Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

[eastmen]

Valve news
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new...uld-held-in-nz-says-gaming-tycoon-gabe-newell

"
We definitely have games in development that we're going to be announcing — it's fun to ship games," he said.

"Alyx was great — to be back doing single-player games, that created a lot of momentum inside of the company to do more of that."
"

index supply issues

We actually have components that are manufactured in Wuhan and when you're setting up your manufacturing lines it doesn't occur to you that you're suddenly going to be dependent on this peculiar transistor that's sitting on one board that you can't get," Newell said.

"Everybody ended up running into the same problem simultaneously — you go from, 'Oh, we're in great shape,' to, 'What do you mean Apple or Microsoft just bought the next two years' supply of this just so they could make sure they aren't going to run out?'

"You went from a situation where everything was getting done just in time to people buying up all the available supplies.

"So the only thing keeping us from shipping in New Zealand at this point is just getting enough of them made — we're very much manufacturing constrained."

My guess index 2 later this year or early next year with a new game following a few months after

 

[Karamazov]

portal 3 please
or a VR portal

 

[swaaye]

I think a VR Portal would have some challenges with avoiding horrific motion sickness.

Valve making games to sell their hardware is interesting to see. It's essentially like consoles and exclusive games. And PS VR.

 

[Davros]

That would be horrible, the last thing we need is games that are locked to a particular headset

 

[swaaye]

That would be horrible, the last thing we need is games that are locked to a particular headset

I don't mean that. It's just that I think the only reason Alyx exists is to help sell Index. Not that that is exactly a bad thing considering it is compatible with everything.

 

[manux]

I don't mean that. It's just that I think the only reason Alyx exists is to help sell Index. Not that that is exactly a bad thing considering it is compatible with everything.

It might be better than that. Though it's not known if future of valve is regular or vr games. Gabe Newell said this recently

But, whatever Valve is working on, it’s likely to be single-player. Referring to last year’s VR-exclusive adventure, he said: “Alyx was great — to be back doing single-player games, that created a lot of momentum inside of the company to do more of that.”

https://uploadvr.com/gabe-newell-new-valve-games/

 

[eastmen]

That would be horrible, the last thing we need is games that are locked to a particular headset

The great thing about valve's platform is that they support almost every single vr headset on the pc platform.

Oculus looks all in on their own mobile platform that is really locked down. I wonder how long it will be until they remove functionality with steam and the pc link only lets you use the pc hardware to better play the games on the oculus store.

But if Valve wants VR to be a thing and to not loose out on steam being the platform or one of the big platforms for it they need to invest in hardware and I think that is why the index exists. They know they can't sit back and wait for htc or other small companies to move forward.

I expect to see new indexs that leverage the index controllers (knuckles) and lighthouse v1/2 moving forward where the headset itself sits at the $500 mark that the index currently is. For most vive or index users the cost of upgrade is only the cost of the headset and not the kit buy in. Over time the kit itself may come down in price if they can bring down index controller and light house prices.

 

[Davros]

Here are the ten top selling titles on Steam for the week as reported by Valve:
1: Rust.
2: EVERSPACE 2.
3: Valve Index VR Kit.
4: Dyson Sphere Program.
5: Cyberpunk 2077.

Index outselling Cyberpunk 2077

 

[swaaye]

Seems questionable, but I looked around for the Reverb G2 out of curiosity and that's out of stock in many places.

 

[Davros]

Its been in the top 3 for many months despite them claiming supply issues
and in their top sellers for the year its not even listed not even in the top 100

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Here are the ten top selling titles on Steam for the week as reported by Valve:
1: Rust.
2: EVERSPACE 2.
3: Valve Index VR Kit.
4: Dyson Sphere Program.
5: Cyberpunk 2077.

Index outselling Cyberpunk 2077

I wonder if it's by country. I'm looking at the Steam best sellers (all products, any price) here and the Index isn't even in the top 100. Global Top Sellers also doesn't show the Index.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

I see it at about #40 on the Top Sellers (all products). Cyberpunk is at #5.

On the Global Top Sellers it's at around #98.

 

[manux]

If the apple headset is for real and for 3k$ I might buy one. Interesting stuff. dual 8k screens, eye tracking, cameras+lidars for AR use case. Sounds almost too good to be true. Maybe apple has some insane prototypes but the retail product would be scaled down version? This could probably replace tv and monitor for many use cases.

