The breakout box is still messy. Is it supposed to sit on the floor in front of you? Or on top of the PS4?
Sony VR Headset/Project Morpheus/PlayStation VR
It will hover next to you like the little robot thing in Killzone.
placing it on top of PS4 wont be a good idea for noise. PS4 have really hot top side.
Oculus also has a breakout box, so Sony is not alone in this approach [although Sony's is bigger].
Loads bigger. Oculus's box looks pretty impotent in comparison.
I guess it's the price we'll have to pay for the tech, I wonder if PS5 would remove the need for the box? Either way I'd like a way to hide the box.
D
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Well you'll have your PlayStation space helmet on with its own sound so noise probably won't be a huge issue.
That would increase the price of every PS5 [additional processing chips, another HDMI port [one for Headset, one for VR] that needs to be licensed and paid]. VR will be used by certain % of userbase, but it is safe to say the majority will stick with flat TV gaming.
Breakout box is [IMO] totally acceptable way to handle current VR. As a user, I don't care where my cables go. On one level I can appreciate that there will be some "buffer zone" with cables when I almost kill myself in some VR horror game and pull the cable with all my strength.
ideally the consumer version should likely be also wireless, implementing some kind of HDMI streaming when you want to disconnect it from the box. The size of the box could be due to the fact that on console the superb high framerates require some extra power, which is typical on PC.
The headset connector is in front, so if you pull on the cable it would probably disconnect without bringing down the PS4 with it. It could be why the connector looks so weird with square shape inserts, it keeps it straight if you pull it at an angle to avoid breaking/bending the pins, but might not require too much force to pull out?
It might be magnetic like the MacBooks power connectors. If you pull it accidentally, it just disconnects without dragging the MacBook crashing down. Seems quite appropriate for VR.
The processing chips could just be a percentage of the CPU/GPU processing. PS4 needs processing in the breakout box because it's barely powerful enough for VR as is. Using 10% or whatever on reprojection would have too much of an impact. But on PS5, the reprojection would be maybe 3% of total resources.
That said, low latency may warrant processing. It's really the size that's baffling. Why isn't a mobile SOC in the headset, or the box being a tiny belt-mounted thing?
Oh, you mean the monitor from Halo.
60>120 reprojection is not resource-hungry, its about half milisecond [done in async way, so it does not impact general rendering of next frame] if I heard that correctly. There is no need to add external hardware for that.
What gives more benefit is separate stuff that can reduce larger chunks of CPU/GPU time - spacial audio processing, VR OS and LED tracking [possibly this is impossible since this is part of core rendering pass] and similar stuff. I would also say, ability to use more than one camera [PU that has ports for more than one camera].
Belt hardware = big no. That is not user friendly.
As for "barely powerful enough for VR", I don't agree with that statement. Devs have said the same. Everything that PC can deliver with 970/980 for Oculus/Vive [higher render target, 90fps minimum], PS4 can render that at 1080p60 without content changes. Console hardware is more than capable for good VR.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...us-playstation-vr.55521/page-107#post-1885842
Code:
https://youtu.be/_Su45ND3pDc?t=2199
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1550&v=W8bREFpp2o8
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I mean Tinkerbell from Peter Pan.
The fact that they've had to compromise on both render target and frame rate could certainly be seen as a good argument for "barely powerful enough for VR". Afterall a 970 is considered the minimum requirement on the PC at that base framerate and render target. Also, the devs say the PS4 experience is almost the same, not identical. So almost as good as the minimum PC experience while also sacraficing render target and frame rate.
Spatial audio processing makes more sense in game where all the data is, rather than sending hundreds of audio streams to an external box. VR OS - what precisely is that?
Why?
Using ever once of processing power and nothing spare, making an external processor more important. PS5 will be able to provide a vastly improved VR experience (version 2) and have enough oomph (probably) to do all the VR things.
OT top tip : use normal round brackets instead of square brackets for asides as square brackets are used for control codes.
The fun part is that the box is MUCH more powerful than the previous prototype, and that means it does more than what they are telling publicly.
We had a hint about this in the recent presentation saying the box now does "most of the heavy lifting for VR" but it can't really be about the reprojection, since the same presentation shows the GPU doing it.
Maybe it's the audio part they significantly beefed up? I think my idea of doing proper binaural processing in that box isn't crazy. Sending dozens and dozens of streams with some geometry and metadata as an hdmi sideband channel. A few tensilica-4 dsp cores would be quite powerful, and it can easily add up to 10+ watts. They kept talking about the importance of audio in VR, but we have zero info about what the box has for sound processing. Adding more power this late could be simply adding more cores and moving from tensilica-3 to the new tensilica-4 dsp (which is twice as powerful). These are almost off-the-shelf solutions with libraries of sound processing code already made.
I want a nice reverb.
We had a hint about this in the recent presentation saying the box now does "most of the heavy lifting for VR" but it can't really be about the reprojection, since the same presentation shows the GPU doing it.
Maybe it's the audio part they significantly beefed up? I think my idea of doing proper binaural processing in that box isn't crazy. Sending dozens and dozens of streams with some geometry and metadata as an hdmi sideband channel. A few tensilica-4 dsp cores would be quite powerful, and it can easily add up to 10+ watts. They kept talking about the importance of audio in VR, but we have zero info about what the box has for sound processing. Adding more power this late could be simply adding more cores and moving from tensilica-3 to the new tensilica-4 dsp (which is twice as powerful). These are almost off-the-shelf solutions with libraries of sound processing code already made.
I want a nice reverb.
Has anyone discussed the audio experience of PSVR? Any hints at truly convincing 3D audio? It was certainly a hoped for feature (first in the console, than in the breakout box).
Nice, it looks like the previous PSVR breakout box. They added the "social screen" but not audio processing since a PC CPU is powerful enough. This is reminiscent of the original voodoo card, which was doing a pass through of the signal until a game specifically called for the 3D driver.
Oculus also delayed the preorders to 2016. So still no price! What a bunch of chickens. The first to announce a price is setting the ballpark figure for everyone else.
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