Occulus Rift

[brohoward71]

So the Rift package is now £399. Inc touch controllers etc.
Its getting to a price where i mght consider it now, Anybody else had / is going to give it a go.
I havent even tried one yet but I am very curious. Would love to have a go of project cars with this

 

[cs_rich]

So the Rift package is now £399. Inc touch controllers etc.
Its getting to a price where i mght consider it now, Anybody else had / is going to give it a go.
I havent even tried one yet but I am very curious. Would love to have a go of project cars with this

I've got one but it doesn't get as much use as it should.

Some of the tech demos are really impressive but only in a showing off kind of way.

Got a space combat sim which was pretty impressive and Project Cars is pretty cool too though don't eat before playing for the first time....

Really good for playing back 180 degree videos though.

 

[Goodj]

I heard that, because of all the financial mis-wanglings that happened around Oculous that a lot of developers are walking away from it.
The drop in price recently is to try and grab some market share so it doesn't end up as the new Betamax.

I've tried PS VR and a Vive. You can tell straight away where the extra money went on a Vive....also the 3k worth of PC backing it up, probably.

 

[Cookie]

Half a billion in a lawsuit iirc

The price is tempting, but I'll wait for the next batch of VR headsets

 

[Darren S]

Only tried the Vive so far. Standard Steam stuff that comes with it is great fun. Simple, well written and plays good.

Not so much with the likes of Project Cars. The frame rate takes a plummet and even on a 1080 - you'll be turning off a lot of the eye candy on order for it play at anywhere near smooth. Looks horribly blocky too - like your face is about two inches from and LED display. That said, I pootled around Oulton Park, staring in appreciation at the door catches, the heater controls and even the stereo on the Evo VI. They were exactly as how I remembered them.

 

[Goodj]

Half a billion in a lawsuit iirc

The price is tempting, but I'll wait for the next batch of VR headsets

Wait until they can be wireless, the biggest pisser about the VIVE is how you're untangling yourself from the umbilical cord every other minute

 

[Darren S]

Wait until they can be wireless, the biggest pisser about the VIVE is how you're untangling yourself from the umbilical cord every other minute

I've thought that about of a lot of items. Wait until some genius cracks the ability to make a mobile battery the size and weight of a Pringle - AND give it twelve hour usage time.

Overnight trillionaire!

 

[Goodj]

I've thought that about of a lot of items. Wait until some genius cracks the ability to make a mobile battery the size and weight of a Pringle - AND give it twelve hour usage time.

Overnight trillionaire!

Also valid, the battery would have to be something impressive if VIVE went wireless. That alongside the wifi bandwidth to do 2x 1080p screens.

Alternatively, you get one of those backpack PC's, but then how long can you play those before you end up with 3rd degree burns on your back? Still got to trail a power cable though.

 

[mace¬]

I have managed to come over all the issues you list and come up with my own Virtual Reality game that comes in 3D.

Spoiler

[/spoiler[]

 

[Goodj]

thats lit

 

[Toypop]

Only tried the Vive so far. Standard Steam stuff that comes with it is great fun. Simple, well written and plays good.

Not so much with the likes of Project Cars. The frame rate takes a plummet and even on a 1080 - you'll be turning off a lot of the eye candy on order for it play at anywhere near smooth. Looks horribly blocky too - like your face is about two inches from and LED display. That said, I pootled around Oulton Park, staring in appreciation at the door catches, the heater controls and even the stereo on the Evo VI. They were exactly as how I remembered them.

^^^ The truth.

I have a Vive. It has been boxed up in the spare room since I had relatives over at Xmas. Biggest waste of money ever and I'd put it on Ebay if I had an account/reputation etc.

I'd say the only games worth playing on it were actually the games where you stand up and it tracks you fully around the room - and even then I suffer due to a lack of space. The stuff that came with the Vive like the bow and arrow game etc is great but it is just a simple party piece and makes you hot, sweaty and exhausted from having your eyes 5mm from the screens. Brookhaven Experiment is mega scary but very simplistic and short lived. The type of "sit down" games that were initially associated with the Rift (prior to its controllers being released) just play better on a monitor.

The problem with VR is that the resolution is utter sh*te. It sounds good on paper but you have to remember that this resolution is not compressed into a small 16:9 rectangle that takes up only a small part of your field of view. Rather it is spread across a giant sphere filling your entire vision so the pixels are spread so thinly it is more akin to a PS2 game on an old CRT. I'm not talking about "screen door" but literal resolution.

Like in Project Cars you need to use super sampling (which causes my 1080ti to sh*t the bed) just to be able to pick out brake points. I'd rather run it at 4K on my monitor on Ultra than PS2 resolution at medium detail in VR. In old PS2 racing games for example, track side signage like brake markers were deliberately over sized but modern games are designed for 1080p minimum and what you see in the headset looks more like the old SD resolution and it really makes things hard.

