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

[gravy]

Nintendo still don't advise young kids using the 3DS. There's no real evidence that it does them harm, the warnings don't damage sales but they do protect against agressive lawsuits.

Dont half get annoying though. Nintendo seems to have half a dozen warnings on each of their games these days.

Yeah I know and unfortunately its prevented Nintendo from enjoying any commercial success at all

[Whiteball]

The one thing no-one, not anybody can do is describe what VR is like. You HAVE TO experience it first hand as it something you experience with more than visual senses alone. It is NOT just 'fancy' or 'better' 3D.

I have a DK2. Going by all the stuff I had read and watched with people eulogising all over the place about how good it is, I couldn't wait to try it. My first impressions where, from the myriad of demos and games with hacked drivers, pretty poor. I actually thought, maybe in two or three years they may be closer, but maybe not. I was totally underwhelmed.....

....until I got Elite Dangerous. That changed everything, I went from gaming at 2560x1440 res on my monitor down to the Rift's much lower res. Did it matter? Not one jot. The experience is compelling and made me a true believer right there and then. VR WILL be big in games when done right. No question about it. It's transformative.

[Jamesac]

You can understand anything without experiencing it. I understand space travel, though I’ve yet to enjoy it myself.

You don't understand space travel. You know about it, and probably have a fairly good mental picture of it, but you don't understand it in a way that someone who's been up there and lived in zero G has. Your understanding is a stick figure, as compared to Chris Hadfield's masterwork painting. VR isn't quite such an extreme leap, of course, but until you've played a game or two and gotten some time inside your understanding is utterly compromised by a lack of experience.

[pogo]

You don't understand space travel. You know about it, and probably have a fairly good mental picture of it, but you don't understand it in a way that someone who's been up there and lived in zero G has. Your understanding is a stick figure, as compared to Chris Hadfield's masterwork painting. VR isn't quite such an extreme leap, of course, but until you've played a game or two and gotten some time inside your understanding is utterly compromised by a lack of experience.

I do understand it. I understand it well enough that I found last year’s “Gravity” film most annoying as it again and again replaced good (and exciting) science with nonsense. Totally spoiled it for me. Some of that understanding comes from my science and maths background but a lot comes from the many reports made by people like Chris Hadfield and the many people that have gone before him.

I don’t think VR is indescribable, no more than space travel. It’s just too early to describe it, or at least describe Rift. The final version doesn’t exist and the version closest to it (though we don’t know how close) isn’t available for extended hands-on testing, only at trade shows. The only finished software for it is Elite. There‘s little point doing an in depth review as it will be totally out of date when the final version ships. When it is released we’ll see comprehensive and in-depth coverage, from a wide range of gaming and technology sites.

It will still be true that it will work differently for different people and so the recommendation will be to try it yourself. But probably even that will be made easier by extensive testing which will at least give some indication of who will get on with it, who will have most trouble with it.

[gumboot]

I do understand it. I understand it well enough that I found last year’s “Gravity” film most annoying as it again and again replaced good (and exciting) science with nonsense.

I'm annoyed by lots of nonsense -- some of which may also annoy experts in the field -- does that mean that I understand all of those fields?

[gravy]

[pogo]

I'm annoyed by lots of nonsense -- some of which may also annoy experts in the field -- does that mean that I understand all of those fields?

I would assume that if you don’t know the science you would enjoy Gravity much more for what it is, mindless entertainment. If you’re annoyed by it you probably understand much of the science, as it was otherwise quite well done visually.

The point of bringing up space travel is it’s something that is well understood by many people who take an interest even if they don’t experience it. It even may be related, as the space sickness experienced by astronauts arises in a similar way to motion sickness, and so is also probably like nausea caused by VR devices. I would’t be surprised if NASA were one of the first customers for these.

[zip accident]

Something that bothers me. In this house there is a front door, and an inner door, and sometimes people leave the inner door open.

In space, that would matter. An airlock door would keep in the air, but the inner door would keep in the heat. The temperature of space may be high, but that's the speed of the negligably existant gas molecules, the IR transmissivity means that unless the sun is directly on it, any door looses a lot of heat. So, the air in an airlock would be cold, unless it connected to the air in the rest of the craft, in which case the rest of the craft would be cold, but the airlock, not especially.

[gumboot]

Typical brits, moaning about the weather, even in space.

[pogo]

The ‘temperature’ of space doesn’t matter as there’s so little matter in space, so very little thermal energy. Space is a vacuum and vacuum is an extremely good insulator, so there would be no heat loss by conduction or convection. The only heat loss would be black-body radiation (the formal name for IR transmissivity) and that depends only on temperature, so all that needs to be done is keep the outer surface cold with insulation.

As for airlocks when they contain air it should be at the same temperature as the rest of the craft. I imagine the airlock will have air in most of the time, so it’s useful space and accessible, so will be insulated mostly on the outside.

[Whiteball]

I am not so sure that the problems are with VR itself. More the poorly understood way to code or implement ideas on it in software.

Sure, better hardware can abstract away the need for a lot of careful planning, design and coding, but done right current software causes no problems. Of course, determining what is 'right' depends on the hardware in front of the developer at the time I guess.

Basically 99% of the software I've seen is pants. Not because of VR itself but because people are not matching the ideas to the medium very well (yet).

[zip accident]

The ‘temperature’ of space doesn’t matter as there’s so little matter in space, so very little thermal energy. Space is a vacuum and vacuum is an extremely good insulator, so there would be no heat loss by conduction or convection. The only heat loss would be black-body radiation (the formal name for IR transmissivity) and that depends only on temperature, so all that needs to be done is keep the outer surface cold with insulation.

As for airlocks when they contain air it should be at the same temperature as the rest of the craft. I imagine the airlock will have air in most of the time, so it’s useful space and accessible, so will be insulated mostly on the outside.

No, if the inner door was shut, the space between would act as (thick) double glazing.

[gumboot]

I'm not sure how double glazing is better than a vacuum, here.

[pogo]

I am not so sure that the problems are with VR itself. More the poorly understood way to code or implement ideas on it in software.

With the long time it’s taking developers (and it’s mostly developers who have these things) have plenty of time to solve the problems. That’s the main upside of it taking so long, and may even be one reason they have such a leisurely release schedule. Better to take their time, get the hardware right, and give developers time to get the software right. There will still be games with problems but far fewer both in number and proportionately.

No, if the inner door was shut, the space between would act as (thick) double glazing.

True, but I imagine on any current spaceship where space, i.e. capacity and storage, is a premium, you would want to be able to use the space. The loss through the outer door, which is surely reinforced and only a couple of feet across, would be minimal compared to the rest of the craft.

[Little stoned kiwi]

There is a Space thread. Pogo, can you please go be an inexperienced armchair expert about it there? Then you can get back to being an inexperienced armchair expert about VR here.