What Excites John Carmack About Oculus Rift | Joe Rogan

What's your own experience if there's a mount rush more video games your george washington you're up there so this is great people have been kind of nudging us from years and years to get this done so it's great that we're finally able to make it happen. Yeah i'm i have been from day one a gigantic quake junky and doom junkie so for me to have you in here is a giant tree never be not. Talked about your video games and your creations so many times on this podcast so it's very cool to have you here and thank you very much for showing me before the podcast got started i should tell everybody you showed me the latest and greatest version of oculus rift which is amazing it's so small for people watching the youtube this is the entire unit this this thing that sits on your head it's very light. And it's not attached to a computer like you don't have to carry anything around there's no extra everything is in here so this is the oculus quest the stand alone device and it's been kind of the culmination of a bunch of different products that we've been working on and it's the vision that we had even six years ago just the idea of not connected to anything you put this magic hat on and you're transported to these different worlds and this is available right now anyone can buy this right yeah okay so it's available that jamie just actually pulled up the website. Push this up to you pull that yeah there you go how what is the battery life on these things so it depends on what you're doing where i if you just sit there and watch netflix i it'll last a little more than three hours if you play some of the really hardcore games it might only last two hours or so. Do you have numbers on how many people are watching netflix on this thing so our previous one right before this the oculus go was a little bit more media focused and that's one of our more popular applications i mean surprisingly. Things everybody thought that vr was going to be all about these just amazing gaming experiences but some of the most popular experiences are doing reasonably conventional things watching netflix watching youtube amazon prime stuff like that. Where if you're like if you're you and you've got a great home theater and everything there's not this much benefit to having a theater like that in vr but if you're in a situation like you're in a tiny room in tokyo or something the idea of being able to put on the vr headset and have. This like lovely ski lodge atmosphere with a giant screen tv it has some real benefits so in the end vr should be a replacement for anything you do on screens today whether it's. Your phone your tablet your tv your laptop your pc all of these should eventually be superseded by just having more flexible screens in vr and we have lots of challenges now with resolution and comfort for long term use. This is the direction that everything's going not only do you have things in vr that you couldn't do anywhere else just experiences that you can't have with that level of immersion but it should pull along every other thing that people do with screens devices today. That's i didn't consider television shows but of course people would be watching netflix on this if it's possible have you done the disney world ride the avatar ride flights of passage now i haven't done that yet it's amazing. You sit on this it's like a motorcycle looking thing it straps you in place and it's supposed to represent one of those flying dragon things and avatar. And then you have the headset you put that on and the virtual reality experience is second to none minutes incredible super high resolution and the motorcycles moving around you get wind and smells and all these sensor yeah so that's one of the really interesting things like i think about that whenever i am at amusement parks for things like the harry potter rides and stuff like that where they're doing lots with screen. And motion platforms where i think about it from the vr perspective anything we're doing visually and audibly we could go ahead and do a great job in the headset so it's cutting down to these few physical things that you can't do so you've got. Things with motion platforms that actually jostle you around that you can't do in vr you've got things like smell and like the void i'm where they have the star wars experience there, we have a fantastic star wars experience on quest. Which in many ways has a lot of that magic but in the void where they set it up and they blow hot air over what's the virtual lava towards you that's something that you still don't get. But it's kind of like the age old battle of what can you do differently in an arcade that you can't do as good in your your home system and vr now takes let you do all of these amazing things there but if you're willing to spend millions of dollars and build a theme park attraction essentially you can still throw some of these extra things in people joke about. When is smell a vision coming to vr and there have actually been real companies that have spun up to say it's like well we want to do sent augmentation it's not a great thing and those are still the last vestiges of things where you have to go someplace but the promise of vr is to. You know the world as you want it not having to go to someplace to do something magical and if you can get to ninety something percent of that experience staying in your own room then that's great. What would they be able to do with smell vision would you have a standalone unit that like has access to the program so like if you're flying over orange fields it would spray citrus in the air so sort of like soaring over the world of you were done that disney land right. So they were somebody literally did make this where they made a little box that put that glued or attached to the underside of the head mounted display and one of the interesting things about sent as opposed to i like audio or video with video everybody knows that you just. Make red green and blue colors you can mix them in any way make all the colors that we can see smell isn't like that i am are noses actually a receptor for a whole lot of discrete different molecules there's no way to mix up smell like the way we do with light to make red green and blue primaries with that so they really had to pick okay here's the dozen or so smells that we're going to have with this and it would just sort of spritz it out on a little blast of air i very close to your nose so it doesn't need much of it to get in. So if you really wanted to do some sort of a jungle experience with you know thousands different smells of plants and dirt and all the you would have to have like some enormous unit that spraying these various things yeah although i suspect that at least modern people in modern society do not really have that discerning of a level of sound like if you took i some peruvian indigene or something that they probably would complain it's like the fidelity on this is garbage i should have five hundred different smells here and i only detect five right but you take you know a normal city person and you just three cents of jungle is probably going to be more than enough to sell the experience yeah the guy in the jungle bill this is sterile urine yeah it's not real so what is this jamie oh my goodness so this is something she's holding and she's pulled it off it attaches to the headset it says feel real yeah sensory mask so it's a century mass that smell virtual reality oh yeah it's so it simulates simulates hundreds of smells to immerse you in the virtual world wow of course it's coming but why am i shocked look at this guy's got like a little cartridge popping in there with all the refilling your toner cartridge reliable sent generator how hilarious but yes if you have to if you have to rank your senses that's not in the top two yeah it's probably going to be clunky like the earlier versions of vr where you got that low resolution sort of thing i remember my friend duncan he's he's a huge technology freak and he had a really early version of the consumer virtual reality headsets the early early oculus and i remember putting it on going oh my god even though it's really pixelated like this is a game changer like that sense that you've seen the future yeah you put it on it's like it's not here yet but that's the the ability to just project a little bit past the flaws there and say okay well we're going to sort this out over the next several years we'll get higher resolution we'll get the response better and you can imagine what it's going to be yeah it's pretty stunning and what you just showed me today the the star wars one is actually higher resolution than the void which is the one that you pay to go see or you go to the warehouse and everything i've done that several times the void with star wars and in the void with uh rekha Ralph which is pretty cool too it's really fun but the physicality of having the actual props there is the magic of being in there it's like you pull out your storm trooper blaster and you have to shift it around and that's really something versus a lot of times when you're just using the controllers to pretend you're doing things you feel like you're a mime someplace some french mime kind of pretending to do things and that doesn't sell the experience and that's why i you know my favorites are the things like beat saber where in the game you are swinging this lightsaber sort of thing through things so your actions in reality are exactly what your actions in the virtual world are you swing through it there's a little bit of a of a buzz as you cross through it and it's just feels like you are you're projecting yourself there