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

[gilesgoat]

Have we any idea how much of a boost to VR this new PS4 Neo might add....

I will know as soon as I'll get a devkit ( which hopefully won't be too long ) .. so far I can ONLY SPECULATE based on some tech specs that I can not even talk about.

The time we get to know about the existence of Neo, I immediately asked for a devkit, and so almost every 2 emails sent to Sony

But so far I really have NO IDEA.

I hope Sony are treating you well....

Well I downloaded yesterday "the latest SDK upgrade" should contain "all" for Neo .. first time I see at the end of the load "a fuckload of warnings about NDAs" and such .. but until I have a Neo devkit I can't know for sure how improvements there are .. "on the paper" there should be "quite some improvements" BUT also quite a bit of burden/pita for the developer.

Yes Sony are treating us pretty well, I am sure they also treat all other developers equally well so far I have not seen any "negative attitude" of any sort in there and they have a nice bar ( but the espresso is so and so ) in London

[korruptor]

Yeah, just wait for another 3 years when they bump the PS4 again. This is going to be a massive ballache for a while

[PumaG]

I noticed on twitter yesterday that Jason Bradbury (Gadget Show) had tweeted that he has spent £3000 on a new computer in order to run his Vive VR!
He said all the PC's he had weren't good enough to use it to it's full capacity. Getting expensive this VR stuff isn't it?

Slightly sensationalistic statement there. He bought a very expensive and slightly overkill laptop (GT72S Dragon 4K Extreme) (64GB RAM and 2x SSDs in RAID 0) that contains a Desktop comparable video card selling for £389
I've been off the self-build scene a whilst, but imagine you'd get a perfectly capable desktop for at least half that. The recommended graphics cards are around £300 mark, spunk £500 if you must. RAM and CPU don't seem to be anywhere near as high requirements. Take the price of a great monitor off the Vive's price and things start to look a bit better.

I reckon if you were on the verge of splashing out on an expensive monitor for gaming anyway, then you could kit yourself out for less than a grand on an existing PC. Plenty of people thought nothing of £1000-£1500 on flatscreen TVs in their early days. The Samsung LCDs in the XBox 360 demo pods were massive sellers among gamers.

I've only used the more cartoony games on the Vive and they were already an incredible feeling. The sky's the limit

[Gus]

I noticed on twitter yesterday that Jason Bradbury (Gadget Show) had tweeted that he has spent £3000 on a new computer in order to run his Vive VR!
He said all the PC's he had weren't good enough to use it to it's full capacity. Getting expensive this VR stuff isn't it?

Slightly sensationalistic statement there. He bought a very expensive and slightly overkill laptop (GT72S Dragon 4K Extreme) (64GB RAM and 2x SSDs in RAID 0) that contains a Desktop comparable video card selling for £389
I've been off the self-build scene a whilst, but imagine you'd get a perfectly capable desktop for at least half that. The recommended graphics cards are around £300 mark, spunk £500 if you must. RAM and CPU don't seem to be anywhere near as high requirements. Take the price of a great monitor off the Vive's price and things start to look a bit better.

I reckon if you were on the verge of splashing out on an expensive monitor for gaming anyway, then you could kit yourself out for less than a grand on an existing PC. Plenty of people thought nothing of £1000-£1500 on flatscreen TVs in their early days. The Samsung LCDs in the XBox 360 demo pods were massive sellers among gamers.

I've only used the more cartoony games on the Vive and they were already an incredible feeling. The sky's the limit

I was running my Vive through a Mac Pro 2009 with a GTX 970 in it for a while (970 was £250 when I bought it). The Secret Shop demo stuttered a fair bit though, so I lashed out £500 on PC components that got me to a "slightly better than VR min spec" base machine, & dropped the 970 into that. All's been well since then :-)

[Jamesac]

I spent $1890 on a machine, including the Rift itself. I cheaped out a bit on the graphics card, going with a 980 rather than 980ti, but other than that I built a really nice, strong machine that should handle whatever I throw at the Rift for more than long enough for the next generation of graphics cards to become reasonably priced.

The $1890 is divided between case, power supply, CPU, CPU cooler, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, a USB 3.0 card so I don't have the Rift stealing all my slots, and the Rift itself. Pricey, sure, but not the $4300 that guy's insane rig cost.

[PumaG]

this looks handy to gauge how your current or proposed CPU-GPU combination scores with Vive

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/wiki/systems

[gumboot]

Is it just me who's filled with dread at the prospect of having to buy own a dedicated gaming machine?

It's one of those things I thought was completely behind me, which I'd never have to see ever again.

[gilesgoat]

Is it just me who's filled with dread at the prospect of having to buy own a dedicated gaming machine?

It's one of those things I thought was completely behind me, which I'd never have to see ever again.

That is what Consoles should be for .. now I am thinking "wonder if XBOX will catch up with VR", I suppose in pure theory they COULD support Vive/OR if they'd want to

[Deckard]

Is it just me who's filled with dread at the prospect of having to buy own a dedicated gaming machine?

