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The VR thread!

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King of Cable Management
Sep 26, 2015
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Excerpt from Luckey's AMA last night. Does it change anything for you?

I saw this and am thinking: does this mean that the VR headsets will, at least in part, track the pricing of OLED displays? They have been plummeting lately, down to affordable levels, but still have a ways to go and will come down even more. Optics on the other hand, unfortunately don't really come down in price unless you start to really compromise on quality.
 

Phuncz

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May 9, 2015
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I can hardly believe a lot of money is in the OLED displays, but I'm fully expecting $300 or more is being calculated as indirect costs, like R&D, salary, marketing and whatnot. And it hard to believe Facebook has helped in any way to make it a better product, just a bigger buzzword. This seems like MakerBot all over again, becoming a marketing machine instead of producing 3D printing machines.
 

GuilleAcoustic

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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.

That is my exact thought. As a linux user I'll pass and see if it gets adopted and gets linux native support. My priority moved now toward the incoming nvidia Pascal GPU, which are supposed to be a huge improvement over Maxwell.

I bought a 25" 1440p with 100% sRGB covering screen, for less than an Oculus price, which by itself was a huge improvement concerning games and overall experience (CAD and digital drawing is awesome with it).
 

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King of Cable Management
Sep 26, 2015
775
759
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Vive was fully compatible with SteamOS.

I'm probably going to wait at least until 2nd gen. VR headsets start coming to market to jump on board.
 

EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
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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.
You may get your wish if you use Solidworks or Catia: Dassault are showing off the Vive as an alternate to CAVEs for dispaly of models and assemblies.

And it hard to believe Facebook has helped in any way to make it a better product, just a bigger buzzword.
Apart from having a big enough wallet to convince Samsung to do a short-run custom OLED panel (anything under a million units is a short run for OLED panels, because of the MASSIVE fab startup costs)*, Facebook has a huge custom electronics engineering division. They nearly single-handedly kicked off the Open Compute initiative to push completely custom server hardware, so they have a huge team of guys who literally design customised motherboards for servers and networking hardware. That's a great knowledge-base for designing the hardware to drive those custom OLED panels.Then there's the server infrastructure needed to get the backend working: Oculus store, all the social side of things (Carmack and Abrash finally get to build the Metaverse they've been wanting to for decades), etc.
Iat 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.
I think this is already true. No monitor or combination of monitors you can buy will provide such a complete paradigm shift in immersion as a VR HMD.
There is a market for multiple competing companies to make motion simulator platforms in the $5k-$10k range just for driving game enthusiasts (many are single-axis rotation so unsuitable for other sims like flight sims). If Oculus were to release a DK2 with a different label on the front as CV1 you would be looking at a buy-in of ~$1300 for a PC plus the HMD. Pushing that out to ~$1500 for a dramatically superior HMD is a good decision.

On the Vive's potential cost: With the screen and optics being very similar to the Rift's, the main difference for the HMD itself is the casing. The Vive Pre is a basic injection mould, so if that releases unchanged as the consumer Vive it's be somewhat cheaper (though much less pleasant to wear due to the greater weight and elastic headbands). HTC may have a redesign waiting for the consumer version, but only if their projected release date gets pushed back to allow for production startup, or they do a paper launch. Lighthouse is also a mechanically complex device compared to a CCD/CMOS camera (high-speed spinning optics, speed-controlled motors, Class 3B lasers with safety-interlocks to allow a Class 1 product classification, precision frame for reliable baseline), and everyone here is well aware that even a little mechanical complexity becomes expensive to manufacture. Lighthouse avoids the cost of fabbing a sensor ship, but needs a lot of it;s own custom mechanical components. The controllers are gong to be of minimal cost to produce though, same as Touch (though both without the volumes to be as cheap as the XB1 controller, which is close to the raw plastic cost).
More worryingly, HTC are selling just the HMD, unlike Oculus. This means they can't subsidise it significantly, particularly as HTC are not in a good financial position. HTC's attempt to set up their own Vive store also indicates they are not goign to be receiving a big (if any) cut of sales through Steam of Vive-compatible titles. I wouldn't hold my breath on the Vive being anything less than on price-parity with the Rift + Touch combination, and potentially more.

PSVR is more interesting. Sony are fabbing their own OLED panels, and using a single panel rather than two panels. That's both a production overhead they can reduce, and a margin overhead they don't need to worry about. They do have the additional cost of the outboard processor to perform Reprojection (AKA Timewarp), but Sony have their own division producing framerate conversion chips for TVs, so they may be able to use or modify a CotS chip there. They are also in an even better position than Oculus to subsidise HMD sales through software sales. My guess is the PSVR will come in slightly under the Rift pricing, even with a pair of Move controllers included.



* The DK2 was so cheap because it literally used the entire front panel assembly from a Note 3; glass, digitiser, even the Samsung logo. It was a completely off-the-shelf part from a high-volume production line. The optics were also off-the-shelf plastic singlet lenses, and the chassis a basic injection mould.
 
