Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality
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Seems like a good solution from MS research (logical solution, though will increase the price and computing requirements)
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...lp-fix-vrs-tunnel-vision-and-nausea-problems/
though better would just be a curved screen and a projector
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...lp-fix-vrs-tunnel-vision-and-nausea-problems/
though better would just be a curved screen and a projector
Been more than a few ambilight-style proposals for VR since the kickstarter got traction, but surprisingly few implementations of it.
I'm guessing that the FOV of current HMDs is still low enough (and has been getting lower with each iteration) that the drawbacks and complexity probably outweigh the benefits. With the current HMDs you also have the risk of adding further reflections and artifacts by illuminating the face and forward surface of the lens. Maybe in a few months after the new-HMD smell has worn off we'll see more people willing to put their new toys under the modding knife to test this stuff out.
I'm guessing that the FOV of current HMDs is still low enough (and has been getting lower with each iteration) that the drawbacks and complexity probably outweigh the benefits. With the current HMDs you also have the risk of adding further reflections and artifacts by illuminating the face and forward surface of the lens. Maybe in a few months after the new-HMD smell has worn off we'll see more people willing to put their new toys under the modding knife to test this stuff out.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Nice that it appears to be taking advantage of some of the Microsoft research that also went into Room Alive. VR would seem to be an almost ideal usage of that. Since, as noted, peripheral vision doesn't require nearly the visual fidelity nor accuracy of something directly in the eye's focal area. It's still just a Band-Aid, however, since a person naturally glacing over without moving their head will ruin the illusion. Until 180+ degree FOVs with or without foveated rendering become a thing, you still won't be able to get anything remotely resembling what the human vision system is used to seeing in real life.
Regards,
SB
Maybe we should have a news thread for vr news... but here goes for the current king, long live gearvr
http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/11/million-gear-vr-users/
http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/11/million-gear-vr-users/
So today I got an interesting email from oculus. My canceled rift shipped. It will be here Wed right in time for me to go to Disney.
oh and also another rift is coming to my house . So now I have two rifts it looks like . Best part is I have 2 tracking numbers and they both already departed the shipping center however no money was deducted from my credit card .
So did I just get two free rifts ?
oh and also another rift is coming to my house . So now I have two rifts it looks like . Best part is I have 2 tracking numbers and they both already departed the shipping center however no money was deducted from my credit card .
So did I just get two free rifts ?
*cancelling rift order now...
lol yea . I had multiple orders for some reason at the start of my adventure and have a few new ones now.
So what's happened with your multiple Rifts? It looks as though the Vive will be in my hands within the hour, so tonight is going to be interesting.
well i'm off to Disney tomorrow and one rift is coming tomorrow and one is coming Friday. I'm hoping my brother in law can be there to pick both up and sign
So after a couple days living with the Vive and a near-ideal room scale VR setup (about 17ft between sensor corners), there's a few interesting takeaways from it.
1) Granted I'm not a kid anymore and may not have the greatest physical fitness, but standing+walking room scale VR is tiring for multiple hours of use. Sore feet, knees, back, etc.
2) Even with a large, completely unfurnished room, you can never really allow yourself to forget where you are, where your cable tether and computer are, how low your ceiling is, where light fixtures are, etc.
3) After having my friend use it for an hour session I had to take apart the strap assembly and foam face gasket to dry them out. Obviously this experience is going to vary from person to person (I tend not to sweat), but I suspect that it's something that will have to factor into HMD design going forward. Being handed a sweaty console gamepad is easily dealt with by wiping it, but there's nothing you can do quickly/easily for cloth and foam that's wet.
4) The fitting/wearing of the HMD feels unrefined, it's more or less the same experience as DK1/DK2 in this respect. The nature of room scale content makes this HMD the most likely of any device to be used in a physically active manner, but for it to be secure and stable on the head pretty much means cinching it tightly against the face.
5) The tracking is impressively robust - enough that I never have to think about where the base stations are relative to the devices or my body. There is no perceivable sweet spot or desired orientation within the volume that I feel the need to maintain in order to get an ideal experience. With the Rift DK2 and CV1 there's an unshakable sense that the extremities of the camera frustum are always within arm's reach, and even if you're perfectly centered you can't really turn away from the camera without being introduced to some subtle shifting/shimmying of position.
I haven't done any true apples/apples comparisons between the Rift-CV1 and Vive for seated-style content. I think seated, near-field content tends to be a lot less forgiving when it comes to perceiving the limits of precision with current positional tracking. It's one thing when your head and body is constantly undergoing coarse motion on the order of inches and feet (as you are when you're standing and walking), but when you're sitting perfectly still with your upper body planted against a chair even millimeters of undesired movement of the world tends to stand out.
