Michael Abrash and John Carmack are both 3D graphics living legends. Both massively experienced and super-bright. When they say that VR has very difficult challenges, you’d better believe them!

From Abrash’s recent Game Developers Conference talk…

I’ve just spent 25 minutes telling you how hard VR is – and that’s certainly true. But realtime 3D was equally hard – just check out Chapter 64 in my Black Book about the lengths John went to in order to solve the potentially visible set problem, or think about how crude the early 3D accelerators were – and over time all that has worked out amazingly well.

This is the kind of opportunity that everyone in the gaming industry should dream of; if you want to do challenging work that has the potential to affect almost every game written in five or ten years, VR is a great place to be right now.

It really is like when I was working on Quake – a new world is emerging.

Both have written some great articles that describe VR implementation challenges in detail. If you are developing for the Oculus Rift you really need to read and understand these.

Michael Abrash

• Slides from my Game Developers Conference talk
• Two Possible Paths into the Future of Wearable Computing: Part 1 – VR
• Two Possible Paths into the Future of Wearable Computing: Part 2 – AR
• Raster-Scan Displays: More Than Meets The Eye
• Latency – the sine qua non of AR and VR
• When it comes to resolution, it’s all relative

John Carmack

• Latency mitigation strategies