Virtual reality

[Oli]

I can imagine all sorts of things.. what's actually being done is what you should be interested in.

You say that in the advanced concepts section of a spaceflight forum 

[KelvinZero]

Well, just imagine that you're actually on Mars - you could still make tremendous use of telepresence technologies (I wouldn't necessarily call them "virtual reality", since the display could be showing a live video feed)

Instead of always having people don spacesuits to leave their habitat, they could put on a pair of VR goggles to pilot a robot that will do the hard work outside for them. That minimizes the risks, and yet still allows a personal hands-on approach to doing the tasks at hand. The robot would always be outside, ready to be activated and piloted.

That is my view, Short range teleoperation will probably replace spacesuits entirely at some point. The list of advantages is huge. Its not clear when this will happen but I personally expect this technology to make leaps and bounds. Teleoperation can potentially surpass human dexterity, whereas a human in a suit can only approach it.

[grondilu]

Hi grondilu, let's not derail your thread to a "Whats HSF for" debate, but you really are holding a minority viewpoint here.   It doesn't mean the majority is right, but It does mean you need to explain your point of view before people can even guess what it is. At least notice that you are dismissing pretty much every big name in popular science from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking.

I'm fine with holding a minority viewpoint here.   I'm not a big fan of argumentum ad populum, anyway.

[grondilu]

This sounds like a discussion from when I was a teenager (20 or so years ago).

It's not like there's been some revolutionary breakthrough in VR.. they're just attacking the latency problem.

VR didn't need a revolutionary breakthough.  It's just that the technology is now ready, mostly thanks to advancements in consumer electronics.   Now there is enough processing power to generate visually convincing 3D environments.  There are also cheap accelerometers, and high-resolution displays coming from the smartphone industry.

Sometimes a technology emerges not because some genius inventor cracked it (though Palmer Luckey was indeed kind of smart), but because the time is right.

[QuantumG]

Ya know it doesn't exist right?

All HMD systems suck. Oculus Rift will suck differently. Quite apart from the fact that output is only half the problem.

Don't talk about it like it has arrived. It hasn't.

[grondilu]

Ya know it doesn't exist right?

All HMD systems suck. Oculus Rift will suck differently. Quite apart from the fact that output is only half the problem.

Don't talk about it like it has arrived. It hasn't.

It has been tried by thousands of people already (lots of them being regular dudes).   I actually don't remember having heard anyone saying anything like "it sucks".

[QuantumG]

Huh? Every single person has said "yeah, it's great, are you working on better resolution?"

Not to mention the fact that first person shooter geeks are not "regular dudes".

[grondilu]

Huh? Every single person has said "yeah, it's great, are you working on better resolution?"

Yes, it needs a better resolution.   And positional tracking.  And the user interface needs to be carefully designed.   It's still in development.

This is the "advanced concept" section.

Not to mention the fact that first person shooter geeks are not "regular dudes".

First person shooter geeks were the people who bought it.   But then they had it tried by all kinds of people.

[QuantumG]

Who cares what Grandma thinks.

If it's the "advanced concepts" section, why are you talking about stuff from the 80s?

Every time VR is hot we hear the same nonsense. It's not magic, it's just a crappy screen really close to your face.

[grondilu]

Who cares what Grandma thinks.

I showed you the granma only to illustrate the point I was making that not just FPS geeks have tried the Oculus rift.

If it's the "advanced concepts" section, why are you talking about stuff from the 80s?

Because you did first, when you mentioned discussions you had twenty years ago or something?

Every time VR is hot we hear the same nonsense. It's not magic,

Nobody said it was magic.  You're imagining things.  You seem to have difficulties separating this actual thread from what you thought about VR from your past experiences and discussions.

it's just a crappy screen really close to your face.

You know the lenses focus the image at infinite, right?

[sanman]

Well, just imagine that you're actually on Mars - you could still make tremendous use of telepresence technologies (I wouldn't necessarily call them "virtual reality", since the display could be showing a live video feed)

Instead of always having people don spacesuits to leave their habitat, they could put on a pair of VR goggles to pilot a robot that will do the hard work outside for them. That minimizes the risks, and yet still allows a personal hands-on approach to doing the tasks at hand. The robot would always be outside, ready to be activated and piloted.

That is my view, Short range teleoperation will probably replace spacesuits entirely at some point. The list of advantages is huge. Its not clear when this will happen but I personally expect this technology to make leaps and bounds. Teleoperation can potentially surpass human dexterity, whereas a human in a suit can only approach it.

