work with that. There are a lot of companies that I am... One of the side effects of putting a VR headset on is you are forced to pay attention where if you're a company like Walmart training people, you expect most people wind up having their phone out, they're not paying attention, but put them inside the headset. They have... It's almost the clockwork orange stretching the eyes up. They have no choice but to pay attention. But if it's important and you're training them for something that matters, this is what you want. But when I was thinking about things like I am... I remember watching some judo instructionals for things and like male Olympian level stuff, it just goes by so fast. You just blink and it's gone. But a lot of things that I did in VR for some of the video stuff was giving you this almost super power sense of time where you freeze frame and then being able to like slowly frame forward, frame back, jog forward. And when you've got an immersive sense here, that really feels like an interesting godlike power. Like you're sitting here, you're just like stop time, step, step, step, roll back, look closely at it, run forward. And almost anything physical that you want to train people to do is going to have some benefits for things like that. And that's something that we're still just really at the early days of exploring that for making a difference for people's training. Yeah, I think sparring. You could have something that would throw strikes at you and you could move away from those strikes and hit it, leg kick it, do things along those lines. The problem would be that you're not hitting anything. That's the only problem. Yeah, but there's certainly some valuable things you could do there. And I have a friend that has a stick fighting background. When I showed him Beat Saber, he was like, oh, immediately you have to do some stick training thing for this. And yeah, clearly we're even if you're not hitting things there, but that sense of getting the motion, figuring out how to move around, the situational awareness, and there's probably some things to do there. It is a stretch to imagine some kind of a head mounted display involved in actual grappling in any way, but I- That's the big stretch. Yeah, because also you would have the thing, the only thing I was thinking is you could have like a dummy, like a robot mechanized dummy that has crude movement, but it does understand it can throw punches and kicks and it's programmed and you could kind of spar with this thing in a virtual world and that thing also connects to the system. So it understands where you are, it understands what you're doing- Martial arts robots punching people. Yes. That could go poorly. Go very poorly. Yeah, it could go very poorly, but it could also be awesome. You could imagine perhaps, again, the augmented reality systems that we have today are finding most of their value in training and it's for people like jet engine mechanics, but you could imagine scenarios like that where you're training something like martial arts where it's looking through and it's not making you a fully simulated thing, but even if you're working through a drill with someone, if it's basically drawing the outline of your arm goes here, your leg goes over here, again, training is one of the value areas that is working out. Yeah, visualization is very important in martial arts. I mean, shadow boxing is already a huge part of a striker's learning, like learning how to visualize and that's what they're doing. That's what they're supposed to do and when you see a good fighter shadow boxing, they're sort of recreating these movements. If you had a virtual reality headset and you had an actual opponent in front of you, I think it would be way more lifelike and actually way more beneficial. In fact, there are a bunch of football teams that are using VR for some of their training, which largely is kind of visualizing the way plays are going to go. It's not like they have virtual versions of everything, but that sense of being able to see what it would look like when it's going right to kind of lock it into your mind has some value. It seems to me that something like the void, which is really fun to do, you could see in the future as technology improves having quake-like competitions in some sort of enormous warehouse environment with other players. That's been one of the real visions from early days. In fact, last year we cobbled together a demo at Oculus Connect, our big kind of convention, which is the new one's next month here. We had a large area set up and you had this game called Dead and Buried, which is kind of a cowboy zombie shooting thing. We had a bunch of people that could play in one common enormous shared area. It was amazingly cool and everybody's like, well, when do we get to play with this? This was all held together with duct tape sort of experience. That's a lot of hard work to turn it real, but this warehouse scale stuff, there are a number of companies that are trying to do this with various bits of technology. Here we go. James just pulled something out. What does this say? Yeah, that idea of where you could set up, people are crouching behind real things. In their virtual headset, this is all kind of zombie western themed stuff and they can put their hand on real things there. They can move around, draw a bead on people. Then you've got another person there with a tablet, which is a window into the virtual world. They could look at that and see the way it's all drawn in style, the way the people are rendered inside it. This is again, the amazing stuff you can do outside of your home, where you get the VR stuff that you wind up doing inside your home and then you figure out what things can you do if you're willing to set up a dedicated play space. This is people not moving around too much. It's mostly kind of a cover based thing, but there are companies that have people charging around in pads with a virtual world that they can skin in all sorts of different ways. It's all exciting. Here's what we're getting an image of what it looks like to the people that are playing it. As things get more and more accurate in terms of what you're seeing and more realistic, you could conceivably be jumping up and down on boxes and running up ladders and things along those lines and actually doing it in the virtual world as well as in the real world. Yeah. Right now, if you've done the void, you can tell there's a little gap between reality and you wouldn't want to do a diving grab at a ladder rung. You can see that there are things we need to fix to get there, but that's all possible. There's no can't be done sort of thing there. Eventually, you won't even need to be holding a controller. It'll be able to track your whole body just from cameras and work all the kind of computer vision magic out from that. You will then be able to set up these wonderful skinned virtual environments. Yeah. That's why I was thinking like esports in terms of like an actual sports sport, like esports in terms of like doing something on a soccer field with a bunch of people with virtual reality and they're playing some sort of horrific nightmare dystopian environment, zombie game, like whatever, fill in the blank with your imagination. Yeah, that's totally going to be here. Wow. How far away are we from that? A lot of it depends on kind of company plans where we don't have people pester us about the technical hooks for things like this and the people that are doing it themselves like the void, they put their own tracking technology on top of it because ours isn't set up publicly in a way that they can do that. It's a lot of work for people to do it. We will eventually commercialize it so that you can set things up more easily out of the box. But a lot of these then become entrepreneurial business plans of like, okay, who's going to go raise the tens of millions of dollars to set up and do it right. But it's on the cusp of being, it's not a technical problem now. It's not a technical impossibility. No new research really needs to be done, but there's still lots of challenges to work out. So it's more about figuring out if you can get the business plan to close, you can make the technology work.