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iFreilicht

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Feb 28, 2015
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PlayfulPhoenix is right, the current generation of VR is unlike anything we have ever used in gaming, but whether buying a headset is viable highly depends on the games you're playing. If you're into Racing games or Space simulators, this is THE thing you've been waiting for. There is no monitor on earth that can replace the experience of actually looking around in your cockpit and feeling like you're actually in the vehicle you're driving. If these are the kinds of games you play and you have the money to spend, either buy it now or wait for the Vive and then decide which is the better product for you.

But for me, and probably a lot of other people, it is nothing but a gimmick, and 740€ are not a justifiable price for that.
 

EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
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it is nothing but a gimmick
I really cannot agree with that. While a handful of genres may not translate directly to use with a HMD (free-roaming FPS is the most notable, without access to an omni-directional treadmill), most will when VR design constraints are taken into account. Third-person camera works surprisingly well with proper environment design (the 'mini-world' works excellently) allowing for gentle camera-drag along a set path without nausea, god-games obivously work very well with similar design. First-person is mainly tricky in setting up long-distance locomotion without inducing vection (there are several tricks with head-locked overlays with varying degrees of success, targeted teleporting is pretty popular and used in Bullet Train, The Gallery, etc) and then there are non-gaming applications. VR is already being used by architects for walkthrough of prospective buildings with a far more effective sense of scale than printouts, a flat monitor or even 3D printed models. VR has been used in industry for design (particularly automotive human interaction) and training for decades, and low-cost VR will make this much more common. Social interaction is also going to be a dramatic change; everyone who has tried the multi-person Oculus Toybox demo has made some variation on the exclamation "I felt like another person was in the room with me", and that from a mere static head and basic hands.
We're a long way from the capabilities some fictional descriptions of VR (with some things being as yet technically impossible like certain haptic and tactile interactions, accurate GVS, muscle spindle and other internal stimulation, etc) but the HMDs Oculus and HTC are releasing soon are above the capabilities of any HMD created by anyone thus far, and in all but angular resolution are superior to CAVEs and dome displays.

VR is far from a gimmick. It may not be viable for most yet, but the smartphone, a mere PDA with a name change, went from the $600 "who would pay that much for just a phone/a PDA you can't install things on?" iPhone to near-total ubiquity in a less than 9 years.
 

jØrd

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NASA use VR for various training aspects & have done for some time. IIRC Tim Peake trained to use their space backpack thing in a VR environment where the real world controllers were mapped into the vr space. IIRC there is some footage of it in this video. Calling it a gimmick seems uninformed and near-sighted.
 

iFreilicht

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I really cannot agree with that. While a handful of genres may not translate directly to use with a HMD (free-roaming FPS is the most notable, without access to an omni-directional treadmill), most will when VR design constraints are taken into account. Third-person camera works surprisingly well with proper environment design (the 'mini-world' works excellently) allowing for gentle camera-drag along a set path without nausea, god-games obivously work very well with similar design. First-person is mainly tricky in setting up long-distance locomotion without inducing vection (there are several tricks with head-locked overlays with varying degrees of success, targeted teleporting is pretty popular and used in Bullet Train, The Gallery, etc) and then there are non-gaming applications. VR is already being used by architects for walkthrough of prospective buildings with a far more effective sense of scale than printouts, a flat monitor or even 3D printed models. VR has been used in industry for design (particularly automotive human interaction) and training for decades, and low-cost VR will make this much more common. Social interaction is also going to be a dramatic change; everyone who has tried the multi-person Oculus Toybox demo has made some variation on the exclamation "I felt like another person was in the room with me", and that from a mere static head and basic hands.
We're a long way from the capabilities some fictional descriptions of VR (with some things being as yet technically impossible like certain haptic and tactile interactions, accurate GVS, muscle spindle and other internal stimulation, etc) but the HMDs Oculus and HTC are releasing soon are above the capabilities of any HMD created by anyone thus far, and in all but angular resolution are superior to CAVEs and dome displays.

VR is far from a gimmick. It may not be viable for most yet, but the smartphone, a mere PDA with a name change, went from the $600 "who would pay that much for just a phone/a PDA you can't install things on?" iPhone to near-total ubiquity in a less than 9 years.

That's why I said it's a gimmick for me. All those use-cases you're talking about are interesting and I am eager to see how they work out, but the main application for me would be gaming, and no game that I currently play or will play in the future benefits from VR as of now. I am sure that a lot of genres will be able to adapt to VR and find good implementations that reduce motion sickness to a minimum while allowing greater freedom in terms of camera and movement, but until then, it's simply not worth it for me.

There's no doubt that VR will be a much more common sight in the future, but this time around, I am not going to be an early adopter.
 

