John Carmack gave his QuakeCon keynote this year which focused on his efforts and thoughts about virtual reality.  Following the release of Rage, Carmack allowed himself to let loose, buy some VR headsets and get his engineering mind locked in on a new technology.  Carmack spoke for over three hours, wandering away and then back time after time to the virtual reality theme.  His sleuthing and coding has led to the creation of a playable VR demo of Doom 3 (which he tried to temper expectations for).  Virtual reality has been portrayed by the media to be a realistic life simulator, but Carmack assures us that there is still plenty of work to be done.  These warnings led into musings on the state of display technology, cloud gaming, Ouya, and many other topics during a three hour one-man show that most audience members couldn’t endure ‘til the end.

The Doom 3 demo is to be available to the press Friday at QuakeCon, and on Saturday to the general public.  A similar demo was shown to the press at E3, and many journalists came away impressed, even though the headset itself looked like a hobbyist’s product.  Carmack claims that although he worked to get the latency down from the original 48 milliseconds on the displays, it is still significant and noticeable.  A latency time of 20 milliseconds is what Carmack estimates to be the sweet spot  where it wouldn’t be noticeable in a VR setting. 

All of this virtual reality discussion led to other issues in display technology, including improvements in stereoscopic 3D, how 3D is helping refresh rates rise to 120 Hz, and the fact that retina display level quality is not necessary on larger screens. 

Some other highlights from Carmack’s talk include: