Realiview

Community Showcase Game Development
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1

Hello everyone,

This is my first post so lets start with an short introduction to myself and Realiview. I am 38 and work in IT in Edinburgh, Scotland but have always been into movies, cameras and interactive media.
About 12 years ago, a thought came into my mind regarding simulation of the human first person perspective. Since then I have not seen any change in how video games depict the 1st person view, which heavily uses the basic idea of “the camera represents the head with a built in “eye” and if we put a camera in the position of the head and then move the head, the eye will move directly with the head movement” and so in turn simulates the human first person perspective.

I have been in continual conflict with this basic concept, as I believe both head and eye movement should be simulated as the transition movement, which occurs when the head tracks the direction of sight, produces subtle but important extra visual information, leading to greater sense of depth and immersion.
I would ask you to try the following test, to demonstrate this in real life.

  • Close one eye.
  • Look forward with your head straight.
  • Now without moving the head, look at a object of interest, paying attention to the whole view including surrounding objects etc.
  • Now naturally allow your head to re-align with the direction you are looking but try to concentrate on everything that changes.

The main thing being that your eye changes position in 3D space and continually has to re-adjust to stay aligned.
This re-adjusting as your eye moves position in 3D spaces, produces extra significate parallax information that is not present in the case of a fixed position “eye” being moved by the head.
Another way is to look keep your sight fixed on an object of interest and move your head but keep your eye looking at the object. Again the surround area changes significantly whilst you are moving the head and still re-adjusting your eye to fix on the object, this again being down to the eye position moving in 3D space.

Here is a link to a concept video which does include two short videos demonstrating a replacement camera system to simulate head and eye transitional movement.

There are other videos on my YouTube channel including an old concept video created using Unity, before then I did use Macromedia Director to create the first concept demo of it.
Stephen Palmer - YouTube
If there is enough interest in this, I have been preparing a blueprint which will allow adding to your project and linking to the “head” bone of your existing characters.

Thank you for your attention.

Stephen

2

Interesting.

Guess you’d need to run a trace every tick to see what the player is focused on, meaning that in a multiplayer environment things would be slightly out of sync between clients.

Not terribly though - who is really going to notice the difference between eye/head rotations unless they are ridiculously close to another player :slight_smile:

Thank you for sharing :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for your comment Kris.

Realiview is a visual immersion effect more than a gameplay effect. The control is still essentially standard in that moving the right stick of a gamepad, the view directly points in the desired direction. The difference is that just like in real life, you are directly controlling the view of the eye. The system then dynamically moves the head to point in that desired direction. As the eye is a child entity to the head, the eye’s 3D space location changes and it had to compensate by continually looking back into the original desired location.

The effect is that the eye’s 3D space location changes as the head is moving but is still maintaining the view of the original desired direction. The transitional movement of the eye and the head creates a more dynamic and realistic view of the scene. I am planning to make a commentary based video and release a small demo environment very soon.

But yes when objects are close to the player, the effect is heightened allowing a player to look around an object without actually moving the body itself, just using the right stick/mouse movement. The effect is also very apparent when in a cockpit, with the different transitional movement changes which happen when quickly changing between looking at close and distance objects.

Thanks again.

Stephen

4

Seasons greetings. I have a present for you!
For more information on the Realiview concept, head to

https://www.astonishedbydesign.com/fpsimulation NOTE: This is still a work in progress!

5

Better just to link a pre-setup project :slight_smile:

6

Updated with link to pre-setup project as requested. I would advise filling with a bunch of your own assets before testing though. Having collisions set up on the assets first makes a significant difference to the effect (complex collisions recommend).

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I have removed all the links as a huge update is coming in a few days …

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Interesting, but I’m not seeing how this enhances realism or immersion; it just looks like the character is doing a weird little pan around the object; it was a little vertigo inducing to me actually. Also, head bob in video games has always been problematic – it tends to be distracting if anything; I mean, MY head isn’t bobbing. (So yes, I always turn it off when possible.) In real life, you really have to focus on the bobbing for it to be noticeable, because normally the brain just compensates for it and your eyes stay focused on whatever you’re looking at while moving.

