The VR thread!

[jeshikat]

Oculus is about to open up pre-orders for the first consumer version of the Rift: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/oculus-rift-pre-orders-to-open-on-jan-6/

Anyone else excited?

I know a lot of people are holding out to see a comparison between it and the final version of the Valve/HTC Vive but I really want to play Eve Valkyrie so I'll probably spring for the Rift.

 

[confusis]

I'd rather spend the funds on a third screen. More flexible

 

[Phuncz]

I'm going for the Vive, because it seems like a better overal product than Facebook's Oculus and I'm not into supporting companies that thrive on selling people's private information and catalogged habbits.

But with my single R9 290X I'm not expecting to be able to power it properly. On the other hand, I did just succesfully test bifurcation on my AsRock Z87E-ITX board, so I might be able to build a second VR rig with an extra R9 290X.

 

[QinX]

I'd rather spend the funds on a third screen. More flexible

I'm already on three screens, and if I had the GPU and monitor to support I have my old three screens as well, but I'd definitely choose a VR headset for my gaming. for day to day office use. moar screen is bettah.

I'm going for the Vive, because it seems like a better overal product than Facebook's Oculus and I'm not into supporting companies that thrive on selling people's private information and catalogged habbits.

But with my single R9 290X I'm not expecting to be able to power it properly. On the other hand, I did just succesfully test bifurcation on my AsRock Z87E-ITX board, so I might be able to build a second VR rig with an extra R9 290X.

I'm still on the fence, Vive is expected to launch in April so it isn't that far away. But the Oculus I can pre-order now! I wonder if the R9 Nano is enough. I'd also rather support HTC and Valve which.

 

[EdZ]

I originally got my DK1 though the Kickstarter, so unexpectedly will be receiving one for free rather than hammering F5 tomorrow.

In terms of technical capability, Vive and the Rift are almost identical. Same spec display panels (and possible the same actual panels), same tracking capabilities (occlusion-robust 2-hand or less robust 360° depending on tracker placement in front of you or in the room corners), slight difference in hand controller design (Oculus Touch has analog sticks and capacitive finger-left detection, the Vive controllers have haptic thumb-touchpads), and some slight differences in final compsoiting and output pipeline (Oculus are using Timewarp and aiming for Asynchronous Timewarp at launch to be more tolerant of frametime hitches, Valve are eschewing timewarp to allow for more rigid pixel-masking).
Oculus have by far the edge in mechanical/product design, but HTC have yet to unveil the final consumer version; though if the recently publically unveiled Vive Pre devkit were originally intended to compose the limited consumer release, don't expect a dramatic improvement on that front.

Much has been made of Valve's OpenVR API as being 'universal', but as of now the only HMD it powers viably is the Vive. DK2 support is buggy at best and broken at worst, and requires quite a bit of hoop-jumping to get working reliably and even more to optimise for performance. This is not unexpected, as nobody expects Valve to put effort into supporting someone else's HMD, the same as nobody expects Oculus to put work into supporting the Vive.
VR is so regidly performance and latency dependant that this is likely to continue for a generation or two. Once GPU architectures and graphics APIs have been changed a bit to aim for latency-optimisation rather than the current throughput optimisation, and most companies making HMDs and controllers have settled on a reasonable functionality baseline, a generic HMD API would be a more viable option. Until then, expect something similar to the early days of hardware video accelerators.

Dual-GPU for VR is currently not a good bet. It has to be coded in and optimised by the engine developer and game developer, it's not just an option flag you can flip or something you can expect a GPU vendor to code into a driver. To actually get an improvement in latency rather than make things worse requires some very careful choices in job-dispatch.

 

[BirdofPrey]

Do I want one? yes
Is it feasible for me to get one? Possibly
is it a good idea for me to actually get one? unlikely.

VR sounds neat, and I have had my eye on it and EvE:Valkyrie for some time now, but on top of the high pricetag for the VR unit itself, I'd also need to spend a couple hundred more dollars on a GPU that can push despite my current GPU being plenty fine for me right now only doing 1080p gaming. That's $500-600 I'd rather spend on updating other parts of my system that need it more (such as the fact my Phenom X4 almost counts as an antique as fast as the PC world moves).

Also, I;ve been meaning to grab an ultrawide monitor or two for general use, which is more money not available for specialty items.

 

[jeshikat]

I'd rather spend the funds on a third screen. More flexible

A monitor has more everyday uses today, but it can never give you a good sense of scale. That's actually one of the things I'm most looking forward to with VR.

It's easy to lose grasp of the size of things when you spend all day staring at it on a 2D screen in a CAD program because you can just zoom in on things until they fill up the screen. So I'm hoping I can get a workflow going where I can export my CAD models into a VR environment to examine at the correct scale.