Darren is right though that looking at the close up stuff can be impressive. Sitting in a vintage F1 car and having the cockpit sides up by your ear and seeing the wheels and brake disks etc is awesome. Anything more than 5 meters away is garbage though!

TLDR: Avoid VR like the plague. Not even the next generation. Wait for 3rd or 4th. Wireless headsets with 2 x 8K screens. Even 2 x 4K screens would be far too low to get a perceived resolution resembling a 1080p monitor and we ain't even got that far yet. Hell it's not so much the screen technology but the GPU's! The GPU fire power required to get something acceptable to me is ten years off!

 

[SharkyUK]

Feelin' the VR love...

 

[Silent_Scone]

Hell, even I've waited this long for gen two VR

 

[Cookie]

Hell, even I've waited this long for gen two VR

This should be the key. I'm waiting until you decide to finally pull your finger out. Don't go buying a Rift tomorrow, I need to eat more than beans this month

 

[SharkyUK]

I think the problem is two-fold.

Firstly, the hardware isn't quite there yet. There are numerous 'barriers', some as are pointed out already. The tethered umbilical, relative poor visual quality, cost...
Secondly, it's one thing to have hardware with sufficient performance but it's a whole different game in terms of producing something mainstream (software) that will make users invest in a VR system.

 

[McGherkin]

I've always wanted to try one with my sim rig, I'd imagine the feeling would be quite immersive because the car controls are all present and real. As opposed to with the silly touch controllers, where you're pressing a button to fire a gun and it doesn't really feel like a trigger.

I'm not overly bothered about graphics too much tbf.

 

[Silent_Scone]

I think the problem is two-fold.

Firstly, the hardware isn't quite there yet. There are numerous 'barriers', some as are pointed out already. The tethered umbilical, relative poor visual quality, cost...
Secondly, it's one thing to have hardware with sufficient performance but it's a whole different game in terms of producing something mainstream (software) that will make users invest in a VR system.

The FOVE looks like a good contender, but 1440p per eye is going to push hardware to the limit

 

[SharkyUK]

I've always wanted to try one with my sim rig, I'd imagine the feeling would be quite immersive because the car controls are all present and real. As opposed to with the silly touch controllers, where you're pressing a button to fire a gun and it doesn't really feel like a trigger.

I'm not overly bothered about graphics too much tbf.

To be fair, the immersion is pretty good right off the bat. It does really work and has impact. Even a self-confessed graphics 'ho like myself has been impressed with some of the demos out there, even if I then feel a little disappointed as I realise the tech is still not there yet and soon start picking it apart. Even some of the PlayStation VR stuff is cool (for an hour or two) despite the reduction in visual fidelity and blurred periphery resulting from shader warping and low-res output. The Batman game was cool

I've been working with the Vive and Rift recently on some other projects and they have been superb in terms of how they are being used. I can't go into detail but they have been used for training purposes where users have been largely stationary and trained on virtual apparatus. Once the initial feeling of scale had been overcome (everything seems too... scaled-up sometimes in VR!) it seemed that the users felt quite comfy in their training. In real-world terms their 'apparatus' would have been within arms-reach (such as a computer or switches and dials on a panel) and it worked well for close-up interactions.

The FOVE looks like a good contender, but 1440p per eye is going to push hardware to the limit

Yeah - 1440p per eye won't see many people opting for the Ultra settings!

 

[Cookie]

SLI still isn't working properly with VR is it?

 

[SharkyUK]

SLI still isn't working properly with VR is it?

It's not great and support is very limited. nVidia are working on support for it through their VRWorks system and AMD have their LiquidVR system. The conventional SLI rendering process doesn't lend itself well to VR hence things need to be done differently.

 

[Cookie]

Will it end up like a card per eye?

 

[SharkyUK]

Will it end up like a card per eye?

Yes mate - that is the aim. SLI (as in conventional SLI) works by splitting work across multiple GPUs by frame - i.e. with 2x GPUs, one card will handle the odd-numbered frames, the other card handles the even-numbered frames. Each GPU works on data from its local memory hence each GPU has its own copy of the same data. By staggering the point at which each GPU begins its render phase the system tries to maintain a consistent delivery of frames to the display and this can result in a nice increase in performance when compared to single GPU systems. Sadly, this does nothing for the latency and this is an issue in VR.

By splitting the rendering of a single frame across 2x GPUs (to stick with the 2x GPU example) we can better parallelise the process by effectively assigning one GPU to the left eye, the other to the right. These two images for the same frame are then delivered to the display. This improves both the latency and framerate compared to a single GPU system.

There's a fair bit more to it than that (including different ways you can send data to the GPU(s)) but that's it in a nutshell.