Is VR going to die because of no software?

[manux]

One interesting but not so much talked facebook thing is the non tethered version of rift. That could be the device to break into mass market as there is no need for pc, wires etc.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...lks-around-in-oculus-santa-cruz-vr-prototype/

 

[hughJ]

I think a killer app is still needed regardless of what the form factor will be. SoC-style tetherless VR gets rid of the cabling and high cost PC, but it also makes for a much less capable headset, problematic for motion controller tracking, and has to create a new market and application ecosystem from scratch (rather than getting jump started from consoles or PC).

Finally got my UPS tracking number for Touch, so that should be here next week hopefully. And now 'processing' for the extra camera. IEM earphones are due tomorrow. I wonder if I'll be able to justify keeping the Vive after this. I suppose it'll depend on how well a 3-4 camera setup works, and how seamless the Oculus-SteamVR integration is. I definitely can't see myself buying both families of headsets again for gen2.

 

[hughJ]

On top of all that, I'm still moderately concerned about just what the fallout is going to be once we start feeling the economic brakes from Moore's Law winding down. We can't really expect for the sort of mobile miniaturization and performance scaling that we've seen for the last couple decades to continue for the next couple, so things like all-in-one high-end VR/AR headsets aren't at all a foregone conclusion, and especially not at low cost. Wireless video transmission could allow for tetherless connections to local and cloud compute, but there'll probably be some pretty rigid physical limitations there (line of sight, etc).

 

[manux]

Probably very wrong thread but here it goes: http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar-microsoft-hololens-way-behind

According to The Information, Magic Leap still has not been able to get the fiber scanning display to work. It has since demoted it to a long-term research project. “You ultimately in engineering have to make tradeoffs,” Abovitz said in the interview

 

[manux]

HTC seems to be investing into content

Vive Studios is a direct analogue to Oculus Studios, the internal Oculus game studio headed by Jason Rubin, although its scope is apparently broader. Oculus has a separate group (called Oculus Story Studio) for cinematic virtual reality, but Vive Studios is supposedly working in a very wide range of fields, including “games, education, cinematic, design, social, real estate, and sports.”

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/1...ios-virtual-reality-entertainment-arcade-saga

 

[xz321zx]

On top of all that, I'm still moderately concerned about just what the fallout is going to be once we start feeling the economic brakes from Moore's Law winding down. We can't really expect for the sort of mobile miniaturization and performance scaling that we've seen for the last couple decades to continue for the next couple, so things like all-in-one high-end VR/AR headsets aren't at all a foregone conclusion, and especially not at low cost. Wireless video transmission could allow for tetherless connections to local and cloud compute, but there'll probably be some pretty rigid physical limitations there (line of sight, etc).

Yeah maybe that could be the crux of the matter , or how VR-s recent revival got started: some people drawing catchy parallels with Moore's Law and active-matrix pixelated displays.
Well in reality ,shrinking CMOS or for that matter pixels have not much to do with near-eye displays these used to be non-pixelated to begin with , night-vision devices.
A camera viewfinder panel (used in Sony's earlier stuff) or a smartphone display ( used for FOV "outnerding" ) is not a near-eye display really.

Tend to think non-jittery picture/software would go a long way, instead of the catchy / cozy phrases, and false parallels.

 

[Arwin]

I think the situation is barely different from any other new platform launch. It takes a while before the install base is large enough for especially smaller titles and studios to be profitable. There is often a lot of money to be made by early titles anyway, but that is because they are on the market for a long time and over that period tend in to make pretty significant numbers eventually if they were notable at launch.

PSVR has an insane amount of titles out already. I had to pace myself buying stuff. PC VR is only just getting started.

The major difference here with platform launches is that there are developers who really wanted to do VR out of sheer passion and that there are more Indy developers in general bringing out titles at launch.

We should not kid ourselves though. PS4 is just now becoming a mass market commodity. It will take at least three years for VR to get a similar marketshare. The people I showed VR to were convinced they need this and as a result they are buying PS4s this Christmas, so that they can add a PSVR next Christmas.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

We should not kid ourselves though. PS4 is just now becoming a mass market commodity. It will take at least three years for VR to get a similar marketshare. The people I showed VR to were convinced they need this and as a result they are buying PS4s this Christmas, so that they can add a PSVR next Christmas.

Same happened with Kinect. Everyone bought one, software died up, device died. The the point the second iteration, new and improved, got no-where and ended up a stone around the console's neck. The assumption that VR Gen 2 will fix things is ignoring the fact that by Gen 2, VR will be dead if VR 1 isn't able to establish itself as a real market with longevity.

The question will be hoe much VR you and other PSVR owners engage in over the next months, and whether the experience has legs or not.

 

[Arwin]

Have you ever put on the thing?

 

[Karamazov]

VR star wars And porn will save VR.

 

[hughJ]

Short of some discovery that VR headsets are carcinogenic, a gen2 is pretty much a lock at this point from Oculus and Valve. Headset sales aren't significantly off from what was publicly bandied about by Iribe a year ago (the pre-order numbers would have given the platform holders are good ballpark estimate on what to expect in the coming couple years.) Every iteration of HMD we've had now since 2013 has been a huge leap from the one previous, and we're miles away from diminishing returns in any particular respect. The Vive is essentially a refined development kit, the Rift is only just now completing their hardware launch, both Oculus and Valve are still rolling out significant feature additions to their SDK, and now we're seeing the beginnings of a VR consortium under Khronos. This whole machine is just getting started.