Part of the issue, I think, is that when playing a video game, the camera still just represents head position; the eyes are never part of this, being free to look at any part of the screen. So there’s no real way to incorporate eye movement. Maybe that could be different with VR head tracking and eye tracking, but I can’t speak to that.

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Thanks for comments.

“…your eyes stay focused on whatever you’re looking at while moving” and “when playing a video game, the camera still just represents head position” are exactly right. I am looking forward to getting a better interactive demo which should show that Realiview does simulate both head and eye movement, including focusing on whatever you’re looking at whilst moving, under certain conditions. My day job is keeping me back this week but at worst Sunday.

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Here is the current state of Realiview coupled with the great Advanced Locomotion System V3 by LongmireLocomotion and Modern Classic Interior by Next Level 3D.

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Like it.
Curious how it would work with things you hold, either for inspection or in the case of a firearm, aiming.

13

Things are getting pretty exciting with new features and refinements including object interaction. I want to release demo projects and builds but I need allow for it to be as bug free as possible.

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Hi everyone,

Realiview is getting pretty mature now and the object manipulation component, Realiobject, is really starting to take shape now. In short, Realiobject takes previously static meshes and gives them a multitude of abilities including to allow for dynamically animated pickup, holding and multi state transforming, which is very powerful for creating multi-state lifts and switches etc. These all combined creates what I refer to as the FPS. First Person Simulator. Oh and did I mention, dynamic crouching!?

I will be looking for testers shortly.

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Any update obv the Realiview plugin?

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Thanks for the interest. It has been a while for sure. Things have not stalled completely however there has been a slight shift in that I am looking to implement this into something, currently undisclosed but safe to say it does not feature any weapons, unless you feel that a cello or tuba have the power to destroy you!

Feel free to try out an end of 2019 demo which shows some Realiview, Realiobject and Realiwalk.

There are no standard “animations” in this demo, as all the animation is dynamically generated, including the walking, which is definitely the tricky part. The main idea with that is that the body moves to where the feet take it rather than body being directly controlled. Please try moving in and out of 3rd person to see effects of the “eye” control and generated head movements.

The walking can be problematic mostly when starting to move so if stuck, jump and move forward to get going.

Picking up the gun at the start is slightly “Trespasser” esque, just make sure to stand close and hold right mouse button until the left hand takes it and fully passes it to the right hand. Once you have it again, move in and out of 3rd person whilst moving and leaning etc. again this is due to having no standard animation usage.

Without holding the gun the arm can reach out and attempts to not go through walls etc. home and insert allow the hand to switch between hand gestures.

Please bear with some of the unconventional control and movement. I still feel that when I play and see video of conventional first person games, they still feel too much like replication of a movie camera movement, panning, tilting and being pushed on a dolly etc. Yes some games try head bob but without the constant view stabilisation, included with Realiview, it does not work because the view movement is just wrong and distracting.

In the demo, try not to do the conventional and move the mouse to alter the view to compensate for body movement, i.e. don’t even move the mouse if looking at something and try crouching, leaning and jumping etc.

There is much to discuss if you wish and videos cannot really convey the ideas very well. So anyway, just go ahead and download this basic demo area build if you want to try something a little different.

https://astonishedbydesign.sharepoint.com/:u:/g/FPSimulator/EVQIERVhef9JoNUl30MW9JcBKU3JzYolD7b6_QWUmalggw?e=GR2MSx

Best wishes to all.

Stephen

18

Hi all.

It has been a while since my last update. Here is my recent introduction video to The First Person Simulator, which contains Realiview as the vision component. It is an attempt to put the concept and details of the implementation into one video and demo.

Playable demo
https://astonishedbydesign.sharepoin…iWyag?e=xQ0rSA

Any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Stephen