Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[Mqark]

Still no word on a consumer launch window I take it then...?

I'd say there was not much left for them to do to make the hardware ready, it feels like a finished product. The developer support and SDK might be their main focus now i guess.

I presume they are getting everything in place for scaling up manufacturing.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

I guess realistically, we're looking at a consumer launch for "holiday season" next year. All the noise this year is for XBone and PS4 which would probably drown out any marketing attempt for the Oculus.

Factor in the manufacturing lead time and distribution rights negotiations/supply chain to get enough units out there as well...



At least it'll give people enough time to save up some cash for one...

[gravy]

Well

This is what I predict

They won't release before getting bought for somewhere in the $100m range

At his Quakecon talk before announcing fucking off Occulus Carmack said in passing he won't be doing any more rocketry barring another 'liquidity event'. Which was odd given he'd already sold ID and wasn't involved with another company. That soon changed

So I'm guessing their strategy is to get bought and a might fine purchase they'd make too for any of the console vendors.

Something else that is interesting is Carmack is currently working on the mobile SDK

So that's cool, if you could have a rift + with something you can slot your phone into you get a lot of stuff it doesn't currently have. Have the phone at the front with the camera facing out and you can get:

* Translational movement detection, the OR currently only gets rotational right now
* AR

Should be cool Could make them a mobile phone company acquisition target too.

We were talking about this at work yesterday and I was trying to figure out why this was so exciting to me.

I think what it is is it's the first bit of HW for AGES that suggests all kinds of new gaming experiences. I mean the Wii and Kinect both sold on the gimmick factor which the OR definitely has but I'd say neither have created significant change or advance in gaming. I get the feeling this could.

The last thing I felt like this about was multitouch and that's turned out pretty well

[Mqark]

Palmer told me (a random nobody off the street) yesterday that they fully expect somebody will copy them, but they believe they will always be the best. He said it with such a convincing and cheerful enthusiasm that maybe he's confident it won't be an issue when they get bought by a big player.

He also mentioned that they (OR) worked out that the technology was all available to do this in 2007 but it would of course have been fantastically expensive.

The cues for the demo, on today, the busiest public day were predictably epic.

[techno12]

A fellow game dev friend of mine tried it at the Develop conference last month.

He said it made him nauseous within 5mins, and it took him 2 hours to recover. He doesn't get travel sick (I do). Hence he thinks its going to be a fail.

His comments have made me itch to try it even more. I hear its at the Eurogamer Expo but I dread to think how long the queues are, unless most of Joe Public only cares about the new CoD etc..

[Yak]

Finally got mine set up and I am sitting here downloading demos and playing with it now. Amazing how immersive it really is. Put on headphones and the Rift and it really feels like you are elsewhere, to the extent that it's actually quite jarring when you hit Esc and drop back out to the real world. Amazing potential in it. Just spent half an hour in a spacesuit flying round the ISS and gazing down at the earth rotating below. Lovely. And it's still really early days yet but boy this is a zillion times better than the VR I tried back in the 90s and it's amazing to think I've got it right here for a couple of hundred quid.

Does make me realise I need a new PC though, my old horse is >5 years old now and it shows, for VR you really need everything to be silky smooth.

Good job I've got a new machine ordered then .

Right, where else can I go...

[ElfQrin]

He also mentioned that they (OR) worked out that the technology was all available to do this in 2007 but it would of course have been fantastically expensive.

It was available since 1991.

[Yak]

Sure you could do head tracking and crude headmounts back then but it was complete and total smeg as well as being stupidly expensive. Now you can do it semi-infinitely better than you could back then and for less than the price of a Commodore 64 it finally gets interesting again .

[Jamesac]

He also mentioned that they (OR) worked out that the technology was all available to do this in 2007 but it would of course have been fantastically expensive.

It was available since 1991.

Oh god, no. No. Just no. I played on the VR hardware of the time, and I'm pretty sure it was that model machine. No.

Ew.

God. Just... no.

Ick.

James

[Mqark]

He also mentioned that they (OR) worked out that the technology was all available to do this in 2007 but it would of course have been fantastically expensive.

It was available since 1991.

I'm telling you word for word what the guy that created Oculus rift told me, no need to start pedantically trawling the internet for facts. I'm assuming he means that in order to do it the way he has done it the components were mature enough in his estimated 2007.

[ElfQrin]

no need to start pedantically trawling the internet for facts.

Not that I have expressly searched the whole Internet for previous art, I'm old enough to have actually played it in the early '90s, and since then I've always wondered why such awesome technology weren't developed further, until today.

[Yak]

I think it's simply that back then people realised that yes, it was an interesting idea, but with the technology of the day although you could kind of do it it was both expensive and shit and it was put on the shelf labelled "one day". Couple of decades later later you've got flatpanels and accelerometers and GPUs and you can do VR for beans so it's finally being developed again.

[Yak]

if any of my fellow rifters haven't tried this yet for fuck's sake do!

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/v ... php?t=1544

That elicited several heartfelt "holy fuck!"s and constant grinning like a complete idiot all the way through .

[Bod]

& those of us not lucky enough to experience OR yet ...

[Jamesac]

no need to start pedantically trawling the internet for facts.

Not that I have expressly searched the whole Internet for previous art, I'm old enough to have actually played it in the early '90s, and since then I've always wondered why such awesome technology weren't developed further, until today.

You can't pretend that steaming turd was a proof of concept. Commercial 1990s VR was utterly unsuited to the task, and the reason it died on the vine is because what the public got to see was truly wretched. The only thing it proved is that the experience they were trying to create simply wasn't possible with the technology of the time.

James