 

[MrSpiggott]

Arwin is right, there is a qualitative difference to the experience that can't be put into words. Probably the closest we've come to is 'presence', but that doesn't begin to explain the emotional response felt.
It has to be experienced to be understood and that's the greatest danger to the product.

I've shown PSVR to half a dozen angry old skeptics, people who have tried the old Amiga or mobile phone based systems, and the response is always "Oh, now I understand."

It's ruined regular racing games for me. The next console might be a 100Tf monster, but on a TV screen, it won't be able to offer the quality of experience VR does.

I think the product will live or die on the ability of people to try it and not make their minds up from mobile phone experiences.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Have you ever put on the thing?

I think the product will live or die on the ability of people to try it and not make their minds up from mobile phone experiences.

Except we have people who have VR and have it sat around doing nothing now because there's nothing to do once they've had their experiences. It could be the most amazing experience ever when first put on, but that doesn't mean people will make it a common feature of their daily lives. That's unpredictable. If the headsets were cheaper and comfortable and futuristic, I could see VR doing a lot better. In this birthing phase though, it has incomparable wow factor and then a lot of nothing but promise, it seems. That's early days for PSVR I guess, but if there's no content then there's no reason to buy the thing, no matter how much potential it has.

I've been a huge advocate of novel tech ideas over the past couple of decades, and they've all failed. We are still sat in front of TVs playing controller-based games. Why? Because at the end of the day that's what people actually want. There are very few technologies that actually become a part of the cultural norm. It is very far from being a given that VR is one of them, and at this point it's on the same sort of flaky ground as 3D was.

 

[Arwin]

Ok, but you still haven't tried it, right? Don't become like this ...

Anyway, Pinball FX2 aka Zen PInball 2 is on VR right now, and I've been playing it a lot this morning. Really loving it, especially the CastleStorm table looks amazing, with new lighting effects looking really great. And even the old tables they picked in the classics pack, that don't look quite as great and there are some aliassing issues still, it almost blows you away how different it is to see the table like this.

I've uploaded 15 mins of gameplay of the CastleStorm table here (still processing):

How different it is when you have this on VR is staggering. The table is just there before you. You can lean over. The only thing this video conveys really is how your head moves in VR to look at the table.

I keep playing some of the other games too, though time has been tight.

I am by the way not like you. I did not believe in the first Kinect and was very skeptic of the second. I recognised the power of the Wii, but never bought one because the experiences were too shallow and I noticed that right away. Only Move and 3D tv worked for me, but 3D tv was too laggy.

 

[Globalisateur]

No enough VR software? And whose fault is it?

That's your job Shifty. Where is Adventures VR ?

 

[Rodéric]

There's a wow factor when using VR, but setup is long [you have to resetup it each time someone else uses it, unlike a pad or mouse], screen are too low DPI, image quality is lower because it needs to achieve 3x higher framerate, device is very expensive, bulky and limited by a cord (that's being improved with wireless version), and it's a limited experience anyway, either sitting (so cars, and what not in which the character is sitting, Mechwarrior would do fine), or room scale VR if you have enough room to do it, but then you need to teleport from one stage to another.
VR how-to interactions haven't been written yet either, so everyone's in the dark regarding that.
There's potential but no killer app yet, and AR is leaps and bounds more interesting (since it would enhance daily life everywhere, at any time.)...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Ok, but you still haven't tried it, right? Don't become like this ...

Not yet, but at the same time I've been very vocal that people have to use VR to appreciate what a game changer it is. I acknowledge it's an epic experience. What I question now is if it'll ever get off the ground, like many other techs and ideas.

Is this round of VR like the Apple Newton rather than the iPad? Is it DAT and 3DTV rather than CD and radio? Is it DualShock or Move?

There's a wow factor when using VR, but setup is long [you have to resetup it each time someone else uses it, unlike a pad or mouse], screen are too low DPI,...

Yep. It's possibly like a board game you buy and love and only play twice because it's too long and time consuming and when you have some free time you'd rather just veg in front of the TV or play some shallow download console game that's nothing like as good as the board game but at least it's immediate. And your friends love that board game too, but aren't going to spend $50 on it knowing they'll only play it a couple of times. There's an investment for effective VR beyond just the notably monetary investment, and it needs amazing software to justify that which still isn't on the cards and can't be relied upon.

 

[Arwin]

By the way, I think few platforms had this good a software launch, if any.

Also, I think you have to be a skeptic of a special sort that doesn't see this as the first viable step in this next phase of gaming evolution. You can discuss whether this will fail in this generation, you can discuss the speed at which this is going to happen (hard to predict). But hardware and resolution will scale up, weight will go down and interfacing with the world continue to improve.

Having said that, I think the Pro in particular seems to be capable enough as it stands. Something like Playroom VR is sharp enough now and running at native 120fps as well, and it's great fun too. The weakest games today graphically just do not support the VR rendering optimisations yet. Typical early generation, and personally I can barely believe this thing just came out.

Oh and PSVR usability is pretty much flawless. Takes about a minute the very first time for people who never used it to explain how to put it on and adjust it so you see things sharply, and then it's on and off within 10 seconds. Not a single issue with that, had people drawing in 3D who never even played a modern videogame in no-time.

 

[BRiT]

By the way, I think few platforms had this good a software launch, if any.

The Wii and Kinect both had as good a software platform launch as PSVR.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

My guess is there are two opinions from two kinds of people in this thread:

1 - The ones who tried PSVR and are aware of its current and upcoming portfolio

2 - The others.