It looked great until the bit at the end that said it was simulated and not actual gameplay footage. So basically nothing new to see here.
Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality
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It looked great until the bit at the end that said it was simulated and not actual gameplay footage. So basically nothing new to see here.
$200 seems like a small amount of money when you consider that if the games are priced anything like the previous Oculus launch content then we're likely going to see a lot of $50 games that have a few hours of gameplay, and you'll need to buy them in order to get a full taste of what the controllers have to offer. The nice thing about SteamVR/Vive's plenty of assorted free demos, early access and shovelware is that you can get a pretty well rounded taste of room-scale and motion controllers without having to buy a couple hundred dollars worth of content that you might only play once.
yes but it brings the price up to $800 which is what htc vive is and htc vive has had room scale and touch like controllers since launch.
That's why I believe oculus is being quiet. Who would buy the rift knowing it will cost them that much and they have to wait 4 months for it when they can just get the vive in 3 days
As soon as the Rift and Vive prices were announced it was pretty clear that they both were going to come out to be roughly the same price. Oculus is definitely behind the eightball here, but there's really nothing they can do quickly/easily to change the general trajectory of hardware sales.
The reason to buy the Rift over the Vive hasn't changed all that much: if you don't have a lot of space for room-scale, and/or if you assume that room-scale will never be viable as a market, and/or if you assume that for the life cycle of this generation of HMDs we won't have a self-feeding ecosystem of quality content and the value of the systems will then be dictated by how much money the platform holders are willing to throw at their respective systems.
The reason to buy the Rift over the Vive hasn't changed all that much: if you don't have a lot of space for room-scale, and/or if you assume that room-scale will never be viable as a market, and/or if you assume that for the life cycle of this generation of HMDs we won't have a self-feeding ecosystem of quality content and the value of the systems will then be dictated by how much money the platform holders are willing to throw at their respective systems.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Or if you live somewhere that the Vive laser emitters might get shaken from time to time, the Rift might be the better choice. Like where I live (near a Hospital where helicopters flying by isn't infrequent) then Vive isn't really an option unless I'm fine with things going absolutely haywire anytime a Helicopter goes by.
But yeah, if I were to get one. It'd still be the Rift just for the convenience of the system even if shaking wasn't an issue.
Regards,
SB
Got what is probably a stupid technical question. I was leaning towards waiting till v 2.0 of the various headsets were out. Mostly looking for higher resolution and a larger field of view. Especially the larger field of view. It occurred to me this may not be a case of building a slightly larger television and may be more like a new console generation. By that I mean the time-frame. Since the resolution would have to increase to match the larger field of view, would we be talking about games having to be built specifically for it? Could it be more like 4 or 5 years before better headsets are available given the potential technological differences or is this a somewhat trivial matter? I think the PSVR is listed at 100 degrees and the Rift at 110 degrees. Could I build the exact same game with basically no differences to suit both, providing the code runs on both a PS4 and a PC of course, or would I be looking at significant development work?
Just trying to get a feel for future options here. My personality type tends to say, "If it is over $100 then I am not buying the first model or a low serial number".
Just trying to get a feel for future options here. My personality type tends to say, "If it is over $100 then I am not buying the first model or a low serial number".
All of the HMDs that have come as a result of this recent VR boom are essentially revisions of the basic architecture and form factor of the Rift prototypes from 2011/2012. The common features between all these HMDs are that they use traditional displays, simple magnifier optics to boost FOV and collimate the light, and over the last 4-5 years their FOVs have stayed roughly in that same 90-110deg ballpark (the DK1 still has the biggest FOV of any of these HMDs.)
Any dramatic increase in FOV (humans can see upwards of 270deg when you factor in eye rotation, so we have a very long way to go) is going to mean a complete redesign of the HMD from the ground up pretty well. Everything from the display technology, resolution, optics, form factor, rendering optimizations, display communication protocol etc will need to get readdressed. Now that we have consumer HMDs out in the wild, the manufacturers aren't going to be willing to make huge concessions in the size and weight of these devices in order to improve the specs, so it's not going to be a simple matter of throwing giant screens at each eye like StarVR does.
The v2.0 of these devices are more likely to see a big bump in resolution, a trivial increase in FOV, further refined tracking (all of these HMDs suffer from some visible tracking jitter), and likely some form of eye tracking to provide dynamic IPD adjustment, foveated rendering, maybe faux-depth of field effects trickery, etc.
Any dramatic increase in FOV (humans can see upwards of 270deg when you factor in eye rotation, so we have a very long way to go) is going to mean a complete redesign of the HMD from the ground up pretty well. Everything from the display technology, resolution, optics, form factor, rendering optimizations, display communication protocol etc will need to get readdressed. Now that we have consumer HMDs out in the wild, the manufacturers aren't going to be willing to make huge concessions in the size and weight of these devices in order to improve the specs, so it's not going to be a simple matter of throwing giant screens at each eye like StarVR does.
The v2.0 of these devices are more likely to see a big bump in resolution, a trivial increase in FOV, further refined tracking (all of these HMDs suffer from some visible tracking jitter), and likely some form of eye tracking to provide dynamic IPD adjustment, foveated rendering, maybe faux-depth of field effects trickery, etc.
StarVR offers 210 x 130 degrees FOV
I don't think size is really an issue, weight could be, but can't seem to find any solid info on it?
First - thanks, that is what I thought.
Second - Unfortunately you then mentioned StarVR which I went and looked up..... Dang! 210 degrees.
