Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

On the resolution front, you're right that resolution is way too low, however do you know what setting he was running LT on? As it can be quite 'artifacty' at the lowest setting, but at the highest, which clearly increases the internal resolution, the graphics are pretty solid, and it's just the SDE that causes a problem IMO.

Also, if you have the horsepower, you can edit the steamvr INI file, and supersample all games. Apparently it works wonders, especially on fixing text and other aliasing issues.
 
Sounds like TableTop VR is right down your alley :)

Yeah I thought about that as well, but an AR version would be even better. :) Part of the fun of gaming with my gaming group is getting together and doing gaming and non-gaming stuff together. VR can replicate some of that certainly but not in the same way.

And the possibilities for tabletop miniatures war gaming just blows my mind. :D

Regards,
SB
 
Teardown and component price estimate for rift

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-components-cost-around-200-new-teardown-suggests/
All of this of course fails completely to include the years of R&D that went into producing a the Rift, not to mention hugely complex and software development to support the headset, a lot of which simply didn’t exist prior to the recent VR renaissance. Not to mention this report is almost entirely focused on material electronic costs, there’s no mention of the custom Fresnel lenses manufacturing costs, for which you also have to factor in the complex specialist R&D for those too. Finally, this report is based on estimates of individual costs without any knowledge of commercial arrangements based on bulk – we’ve no real way of knowing how much Oculus paid or are paying long term for these parts.
 
with the sensors so cheap its a real shame they wont include 2 with touch. Imo they should bite the bullet and send a second sensor to everyone who owns the rift currently and pack a second one in for future rift purchases . They should also include two sensors for touch. That way they get great 360 tracking
 
with the sensors so cheap its a real shame they wont include 2 with touch. Imo they should bite the bullet and send a second sensor to everyone who owns the rift currently and pack a second one in for future rift purchases . They should also include two sensors for touch. That way they get great 360 tracking
Have they said they're definitely not yet? To date they've been unsure in interviews that I've seen.
 
Have they said they're definitely not yet? To date they've been unsure in interviews that I've seen.
I think they will just put in 1 and price at $200. I really think it should be 2 at $200 or even $150. But no nothing official. I think they are going through with their plan to make touch a 180 degree experience. Which is a real shame. They had a year to course correct and go room scale but it seems like they will force it into a new generation or charge the early adopters a crap ton for two more cameras next year to keep up
 
Cameras may be cheap, but the quantity of USB 3.0 ports would become problematic for a lot of people once you start talking 3-4 cameras (not to mention the cabling), and even if it's not a problem, it's certainly reaching into the realm of absurdity that a single PC peripheral could swamp most/all of the high speed ports on the majority of consumer motherboards. The big 'win' that Oculus have over Valve right now is the easy setup-and-play user experience, but a lot of that goes out the window if Oculus starts attempting to reorient their product to try and match what the Vive was built from the ground up to do.
 
AMD and NVIDIA GPU Vive VR Performance in Raw Data
Both AMD and NVIDIA have had a lot to say about "VR" for a while now. VR is far from mainstream, but we are now seeing some games that are tremendously compelling to play, putting you in middle of the action. Raw Data is one of those, and it is extremely GPU intensive. How do the newest GPUs stack up in Raw Data?
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http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/08/01/amd_nvidia_gpu_vive_vr_performance_in_raw_data/1
 
Yeah, I would say that Raw Data is probably the first VR game that I've played that I would argue really doesn't hold to the same minimum GPU requirements that most titles have. My 970 was regularly dipping below the 90Hz barrier (to the extent that the framey-looking reprojection and sluggish hand reactions were visibly annoying), and the gameplay really begs for oversampling because it directly impacts your ability to aim through your iron sights. I've been largely focused on UE4 for the last couple years due to its c++ base, but Unity coupled with Valve's help seems to be the better fit for VR right now.
 
Yeah I thought about that as well, but an AR version would be even better. :) Part of the fun of gaming with my gaming group is getting together and doing gaming and non-gaming stuff together. VR can replicate some of that certainly but not in the same way.

And the possibilities for tabletop miniatures war gaming just blows my mind. :D

Regards,
SB

True... but then when you consider you need 4 AR headsets and each needs it's own PC, then all of a sudden the prospect of just setting up the game on the table becomes a bit more appealing!

One day(10+ yrs?), when glasses are super light weight, and it can all be powered off your cell phone, then maybe?? But it's really ages away from being practical.
 
True... but then when you consider you need 4 AR headsets and each needs it's own PC, then all of a sudden the prospect of just setting up the game on the table becomes a bit more appealing!

One day(10+ yrs?), when glasses are super light weight, and it can all be powered off your cell phone, then maybe?? But it's really ages away from being practical.

Well, or you just need 4 Hololens devices. :) Granted, it'll be interesting to see what their consumer focused device ends up being in 2-4 years as the current development focused device is very rough around the edges.