Phuncz

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May 9, 2015
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I think I might try racing simulators again with VR, just because it would actually be much more realistic because of the head tracking and the sensation. But if it will be enough for me to plop down 700-800€ next quarter, I'm not so sure.
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
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Feb 22, 2015
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You may get your wish if you use Solidworks or Catia: Dassault are showing off the Vive as an alternate to CAVEs for dispaly of models and assemblies.

Neat! I'm not using SolidWorks though. I'm not so much interested in modeling in VR, the resolution is too low right now, but instead I want to use it for inspection. So I should be able to just export the model to OBJ and drop it into a Unity environment or something.
 

iFreilicht

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I think I might try racing simulators again with VR, just because it would actually be much more realistic because of the head tracking and the sensation. But if it will be enough for me to plop down 700-800€ next quarter, I'm not so sure.

That's where I'm standing, too. While TDU and TDU2 aren't racing simulators (or really great games in general), I played both to 100% because I just loved the feeling of driving through this vast world and looking around in the cockpit. I can only imagine how little productive stuff I would do if I were to own a VR headset.

Something that just jumped to my mind: As all Kickstarter supporters of the original campaign who bought a DK get a free Oculus Rift, some of the Developement Kits should be possible to obtain from ebay or the likes. Maybe it's possible to get one for 200€ or so, that would be a price I could see myself paying, even if the resolution is shit.
 

Phuncz

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Oh another TDU fan ! I've done the "Race Around The Island" (2 hours driving for one lap) dozens of times, I loved those games ! While indeed not 100% accurate, they did provide a satisfying driving experience where you could just cruise around and love it. The only other game that ever could give me this feeling was GTA, but even there it wasn't up to the level of TDU. I'd plop down the money for VR in a second if TDU3 would be coming out with support for it.
 

iFreilicht

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I know this is a bit off-topic, but the more realistic case is that somebody will mod TDU2 to support VR. Eden Games isn't part of Atari anymore and since 2011, they only made a single other game "GT Spirit" which was made for Apple TV and will be released on iOS at some point in the future. Right now, I don't know of any alternatives to this franchise.
 

PlayfulPhoenix

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I know this is a bit off-topic, but the more realistic case is that somebody will mod TDU2 to support VR...

I get the feeling that, most of the time, games that are later modified to "work" with VR tend to be pretty crappy games for VR. Perhaps in games where your relative position is always fixed (such as in a cockpit or driver's seat) this isn't the case, but for nearly everything else the viewport is so fundamental to the experience that everything else about the game has to be designed towards it. And not just UI elements like menus and the HUD - even things like map geography and spawning behavior are all optimized for how players see the digital world around them.

Adapting an off-the-shelf FPS to VR after the fact, for example, comes off to me like retrofitting panoramic windows to a nuclear bunker. Great-looking in principle, but insensible in use.
 

Phuncz

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I have a hard time believing "retrofitted" games would be good VR games in general, after the last 5 years having to deal with games that have 65-75° FOV, 30 or 60fps lock (game time dependent) and no way to change it. Not to mention micro-stutter, motion blur and serious lack of optimization not helping the experience.
 

EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
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Retrofitted games are rarely worth bothering with in terms of comfort. 'Injection' drivers (e.g. VorpX and Vireio Perception) are at best barely tolerable (and only then with a lot of tweaking to try and get the FoV correct, the head/neck model 1:1, etc). Games modified by the orignal developer for VR support are a more mixed bag: if all they have done is drop in the Unity/Unreal VR camera, it's going to be a bad expereince even without and performance issues due to UI and control design (any game that involves moving yourself around with WAD or an analog stick is a bad idea), object/world scale being totally wrong, etc.
A few games take well to post-development VR support. Simulators have a bit of an easy ride, but it's not impossible to modify other games to work in VR. They will invariably end up with some concession in terms of control or UI, but they can at least be a comfortable experience.
 

BirdofPrey

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Sep 3, 2015
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I seem to remember seeing some game devs (think maybe it was the CCP guys working on Valkyrie) talking about that sort of stuff.
One of the thing that was brought us was run-speed in FPS. It is usually disconnected with how fast people actually run and clashes with VR.
 

EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
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We now have a price for the HTC Vive ($799 US, shipping costs and regional pricing not yet confirmed), a pre-order date (29th February at 10AM Eastern Time / 1500 UTC), and a prospective shipping date (4th April).

Unless HTC add a massive extra gouge on top of VAT to the UK price (rumoured but unconfirmed to be £689) I'll be ordering it. The higher than expected price of the Rift and Vive will eat into my VR fund more than I was expecting though, so now I'm actually hoping for a delay to the PSVR release just to give my wallet some breathing room!
 
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Phuncz

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I hope you can recuperate these costs somehow professionally, as your knowledge/expertise on the matter is worth it.
I won't be getting any of them before the end of the year I'd guess. Too many cases I'm invested in :D