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

[gumboot]

And Cardboard?

nowhere near as good....

VR is not about 'good 3D' but about presence. You do not get that with such things as cardboard.

So even the worst of the not-Cardboards are way ahead, then? That's good news. something to look forward to.

Although I found Cardboard extremely variable. Some really basic demos keep the lag down to not immediately-apparent degrees.

[Jamesac]

Microsoft claims to have developed superior Oculus Rift lenses

So about the important quote- "with the group claiming to have developed a superior lens design than the one currently inhabiting the Oculus Rift DK2 headset."

"DK2"

If they've got something better and relatively affordable to what the final version has included I'll be very interested. Right now, though, the solution is on hardware that was never close to final and uses lenses that "According to The Register, it works out at around £130 ($200) per eye."

I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. The headline might as well have read High End Hardware Outperforms Prototype of Consumer-Grade Hardware.

[gilesgoat]

And Cardboard?

nowhere near as good....

VR is not about 'good 3D' but about presence. You do not get that with such things as cardboard.

So even the worst of the not-Cardboards are way ahead, then? That's good news. something to look forward to.

Although I found Cardboard extremely variable. Some really basic demos keep the lag down to not immediately-apparent degrees.

Cardboards are not a consumer product, they are a clever hack to "allow you to experiment a bit and get an idea of things without spending too much", it's a bit like the super poor version yet useful for some experiments , of Gear VR.

However you are dealing with ( even if powerful but not super ) a phone, not a dedicated PC/HW to do some stuff, Samsung I know had to modify stuff in the OS to improve the latency and all the stuff and you know if you want to use stuff like VR "At best" you need a quite pumped PC/GPU as well.

I still don't understand all this "war on prices" .. it gets to a point where you get what you paid for, so far I think prices of stuff like DK2 are more than reasonable for what they deliver, there's lot of stuff that can be done with them I think the price is ok.

I'd rater spend $600 and have something that really delivers "the experience/presence" than spending $300 and have something that is "meh kinda but not", after all is stuff that if reasonably well done you are going to keep it and use it for a number of years.

DK2 so far been very good, not perfect but very good, useable for a number of years sure for various things.

I see all those things like really nice instruments for exploration of new possibilities/world, ok maybe they are "expensive toys" but they are expensive toys of a good kind/quality so far.

Pay too cheap and you get what you get.

[Dio]

VR is not about 'good 3D' but about presence. You do not get that with such things as cardboard.

I don't think we need to over-prioritise the sense of 'presence'. I've used some very good 3D headsets and never had presence, and for me at least I believe that's a good thing.

I don't want to worry about vertigo or ducking to avoid things that are about to hit me in the face and potentially falling on the floor in the process. Instead, I want to be wearing a headset on my face that lets me view a virtual world without artifacts or judder, and that has a set of rules my brain can learn and I can then have fun in.

Take TxK as an example; if you read the literature, the way it moves the camera is pretty abusive of the user and should cause dramatic motion sickness. However, because the camera is completely and predictably slaved to the user's input, it takes less than a few goes for your brain to learn how it's going to react to what you do and anticipate. In the same way that driving a car is always a far less violent sensorial experience than being a passenger in one, because you know ahead of time what the car's about to do.

[gumboot]

It might be lack of presence that's protected me from motion sickness, too.

Although I'm one of these people who pukes his guts out as soon as he steps onto a boat.

[Whiteball]

VR is not about 'good 3D' but about presence. You do not get that with such things as cardboard.

I don't think we need to over-prioritise the sense of 'presence'. I've used some very good 3D headsets and never had presence, and for me at least I believe that's a good thing.

I don't want to worry about vertigo or ducking to avoid things that are about to hit me in the face and potentially falling on the floor in the process.

me too, but I'm not sure i'm following what you are getting at.

I don't see the point if it's just 3D or a 'big screen' experience. We have 3D and big screens already (although it was nice to play some retro stuff on a virtual cinema screen).

When I tried the TxK demo on my DK2 what made that better than playing it on a monitor?
Feeling like I was 'in there with it all' ...present?

Otherwise playing the game or rotating around the shapes and playfield is no different to rotating it around on your monitor?

Or should I be looking for a different word to presence then?

[gumboot]

I can't imagine that there's any kind of "being there" feeling without proper positional head tracking.

A monitor is a horribly small field of view for some games, though, and even Cardboard can fix that.

[Dio]

Or should I be looking for a different word to presence then?

Presence has a very specific meaning in VR: it means you no longer consider yourself a human being watching something on a flashy headset, but instead your brain comes to believe it is you actually there in the virtual world - the avatar is you, not just a proxy for you.

There are varying reports of how easy this is to get. From what I've heard, people who "get" the presence thing can sometimes get it on DK2, and are very capable on Crescent Bay or the Valve kit with a good demo. I've used DK2 a lot, Crescent Bay a few times and I didn't. Haven't managed to try the Valve kit yet though.

[Orangy Tang]

I can't imagine that there's any kind of "being there" feeling without proper positional head tracking.

I get brief moments of presence on the Gear VR, even though that doesn't have positional tracking (it does have *very* good rotational tracking though).

The Gear is a lovely piece of hardware btw. I was very skeptical at first, and obviously it's not as fully featured as a PC HMD, but it's an impressive bit of kit. You lose positional tracking but being untethered so you can freely rotate without wires is a very compelling trade-off, as are the portability gains.

Having tried pretty much all of the current high-end HMDs, the future of VR is looking good - they all deliver in very compelling ways. There's going to be a lot of second-tier crappy devices though, particularly all the plastic Cardboard knockoffs that are jumping on the bandwagon. Oh and if Google can just kill Cardboard that'd do VR a big favour.

[OX mkII]

Is anyone else thinking this is taking too long to get to market and could get wiped out by competitors before it get's a release? Konix anyone?

[RedOktober]

I don't think Konix will have anything ready in time.

[Jamesac]

I think I'm impatient. I don't think it's taking too long. It's the Kickstarter effect in full force- first you hear about the prototype of something amazing that you want, then you wait forever for it to get made. It's not that it's taking any extra length of time to happen, just that creating something always takes longer than planned.

[Baggypants]

Crank of the month http://www.grabitmagazine.com/blog/post ... l-reality/

[Whiteball]

Why a crank?

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

Almost certainly "someone" will die because of reasons - Could be that they have a dodgy ticker and shouldn't probably be playing some horror/survival thing or maybe they'll die from sleep deprivation because they're too stupid to take a break after 60 hours of non-stop gaming like those guys in Jap arcades/gameshops playing jRPGs.

Maybe they'll jolt back to try and avoid something and fall off their chair.

It'll happen, it's just a case of when. Then the nanny-state will order a big review into the safety of such things and issue "new guidelines" and that "lessons will be learnt".

Etc.