1) Granted I'm not a kid anymore and may not have the greatest physical fitness, but standing+walking room scale VR is tiring for multiple hours of use. Sore feet, knees, back, etc.
2) Even with a large, completely unfurnished room, you can never really allow yourself to forget where you are, where your cable tether and computer are, how low your ceiling is, where light fixtures are, etc.
3) After having my friend use it for an hour session I had to take apart the strap assembly and foam face gasket to dry them out. Obviously this experience is going to vary from person to person (I tend not to sweat), but I suspect that it's something that will have to factor into HMD design going forward. Being handed a sweaty console gamepad is easily dealt with by wiping it, but there's nothing you can do quickly/easily for cloth and foam that's wet.
4) The fitting/wearing of the HMD feels unrefined, it's more or less the same experience as DK1/DK2 in this respect. The nature of room scale content makes this HMD the most likely of any device to be used in a physically active manner, but for it to be secure and stable on the head pretty much means cinching it tightly against the face.
5) The tracking is impressively robust - enough that I never have to think about where the base stations are relative to the devices or my body. There is no perceivable sweet spot or desired orientation within the volume that I feel the need to maintain in order to get an ideal experience. With the Rift DK2 and CV1 there's an unshakable sense that the extremities of the camera frustum are always within arm's reach, and even if you're perfectly centered you can't really turn away from the camera without being introduced to some subtle shifting/shimmying of position.
I haven't done any true apples/apples comparisons between the Rift-CV1 and Vive for seated-style content. I think seated, near-field content tends to be a lot less forgiving when it comes to perceiving the limits of precision with current positional tracking. It's one thing when your head and body is constantly undergoing coarse motion on the order of inches and feet (as you are when you're standing and walking), but when you're sitting perfectly still with your upper body planted against a chair even millimeters of undesired movement of the world tends to stand out.
Thanks for the impressions, I look forward to additional insights! Number 3 is an interesting one, sounds like Sony may have already thought ahead in that regard given their focus on MP. I don;t see it as a big deal for me personally though as I don't envisage a lot of sharing of the headset other than with the wife.
Other odds and ends:
1) Both consumer Rift and Vive eye-lens relief are much improved over DK1/DK2, but I would still recommend contacts or roughing it without glasses if your eyesight is not that bad.
With DK1/DK2 you were encouraged to get your eyeballs as close as possible to the lenses to maximize FOV (to the degree that I trimmed my eyelashes so they wouldn't brush the lenses), which meant that wearing glasses was out of the question, and you were constantly having to clean the lenses of smudges from coming into contact with your skin. With the Rift and Vive I've yet to have to clean the lenses at all after almost a month (this is probably one of the most important ergonomic and usability improvements coming from the devkits), and there appears to be a healthy enough amount of relief to fit eye glasses in both
But as has been mentioned elsewhere, the Rift does not have the width in the facial gasket to accommodate the arms of your average pair of glasses (especially if you have the trendy thick black plastic kind). The Vive in this case does have the width to handle glasses comfortably, but I still don't feel 100% comfortable using glasses inside the Vive because you're risking having your glasses coming into contact with the lenses and potentially scratching them, and you do have to sacrifice some FOV by adjusting the eye-lens relief further away from the face. Without glasses on I'm able to wear the Vive at the minimum eye-lens relief setting with no risk of eyelid or forehead smudge. The Rift does not have any adjustment in this regard.
2) The Rift's lenses seem to me to have greater clarity across the full area of the lenses than the Vive, but the Vive is still much better than the DK1/DK2. The fresnel ridges on the Vive seem less offensive, likely because the artifacts are much more structured looking while the Rift's look like a blur that you would normally associate with smudged lenses. Also good to note that most of the Rift loading screens seem to use white text/logos on black backgrounds, which is pretty much the worst case for showcasing the scattering and probably makes public opinion on this worse than it is.
3) Last week I tried the vrgirlz/veiviev 3D photo-sourced models on the Rift. It's surprising how difficult it is to establish scale and eye-to-floor height simply by eyeballing reference points and adjusting the virtual camera to the appropriate standing height. Even juggling the HMD on/off to compare the virtual floor and the real one is weirdly ambiguous in whether they appear to be the same height to even within a foot of accuracy. This may not seem like a big deal, but your proprioception does all sorts of weird shit to try and make sense of what it's seeing and feeling. If you sit down in a chair in VR with your feet touching the ground and are facing a human-sized model at eye level (as would be the case with any traditional FPS in seated VR), your brain fights to establish the floor distance that you feel on the soles of your feet as being the same as the virtual one that should be below your feet. What this ends up doing is giving you very fuzzy signals about scales of objects and distances that you see.
