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

[gilesgoat]

Getting better .. spinning cube with banana inside room with mapped texture ..



A few more thingies and we start to get into "the right direction" ...

[snaff]

Getting better .. spinning cube with banana inside room with mapped texture ..

The LLamasoft hello world.

[Deckard]

I like how genuinely excited he is

[youtube]RehCTRrWM0&sns[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RehCTRrWM0&sns=em

[Bod]

This is useful ... http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments ... by_bilago/

It's a game launcher with various options to aid compatability.

[Misfit]

I like how genuinely excited he is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RehCTRrWM0&sns=em

Bugger, now where do you get a Razer Hydra controller from?

[Surfr]

My order status has been at READY for 5 days now. It looks like I missed the boat for UK distribution. Gutted.

[pogo]

"We're very close to having the first death in VR"

Though I wonder if he's got it wrong. His argument is VR is so immersive that someone with e.g. a weak heart will be scared to death. But I don't think that's particular to VR: there are people who should avoid scary games, horror films etc. and they do. If you're too scared of such things you self-select not to watch/play them. That's just a case of proper labelling which is nothing new, and easier than ever now with online reviews, advisories even at the point of sale. No-one should be unpleasantly surprised by how scary a game is.

There's another way VR could lead to injury and death though. There's bound to be someone who uses VR is less than ideal surroundings and does themselves an injury colliding with something or touching something hot they literally can't see. Even worse it's easy to imagine even worse scenarios, such as e.g. someone tripping over and falling and banging their head, knocking over a candle or hot liquid into electrics. Add into this young children and pets who don't realise what's going on and get in the way. I'm sure 99% or even 99.9% will use them very safely and sensibly but once they're in hundreds of thousands of homes even 1/1000 is enough to lead to many accidents and even deaths.

[Dio]

More people are killed by toilets than by lightning.

[pogo]

Not familiar with that particular statistic but yes, domestic accidents account for far more deaths than things like being hit by lightning. People are already very good at killing themselves at home, so are poor at assessing common risks and maintaining a safe environment. And soon VR headsets will be in use in hundreds of thousands of those homes.

[gumboot]

Hasn't this already been demonstrated with Wii safety problems?

[Whiteball]

I would guess most people will be sitting down and not actually wandering around with these things on, at least to begin with.

You might bump your head on something possibly, but it's not like your going to poke your eye out on anything by swinging your head around...

[pogo]

We'll see. The obvious difference with the Wii is with that you can see when your swing of the controller is about to hit something. Being essentially blind means its much easier to mistakenly collide with something or knock something over. Having immersive audio makes it worse as you can't use sound as a cue. Add to that the game may be displaying things that disorient you, make you react and so move unexpectedly, or otherwise make it harder to keep track of the world outside the VR set.

The smart thing to do is only use it where it's safe. Have a dedicated play room with no easily knocked over items, a large and easily navigated space, somewhere to secure food and drink so it can't be knocked over. The problem is that not everyone has that sort of space. You probably have a choice of the living room, where the console is, with all the clutter that contains, or the office/PC room which is full of tech, wires, sharp edges. And in many homes you've also got other people and pets who may not understand that you can't hear and see.

Something I've mentioned before would be a solution to this. Have an entirely self-contained unit which not only contains the screens and speakers but also the CPU, GPU. Given the power of phones now it's entirely feasible. Then you're not tied to the living room or PC room and can go wherever is safest, even into the garden. A unit with integrated CPU might also be smarter at helping you out of trouble. It could e.g. include motion tracking that alerts you if you move outside an area you designate as safe, or it could pause the game and make the screens translucent if it detects movement, so if someone else gets close.

[gilesgoat]

Horse sense, don't go around with that thing .. also the cables will limit your movement .. also if you hit something more than hurt yourself there are chances you are going to smash an expensive bit of HW ...

[Dio]

Given the power of phones now it's entirely feasible.

VR, even on the very best, 500+W PCs available now, will be a pretty thin experience compared to what it will be when we can throw 10x, 100x, even 1000x the horsepower at it. (10x resolution, 2-5x frame rate, 20-50x increase in graphical fidelity required because 'tricks' like bump mapping look weak and artificial in VR).

[(o)(o)]