Sony VR Headset/Project Morpheus/PlayStation VR

[eastmen]

Hey guys remember when we argued that one of Sony's biggest retail partners were wrong that it was coming out at the end of the year ? Those were good times.

How does everyone feel about the release date now ? Are you upset that sony lied about it coming out first half of the year ? Are you happy it gives you time to buy the stuff not included in the package ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

without the camera it has exactly the same capabilities as Gear VR ... which is not saying much.

This is the setup (without HDMI going back to the TV, power cable for PS4, or the HMD extension cable):

Two cables form PS4 to minibox? Why not combine them into 1 (two wires, one cable with two heads)?

 

[gmoran]

Most sim racing fans (and space sim, flight sim, cockpit-based genres) said there is no going back once you tried VR. But some other genres seem to have counter intuitive results, like typical fps are crap in VR. Not a lot of action genres encourage turning slowly, mild in-game accelerations, etc... It might take a few failures until great VR-specific genres emerge.

I'm mostly sad about the launch date, but it means I still have until october to get off my lazy ass and finish building my sim rig. It will be much less elaborate if I don't need monitors at all, nor align it with the projector. It can be in the corner.

Yeah I have a reasonable racing rig, not top end but still pretty good (got a proper Playseat a few years back for £150), and I can't wait for the VR cockpit experience.

 

[eastmen]

Indeed. Though it applies across the board. If VR games outside of cockpit experiences don't work out, then I'm still looking forward to those VR experiences or VR movies where you stand in the movie and look around.

3rd person stuff works fine. I've tried a lot of demos like that. The only thing you need to move with is FPS titles and even then most of them work fine.

 

[temesgen]

Hey guys remember when we argued that one of Sony's biggest retail partners were wrong that it was coming out at the end of the year ? Those were good times.

How does everyone feel about the release date now ? Are you upset that sony lied about it coming out first half of the year ? Are you happy it gives you time to buy the stuff not included in the package ?

I always expected late fall, the holiday hype will drive sales demand. I would less committal to the price over time though, it may very well come down relatively quickly.

 

[hughJ]

I think the biggest error with a lot of VR content is not orienting gameplay around how depth is perceived. Most of your depth perception in VR comes from linear perspective through stereo and motion parallax, so you need an art style that clearly accentuates geometry lines, textures that have highly visible and repeating patterns so you can discern scale of surfaces at a distance, and have most/all of the important action occurring within ~50m of you because beyond that you get zero stereo depth, so everything beyond can end up looking like a flat skybox. Lighting quality, dynamic shadows, reflections, PBR materials, etc really don't matter for making you feel like you're someplace else.

If you take Eve Valkyrie for example, almost everything outside the cockpit is far away due to the scale of outer space environments, all the objects use modern-style natural material textures (which are little more than noise inside the HMD), and the gameplay doesn't require you to interact with your cockpit at all, so you're never looking at the only thing that has depth.

This plays into why room scale VR demos do so well - the very fact that it requires you to be looking at and interacting with an environment that's within arm's reach means you get constantly hammered with reinforcing depth cues.

 

[Egmon83]

To be perfectly clear it isn't a sub-set of VR. It's simply not VR at all. The user has no way to interact with the content being displayed. It's just a glorified big screen simulator. But we are going off-topic here anyway..

I could have sworn I was controlling Drake. Would GT5 headtracking plus HMZ suffice ? Or is the FOV your problem then?

Two cables form PS4 to minibox? Why not combine them into 1 (two wires, one cable with two heads)?

That would be better, but PS4 has USB and HDMI at opposite sides, still your idea would be a more elegant solution! Maybe its to allow longer cables if the user prefers instead of a proprietary cable?

 

[London Geezer]

Am I the only one who's actually very excited by the 3D sound part of VR? Surround sound only takes you so far and to me, a huge part of immersion is a good, wholly surrounding sound. And I can't wait to plug those headphones in and get really enveloped in realistic 3D audio.

If it works as I hope it will.

 

[scf]

"Several titles we've not seen before in VR like Gnog and Thumper. Sony is also showing a new social expire tech demo. "

 

[temesgen]

Am I the only one who's actually very excited by the 3D sound part of VR? Surround sound only takes you so far and to me, a huge part of immersion is a good, wholly surrounding sound. And I can't wait to plug those headphones in and get really enveloped in realistic 3D audio.

If it works as I hope it will.

Are speakers part of the design or is that another accessory? I'm curious what the film experience might be with one of these too. If it's good that could help adoption rates due to additional content.

 

[temesgen]

Another question, the latency appears to around 18 ms, how does that compare to OR and Vive?

