The Video Game Critic

Paul, it's tough to really say what the graphics would compare to. They are definitely definitely relatively simple 3D PC graphics.  They are probably on par with what was being seen in PC video games during the late 90s.  One good thing, though, is that the 2 screens in the head-unit that form the image are very high resolution; just as good as today's PC monitors. So even though the graphics and textures are rather crude, the image is very sharp and helps with immersion.  But since it's tough to explain, check out this link below and the photos within it. One photo is of the lab itself and the equipment; two others photos show "in-game" graphics for the VR software (including one of a maze that is similar to the one I walked through):

http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/tarrlab/papers/journal-papers/navigation-and-scene-recognition/tawa02nn.pdf/download.pdf


Again, you can see that the graphics are pretty simple. I figure that's probably for a few reasons. First, the lab was built around 2000, so the software itself is a bit outdated now. Still, my thinking is that the program is capable of better graphics, but they keep it simple because they are focused on the "research" rather than creating a photorealistic VR world. As we know, it takes years for a team of hundreds of experienced VG developers to complete a game. I'd bet this lab is just employing one guy (or Computer Science grad students) to write these programs for them, so they probably try to keep the programming to the bare-bone essentials that they actually need to perform their experiment.... (But I wouldn't be surprised at all if the students/programmers also created an actual VR game as a personal side project [much like the story of Spacewar!'s creation years ago]. Now if they did that, that'd be really interesting to try.)

Thank you for the write up.  Very cool stuff. 

When I was a kid I remember VR being all the rage with the best commercial example, being a Pterodactyl FPS type game.  I never did get to play it but thought it looked amazing at the time, today, most definitely, not so much.