Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

[Deleted member 13524]

Yeah...

According to the press team, the price will stay under EUR 1.000.

Good riddance then.


This reminds me of all the Steam Machines hype where people were expecting to get great bang-for-the-buck but ended up with terrible performance/price ratios, mediocre hardware and no Windows (where all the games are).

 

[hughJ]

1000 EUR??? I should certainly hope it's well under that. I don't see many people going for it if it's more than half that price. I hope that's not an omen of Oculus pricing.

Palmer said something to the effect of it being a bit higher than $350: "You know, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. We’re roughly in that [$350] ballpark… but it’s going to cost more than that.", so I'm guessing $399. HTC on the other hand conceivably could be walking into this with the mindset where you charge as much as supply/demand will allow you to. For a company that's on shaky financial legs and no long term stake in this medium (patent-wise) it would seem incredibly strange from a business standpoint to sell a device for less than what the market will bear. Used DK2s on Ebay right now are going for more than double their original list price, so it's not hard to imagine those first couple months of limited shiny new Vive shipments going for absurd prices.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I got the opportunity to try out a DK2 earlier. It was a home grown demo so nothing fancy but my main impression was that the screen door effect was much more pronounced than I was expecting. It was very obvious. I hope thats solved in the later versions. Also there was a gap at the bottom of the headset that was a little distracting. Head tracking was also really juddery but I'm assuming that was a fault with the unit or the demo so I'm ignoring that in my impression.

 

[eastmen]

I got the opportunity to try out a DK2 earlier. It was a home grown demo so nothing fancy but my main impression was that the screen door effect was much more pronounced than I was expecting. It was very obvious. I hope thats solved in the later versions. Also there was a gap at the bottom of the headset that was a little distracting. Head tracking was also really juddery but I'm assuming that was a fault with the unit or the demo so I'm ignoring that in my impression.

Crystal Cove is a lot better for screen door. The final kit should be much better too

DK2 uses a note 3 screen 1080x1920 / 2 = 1080x960 per eye.

CV1 is 1200x1080 per eye so a nice resolution bump making the pixels closer together along with the fact that its two screens vs one and while we don't know what screen tech its using. If it is using pentile still they have made several improvements over the pentile used in the note 3. So that will hopefully help with screen door if they stay pentile

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Sams...crets-of-the-brightest-AMOLED-display_id54772

 

[tabs]

By all accounts I've read so far of people who've tried the CV1, its screen door effect is barely noticeable unless you hold very still. Then you see a faint grey line as opposed to the obvious black line you see in the DK2.

 

[hughJ]

Crystal Cove is a lot better for screen door

Crescent Bay

Whatever difference there is between DK2 and CB/CV1 will probably be more from an added diffuser rather than the panel res itself. Reminds me of shortly after the DK1 launch people were looking for ways to combat screendoor and subpixel visibility by whatever means possible: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=17927 Managed to get Elite Dangerous working through SteamVR last night, so I might be tempted to pull apart the DK2 and experiment with some grocery bags during its last couple months of life.

 

[eastmen]

lol to many code names !

I tried the CB a year ago now or close too it. It was a huge step up from the DK2 so I'm sure the final kits will be better still. I don't think they will be using a repurposed phone screen . They were using 5.7 inch screens in the DK2 so the new screens would be under 3 inchs. I don't think Samsung has a phone that size right now.

As for your trick , apparently 3m has some type of filter people were using to great results. It was on the official boards when the dk2 first hit.

 

[eastmen]

valve just delayed the vive to april. I bet Oculus is dancing in the office right now. It gives them more time to refine and plan.

At this point they may push back also to get touch into the package.

 

[hughJ]

I'd be shocked if anything that HTC/Valve is doing (or not doing, in this case) is having any meaningful impact on Oculus's schedule or SKU. Unlike HTC/Valve, they've got real developer partnerships that they're responsible to and delaying the launch further for no real reason just wouldn't make any sense, and neither would radically altering their SKU pricing to include "devkit" motion controllers and an extra camera that none of their partners' launch titles will use. Oculus is probably already far along in the process of manufacturing the HMDs so they can build sufficient stock prior to the Chinese New Year, and anything to do with Touch is probably on the back burner until after they've got a successful launch under their belts.

The better question is what exactly is going on at HTC such that a 3-4 month delay would be dropped on developers on the same day they made a public blog announcement, lol. It just makes that entire operation come across as half-baked. With Sony piling on the title announcements and Oculus having at least a few big IPs attached, HTC is more and more looking like they're bringing a peripheral to a platform fight. For a company that's financially on the ropes it can't be a good feeling to see you're being drawn into a market battle that's likely going to carry high cost and low returns for the next couple years.