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-apple-ar-vr-headset-n301/

 

[pjbliverpool]

If the apple headset is for real and for 3k$ I might buy one. Interesting stuff. dual 8k screens, eye tracking, cameras+lidars for AR use case. Sounds almost too good to be true. Maybe apple has some insane prototypes but the retail product would be scaled down version? This could probably replace tv and monitor for many use cases.

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-apple-ar-vr-headset-n301/

Sounds like a VR dream from those specs, all aside from the FOV which isn't mentioned. It'll never be a "perfect" VR headset until the FOV is 120+ degrees IMO. Still even with that I'd be waiting for all that tech to drop well below 1K before I'd jump. Nice to see someone doing it though as it likely means it'll hit the mainstream sooner rather than later.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

If the apple headset is for real and for 3k$ I might buy one. Interesting stuff. dual 8k screens, eye tracking, cameras+lidars for AR use case. Sounds almost too good to be true. Maybe apple has some insane prototypes but the retail product would be scaled down version? This could probably replace tv and monitor for many use cases.

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-apple-ar-vr-headset-n301/

At that price point with AR being the target (2nd product), it appears to be going after the HoloLens professional market.

If can actually does have dual 8k screens and it can actually take dual 8k inputs (instead of upressing from a lower resolution like the PiMax 8k) and it has a greater than 120 degree FOV (I might go down as low as 100 degrees) then I'd be interested in it for a working environment depending on how light and comfortable it is.

Of course also assuming it would work on a PC. I'm not getting a Mac just to be able to run this.

OK, now hopefully some PC OEM, or Microsoft themselves, will come out with something similar.

Regards,
SB

 

[manux]

At that price point with AR being the target (2nd product), it appears to be going after the HoloLens professional market.

If can actually does have dual 8k screens and it can actually take dual 8k inputs (instead of upressing from a lower resolution like the PiMax 8k) and it has a greater than 120 degree FOV (I might go down as low as 100 degrees) then I'd be interested in it for a working environment depending on how light and comfortable it is.

Of course also assuming it would work on a PC. I'm not getting a Mac just to be able to run this.

OK, now hopefully some PC OEM, or Microsoft themselves, will come out with something similar.

Regards,
SB

I don't think anything can run dual 8k on vr framerates. It has to be eye tracking+foveated rendering+ridiculous smarts on what to update each frame. Though if it's pulled of well it would not be noticeable to human eye.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I don't think anything can run dual 8k on vr framerates. It has to be eye tracking+foveated rendering+ridiculous smarts on what to update each frame. Though if it's pulled of well it would not be noticeable to human eye.

I don't need it to render a game. I just need it to render my desktop and whatever applications I'm using (Visual Studio, browser, Word, etc.) at the max native resolution of the headset.

There aren't many games in VR that don't make me sick (can count them on the fingers of one hand), so I don't play games in VR.

So a high FOV, both horizontal and vertical would be appreciated to minimize head movement in order to bring things into view. But horizontal is more important than vertical, so I can make do with a narrower vertical FOV if needed.

Regards,
SB

 

[manux]

I don't need it to render a game. I just need it to render my desktop and whatever applications I'm using (Visual Studio, browser, Word, etc.) at the max native resolution of the headset.

There aren't many games in VR that don't make me sick (can count them on the fingers of one hand), so I don't play games in VR.

So a high FOV, both horizontal and vertical would be appreciated to minimize head movement in order to bring things into view. But horizontal is more important than vertical, so I can make do with a narrower vertical FOV if needed.

Regards,
SB

I imagine given the specs the part of display one is looking at is updated at full res and rest is progressively less. Then it's up to how fast and accurate the eye tracking is.

 

[manux]

Super impressive if true. Quest2 is on the way to become the most sold vr device(if not already).

Rec Room isn’t just one of the best free social VR apps out there. In the absence of hard sales data, it makes for an excellent watermark for how things are moving in the industry. Now, according to Rec Room’s downloads on Quest 2, the developers estimate that Facebook has potentially sold upwards of three million Quest 2 units in 2020 Q4 alone

https://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-rec-room-2-3m-oculus-quest-2-sold/

Source roadtovr uses

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1357839404459556865

 

[BRiT]

From my view, it's sad to see people reward Facebook through Quest 2 purchases. Hopefully someone else will make better headsets and harvest all of those VR consumers.