My question applies to software somewhat as well. For a normal display on your PC I wouldn't question the ability to scale to different monitor resolutions. This seems a touch different. From a software standpoint, would a game that was designed to work on one of the existing 3 VR headsets be trivial port to a larger FOV and higher resolution? Something tells me it isn't that simple. Not with the different distortion (lenses) being used. Or am I off my rocker?
We wont see higher FOVs of anything more than a few degrees so it shouldn't be a problem for current games to support it , the modern egines all support it.
As for the games they should run fine at higher reoslutions just like a normal game. The problem is hardware power. So while I think gen 2 will have better screens I don't think they will be leaps ahead
The better point here is that there was nothing stopping Sony, Oculus or Valve from implementing that sort of setup. The StarVR/Infiniteye developers were on the same MTBS3D forum that Palmer and several other Oculus employees frequented back in the early days - aspects of the design have had schematics available and have been the subject of public discussion since before any of these consumer HMD designs were set in stone. Sticking two 16:9 tablet panels in front of someone's face isn't a viable product that can sell tens of millions of units.
The resolution is a non-issue aside from the obvious rendering horsepower and transmission bandwidth requirements. The FOV increase will only really matter if/when there's a need to shift away from single rectilinear viewports per eye (although this is something that Nvidia's already starting to deal with.) The lens distortion parameters (as well as the algorithm to implement them) has changed with every successive prototype we've had. From a content developer standpoint they're currently a non-factor. The SDKs as they are right now are responsible for creating and managing the eye buffers, frustum parameters, lens distortion, etc (you can use a DK2 on the Oculus store just as well as you can a CV1, and this requires zero developer time since the software detects which HMD is being used and uses the appropriate path and parameters.) These can/will be free to grow, shrink, or change according to the parameters of new HMDs with minimal developer intervention. At some point we may be dealing with curved panels or projection systems that can facilitate very wide FOV while keeping or improving the form factor, but that's probably not going to be any time soon.
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The real roadblock from a content side is going to come not from the HMD specs, but from input (and I would include the positional tracking volume as a form of "input"). PSVR and Oculus's tracking architectures are suited for forward-facing, non-rectangular volumes. It's very easy to think up games that could be designed for the Vive that would be unusable on the Rift or PSVR. To a lesser degree with the Move, Touch and Vive controllers, while all 6dof, they will be different enough that I can imagine certain types of content not being equally suitable for all three (mostly to do with the wand vs hand shape/size differences.) The Vive controllers aren't very well suited for two handed interaction - grabbing and manipulating small objects with both hands, or grabbing something from one hand to another. This is why you'll see a lot of interface design on the Vive moving to inventory pop-up systems that allow you to grab from areas that are floating some distance above your virtual hands/wands in order to avoid you clashing the controllers together.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4o85yt/wall_mounting_vive_basestations_decreases/
I guess a shock mount or other suspension/isolation system is a non-starter unless you can attach it to something with enough mass to keep its own vibrations minimal. I have to assume that at some point these lighthouse boxes will move to a solid state system because the amount of vibration these units produce (while very very tiny) is going to become more problematic for future iterations of the tech. More precision isn't worth a whole lot if the accuracy allowed for by manufacturing and average operation tolerances isn't there also. You don't fully appreciate how much tracking jitter there is until you set the HMD down on a solid surface and watch the view vibrate on the monitor.
Damn you guys are awesome. This is a hobby/ curiosity for me so the tech side does get beyond me, at least here, pretty quickly. Least now, barring something radical changing, I can just test out the headsets in the Fall and see if I like them enough to pay for them.
Remember that old curse? "May you live in interesting times." Between HBM/ 2, Neo, Scorpio, NX rumors and the 4 (?) VR headsets coming out... interesting times the next couple of years.
Remember that old curse? "May you live in interesting times." Between HBM/ 2, Neo, Scorpio, NX rumors and the 4 (?) VR headsets coming out... interesting times the next couple of years.
I don't know if improving accuracy is as simple as adding more lighthouses like you can cameras for Rift. The laser swipes occur at regular intervals which are limited by the rotation speed of the motors, and their timing is synchronized such that you don't have more than one swipe occurring globally at any one time since the photodiodes can't differentiate between simultaneous sources. Right now they're spinning at 60Hz/3600rpm, and while they can likely handle spinning faster they probably can't spin much faster, and not without bumping into issues of accuracy/consistency from their own vibrations. I'm mainly left wondering what one could do if the beam motion were solidstate and you were able to have 10x or 100x the scan rate and zero internal vibration. I'd imagine that high of a scan rate might give you enough samples to offset environmental vibrations, take multiple sample averages for less noise, instantaneous box synchronizing, faster establishing/reestablishing of position, add more trackers to boost the Z-axis precision, etc, etc, etc.
I don't think those are perforations for a speaker. They seem like tactile surfaces positioned for your thumb, so I'm guessing that spot is either a neutral place for the thumb to rest with a simple capacitive sensor under it to support their finger gestures, or maybe even a proper capacitive touchpad to allow for trackball like input. (more likely the former though as it looks too close to the buttons for it to be comfortable for swiping touchpad-style movements.)
I just tried a gear vr.
Holy molly. It's horrendous!
Sure it's much more responsive than my cardboard. But the pixels.. Omg so many pixels visible.
I guess that's because it's using pen tile arrangements? While my cardboard using 1080p RGB
Holy molly. It's horrendous!
Sure it's much more responsive than my cardboard. But the pixels.. Omg so many pixels visible.
I guess that's because it's using pen tile arrangements? While my cardboard using 1080p RGB
