Awesome a forum! [+Intro of myself, and my LCD work]

[Ahigh]

Hey, Mark. Great job setting up your own forum.

I just glanced over some of your posts on other forums, and I know how it can be when you are contributing a great deal of technical information and it's physically on someone else's system.

This should give you a great way to educate folks and still maintain some control over your own content!

And of course, great job on everything you are doing.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Thanks for the compliment!
As forums are a chicken and egg that takes time to grow -- come back frequently; and reply to any topics that you know anything about.

You're also the original creator of the "HDTV Blur" article on Wikipedia (now renamed "Display Motion Blur"). From knowing you on Blur Busters, tell me about a story your experiences with display motion blur?

[Ahigh]

Well, back in the summer of 2005, I was the lead programmer on a project called "UltraPin."



This is Mike Hally who I worked with at Atari Games. He was my tester if you can believe that!

List of games that Mike worked on

Mike and I were the first two people to play Visual Pinball in this orientation. I made the original changes for the orientation and the changes to allow the physics to work better so that multiball didn't totally suck.

Every day Mike and I would play Attack from Mars on this cabinet, and yes that's a CRT. The gameplay was sweet!!!

When we worked at Atari, Steve Ritchie was across the hall from me. I was the lead programmer for San Francisco Rush 2049 coin-op at that time and Steve was the producer on California Speed Coin-op. He had an Attack from Mars pinball (a real pinball of course) that was given to him before he left from working on pinballs to come to Atari to work on video games.

When we would work all night in the Rush lab, we would sometimes play pinball in the wee hours of the morning over in Steve's Lab.



The above is an image of the Game Designer (Steve Riesenberger aka STV) and Thomas Stubbs (aka Vecster) while we were playing Attack from Mars pinball back in 1999 in Steve's office.

Well fast forward back to 2005. Video pinball was awesome and gameplay was spot on. It looked to be a huge hit!

Until we put the LCD screen into the cabinet (the screen that was decided to be used for production).

Here's an image of the day the LCD screen arrived from Tovis. Now this was 2005. So big LCD screens were not as common as they are now, and we didn't know much about them.



But this began my quest to figure out how the LCD screen killed the awesome gameplay of UltraPin.

Side-by-side the gameplay with the LCD sucked major ass, and the lower resolution huge gigantic tube was totally fun to play!



I will continue the story in multiple parts, because it's a long story.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Keep it up Aaron! This is the type of content that eventually make Blur Busters Forums awesome.

[Ahigh]

So Mike and I had been playing pinball every day since September. So it had been about 2 months of playing every day at 60hz multi-ball getting high scores talking smack. Just FUN FUN FUN!!! I mean really awesome stuff!

Then the LCD screen arrives, and here is the timeline. These are actual photos with time stamps of exactly when this happened. ACDSee shows that these photos were taken by my Sony U30 camera with the data set properly to record exactly when the photos were taken.

I went home sick, and the last photo is from my toilet. I had a REALLY REALLY bad headache before this happened.




<two hours of playing LCD pinball after playing CRT pinball for the previous two months commence>
<40 minutes of driving home with a really bad headache and nausea>

Click the following link only under caution. It's the disgusting result of playing video pinball on a sample and hold display (vomit):

http://www.goodshooter.com/ahigh/img/lc ... _vomit.png

It was this experience that was the motivation for my pursuit of WTF HAPPENED. I played LCD pinball a LITTLE BIT, but not much. I am an expert pinball player. I can't play LCD pinball without puking as an expert player. It is simply not possible.

I know that people are going to be upset about seeing this vomit. But it is important to realize that this is just what happened, and it has happened again on Pac-Man CE. But I refuse to play LCD games that require fast eye tracking. I can play games that do not require or induce me to eye-track, however.

LCD screens, generally, killed my ability to play video games that require fast eye tracking.

When I described what happened, plenty of folks doubted that the vomiting was a response to the LCD motion artifacts. There is no question that this was nothing more than motion artifacts that caused this.

<to be continued>

[Ahigh]

Many people can play asteroids, but I'm among the better players. This image is from GDC 2013 (this year). I was able to build up this many ships in a very short period of time. Generally losing one ship every 70,000 to 140,000 points. In order to play this well, you generally have to eye track your ship, the enemy ship and have a mental image of temporal position of you and the enemy and a concept of the exact delay for a shot.



I can shoot a single bullet and kill the spaceship from very far away. This skill is really something that took a very long time to develop, and it requires that you eye-track in order to form a firm mental image of the temporal data. The latency on asteroids is very small because the vector display updates the ships position from the state of the inputs immediately before drawing the ship.

Games don't have these sorts of low latencies any longer. I spoke with Eugene Jarvis (another friend in coin-op) about Defender. He told me that defender actually updates the top half of the screen while the lower half is drawing and vice-vs. This means that the game's visuals operate at 120Hz. And when your player ship is on the top of the screen the latency for controls is the same as when your ship is in the middle of the screen. The game is not double-buffered which also reduces the latency of visual relative to the controls.

The days of low-latency visceral gameplay has yet to get back to the days of Defender and Asteroids!

But now, after so much research into these things since embarking on this journey, finally the industry is responding.

Mark has had a major effect in taking all of this research into motion artifacts and turning it into this website.

And now, as a result, we finally have manufacturers who can think outside the box that has limited so many people who simply do not understand these concepts because they are difficult to understand. Every time I read Mark's writings, it is such a huge relief that someone is explaining these concepts and that they are making it into products.

<to be continued>

[SS4]

Pretty awesome stuff, I'm waiting til i buy a hosue but i'm gonna build myself a racing arcade to play games like Initial D arcade stage and Wangan midnight. I'll probably add some classics like daytona as well of course
Seing other ppl build some cabinet realy helps keeping me motivated and looking forward to my own project

[Ahigh]

When Mark and I first exchanged e-mails, I was working in Las Vegas as a researcher on display technology. But they didn't really care too much about my work in retinal blurring. I still managed to file some patents related to my research, but I doubt that they will ever be used. They are more applicable to head-mounted displays, actually, than to anything that my former employer does.

But I still kept in communication with the group of people who all worked together on UltraPin, who is now selling the Seiki displays.

Well, now I am working with these folks again and we are pushing very hard to solve these issues with display technologies. In fact, some of the same things that Mark is doing are the same things that we are pursuing at NanoTech. I have to be very careful about disclosing details, but I do want everyone to be aware that we aren't just simply reselling these displays we are actively pursuing making display technology better in order to support video games of the future.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Thanks for the compliment; it is great to know Blur Busters is continuing to inspire display manufacturers with ways of improving display responsiveness for video gaming.

[ikjadoon]

This was a super-cool story.

It's crazy to think that, in terms of latency, we've actually gone backwards. However, it feels really awesome to be a little cog pushing that giant industry a little forward.