With the Vive however part of the room setup involves calibrating where the floor is. You set your controllers on the floor, it establishes the height of the plane and that's that. Also the Vive controllers and base stations are modeled 1:1 in the environment, so you've got a few different supporting points of reference that establish and maintain scale and distance. You can take your controller and tap it against the floor and see+feel it hitting the floor. You can take the two controllers and touch them together and see+hear+feel the plastic contacting each other at the same moment (you have to do this very gently though because you're at the mercy of IMU and prediction - sharp acceleration/deceleration from tapping/banging causes tracking to overshoot by a few millimeters and you can see the controllers clip through each other before they get corrected.) It sounds pretty mundane, but this might be the most impressive thing you can do in VR right now - I struggle to think of anything comparable where a collection of vertex data and texture maps manages to trigger "plastic" in a real way in my brain.
4) For me the jury is still out on just what sort of future room scale VR has in terms of game design. While it's nice to have the flexibility to know you have 3-4 full strides of movement in any direction, the content that tends to involve any sort of locomotion through larger environments (whether it be teleportation mechanics or other trickery) you quickly become accustomed to using those mechanics to move rather than moving your legs. While that bodes well for folks with less space available, the lack of uninterrupted locomotion through an environment does reduce your sense of being in a real space. Even playing something like Quake or Minecraft on a monitor will give you a distinct sense of moving through a space, but a lot of that gets lost in VR using teleportion ("Is the room I'm standing in now 10ft from where I started or 100ft?"). Definitely an area that needs more research.
I managed to break a sweat last night shooting arrows at stick men (one of The Lab demos). Feeling the haptics while drawing the arrow back is quite pleasing, and learning the trajectory and drawing distance of the bow and arrow is very satisfying. An unexpected aspect to this is how my posture seems to impact how I feel playing - there's something cheesily heroic feeling by striking a pose with an arched back and a strong, proper fully-drawn bow stance. While the game itself is probably too short and cartoony to get any real mileage from that, I could imagine a sword and sorcery, medieval combat, Zelda/ElderScrolls type game being quite powerful.
Thought this was a cute story: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgYOh5oofY&feature=youtu.be&t=1h35m50s
1) Both consumer Rift and Vive eye-lens relief are much improved over DK1/DK2, but I would still recommend contacts or roughing it without glasses if your eyesight is not that bad.
With DK1/DK2 you were encouraged to get your eyeballs as close as possible to the lenses to maximize FOV (to the degree that I trimmed my eyelashes so they wouldn't brush the lenses), which meant that wearing glasses was out of the question, and you were constantly having to clean the lenses of smudges from coming into contact with your skin. With the Rift and Vive I've yet to have to clean the lenses at all after almost a month (this is probably one of the most important ergonomic and usability improvements coming from the devkits), and there appears to be a healthy enough amount of relief to fit eye glasses in both
But as has been mentioned elsewhere, the Rift does not have the width in the facial gasket to accommodate the arms of your average pair of glasses (especially if you have the trendy thick black plastic kind). The Vive in this case does have the width to handle glasses comfortably, but I still don't feel 100% comfortable using glasses inside the Vive because you're risking having your glasses coming into contact with the lenses and potentially scratching them, and you do have to sacrifice some FOV by adjusting the eye-lens relief further away from the face. Without glasses on I'm able to wear the Vive at the minimum eye-lens relief setting with no risk of eyelid or forehead smudge. The Rift does not have any adjustment in this regard.
2) The Rift's lenses seem to me to have greater clarity across the full area of the lenses than the Vive, but the Vive is still much better than the DK1/DK2. The fresnel ridges on the Vive seem less offensive, likely because the artifacts are much more structured looking while the Rift's look like a blur that you would normally associate with smudged lenses. Also good to note that most of the Rift loading screens seem to use white text/logos on black backgrounds, which is pretty much the worst case for showcasing the scattering and probably makes public opinion on this worse than it is.
3) Last week I tried the vrgirlz/veiviev 3D photo-sourced models on the Rift. It's surprising how difficult it is to establish scale and eye-to-floor height simply by eyeballing reference points and adjusting the virtual camera to the appropriate standing height. Even juggling the HMD on/off to compare the virtual floor and the real one is weirdly ambiguous in whether they appear to be the same height to even within a foot of accuracy. This may not seem like a big deal, but your proprioception does all sorts of weird shit to try and make sense of what it's seeing and feeling. If you sit down in a chair in VR with your feet touching the ground and are facing a human-sized model at eye level (as would be the case with any traditional FPS in seated VR), your brain fights to establish the floor distance that you feel on the soles of your feet as being the same as the virtual one that should be below your feet. What this ends up doing is giving you very fuzzy signals about scales of objects and distances that you see.