When I think about humans settling and colonizing Mars, there's obviously going to have to be huge amounts of construction, mining, etc done. If you imagine humans in spacesuits doing all that work in the unforgiving Martian environment, then it implies a huge amount of risk. Musk previously made comparisons to settling the American Frontier, and admitted that people would die, etc.

By keeping the humans indoors, it keeps them safer. They'd then be piloting their outdoor robots from the safety of the indoor sheltered environment, and we can then go at mining and construction full-tilt without worrying about all those on-the-job accidents and deaths, malfunctioning spacesuits, etc, etc.

The robot-driven mining and construction industries would be able to expand human living spaces on Mars, while minimizing the suffering and anguish. Human pilots all happily living indoors while operating all sorts of robots to expanding the envelope of human living space would then be free to transform the naked Martian surface into the human-inhabited environments that give us the room to freely live out our lives in.

The more sophisticated and capable our tele-operated robot fleet becomes, then the greater the scope and ambition of our mining, construction operations and overall transformation of the place. This forcing function continues and eventually culminates in our terraforming the planet, in the inestimably far, far, distant future.

[michaelwy]

Here is a recent article from arstechnica:

How gaming tech is making for better interplanetary exploration

"My dream in this area is that, someday, when we put human boots on the surface of Mars, I want there to be millions of people in attendance for that event," Jeff Norris, Mission Operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Ars in a recent interview. "I want them not just sitting in their living room watching a television screen; I want them standing on Mars in their own holodecks right there beside the astronauts."

I think this is not just a dream.   It's what is going to happen.  In case you don't know, Virtual Reality is coming.  The technology is now here, and is currently demonstrated with thousands of units of the Oculus rift prototype, which has been sold all around the world, and whose consumer, final version should be available next year.


By the way, the Oculus rift is not unknown in the space industry.  It was mentioned by Elon Musk on the SpaceX channel, for instance.  They use it for CAD experimentations:


Next month, the Gaia mission will be launched.  After a few years, it will have given us a map of a billion stars and other celestial bodies.   3D programs  like Celestia or spaceengine, once adapted to VR, will make it possible for the regular Joe to explore the galaxy as never before.


Space is a terrible place.  It's dangerous, and just staying alive there is extremely costly.   Yet we want to know and see what's up there, which is quite a natural consequence of our human curiosity.  But , do you think we have to physically be in space in order to satisfy this curiosity?


Moreover, when an astronaut is in space, he already looks around him through a helmet.  He doesn't touch anything with his own skin.  Were he standing on mars, he would not breathe martian air, nor would he feel martian wind.   So, there is already quite a thick layer of technology between his senses and the place he explores.    Is it so much different with VR?

The holy grail is the holodeck from Star Trek Next Generation. The trouble with a holodeck in space is the lack of gravity for the omnidirectional treadmill. The combination of oculus rift and the Virtuix Omni treadmill may bring, however, a virtual reality capability into many homes soon. Transmissions from space expeditions may be broadcast to these, for example from a mars rover. 3d television may also be exploited.
Also, google recently stated that the technology of holograms is just around the corner. That means that by the time a mars landing comes underway in 2030, holograms may be broadcast to many homes allowing a level of immersion not yet previousy attained.

[Hop_David]

That is my view, Short range teleoperation will probably replace spacesuits entirely at some point. The list of advantages is huge. Its not clear when this will happen but I personally expect this technology to make leaps and bounds. Teleoperation can potentially surpass human dexterity, whereas a human in a suit can only approach it.

In someways robots are already improving on human dexterity.

The Da Vinci surgical robot has binocular cameras that give depth perception. Dr. Davis, a surgeon who uses the robot, says the telepresence is so immersive he sometimes forgets he's not inside the patient's body cavity.

The robotic hands are operated by motion capture. The motion capture records wrist motion as well as index finger and thumb motion. The robot hands are primitive, they're more like a crab's pinchers than a human hand.

Where they beat human dexterity is their very fine control. Davis says as he toggles the camera zoom, the hand's motion becomes more minute. He showed a video where peeling a grape was more like peeling a watermelon.

[dchill]

The holy grail is the holodeck from Star Trek Next Generation...

