Kinect and Oculus Rift

When you try T2 for the first time it may seem a little underwhelming. Basically it's just a big TV glued to your forehead, and - if you head does not fit Sony's ideea of what a head should be and where your eyes should be located, like it happened to me - you will have some trouble finding the sweet spot to see a full clear image. Wearing glasses didnt help me also, btw.

But it grows on you, and I knew it will, since I used an Olimpus Eyetrek for around 7 years.

A couple of weeks later I was able to find the sweet-spot in seconds, of course I use some straping and extra padding for a more comfortable wear. The only negative is that my overtheear headphones dont fit with this, so I have to use in-ear (through my DSS2 chip - the T2 can do 5.1 but not as good as the DSS2).

The resolution is full 720p, and when you hit the sweetspot you can actually see the pixels (not as much as with the Oculus Rift, but they are there).

It does not fill completely the field of vision, but it looks much bigger than me 50' plasma from 2 meters away (about 30-40% more on the diagonal).

But the quality of the image is better than anything I know of. The colors and levels of black are incredible, and - when watching 3D movies or playing 3D games - there are, of course, no artifacts, so it's the best way, so far, to enjoy 3D, there is nothing on the market right now that offers better 3D quality. Before purchasing I spent some time on AVForums on this matter and people there agree to this.

Again, this is not for everybody. It is simply too expensive, it costed me 900€ which was very hard to explain to the wife - for a device that only I can use and that takes me away from her when I use it.

However, it is a taste of things to come.

When they add some headtracking, improve the strappings (like in that surgical variant), add a little tuning for people with glasses, and make it 1080p, at half price - everybody will want one.

edit - it works with anything that has a HDMI output...

I believe the HMZ-T1 prototype had dioptre adjustment, which was dropped :cry:
if they left it in then I would be a proud owner right now..
 
Dioptre adjustment may seem like a good idea, but would probably suck for people with astigmatism who need different powers in different directions.
 
It is inevitable if the vendors roll out Gaikai like services.

It's also inevitable that those services will fail if people get motion sickness or bad experience due to lag. What I have understood from carmack's talks is that people are much more sensitive to lag on oculus type solutions than on traditional displays.

I wonder if h265 even has better compression than h264 when the encoder doesn't have frames from future to use for helping compression.It's typically much more difficult to compress realtime data where you cannot peak to next frame to help in evaluating motion. Ofcourse game engines could provide that future data as they have extra information about how objects move. But I doubt there is any company doing such compression using internal data structures from games.
 
Seems like this tread should be renamed Kinect vs Sony VR, as Sony will anounce their version of Oculus Rift in a week or two....
 
I thought I was immune to motion sickness with my T2 - but flying the planes in GTAV has proved to be a lesson in humility - it really turned my stomach upside down....
 
Via EG with Phil Harrison

EG: One disruptive technology that's emerged among the development community is virtual reality headset gaming. Oculus Rift is exciting many, but some doubt its mass market appeal. As someone in the business of making mass market gaming products, what's your take?

Phil Harrison: It's a really interesting discussion. Whether it's headsets or other consoles from other companies or other devices, being successful at scale requires more than just a cool piece of hardware. It requires a software support strategy to have first and third-party software. It requires a business model. It requires distribution. It requires a massive supply chain to build the thing and distribute it around the world, all of which takes significant financial resources.

I love some of these platform innovations that are coming along, and I'm always excited about them, but I don't know that every single one of them can be an at scale, global consumer product, a mass market consumer product, the kind of thing everybody on the street will know about, because of the factors I just listed.

This is why our industry is so exciting. It's this nexus of hardware, entertainment and technology all within this one space. That's why games is such an incredibly fun industry to be in, because there's always something new coming along. It keeps it fresh.
 
It had to happen
The Rift sex simulator. If you’re imagining some crude device where a, shall we say, “lady substitute” is attached to a mechanical arm and the user views porn through the Rift, you’re spot on. But if you’d for some reason like to leave less to your imagination you can watch the YouTube video. The video is technically work safe, but may kill whatever faith in humanity you have left. Consider yourself warned!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLXVinyXjgA
 
It had to happen
The Rift sex simulator. If you’re imagining some crude device where a, shall we say, “lady substitute” is attached to a mechanical arm and the user views porn through the Rift, you’re spot on. But if you’d for some reason like to leave less to your imagination you can watch the YouTube video. The video is technically work safe, but may kill whatever faith in humanity you have left. Consider yourself warned!

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/837/ukcf.jpg/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLXVinyXjgA
.... edited, no video whatsoever now.
 
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What happened to the Kinect thread? :eek:
I liked reading what people were thinking in the kinect thread, at least it was an eye opener about demographics. I think it was locked because some people were naughty. :LOL:

By the way, I didn't see the Kinect+Occulus demo, at least I didn't put the helmet on my head so I can't comment whether John Carmack is right or not about latency. I think we're in the middle of experimentations about VR and it will take some time for the dust to settle. (also some time for patents to expire).
 
There's no way to validate Carmack's comment about latency, and Occulus general anti-console position, with some shitty youtube videos and paid advertising about a 2 billion dollar transaction. I will hold my opinion until I have hard data.
 
There's no way to validate Carmack's comment about latency, and Occulus general anti-console position, with some shitty youtube videos and paid advertising about a 2 billion dollar transaction. I will hold my opinion until I have hard data.

I've read what Carmack has written/said since the days of Quake, and he doesn't bullshit. Indeed, he is quite restrained even with opinions. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, the person whose statements I trust the most in the industry. So I'd be inclined to believe what he says about latency. Other peoples interpretations of his statements however, are all over the place.

Whether Oculus has a "general anti-console position", I'd say that has to be in the eye of the beholder. I haven't interpreted it as such. Their direction so far seems fairly straightforward in terms of path to develop a product and making it available to developers, and eventually consumers.
 
I'm sure the feelings occulus has for the consoles comes from the console makers. Sony has its own vr and i'm sure that occulus had heard about it before we did . I'm sure even if not as advanced MS has something with vr going also.

So why be positive about platforms you wont get on anyway.
 
I'm sure the feelings occulus has for the consoles comes from the console makers.

Equally Palmer Luckey has said some dumb things.

IGN said:
Luckey points out there are already next-gen games running in 720p “so they can barely hit 60 in 2D.”

Sony has its own vr and i'm sure that occulus had heard about it before we did . I'm sure even if not as advanced MS has something with vr going also.
I'd say it's certain that both Microsoft and Sony have patents filed, if not granted, for VR-related tech so Occulus should have been aware of what is happening in the console space. Maybe they've even run up against them.
 
I'd say it's certain that both Microsoft and Sony have patents filed, if not granted, for VR-related tech so Occulus should have been aware of what is happening in the console space. Maybe they've even run up against them.
More likely, they ignored the patent situation because the Patent Office granted OVR patents for exactly the same tech.
 
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