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

[gilesgoat]

HD at rock-solid 75Hz? You certainly want to be playing in the £100+ market.

The good news that the entire market is reasonably linear on price performance nowadays, much more so than in days of old, although the halo cards still do merit a premium price.

Tom Forsyth's talk on it yesterday was fascinating. My concern is that if the games need to be THAT different to be very comfortable, VR needs to build a million-plus userbase for the games to be properly viable. Big ask. (Far from impossible, but far from assured too).

Yes I can vouch for that, games NEED to be adapted, tested and designed FOR/WITH VR in mind, you just do not take anything 3D and put it as that thinking that "it should work" because 50% of it will but the remaining 50% will be puke in a bucket.

Been using quite a bit of Oculus recently is truly amazing/surprising how many things that at first glance you would not even think of they don't work and how STRONG the need to run in the bath and puke your soul out comes when things go bad.

SW MUST be designed and tested to carefully avoid those situations, otherwise .. Well .. It wil
Increase a lot the market of anti vomit stuff ...

However, this is the new tech, this is the challenge, this is a new world to discover and implement ... Bring it on ..

At least we won't be always doing the same things

But yeah it may take a while more before to really become a more mainstream thing, yet the potential is amazing.

[zbandito]

Anyone get a run at Dev Kit 2 or a chance to compare the Sony kit at GDC?

[Darkflame]

Yes I can vouch for that, games NEED to be adapted, tested and designed FOR/WITH VR in mind, you just do not take anything 3D and put it as that thinking that "it should work" because 50% of it will but the remaining 50% will be puke in a bucket.

I remember the first time I got shutter glasses 15 years or so ago. "Worked" with any DirectX game.

However, every little bit of 2D ruined the effect. Not in-game 2D stuff like backgrounds and billboard tree's....that just made the world look fake. No, the games interface.
Simple text destroyed the whole thing. Not sick as such - but massively distracting. The text was flat on the monitor, whereas things "behind" it popped out "in front". urg.

To be fair on NVidia, who did the drivers, they did what they could...lots of settings and options, possibility to replace some games targetting with a new one. But even then, only 10% of games really worked well.

Today things haven't improved that much.
Nintendos probably got the best selling (and thus biggest userbase) of steroscopic 3d device on the planet....and still there's lots of examples of shit 3d. Lots of games in the eShop even have the left/right eyes on the preview images the wrong way around. Not just small publishers either, some big names messing it up. Does no one look? Do they employ cyclops's?

Games themselves fair better, but there's still plenty examples of 2D text onto a 3D image.

I worry about the Rift with its (probably) much smaller userbase. Either lots of developers "dont get" 3d, "dont care" or maybe simply don't see it.

[pogo]

WTF

Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion

Strikes me as an instance of a rich company with more money to spend than they know what to do with. It makes even less sense than Google purchasing robot companies. What the Hell will Facebook do with headset technology?

"Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play, and communicate."

Which says nothing about what will eventually come out of this.

edit: it does mean Google or MS can't buy it which is maybe the point. Could change many people's plans to work with it, if it suddenly becomes a vehicle for FB software and services.

[Ollie]

Right. So that's that spoiled, then.

[gilesgoat]

<party spoiler>

I still hope/want to see IF the new model really improved something for people wearing glasses ...

It still seems to me maybe some people are playing a bit deaf about this ...

</party spoiler>

[IronGiant]

Just think, in-game advertising projected in front of your very eyes in 3D. No doubt in the middle of a game too.

Fuck Facebook, this news has completely put me off OR now.

[gilesgoat]

... I guess is good news for Sony then .. and keep an eye on that new "Glyph" technology as well ...

[Mark]

Notch just tweeted that a mooted version of Minecraft for Oculus is now cancelled. I get the feeling more devs will do the same. Time to fetch the popcorn maybe for this one...

[Mat]

Yup, it's killed dead any and all interest I had in it.
Zuckerberg's a CUNT.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

I can't wait to read the comments on Eurogamer about this...

[Baggypants]

You can kind of see the reasoning. Facebook will bring it to market quicker just because it has all the links to the Asian hardware markets and practically develops it's own server platforms.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/05 ... _lab_tour/

[lazerwalker]

But manufacturing isn't currently the constraint on bringing it to market is it, aren't they still developing the hardware?

I wonder if John Carmack's going to stick around as a Facebook employee - depending on the deal he could be wearing some pretty shiny golden handcuffs...

[pogo]

I imagine it will be more like: developers can make games for it (it makes no sense otherwise, FB aren't set up to make or publish games), but they have to include layers of FB integration. So notifications in-game, posts to your timeline, all achievements, high scores posted to FB and aggregated there, social features such as multiplayer games all done through FB.

The precedent is Google's purchase of Youtube. For a while it looked like a technology play, where they get to to promote e.g. HTML5 over Flash, Chrome as a preferred browser, VP8 over MP4 as a codec/format. But then they made it so you need a Google+ account, and all your comments are made via Google+, a massive boost for that moribund service.

FB isn't dead like G+. But they probably look at XBL Achievements/Playstation Trophies/Steam and wish there was something like that on FB where the gaming experience is very lacking. They tried to link games via FB credits but eventually gave that up, and now social/freemium games are migrating to mobile where the players are. So this is the next big thing for FB and games (?).

[zbandito]

Didn't see that one coming! An acquisition didn't seem unlikely, but FB?

Oh, right. $400M in real dollars, $1.6 billion in funny money...