Playstation VR

[gilesgoat]

*SNIP* The products that are available such now, Samsung’s Gear VR and Google cardboard, are even cheaper.

Because they are a shell with some sensors and some - not even super quality - lenses where "you have to insert your own display/CPU/GPU" ..

Which in case of Gear it means at very least a Samsung Galaxy 6 or better also the FOV is not as big as the other ones.

Not sure how google cardboard works with phones that have a res/refresh rate/latency heck knows how much ...

With the Morpheus - if properly SW is made - you can shake you head like a loon at really high speed the image is rock solid, no jitter, no blur, nice and clean.

And also, nice to wear/adjust even for people like me with glasses.

I don't say they don't work but OF COURSE they cost less.

[edit] - However Gear VR HAS a true advantage maybe in all this, it IS really CHEAP and assuming you have already a Galaxy S6 thing, and many people have, it's not such a huge increase in cost and "gives you something that is not too bad".

Who knows, maybe that "will be the winner" after all ?

[Chirpychicken]

If Sony or the community could make Playstation VR work with PC and they release at a price that undercuts Rift and HTC Vive then they could be sitting on a gold mine.

I will be buying one day one regardless mainly for No Man's Sky and whatever game LS are making (which sounds very exciting )

[pogo]

Run out of silicon? Silicon is one of the two main constituents of rock, most of which is silicon dioxide. There may be important minerals we will run out of supplies of soon but silicon is not one of them.

[pogo]

*SNIP* The products that are available such now, Samsung’s Gear VR and Google cardboard, are even cheaper.

Because they are a shell with some sensors and some - not even super quality - lenses where "you have to insert your own display/CPU/GPU"

And they are much closer to people’s expectations what these things should cost. The key difference though is that is where the innovation has been the last few years, in phones and tablets. They have rapidly moved to catch up with PCs, even exceeding them some ways such as performance per Watt.

A lot of the technologies for Rift – the screens, the motion trackers – exists because of phones and already are in phones. So why can’t phones improve to the point where they can’t push as many polygons as a PS4'/ Rift ready PC but can do everything else just as well?

[Dio]

Run out of silicon? Silicon is one of the two main constituents of rock, most of which is silicon dioxide. There may be important minerals we will run out of supplies of soon but silicon is not one of them.

Silicon process development is expected to reach fundamental limitations in the early to mid 2020s. While previously when this has been the case the deadline has continued to push back steadily (although, still approach) there has not been any significant pushback on this deadline in the last ten years or so, so it's increasingly beginning to look like it might be genuine. So my point refers to my career's general dependence on something which - at this point - seems to have a finite hard deadline.

[gumboot]

So we'll run out of go-faster juice rather than running out of silicon, then?

Might have to resort to cleverer design, or something, then.

[Jamesac]

But that's the point I've made before that they have to sell this thing completely differently. It is not a peripheral, it's a completely new platform. Either they can sell the platform or they won't sell that peripheral.

There's no option for trying to make it a peripheral, it's simply too expensive. And except for a restricted class of games (and not a large class, probably down in single digits in terms of unit sales) you need to construct different games for this thing.

It could be a peripheral, if we were in an alternate universe where you could take 90%+ of games and stick them straight into VR and get all the benefits without getting out the barf bags, and if the mfgs were prepared to eat huge costs (since even parity with the console price would mean them eating so much money on each unit, and as everyone says, that is still way too much for a peripheral). But we ain't.

Therefore they have to change perceptions. Or the market's a couple of million units tops, probably smaller, and the AAA guys can't come and play. Of course, we can argue what the advantages of that might be... this could be a platform for genuine innovation, formed by hardcore users who are prepared to search a bit more (and pay for) the experiences and served by lightweight, more agile devs who don't need to ship 10 million units to turn a profit. Whether VR people will be prepared to pay the £10 prices that will be needed to subsidise good software in a small market for much less than AAA quality will be an interesting question.

But when it comes to the hardware it is really now more of a marketing challenge than a technical one. The technical problems have been solved but they're dictating a significant price. (One that in the PC market even a few years ago wouldn't have been considered that extreme though). And hell, this is only the start, to do VR properly you need to spend a lot more money, really....

(One other possible slight underlying point is that this console generation is rather different to previous ones because it is so low-powered compared to the PC competition; had Sony and Microsoft aimed to launch at the top end of the PC market rather than in the midrange there would be more options for the consoles on the VR side, and the price balance between console and headset would have looked better?)

While I agree with just about everything here, there's a problem in that PS VR isn't a platform, no matter how hard Sony might wish otherwise. It's a peripheral device that requires the PS4 to operate, and I'm honestly not aware of any PSVR-exclusive games. Looking around turned up this list of pending titles, and none of them seem to require the PSVR to play. I might have missed one or two, maybe? To the best of my knowledge, though, VR is an add-on that makes these games better, rather than a requirement to play.