The LM CHIL that shows up around 43 seconds into this video is much more like a holodeck: 

www.youtube.com/embed/perMGY0oajs

The system tracks exactly where the user's eyeballs are, so they can walk around a virtual spacecraft and see if from different perspectives.  It's all at human scale, so it's used to pathfind assembly clearances, etc.  It's already been used for a couple years on JSF and GPS-III, to eliminate potential problems before production, and it's being used on Orion and most other LM-SSC programs now too.  I've been in it for a couple different demos and it's definitely cool.

You can google Lockheed CHIL to see more videos and info about that facility, but the video I linked puts it into more of an overall context, since just looking at something isn't even half the benefit...

[cordwainer]

Life support while not hard does require a great deal of extra mass to be put into space and a good deal of reliability to maintain human life. ISRU requires a great deal of labor as well as an initial investment in infrastructure sent into space to make it happen. There is little profit incentive for ISRU and beyond tourism and scientific curiosity there is not much point in sending humans into space. Telepresence and more advanced robotics may give us the tools to make ISRU, other space operations and launch infrastructure cheap enough to make manned spaceflights more feasible in the far future. Bad sci-fi is sci-fi that does not adequately explain human's presence or reason for being in space in the first place.

[grondilu]

beyond tourism and scientific curiosity there is not much point in sending humans into space

You can restrict it to tourism, imho.   Scientific curiosity can be fulfilled with telepresence or robotics if advanced enough.  But whatever the level of realism you can put in a mars-simulation VR system, there will always be rich people that will want the real deal and will be willing to pay a lot for that.

[grondilu]

An article in engadget.com.

Time Machines: NASA goes virtual at CES

It's mostly about the past, but around the end there is this:

« Although public interest in VR cooled off, space was still the perfect deployment arena, and NASA's virtual reality research continued. Its 1997 Robonaut project focused on creating a humanoid robot to perform tasks in place of human astronauts, either autonomously or controlled by a virtual interface. By 2011, the project reached its second stage of development and NASA deployed Robonaut 2 for duty on the International Space Station. The technology used to interact with Robonaut has drastically improved since VIVED was developed, with interface devices like Sensics' piSight display providing up to 6 million pixels per eye (with tiled optics) along with a panoramic field of view up to 166 degrees. »

[Hop_David]

Here is a recent article from arstechnica:

How gaming tech is making for better interplanetary exploration

"My dream in this area is that, someday, when we put human boots on the surface of Mars, I want there to be millions of people in attendance for that event," Jeff Norris, Mission Operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Ars in a recent interview. "I want them not just sitting in their living room watching a television screen; I want them standing on Mars in their own holodecks right there beside the astronauts."

I think this is not just a dream.   It's what is going to happen.  In case you don't know, Virtual Reality is coming.  The technology is now here, and is currently demonstrated with thousands of units of the Oculus rift prototype, which has been sold all around the world, and whose consumer, final version should be available next year.

Not only is telepresence improving but also robotics. Besides being better able to perceive remote environments, we are growing in our ability to interact with and change remote environments.

Miniaturization of electronics was a trend picking up speed In the late 50's and early 60's. NASA and the military invested heavily in this trend. I believe that's why the U.S. led the electronics revolution. If not for their investment, Moore's law might have been known as Deng's Law.

Now we're at the cusp of a robotics revolution. The military is investing in this, DARPA is playing a part. But NASA? Robonaut and other robotic development is a shrinking piece of the pie while BFRs (big ******* rockets) continue to hog funding.

I was disappointed that the Ars article touted VR as a way to experience Mars. The moon and low lunar orbit are 200 to 700 times closer, so the signal strength is 40000 to 490000 times stronger. Much better bandwidth is possible. Also light lag latency is 3 seconds vs tens of minutes. I am hoping to see telerobots on the moon and on asteroids in lunar orbit.

[grondilu]

NASA JPL creates a more immersive way to control a space robot with the Oculus Rift and the Kinect 2

[grondilu]

Laser Link to Moon Trumped NASA and MIT Engineers’ Expectations

« In October of last year, a team from NASA and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory made space communications history by beaming data, via laser, at speeds reaching 622 megabits per second, to Earth from a spacecraft orbiting the moon. »

This means that a robot on the surface of mars could transmit (presumably also receive) data from an orbiting spacecraft at very decent bitrate.   That's quite significant for the prospect of a VR-based teleoperated mission.

Just checked:  the aerostationary orbit is about 17,000 km above mars's surface.

That would put a delay of 56ms.  A bit too much for comfortable VR (it is believed that delays become acceptable below 20ms), but usable I guess.