With the Vive however part of the room setup involves calibrating where the floor is. You set your controllers on the floor, it establishes the height of the plane and that's that. Also the Vive controllers and base stations are modeled 1:1 in the environment, so you've got a few different supporting points of reference that establish and maintain scale and distance. You can take your controller and tap it against the floor and see+feel it hitting the floor. You can take the two controllers and touch them together and see+hear+feel the plastic contacting each other at the same moment (you have to do this very gently though because you're at the mercy of IMU and prediction - sharp acceleration/deceleration from tapping/banging causes tracking to overshoot by a few millimeters and you can see the controllers clip through each other before they get corrected.) It sounds pretty mundane, but this might be the most impressive thing you can do in VR right now - I struggle to think of anything comparable where a collection of vertex data and texture maps manages to trigger "plastic" in a real way in my brain.
4) For me the jury is still out on just what sort of future room scale VR has in terms of game design. While it's nice to have the flexibility to know you have 3-4 full strides of movement in any direction, the content that tends to involve any sort of locomotion through larger environments (whether it be teleportation mechanics or other trickery) you quickly become accustomed to using those mechanics to move rather than moving your legs. While that bodes well for folks with less space available, the lack of uninterrupted locomotion through an environment does reduce your sense of being in a real space. Even playing something like Quake or Minecraft on a monitor will give you a distinct sense of moving through a space, but a lot of that gets lost in VR using teleportion ("Is the room I'm standing in now 10ft from where I started or 100ft?"). Definitely an area that needs more research.
I managed to break a sweat last night shooting arrows at stick men (one of The Lab demos). Feeling the haptics while drawing the arrow back is quite pleasing, and learning the trajectory and drawing distance of the bow and arrow is very satisfying. An unexpected aspect to this is how my posture seems to impact how I feel playing - there's something cheesily heroic feeling by striking a pose with an arched back and a strong, proper fully-drawn bow stance. While the game itself is probably too short and cartoony to get any real mileage from that, I could imagine a sword and sorcery, medieval combat, Zelda/ElderScrolls type game being quite powerful.
Thought this was a cute story: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgYOh5oofY&feature=youtu.be&t=1h35m50s
This happened sooner than what I thought it would... Ikea vr kitchen is here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/447270/
That ikea vr experience is amazing even on oculus where some of the things don't translate well due to missing touch controller and room scale. The fresh garlics hanging on the wall look crazy realistic.
That ikea vr experience is amazing even on oculus where some of the things don't translate well due to missing touch controller and room scale. The fresh garlics hanging on the wall look crazy realistic.
Facebonk doubles down on DRM; prevents facebonk-exclusive games from launching if a Vive is connected to host PC:
http://kotaku.com/oculus-kills-app-that-let-vive-owners-play-rift-exclusi-1778065956
Dick move, facebonk. But that company really doesn't have any other moves, so what else is new? As soon as they bought oculus we knew this shit was coming, along with the spyware in the driver and shit like that.
http://kotaku.com/oculus-kills-app-that-let-vive-owners-play-rift-exclusi-1778065956
Dick move, facebonk. But that company really doesn't have any other moves, so what else is new? As soon as they bought oculus we knew this shit was coming, along with the spyware in the driver and shit like that.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
You do realize that just by using a phone, companies gather more information from you than Oculus? Apps gather information from you. The OS gathers even more information from you. Even the carrier you use harvests information from you.
You also realize that just by browsing the internet many companies harvest far more information about you than Oculus? Hell, game launchers (UBIsoft, EA, Valve, etc.) harvest as much or more information from you than Oculus. Game consoles harvest more information about what you do than Oculus.
And most of the time it's just there in order to provide functionality that the user desires or likes as opposed to not having the capability of providing that functionality. IE - the functionality requires data from certain activities and inputs as well as sometimes needing access to larger databases available online that cannot be stored locally.
If you're going to be paranoid about what data is being used for Oculus. You're going to need to be paranoid about everything in the world that you come into contact with. Heck, just using a credit card when you go shopping gives every company (and their partners) that you shop at information about you. If you pay for something through Apple, Google, Paypal, your bank, etc. you're providing information about you and your spending habits to them.
Have you ever participated in a sweepstake online or in real life in order to have a chance to win something for free? Yup, you just got your information harvested and also given them the right to share whatever information they got from you (address, phone number, email address, name, etc.) with whomever they wish.
Regards,
SB
Please continue the DataMining topic discussion over here: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/oculus-rift-and-facebook-data-mining-spawn.57756/
Thanks!
Thanks!
Surprisingly frisky market and production in china:
http://www.roadtovr.com/chinese-vr-...mounted-displays-shenzhen/?platform=hootsuite
http://www.roadtovr.com/chinese-vr-...mounted-displays-shenzhen/?platform=hootsuite