Regards,
SB
 
Seeing a virtual table top and sharing it with virtual people seems cool and a useful drop-in enhancement to regular activities, but because of that I would say it's also a space that feels conventional and well explored (conceptually). Being able to shrink myself so I'm suddenly a miniature standing on that virtual table and able to be held in the palm of my friend's hand though seems to me to be the stuff of dreams and feels open to a lot of exploration.
 
Seeing a virtual table top and sharing it with virtual people seems cool and a useful drop-in enhancement to regular activities, but because of that I would say it's also a space that feels conventional and well explored (conceptually). Being able to shrink myself so I'm suddenly a miniature standing on that virtual table and able to be held in the palm of my friend's hand though seems to me to be the stuff of dreams and feels open to a lot of exploration.

Just thinking of that makes me feel queasy enough to vomit. :D

Regards,
SB
 
We'll probably have some form of GVS in the future in order to mitigate the more extreme cases of disorientation from the acceleration/vestibular mismatch, but if seeing any sort of large scale objects moving relative to you (large windows moving on a big screen TV) is enough to make you feel queasy then you might be in the small minority that will never be able to cope well.
 
We'll probably have some form of GVS in the future in order to mitigate the more extreme cases of disorientation from the acceleration/vestibular mismatch, but if seeing any sort of large scale objects moving relative to you (large windows moving on a big screen TV) is enough to make you feel queasy then you might be in the small minority that will never be able to cope well.

It doesn't happen generally with 2D or 3D movies. Although the Doom movie was notable for making me a bit queasy near the end with the first person camera gimmick that they did. However, I think that had more to do with the low framerate of movies combined with the first person view. I should make a 60 FPS interpolated encode of that scene sometime to test it out. I'm curious now whether that would affect that.

I also noticed that 2D movies viewed without a background on a VR device can make me feel a bit queasy if large sudden camera movements are made (shaky cam, for instance) but it's generally not too bad. However, the same camera movements with the 3D version of a movie would induce significantly more discomfort, though generally not enough to potentially induce vomiting. At least with what I tried. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something that might though. I don't know if there's going to be a 3D version of Hardcore Henry, but seeing some video reviews of it makes me think that might possibly do it.

Most of that disappears with a rendered environment (cinema, room, drive-in) but not completely in the more extreme cases.

One thing that will immediately start the ramp up towards vomiting, however, is when I've viewed 180 or 360 degree VR video clips where the cameraman is moving the camera around like a traditional cinematographer. I can't take more than a few seconds of that before the nausea starts to rapidly build. I suspect if I kept viewing it for a minute or maybe less, that I'd be disgorging the contents of my stomach in quick order.

The thought of being in a VR simulation where I'm small enough to fit in someone's palm and they are moving me around just makes me queasy in the extreme.

Real life situations that cause people to vomit (roller coasters, spinning teacup rides, etc.) don't make me queasy, however. But there is one real life analogy that does. If I'm riding in the backseat of a car sitting sideways and looking out a side window AND the car is subject to a lot of stop and go or very rough and frequent gear shifts. It's pretty specific, but mirrors the nausea that I've felt in VR.

Regards,
SB
 
NV has much more experience in optimizing for stereoscopic rendering, having done a decent bit of work to optimize drivers for 3D displays etc. So I bet part of that pays off now.
 
UE4 and Unity are the two main engines for VR right now, and UE4 tends to do noticeably better for Nvidia - so that's a part of what you're getting out of Kyle's reviews. Additionally, VR performance in general is one of those use cases that requires extra TLC and execution on part of dev rel, drivers, etc and that's an area where Nvidia seems to deliver more. If AMD has been struggling to match Nvidia's launch day drivers for optimizing titles that sell in the hundreds of thousands, then I shouldn't expect that they're going to suddenly have the resources to devote to VR titles that sell in the tens of thousands.

Releasing slide decks that talk about how your hardware is optimized for VR is one thing, but ensuring that it actually does it is another.
 
AMD has a presentation about VR tomorrow at IFA.
Although IMHO they do well in not focusing on VR right (there's not a single killer-app out there making any of the headsets worth their money) we might get some idea about what they're up to by then.
Regardless, aside from the RX480 performing within Valve's and Oculus' "VR-capable threshold", almost all their marketing on VR have been focused on dual-GPU.
 
Having AMD show up at another conference and talk about all the cool things that have no integration road map from third party developers is not the area where they're coming up short. This is not the page that matters: http://gpuopen.com/games-cgi/, but rather this: https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap.

I have no doubt that AMD is devoting engineering resources to innovation, but for that to lead to anywhere they have to be also devoting dollars to aggressively pursue the likes of Epic and Unity to ensure their efforts translate to the end product experience they're selling to customers.
 
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