What do you think about the Vive?

http://store.steampowered.com/vive/

I am not at all sold on the entire VR concept. For one thing, you can't see the keyboard. I am very interested to see how this trend evolves. If successful, I expect to be seeing news reports of kids walking into traffic more frequently, they already do that texting.

What are you thoughts? Do you believe it will die a gimmick or succeed?

Not to confuse VR with AR. AR lets you experience an augmentation to what is already there. That has a lot of promise I think, in job training for one.

 

VR is something you have to try to get a real sense of it. It really does bring you into the world. I don't think it's a gimmick this time around. I played Shroud in VR a couple of years ago, and it was cool even back then.

 

I've seen no "HUGE" improvement in the VR experience since the release of the Virtual IO I-Glasses, back in 1995 (yay, 20 years ago!).
I played Descent in real 3D on those glasses, and while cool, the Oculus Rift and similar competing implementations are all copy-cat rip-off gimmicks, in my opinion. (Yes, I've tried an Oculus Rift first hand, for many hours)
Michael Tidwell had a great thesis on using the eye as the target for laser driven displays of extremely low power, high resolution, and extraordinary frame rate.
And yet, we're still stuck with these gimmicks. Makes me sad. In 20 years, we should have advanced to wearable wireless-powered contact lenses @ 4k, minimum.

 

I bought a rift DK2 about a year ago. I have to limit my play sessions on it due to motion sickness, which seems to be a common symptom. Maybe it's just my middle aged brain that can't adapt properly, not sure, but I rarely use the rift nowdays, even though for some games like iracing (where you don't need to see a keyboard, you just use pedals and a steering wheel) it is brilliant.

 

If there was ever a time to bring out Half Life 3....

 

I think its a big deal.

But my guess is that adoption will be gradual as the potential user base will have to invest in new hardware to drive it over time. VR isn't something you want to do with subpart hardware and low frame rates. At least without motion sickness. I also wonder how it will pan out over age brackets. Will we see more divorces as gamers isolate spouses with the VR headset on?

 

Sometimes things seem better in retrospect than they really were.

The I-Glasses to which you kindly provided a link had:
Field of view: 30º "each eye" (most of which overlaps)
Resolution: 180,000 pixels per panel

The HTC Vive, on the other hand has:
Field of view: 110º total
1,296,000 pixels per panel

That's not counting advances in head tracking and image latency which make a huge difference.

 

Comparing the I-Glasses vs. the Rift/Vive and calling them just gimmicks that made no huge improvements? Man, I needed a laugh today. Thanks.

For me, the DK1 was unbearable for long stretches. DK2 was vastly improved and I could play games like Elite Dangerous all day. The resolution still sucked and the CV1 is unfortunately only marginally better. Although still light years ahead of some crappy 0.7" 640x480 16-color display

Indeed! Also, I was hoping the Vive would be full 1080p per eye but looks like we'll have to wait until the next generation.

 

Not sure if it was mentioned, but Tracy Hickman (the guy who's helping write the Shroud lore is also involved with the Void VR system, along with his son. Pretty interesting stuff
https://thevoid.com/

 

I ordered mine on Monday (delivery around 6./7.4) and i'm very excited!

But the controllers and the lighthouse system are not usable (at this point) for SotA.

But the resolution from the vive is 1.200 x 1.080 per Eye.

 

I saw something along these lines before. This is what will bring the arcade experience back. It seems like a good opportunity to rent some old dead mall space, and set up a virtual playground to charge the public to play in it. I know I'd go.

 

There's also a VR-style mall that's being proposed and developed out here in Georgia by Lionsgate and other developers. I definitely will go if it opens up as planned
http://avatronpark.com/index.html

 

I don't think a gimmick this time round as it seems to have enough momentum and buy-in from software developers. There is plenty of scope for these to have a use outside of gaming too, and the Vive already has a forward facing camera built in and motion controllers so lots of potential already for AR.

I'm on the fence about the Rift and Vive and which way to go, but leaning toward the Vive. I may wait and see what other suppliers may bring to the party yet too.

 

I'm not a fan of VR as I think it's too primitive to do anything worth doing just yet. There's also a vicious cycle that some gamers won't purchase the tech until there's enough games that support the hardware while the devs won't support the tech until there's enough gamers to play it on.

With that said:

Looks promising.

 

I may or may not think something about this all. I should dump the PMs I exchanged with @mass

 

Let'em have it!

 

So we have implemented the OR in our simulation software for industrial practices.
Most of the motion sickness stuff is related to non-optimized tfx cards being used.
So once there is dedicated gfx cards for this market segment that issue is greatly reduced.

We made some trials with even high end gaming laptops and they were all crap in the deepest level. They simply couldn't cope. While mid range tower solutions at less than a 5th of the laptop price outperformed them easily.

So for us we simply implemented a test prg that runs first and blocks use if the performance is below our requirements. After that we haven't heard any complaints of motion sickness, except for those with differing "glasses strength" whatever that is called in English.

 

This is so very true. If you can't maintain a constant frame rate at spec, you are going to have an absolutely terrible experience, from jitters to judders to frame drops to throwing up in your mouth. Before I upgraded my GPUs, Elite Dangerous was having issues maintaining the 75hz on the DK2 and the experience varied from mildly annoying to spinning room sickness.

The next-gen NVIDIA and AMD cards are being built specifically for native VR support. Current gen is fast enough, but only if you have a top end card, or don't require high fidelity experiences to maintain the high frame rate requirements.

 

Lol, i just found out today that the Vive is powered by my company, Qualcomm.

 

Mythos of the World Axis. If you have a VR headset...I suggest trying this game out. It'll put the "gimmick" status to rest.