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

[pogo]

I think ED will sell the rift to a lot of people and the rift will in turn also sell a lot of copies of ED....It's practically a match made in heaven.

Oculus have already sold all the Rifts they can make until June, if reports from pre-orders are accurate. They don’t need a sales boost from Frontier or any other software any time soon. At the same time Oculus are probably looking at the delay until the Rift is widely available and concentrating their resources where there is actually a market.

Safe for work and quite interesting:
The Rise of VR Porn

[Jamesac]

Werner Herzog believes that virtual reality is getting ahead of itself. “It looked OK, but you get tired of it fairly quickly,” he told the New Yorker of watching VR film. “The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture … you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.”

Honestly, I fully expect "VR film" to run out of gas quickly. Live sporting events should do ok for themselves, so long as you don't mind excluding everyone around you while wearing the headset, but film? It's just another gimmick. Gaming and other activities where you take control or interact with your environment is where VR is going to grow.

And he's right in another way- the dawn of VR is like the PS1/PS2 era, with new rules being made on a regular basis as people figure out which bits of what they know work and what needs to be created from scratch. It's going to be really fun to see it happen.

[Whiteball]

Werner Herzog believes that virtual reality is getting ahead of itself. “It looked OK, but you get tired of it fairly quickly,” he told the New Yorker of watching VR film. “The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture … you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.”

Sounds like another person missing the real point of VR. Probably because their experiences with it are either null or limited to said type of stuff.

VR is a novelty of 'slightly better 3D' for all the 'big screen' stuff for sure, but that is really not what VR is about. Presence is still the biggest and most influencing part of VR and until you have experienced that in a meaningful way you just can not understand the true potential of VR.

[Dio]

A lot of Hollywood is mental for VR. But Herzog is right in what he says that there's a huge learning curve how to use the medium, and wrong that the technology is ahead of the content.

VR now is kind of at the silent film level of technology. It's probably another 20-30 years before filmmakers can really use it how they would want, and it will take them that long to work out what they want too.

Can I say also that I think VR is something really special but I've never had presence and I'm fine with that. Presence implies a loss of control that my mental state isn't really equipped to cope with. I don't want people to be able to throw jump scares THAT FEEL REAL at me. I suspect also that as we learn to use it we will learn to take control of presence - again, using the film analogy, in the early days of film people thought it was real and we look at that now as laughable and I suspect the same will be true in VR.

But that also is one of the reasons VR is so interesting. It may be the only technology of my lifetime which has really opened up a window to how it felt when trains or cars or film arrived, where it really is a total leap into the unknown that's trivially experienced where we don't know how to cope with the experience. If you see what I mean.

[pogo]

It is difficult to think how they will use it for film or film-like content. I’m sure someone will find a way, but I’m also reminded of another VR technology, the one for static shots.

I was quite enthusiastic about this when Apple added it to QuickTime, as QuickTime VR, over 20 years ago. I downloaded some tools, considered getting a camera that would take such pictures. As it was part of QuickTime the content would work on Mac and PC, and through a browser, all for free. It had navigation: hotspots you click on to move from point to point. The internet was slower then but it handled that well, e.g. loading the parts in front of you first.

But it never took off. Nor did any of the other competing standards. Instead if people wanted to capture a scene they would take photos. For their blog, for Flikr, for Facebook etc. Photo sharing exploded, but VR wasn’t a part of it. If you wanted richer content you took a video. It took almost 20 years for Google to come up with Streetview which does much the same, but using Flash then HTML5.

[Darkflame]

QTVR was pretty darn great if you ask me.
If you want a photoreal walkthough of a location, it worked great. Alternatives (at that time) were shit. Javascript was just far,far too slow.
Even flash was pretty bad at it.

I seem to remember some games thus used QTVR. Starship Titanic for one.

It also could be used in reverse - rotate a object rather then the camera, and you have a format for showcasing models you can grab and rotate - long before the web could do any real 3d.

[gilesgoat]

By the way has anyone had so far DK2 working with the newest SDK on WINDOWS 10 ?

.. seems like "Huston we already ( again ) have problems " ...

It's going to be fun for people buying it ...

[Yak]

Got the DK2 working with the Steam version of Flight Simulator X which I picked up for a fiver.

Installed Wales areas photographic textures, then managed to fly a helicopter from Swansea airport, up the coast, up the river to Carmarthen, then follow the roads until I came to my place, and land in my own bottom field .

Flight sim is a whole nother thing in VR. So much easier to fly when you can look all around out of your aircraft. Once decent rez VR is out all those flight sim rigs people make with loads of screens are going to seem positively archaic .

[Bod]

Does it cost much to added photo textures for regions Jeff?

[Yak]

I paid an extra fiver for the Wales photo texture, but I must say I haven't looked around that extensively yet, it may be possible to get some for free. There's quite a lot of free US textures, for example, here:

http://www.blueskyscenery.com/download.html

last night I downloaded the scenery around Hemet, California from there, and as a result I was able to navigate to and fly my helicopter over Scientology's notorious "Gold Base" near there .

[gilesgoat]

Must say VR and flight sims seems really a match made in heaven.

"Everything feels LOT more natural" .. for as good as a flight sim can be you always have "the camera problem", you need some funky control thing to just look around .. here .. you just move you head where you want and you can have "a two second glance" at this or that or that instrument or the other ..

Still AMAZES like FOOK ME when you are just flying 30 seconds and 'nothing but just images are in front of your eyes' and yet you begin to roll or do some sharp turns and you "FEEL THE GRAVITY" is like OMG OMG OMG I AM FALLING, I AM TILITING, I AM AAARGH !

Actually can be scary, you flight this "ultralight" you take off the moment you are some feet high you feel like "WOW" and the moment the thing gets a bit of wind is like "WOW I AM SCARED !" takes a while to get used to it.

The "power of images" is really amazing

[Bod]

You guys tried Revolution X?

I'm guessing you VFR real scenery for the FSX? I ended up buying the full package of 4 and it looks pretty good when flying about from a reasonable height, but seems to be missing a lot of the key landmarks and detail. So I googled for photographic layers to add to FSX and found a great video on Youtube of Rev X.



You have to change the root directory of Rev X to point at the Steam location of FSX and it seems to work after that.
I am installing the FSX files onto the VFR files now. It takes bloody ages though.

Will report back if they are worth the £25.

[Bod]

Jeez, ordered a flight stick from Amazon now !!!

Downloaded a flight planner add-on, and hi-def detailed maps of the Sanfrancisco area.
I can see this turning into a real problem when the Rift arrives next month.


BTW Rev X is Ok ... not as good as I expected though. It does add alot more height and character but lacks that realism that I though it was going to deliver. From a height it is spot on, but fly down a bit and the buildings aren't realistic at all. Still enjoying flying around my home town of Lincoln tho, and the added bonus is the massive Cathedral I can use as a way point when I go a bit wonky.

[pogo]

Report: Google planning a standalone VR headset

“Standalone” meaning you need neither a phone nor PC/console. I.e. like Glass, except proper VR. And why not, with last-gen console class CPUs and GPUs now in phones. It might not be able to match the specs of Rift or PS VR but then it won’t need an expensive PC or console. Plus it should work untethered, overcoming the main restriction of existing VR headsets.

[Jamesac]

Google needs to show off the tech for me to get interested in that. It's cool that they're doing it, and I hope they can pull off an entry-level headset, but time after time it's been proven that good VR needs serious computing muscle behind it.