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

[Bod]

For anyone on the fence, Rift + Touch just dropped to £399 for the summer sale. Apparently it's a 6 week deal and it's available direct or through resellers like Amazon

That's a reasonable price for the two.

[Mat]

Not the best time of year to be selling VR headsets mind you. I've not touched my Rift for a couple of weeks 'cos it gets too sweaty.

[gilesgoat]

Not the best time of year to be selling VR headsets mind you. I've not touched my Rift for a couple of weeks 'cos it gets too sweaty.

It's because of the heat and/or because that VR PR0N ?

[Mat]

The heat. Honest

BTW, I picked up Star Trek Bridge Crew when it came out with the intention of playing it with my regular co-op crew, but nobody else from that bunch has picked it up yet. Have any of youse lot, and would you be interested in Star Trek shenanigans with a West Country lilt?

[Rhythm]

I skipped that official price drop because I really don't have the room to set up a Touch/Roomscale environment. Instead I grabbed a DK2 from eBay. It was £100 and I reckon it'll be good for a dabble in the cockpit stuff I like to play anyway.

If I like it I'll migrate up to one of the MS headsets later as TBH a headset that doesn't need sensors and that can do AR as well intrigues me *far* more than a VR-only unit.

[Darkflame]

I'll be very interested to see how good the inside-out tracking is. Given the huge price difference, if its as good as the hololens, that means the hololens cost is at least half the transparent optics.

[Rhythm]

They start shipping next month, so I guess we find out soon?

The hololens price is geared around trying to fit a VR-capable PC and battery into that headband. Those dev units for MS Mixed Reality need a *beefy* PC (i7, 980, 16gb RAM)

[Stuart B]

Looks like they're going to extend the £399 sale by a few weeks – which makes sense as they seem to have been selling like hot cakes

[Misfit]

Looks like they're going to extend the £399 sale by a few weeks – which makes sense as they seem to have been selling like hot cakes

Surely it has to stay at that price until they release v2....

[WiteWulf]

Possible reaction to this deal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PSVR/comments/ ... psvrgames/

PSVR and camera for $299 with discount code.

[zbandito]

I got a Rift during the sale. Costco has a 'cheap' i7-7700 32GB 1tb+256gb GTX1070 system for $1100, less than the cost of a DIY build at NewEgg. Graphics are sharper than Playstation despite the fresnel lenses and lower FPS; you can tell there are more polygons and framerates are more stable.

Seems tracking is more definitely solid but still needs a third camera (at least) to help prevent occlusion. I really don't understand why any headset does not have emitters or sensors on the top of the head or the ears. That should help prevent occlusion, and they're already sending copper to many of those areas anyway.

Touch is awesome. I remember I conceived something like that as a school boy in 1995. Pretty neat to have it now.

Tough time to build a system, navigating Intel and AMD roadmaps. Note that you must have a 6-core Skylake-X to enable quad channel memory, and you must have 12-cores to get to 44 lanes of PCI on Intel, which is still far below the 64 lane PCI in Threadripper systems.

Will Threadripper force Intel to support 64 lanes by way of making SLI cost effective? SLI is said to not be very effective in VR, but it seems like this is down to software and bus saturation. AMD of course has big incentives to increase the number of GPU sold per CPU.

LG Steam VR headset seems like the one to keep an eye on for now, and was said to aim for holiday release. They are making a wireless box for it, and sent v2 dev units out recently, but I don't think that is going to make it out for Holiday. Same with the knuckles controllers. So for a low cost, and comfort perspective, Rift still seems like a decent choice despite being out for a year and a half already.

[zbandito]

Medium and Quill are pretty awesome. Anyone tried Gravity Sketch or Masterpiece VR?

Anyone using Unity editor in VR? Haven't been able to get it loaded here yet.

Luckys Tale is really quite polished. Same with Dead and Buried. Lone Echo is great.

Any cool Robo Recall mods yet?

[Rhythm]

Mixed Reality appears to have lit a fire under Oculus. It threatened to launch at £350 and OR promptly dropped to £400 as a "temporary" move (now permanent). This week for Black Friday Rift is down to £350 and in response Mixed Reality has dropped to £300

Not sure if it's Black Friday exclusive or not but Amazon have a deal today where if you buy a gaming laptop you get a Mixed Reality headset for free. I've taken a punt with the intent of flipping the laptop on eBay and either getting a "free" VR headset or at least heavily discounting it.

The reviews for MR now that Steam compatibility has formally rolled out are great, and the prospect of a portable VR system that works with glasses really appeals to me.

[Rhythm]

MR headset turned up. Won't have time to hook it up for a few days but the controllers seem nice, albeit not as lush as the Vive ones. Seems to be a very lightweight plastic involved there.

As for the headset, I had a quick try-on and feck it's comfy! It's lightweight, the flip up is a great addition and it's also really nice to wear with glasses.

Looking forward to firing it up in a couple days when work calms down :-)

[Dio]

Will Threadripper force Intel to support 64 lanes by way of making SLI cost effective? SLI is said to not be very effective in VR, but it seems like this is down to software and bus saturation. AMD of course has big incentives to increase the number of GPU sold per CPU.

It's more complicated than it seems. Vlachos' presentation at GDC a couple of years ago covers most of the major bases, but roughly:
- Two GPUs doesn't quite halve your basic rendering time anyway, because a certain amount of work (shadows, etc.) has to be done on both GPUs.
- Then you have to transfer the data across to the other GPU
- Then you have to do the asynchronous timewarp on only one GPU

So although MGPU looks like a simple one-GPU-per-eye option works great, in actuality to get huge improvements you really need to be able to drive the headset from both GPUs rather than only one to make the best of this and that's not currently possible.