Even better will be using either the Oculus Touch controllers or the Vive equivalent to do virtual builds to make sure it's possible to install all the parts into the chassis without interference.

 

[BirdofPrey]

For everyone who always needs more screen space (raises hands) we just need to wait till someone develops a VR desktop environment that lets you create virtual monitors or just plain let program windows float wherever.

Personally, I can see many many more use cases for Augmented Reality (eg. MS HoloLens) than for Virtual Reality, though.

 

[jeshikat]

There's already a couple VR desktop programs. But the resolution of the first-gen headsets won't be high enough to completely replace a monitor for most people.

 

[wovie]

I'm probably going to get one...

Can anyone tell me why? (As in what's there to look forward to; not what's wrong with me )

 

[jeshikat]

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/wiki/compatible_games

Plus non-game stuff like social, movies, educational, tourism. Lots of things to do with a VR headset

 

[jeshikat]

3 minutes to pre-order launch: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/

I'm most looking forward to this:

 

[QinX]

I just lost faith in VR a little bit with that price.
€741 in order to have it in my hands. I'm seriously no longer interested at all. If this had been 450-ish I'd have jumped the bandwagon.

 

[BirdofPrey]

I could have swore they were aiming at around $400-500 some time ago.
Definitely a bust at that sort of premium.

 

[wovie]

I wish they didn't include the Xbox One controller.

 

[Phuncz]

That price is excluding VR controls and an Xbox One controller ? That's... quite a lot. I'll be awaiting the Vive which has VR controllers at launch.

 

[Vittra]

600 USD means 850 CAD at the moment. I'm not all that surprised they are charging this, you do get some benefits to preordering in addition to it being cutting edge tech, but I don't think this is wise to get into yet. The fragmentation that can be caused between the Rift and Vive isn't fully understood quite yet, and the tech itself on the software side pretty much still needs refinement and adoption in all regards, as EdZ mentioned.

I'm happy with my XB271HU for gaming, and with monitors like the Dell UP3017Q beginning to show up, VR has a lot left to prove to me, and a relatively short time to do it.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

With the 740 euros asked in France, I'd far prefer a curved 34" 21:9 monitor. Same price but more versatile.

 

[wovie]

To be perfectly clear, we don’t make money on the Rift. The Xbox controller costs us almost nothing to bundle, and people can easily resell it for profit. A lot of people wish we would sell a bundle without “useless extras” like high-end audio, a carrying case, the bundled games, etc, but those just don’t significantly impact the cost. The core technology in the Rift is the main driver - two built-for-VR OLED displays with very high refresh rate and pixel density, a very precise tracking system, mechanical adjustment systems that must be lightweight, durable, and precise, and cutting-edge optics that are more complex to manufacture than many high end DSLR lenses. It is expensive, but for the $599 you spend, you get a lot more than spending $599 on pretty much any other consumer electronics devices - phones that cost $599 cost a fraction of that to make, same with mid-range TVs that cost $599. There are a lot of mainstream devices in that price-range, so as you have said, our failing was in communication, not just price.

Excerpt from Luckey's AMA last night. Does it change anything for you?

 

[PlayfulPhoenix]

That price is excluding VR controls and an Xbox One controller ? That's... quite a lot. I'll be awaiting the Vive which has VR controllers at launch.

With the 740 euros asked in France, I'd far prefer a curved 34" 21:9 monitor. Same price but more versatile.

I feel very conflicted about the price. On the one hand, I believe Palmer Luckey when he says that Oculus is making essentially no money on the first generation of hardware, at that price point. And I'd much rather they enter the market with something that performs well at a high price, than the alternative - we don't need VR to be set back another ten years just because a company screwed up the execution once again. There must be a flagship of the industry that demonstrates viably what VR has the capacity to be.

On the other hand... I mean, at the end of the day, the headset has to be a better purchase than anything else you could buy to improve your gaming experience at the same price point. And at $600, I don't really know if that's the case for a lot of potential customers. You're comparing entry to a nascent/unproven/underdeveloped realm, against a litany of proven upgrades that can dramatically improve one's gaming experience with everything they already own.

$600 means you can go from one 24" monitor to three, or upgrade an existing monitor substantially. You can more than double your graphics horsepower, add a zippy SSD, or move up to the latest CPU generation. You can buy ten AAA titles. You could practically build an entirely new, half-decent gaming PC from scratch, even.

Are any of those things as cool as the headset? No, but I think that, for the majority of gamers, those sorts of purchases make a lot more sense, and provide a lot more happiness/utility right now than buying the Rift, given how limited that VR experience will be at launch. The only obvious exception I can think of would be the top few percent of gamers that have already exhausted all of those opportunities to upgrade their experience.

To be sure, all-told I'm confident that the headset will sell fine, but I think many people will be justified in waiting until the price drops pretty substantially. I suppose I just wish that such a dynamic wasn't the case.