In a recent talk at the University of Texas at Dallas, Oculus VR CTO John Carmack outlined the current state of Virtual Reality, and he made it clear that while the technology is very promising and advancing rapidly, it still has a long way to go before it reaches its potential.

“We are at the point right now that all of the technical trades have teeth in them, and it hurts,” Carmack told an audience composed mostly of students in the university’s Arts and Technology program. “We can’t get everything that we want.”

According to Carmack, current VR requires tradeoffs between qualities like resolution, stereoscopy, frame rate, and so on. So a VR experience can be 3D and low resolution, 2D and high resolution, high frame rate and low resolution, and so on.

“Feel out the medium”

Carmack explained that VR headsets like Gear VR and Oculus Rift still have a lot of kinks to work out before they reach mass appeal, and consumer-level capture devices are even further away.  However, he urged the students in the audience to start working with the technology now and “feel out the medium” with the limited tools that are available to them.

“I think that people should be working right now on monoscopic things, figuring out how do we want to direct things, how do we want interesting things to happen, how do we want things to change between them,” Carmack said. He explained that even though stereoscopic VR video might not be fully feasible right now, people could still be scripting and directing VR content in ways that would not significantly change as the technology improves.

He also noted that there is plenty of room for new ideas with the way user controls work in VR, comparing it to the way mobile games shifted from virtual buttons to touch-based input with games like Angry Birds.

“No one has figure out what the Angry Birds of VR is going to be,” Carmack said.

Image credit: “John Carmack GDC 2010” by Official GDC – Flickr: Game Developers Choice Awards @ GDC 2010. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.