 

[eastmen]

Oculus has announced Lucky's tale as a pack in

Also Eve Valkrye is part of the bundle.

With these games announced as pack ins (and rumored another 2 to come) I think the price is going to be higher than I thought. $500 is most likely what I think it will be now.

 

[Arwin]

Oculus always made a big deal of keeping the price low, so I do think $500 would be the absolute upper ceiling for that to make any sense.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Sweet, the more (good) bundled games the better. It gives it more of a console experience that people can just pick up and play. My wifes pretty dubious about VR but she likes platformers like this and I'm certain she'll be swayed when she gives it a go,

 

[pjbliverpool]

So SMI claims to have solved the problem of foveated rendering and is already working with PC vendors on "successor projects" with the expectation that second generation headsets will feature this technology (original credit for the link goes to @Diehard in the PSVR thread).

http://uploadvr.com/smi-eye-tracking-foveated-rendering-exclusive/

With resolution increases of 2-4x achievable right now and "much higher" with more effort, as well as, according to Palmer Luckey the ability to help create a true sense of depth, to create better user interfaces, or even to enable much more engaging social interaction in virtual spaces, then it looks like second generation headsets are going make first gen sets look as obsolete as a 1280x1014 CRT vs a modern 4K curved IPS.

I'm still going to be picking up a first gen set on day 1 but I hope they won't be too expensive given how utterly obsolete they are likely to be when the second gen hits. Assuming the "much higher" estimate is in the 8x or more region then that actually means we could be able to achieve much better graphics in a fully 3D VR space than we can on regular 2D monitors. Or in other words, since PC graphics tech will be several generations beyond Volta by that point, the next gen VR headsets could be bringing us more or less completely photorealistic graphics.

 

[eastmen]

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/oculus-rift-pre-orders-to-open-on-jan-6/

Preorders start on the 6th at 8am pst

 

[cheapchips]

So SMI claims to have solved the problem of foveated rendering and is already working with PC vendors on "successor projects" with the expectation that second generation headsets will feature this technology (original credit for the link goes to @Diehard in the PSVR thread).

http://uploadvr.com/smi-eye-tracking-foveated-rendering-exclusive/

With resolution increases of 2-4x achievable right now and "much higher" with more effort, as well as, according to Palmer Luckey the ability to help create a true sense of depth, to create better user interfaces, or even to enable much more engaging social interaction in virtual spaces, then it looks like second generation headsets are going make first gen sets look as obsolete as a 1280x1014 CRT vs a modern 4K curved IPS.

I'm still going to be picking up a first gen set on day 1 but I hope they won't be too expensive given how utterly obsolete they are likely to be when the second gen hits. Assuming the "much higher" estimate is in the 8x or more region then that actually means we could be able to achieve much better graphics in a fully 3D VR space than we can on regular 2D monitors. Or in other words, since PC graphics tech will be several generations beyond Volta by that point, the next gen VR headsets could be bringing us more or less completely photorealistic graphics.

Interesting. I wasn't expecting foveated rendering to become viable so quickly, assuming their tracking and pipeline really does work as advertised.

 

[iroboto]

Just got the Oculus Rfit!!!!! [emoji7][emoji7][emoji7][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji7][emoji7][emoji8][emoji7][emoji7][emoji7][emoji28]
I was original kick starter backer 93 and as a gift they are sending me the final rift set!! Just received my email today took me 20 re-reads to understand what just happened.

 

[London Geezer]

We expect full details when you receive it

 

[pjbliverpool]

Just got the Oculus Rfit!!!!! [emoji7][emoji7][emoji7][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji8][emoji7][emoji7][emoji8][emoji7][emoji7][emoji7][emoji28]
I was original kick starter backer 93 and as a gift they are sending me the final rift set!! Just received my email today took me 20 re-reads to understand what just happened.

You lucky b*stard! What system are you running it on?

 

[iroboto]

You lucky b*stard! What system are you running it on?

lol today it is a PhenomII X4 4gb of DDR2 with a geforce 660
By tomorrow it should be a i5 6600 with 8GB DDR4 with a geforce 660. Still waiting on more news on pascal before I buy my next GPU.

 

[pjbliverpool]

lol today it is a PhenomII X4 4gb of DDR2 with a geforce 660
By tomorrow it should be a i5 6600 with 8GB DDR4 with a geforce 660. Still waiting on more news on pascal before I buy my next GPU.

Cool, It'll be interesting to know what kind of experience you get with that. I'm in the same boat waiting for Pascal with a 670 which isn't massively faster than your GPU (by modern standards anyway).