I really want the PSVR, and plan to Day-1 the system without a second thought, but no amount of branding in the world will make it not be a peripheral. Until the system can carry its own weight, both in terms of hardware and software, Sony simply can't move the perception that it's anything but an extra for the PS4. I'm not saying this as an observer or a fan, but rather as someone who worked gaming retail for well over a decade from the middle of the PS1's life to the early PS3 years. Unless Sony's ads include actual hypnosis, the gaming public won't view it as a distinct platform.

[pogo]

While I agree with just about everything here, there's a problem in that PS VR isn't a platform, no matter how hard Sony might wish otherwise. It's a peripheral device that requires the PS4 to operate, and I'm honestly not aware of any PSVR-exclusive games. Looking around turned up this list of pending titles, and none of them seem to require the PSVR to play. I might have missed one or two, maybe? To the best of my knowledge, though, VR is an add-on that makes these games better, rather than a requirement to play.

The reason for this is simple. These are very new platforms and it is unclear when, or even if, they will ever become mass market platforms. So few developers are relying on them. Certainly developers of AAA titles can’t afford the gamble. Perhaps smaller developers can but they are more likely to be on phone or PC than PS4.

In the end it’s not important what it’s called. VR is certainly a platform. But it exists as a peripheral for other devices. That in theory makes it easier for users to adopt it, as they are leveraging their existing hardware, except it looks like it will be so expensive that few people can justify it. Expensive optional peripherals do not have a good history on consoles. They do better on PCs but even there truly expensive peripherals are a niche market.

[pogo]

So maybe 2016 is not the year of VR after all, or at least not the year it moves from being a niche product to mass market. Or if it does it won’t be Rift or PS VR that does it: something cheaper based on a phone or tablet perhaps. Prices like this are just too high and the market might not be prepared to wait for Oculus to solve their cost and volume issues.

Interesting hints from Ars that Google is working on something:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/0 ... ew-year/5/

Not clear what though. It probably is a version of Android for VR, which makes sense as Google’s business model lets them give it away to anyone making a headset, they don’t need to make something themselves. It also mentions processors for VR, which sounds like it aims to address a particular weakness of theirs that they do not design their own CPUs, unlike Apple. Focussing on VR would let them develop their own skills and advantages in chip design, as it’s too late to catch up to Apple in phones and tablets. And they mention cardboard, suggesting it is purposely poor so people don’t view it as a real, as in competitive, Google VR. Which only makes sense if they have designs on a more competitive product.

[k345y]

I will be buying one day one regardless mainly for No Man's Sky and whatever game LS are making (which sounds very exciting )

Oooo, call!

NM'S sounds like the very game to be using it with.

Doesn't anyone else find an ironic humour in the way that people are constantly reinforcing this VDU as a 'peripheral' get it...? Get it ? Peripheral vision...

I'll get me coat

[Dio]

Might have to resort to cleverer design, or something, then.

Cleverer design can't relicate exponential growth in performance.

[gilesgoat]

Sorry but "a stupid question" .. even the stuff we are actually doing NOW and IS for PSVR WHY on Earth it should be "EXCLUSIVE PSVR" ?

I mean it's OBVIOUS that "yes, it's standard 2D too" ( let's call what you see on a flat monitor 2D even if it's 3D ) BUT clearly IS NOT THE SAME if you play it in VR

To me make it "exclusive PSVR" is just setting a compile flag instead of another, actually it simplifies even quite a bit the whole SW, but why should I make thing ONLY for PSVR ?

Thing is you play 2D you go "WOW" .. you use PSVR you go HOLY COW ! TRIPLE WOW !

Let's put it this way .. it does NOT "require VR" IF YOU ARE SATISFIED with "WOW" .. BUT .. if you want to REALLY SEE THE REAL THING THEN it REQUIRES VR.

I leave you the choice but at the same time "you know what you are going to miss out"

[Little stoned kiwi]

Going on the in depth discussions in the Oculus thread, it would be a wrong to assume a game designed for the screen is enhanced by VR or that a VR designed expreience translates to the screen. There's going to be overlap between the two but there's going to be extremes at both ends as well.

[gilesgoat]

Going on the in depth discussions in the Oculus thread, it would be a wrong to assume a game designed for the screen is enhanced by VR or that a VR designed expreience translates to the screen. There's going to be overlap between the two but there's going to be extremes at both ends as well.

You are already taking it the WRONG way round .. SCREEN -> VR == NO, DOES NOT WORK

VR->SCRREN == YES IF YOU PLANNED IT FROM START !

LS games will be always planned to be good in VR AND OUT OF VR .. we don't want to make people with NOT VR miss the experience. Of course in a way is a bit like "developing two games for the price of 1" but that's how it goes.

[gumboot]

Might have to resort to cleverer design, or something, then.

Cleverer design can't relicate exponential growth in performance.

Depends what it opens up.

But it may well be for the best, anyway, because this constant churn is terrible for the environment.