It's one of those things I thought was completely behind me, which I'd never have to see ever again.

That is what Consoles should be for .. now I am thinking "wonder if XBOX will catch up with VR", I suppose in pure theory they COULD support Vive/OR if they'd want to

Surely MS are going to look shit this Xmas when Sony are trumpeting their VR experience ?

[pogo]

That is what Consoles should be for .. now I am thinking "wonder if XBOX will catch up with VR", I suppose in pure theory they COULD support Vive/OR if they'd want to

Seems very unlikely. It’s not just a peripheral they can release which will either work with existing games or with small modifications to existing games. It’s an entirely new platform. They need developers working on it, which would be hard to keep quiet. Even more than Sony they need a revised console as theirs is slower. And they need all this ready now, or at least in time to compete with Sony, Oculus, HTC this year.

They seem instead to be focussed on Hololens. You can buy one of those now, for $3000 if you live in the US. In theory it will run Xbox One games, as that’s the idea of their universal Windows 10 platform. You can stream Xbox One games to it. I.e. Hololens is their answer to VR and VR gaming.

[gilesgoat]

That is what Consoles should be for .. now I am thinking "wonder if XBOX will catch up with VR", I suppose in pure theory they COULD support Vive/OR if they'd want to

Seems very unlikely. It’s not just a peripheral they can release which will either work with existing games or with small modifications to existing games. It’s an entirely new platform. They need developers working on it, which would be hard to keep quiet. Even more than Sony they need a revised console as theirs is slower. And they need all this ready now, or at least in time to compete with Sony, Oculus, HTC this year.

They seem instead to be focussed on Hololens. You can buy one of those now, for $3000 if you live in the US. In theory it will run Xbox One games, as that’s the idea of their universal Windows 10 platform. You can stream Xbox One games to it. I.e. Hololens is their answer to VR and VR gaming.

Well OF COURSE you need "games designed FOR VR" it's not that you can magically put up an OR and "all works".

But given that "if it works on a PC there's no reason it could not work on an XBOX" I wonder why they did not try to make some "business agreement" with OR/Valve ?

Hololens is yet another bag of fish .. totally different story, totally different concept, probably "even more complex than VR" to make it work "nicely".

I'd love to see one in the act to understand "what really can do", unfortunately there seems no way to see one anywhere and $3000 I am afraid we can't do it for "something at that so basic/maybe level"

We'll see .. who knows .. maybe "next OR thing" will be an AR thing ? Certainly I can see 'a few other ways' it could be done.

My eye/money ( even more complex ) is also going to be on Light Fields.

[edit] - surprises me a bit also that Apple seems to "have completely missed all this" .. but then again .. "Macs are too expensive" and "not well graphically pumped at decent prices"

[pogo]

[edit] - surprises me a bit also that Apple seems to "have completely missed all this" .. but then again .. "Macs are too expensive" and "not well graphically pumped at decent prices"

Apple have not announced anything, but then they normally never do until it ships, and are pretty good at keeping things quiet until very shortly before that. They have made some interesting purchases related to VR, but then they are always working on things which may not see the light of day for years if ever. And some have suggested their VR/AR tech may be used for an Apple Car they are supposedly working on, as some sort of heads-up display.

[Whiteball]

Microsoft have done some deal with Oculus as they supplied the xbox one controller free that ships with evey Rift.
I did read once that the rift was going to xbox as a 'big screen' gaming option....

Apple have some patents for headsets and are known to be looking into them (no pun intended).

[pogo]

Found this with lots of info on patents, purchases, hirings:

http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-vr-project/

Worth mentioning too that Apple rarely rush to market. Theirs was not the first MP3 player, smartphone, tablet or smartwatch. They were later than other companies, often a lot later – tablet PCs were around years before the iPad. It’s still early days for VR, the market is very fragmented, products are in very limited supply and expensive.

Apple could wait and then enter the market with a bang with a product better than anyone else. They have a number of advantages. They have the best app store. They have a community of developers already familiar with their tools and workflow. A global network of retail stores. Great strengths in chip and system design, for e.g. a Hololens-like all-in-one unit.

[PumaG]

Nintendo need to join forces with someone ASAP, they would be a massive asset to a key hardware player. The current hardware requirements are totally out of their philosophy and the sky is the limit now, not 1080P HD or a greasy smart phone. I can see this turning into an expensive war if Apple + another enter. How will Apple's philosophy hold up though, sell the same thing with added hardware feel good factor at a much higher price?


Also VR will see massive growth for training purposes and therapy too, will those companies buy PS4s or PCs?

Nintendo can't possibly get away with any more re-works of old stuff on 2D screens, especially when the kids/mums and dads start getting into VR.
I reckon they should join forces with HTC-Valve and have their own store within steam. They could also have their name put on ready made mini-ITX machines and their own steam based OS. VR is where Nintendo need to be re-hasing the old N64 and Gamecube stuff, they should be working on it now, or their back catalogue will just get ripped off. The Mario 3D games and innovation they introduced in those games are a match made in heaven.