Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality


And then there's this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/com...nd_cv1_many_many_times_over/d1i2aah?context=3

RoadtoVR_Ben said:
Actual FoV on CV1 may very well may be larger than Actual FoV on DK2. The on-paper FoV is only as good as the way the lenses are arrange to take maximum advantage of the way your eyes actually see. Based on the shape of the CV1 lenses (not entirely circular), my suspicion is that they are better optimized to show as much of the available FoV as possible. I'll be asking Oculus more about this next time there's a chance.
 
That's an actual picture taken, not "on-paper FoV". Whatever lens hocus-pocus is that the guy is talking about, it should be appearing in the picture, no?

A picture doesn't reflect how close the lens it to your eye, or how well it works with your eye's fov from that distance. There have been many hands on reports, have any of them mentioned a smaller perceivable fov than either DK2 or Vive?
 
That's an actual picture taken, not "on-paper FoV". Whatever lens hocus-pocus is that the guy is talking about, it should be appearing in the picture, no?
Ben from RoadtoVR does know what he's talking about. They're been covering VR in good depth for years (their OR review is by far the most comprehensive)
 
So preorder people are reporting they have gotten their card charged. I'm a 29 ordered 21 minutes after the hour. They are processing 22-25s ordered up to 7 minutes after the hour. We will see what happens but at this point I may have a vive before my rift
 

Interesting, so I guess the black tape claims were untrue afterall....

rift and oculus both have 2 1080*1920 diamond pentile cellphone screens which were never designed for low persistence 90hz refresh rates (they leave ghosting artefacts in high contrast situations)

1/3rd of each display is literally covered in black tape; thus the vertical resolution is only 1200 instead of 1920

Sorry if I was not clear (I didn't understand it either) with OLED production, screens are 'cut' from a bigger 'substrate' this substrate was also used to cut the S4 screens out of, which is why the physical characteristics are exactly the same.

Except of course that the PPI is different.
 
I wonder how that affects perceived fov

I think the big unknown here is the fact that Brandon took those photos with zero relief between the camera and HMD lens in an attempt to provide an apples to apples comparison. The problem is that this is not representative of the eye position in regular use as the Rift has fixed eye relief without any in/out screen+lens assembly adjustment. Also when you throw in the fact that the Vive still has the ability to make that adjustment, it's entirely possible that most public demos of the Vive have the lens relief dialed up in order to more easily accommodate shuffling people in and out, people wearing glasses, etc. You get the usual inverse square drop off in FOV area as you pull away from the screen, so it's pretty understandable why we hear very different assessments from different sources as to how the FOVs compare in practice. I suspect that for folks willing to crank the eye relief way down until the point where your eye lashes almost touch the lenses (this is the case for me with DK1 and DK2), that the consumer Rift's FOV will be noticeably smaller than the Vive.

edit: And not that any of this really matters in the grand scheme of things because I think the most relevant aspects of this generation of VR will be content (lack there of), and hardware characteristics (the very low resolution/ppd) that can make or break certain content . Having the HMDs with slightly different visual characteristics (fov, subpixel type, lens artifacts, etc) is little more than fodder for internet arguments.
 
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Lots of good intentioned testers will make the mistake of assuming the distance from the front element of a camera is equivalent to the eye distance. The nodal point of the lens system must be known to place it correctly. It can even be a large enough negative value making the test impossible.
 
The Fresnel element was known for quite a while. Hybrid is a fancy word to say one side is flat fresnel, and the other side is spheric or aspheric. The goal, the sum of the two surfaces, should logically be acromat. In short, I guess they get an acromat doublet performance from a single element. An expensive single element where the advantage is the low weight. That's what nikon and canon did with their compact fresnel lenses, for example. (but they call it something like diffractive magical thing(tm), or hybrid thingie(tm), because fresnel is a bad word in optics)
 

Pretty interesting. From one of the first streamers of VR back when Occulus' Kickstarter kits first went out. He actually got his before the Kickstarters got theirs for promotional purposes. This time he's using the HTC Vive.

Some things I noted. Motion sickness is a thing, at one point towards the end he had to pause as it appeared he was close to vomiting. I also got slightly queasy just watching it. Appears like it'll be very personal as to whether motion sickness will be a problem. Angry Joe with the Occulus Rift didn't have any problems even with games that Occulus listed as "Intense." But he didn't use it very much at the time he gave his first impressions (approx. 2 days + events).

Games in the future that want to use those touch controller for "shooty" type stuff are probably going to need a LOT of auto-aim assist. Trying to hit anything at range seemed to be hit or miss as to whether he could hit what he was trying to hit.

It has room scale implementation but it's pretty gimmicky and he basically just uses it like you were sitting except he's just standing.

Another video of his (Budget Cuts) seems to show more promise for mini (tiny) room scale as more than just a gimmick, maybe. He gets tangled up in the cords a time or two. Good thing the game doesn't have him physically moving other than basically rotating in place. Potential for tripping and bodily harm if he'd had to move. It also shows a slight bit of imprecision with the touch controllers (opening drawers he sometimes open 2 drawers at once as game can't determine which one he wants to open). Heh, at one point he jumps up and hits something in RL above him. Lesson to learn, make sure you have lots of empty space above you as well. If you have low ceilings be very careful or risk damaging your controllers with involuntary actions. :D

The HTC Vive touch controller seem to lose calibration at certain points during the game. Quick fix appears to be to pull up the Steam menu and then back to the game.

If I do eventually get into this. I'm definitely waiting until 2nd or 3rd generation devices. By then will have a better idea if this whole thing will fizzle out, remain a tiny niche market, or actually succeed. Any bugs with the motion/touch controls will hopefully be worked out by then as well.

Regards,
SB
 
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If I do eventually get into this. I'm definitely waiting until 2nd or 3rd generation devices. By then will have a better idea if this whole thing will fizzle out, remain a tiny niche market, or actually succeed. Any bugs with the motion/touch controls will hopefully be worked out by then as well.

Regards,
SB

I think second and third gen headsets are going to totally destroy what we have today thanks to eye tracking and foveated rendering amongst other obvious improvements. However there is absolutely no way I can bypass this first wave of headsets and wait another (at least) 2 years to start using VR no matter how much it's going to cost me now. While not perfect, they seem to be more than good enough for an awesome "out of this world" experience that has a huge amount of potential.
 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4crjxz/oculuss_services_are_always_on_and_you_should_be/

When you install Oculus Home a background service with full permissions is spun up and never spun down. This service is used to detect when the rift is turned on so it can automatically launch the rift, but it is also used to constantly communicate with facebook servers.
(...)
So considering Facebook used to allow messanger to passively listen to your conversations using your phone's mic so it could better target ads, this should be concerning.


Oops?
 
If Oculus is forced to hamstring the functionality of their platform to appease concerns brought about due to past actions of their parent company, then we're kind of at an impasse.

I would also expect that data collection during this first generation of VR is going to be more critical for both Oculus and Valve than making money from selling games, because we're talking about an entirely new platform when it comes to consumer usage habits. Collecting information for targeted ads doesn't make any sense when you're talking about a device that's maybe going to be used on a weekly basis by a hundred thousand people. What information is going to be invaluable though is figuring out what types content in VR people actually use, what keeps people coming back, how long people use it, because those are the sorts of currently unanswered questions that will help make projections for the marketplace 5-10 years from now.
 
If Oculus is forced to hamstring the functionality of their platform to appease concerns brought about due to past actions of their parent company, then we're kind of at an impasse.

So you're saying an always-on background service with full permissions that constantly communicates with facebook servers is a very important functionality for a VR headset?
 
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