 

[hughJ]

Another question, the latency appears to around 18 ms, how does that compare to OR and Vive?

Perceived latency isn't really a factor anymore once the compositors started incorporating predicted poses. You could literally have negative latency if you wanted (albeit the further you predict, the bigger your error may be). Whether an HMD happens to quote 10, 15, or 20ms is more or less the same thing.

 

[MrFox]

Two cables form PS4 to minibox? Why not combine them into 1 (two wires, one cable with two heads)?

Maybe it allows them to use standard produced cables to pass the finicky hdmi signal. So one needs to be mass produced hdmi cabling, and the other can be a low frequency cable for power, sensor data, buttons, audio out. Connectors might have a slightly different shielding shape or a key notch, but they would be easily sourced and well tested characteristics against the hdmi very high frequencies, impedance, and signal integrity.

They seem fused together, lamp cord style.

 

[MrFox]

The biological reason we get sick in VR is very funny: our brain think we ate something poison, it's a very deep rooted survival instinct.

I read this on the internet so it must be true.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Are speakers part of the design or is that another accessory? I'm curious what the film experience might be with one of these too. If it's good that could help adoption rates due to additional content.

Looks like you get a pair of earbuds in the package unless I'm missing something.

So the price is pretty good, but it's not hard to see where the extra value is coming from when we look at the higher Oculus and Vive prices. For example:

PSVR is £350, but doesn't include a camera, so really it's about £390. It also doesn't seem to include a decent set of headphones (which Oculus does), so lets say another £20 there (I'm talking retail here, not BOM). So it's roughly £90 cheaper than Oculus all in, but with Oculus you also get a wireless control pad which retails at £50 and (by most counts) a higher spec headset.

Also, is there any news on bundled games for PSVR at the base £350 price? I'm assuming not since it hasn't been mentioned. Oculus includes 2 bundled games in the £500 which is worth another £50 at least.

Even if you discount the control pad which is obviously not needed by any PS4 gamer, Oculus isn't looking like a particularly bad deal in comparison.

 

[temesgen]

Maybe it allows them to use standard produced cables to pass the finicky hdmi signal. So one needs to be mass produced hdmi cabling, and the other can be a low frequency cable for power, sensor data, buttons, audio out. Connectors might have a slightly different shielding shape or a key notch, but they would be easily sourced and well tested characteristics against the hdmi very high frequencies, impedance, and signal integrity.

They seem fused together, lamp cord style.

Wondering if using a standard off the shelf hdcp compliant solution superseded elegance with the design choice

 

[bgroovy]

Well there's more than enough time for everyone to shell out two pennies for the camera. I paid so little for it.

Yeah, the cameras are practically free. Lots of retailers will toss them in for free during the holidays just like they do with games, extra controller, and the camera when selling PS4s.

 

[hughJ]

Am I the only one who's actually very excited by the 3D sound part of VR? Surround sound only takes you so far and to me, a huge part of immersion is a good, wholly surrounding sound. And I can't wait to plug those headphones in and get really enveloped in realistic 3D audio.

If it works as I hope it will.

I think how much you'll be impressed by audio will still come down to how good the sound design of a particular game is rather than whatever 3D audio pipeline Sony is using. HRTF will never be perfect, so just having something rather than not at all is what's important. Also I would say that positional audio out of earbuds or IEMs tends to be crap (even with my $300+ ones), so your mileage will vary depending on what headphones you own.

A lot of funny/annoying quirks with audio design can pop up with head tracking + positional sound though. Games will often be using ambient sounds (wind blowing, etc), and in most cases that means the audio sample is omni-present and static, but with a VR HMD your brain expects to hear it subtly change with tiny adjustments of orientation and position of your head, which of course doesn't happen because the sample doesn't have a position in the game world. So what you end up hearing is almost like a wind noise being played through speakers locked to your head - pretty yuck. You get a different problem when you try to apply a position to ambient sound because you're able to zero in on where they're positioned when they should really be a mix of different sounds from a hundred different places - not so easy to design.

Interestingly enough I would say the best overall sound experience I've had in VR is by far from Elite Dangerous, and they don't even have a special VR headphone spatial audio path last I checked.

 

[eastmen]

Yeah, the cameras are practically free. Lots of retailers will toss them in for free during the holidays just like they do with games, extra controller, and the camera when selling PS4s.

I doubt they will toss them in free when they are required for PS VR . They are going to try and get money from them and so is sony. Right now when there is no content for it of course they are cheap.


Anyway sony said in an interview there will be a bundle with move and the camera. This was just a PR stunt for the lower price

 

[wco81]

What do they have in the mini PS4? not a more powerful processor?