Journal #8761

Had tried the Rift dk1 and dk2, both were pretty bad tbh, i could easily see the pixels of the screen which killed the immersiveness for me personally, "Screen Door" is not much of an issue for me, depends on personal preference i suppose.
Will probably try Vive in the next 2 weeks and see how that is better or worse than the Rift (as far as i know the Rift consumer version is very similar to dk2). PSVR is really not a thing in my mind, since it has inferior hardware that powers it, but to be fair i have not done any research on it.
There is a another HMD which looks promising - OSVR, with it being open source there is a lot of potential for new physical control options etc... And the screen is pretty good (so i was told).

If i were to get a HMD right now the Vive is a no brainer. The controllers and the ability to move around the room rather than sitting beats the Rift to pieces. But i don't have a spare 2k$ to throw for a new setup + the headpiece so that will have to wait

Haven't used any of them, not really in a rush to, but I think even if you were interested in VR it would be a mistake to buy one of them right now. The tech is going to evolve constantly and the cost is really damn high for something that's going to be obsolete so quickly.

I can't speak about how immersive VR is, and I have no reason to doubt it looks amazing, but the issue I don't really see anyone tackling is what exactly has it done for gameplay? Seems kind of important to me!

I haven't seen a single VR-specific game that wasn't just fiddling with physics objects (with higher, shaky hand fidelity!) or a simple wave-based shooter that plants you on the spot (because you just can't reliably move long distances in a VR environment). Motion/tracking controls are easily the worst out there, it doesn't matter how much more accurate they get.

I don't actually think there's ever actually going to be a 'killer app' for VR devices in their current form, they're just too detrimental to game design. The tech might be more impressive, but it seems likely they're going to be looked back at for a laugh just like the VR concepts of the 80s, only 10 years from now instead of 30 because technology and the zeitgeist moves so much faster.

They might have a future in videos and education, especially as the tech eventually gets cheaper, but I find it hard to imagine they'll ever really be anything more than niche.

I'm basically thinking the same about VR as I did with motion controls. It's an interesting gimmick.

Regarding the VIVE, technology is certainly advancing to interesting places, but it seems you need to pay a small fortune in order to try it. Even then, the games that utilise it are barely games at all. They're just room sized apps that you piss around in.

@Strider Completely agree with you mate. I seriously doubt it's ever going to affect the gaming market in any meaningful way, because its really damn hard to make a good gaming experience for VR if even possible.

When the media keeps saying "It's going to be a big deal" 3D suddenly pops up in my mind and when it was a "big deal".

Only tried once the Occulus Rift. That was impressive, even though it made me sick in the end.
What I don't understand is why isn't it easier to be able to play 3D games with a 360° vision, optionally in 3D? It's already possible to use a smartphone to get a 360° vision, so it's technically supposed to be very simple.
A video which I found interesting on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8H5kYesvsM

My roommate is working on a VR game for school this year, so I actually got to take a look around some of the Occulus demos today after he set up the devkit he signed out. (Sadly, no hands-on experience with the Vive or Morphe- I mean, PSVR yet) I didn't get any vertigo from the 'rooftop' demo, but the dinosaur ones made me a bit nervous, despite knowing full well that the featherless raptor wasn't real.

I think the tech has potential, but we need A) to get used to some of the design quirks, and B) Actually have a dev team make a full-on VR game instead of a series of tech demos. As fun as Horseshoes, Hotdogs, and Hangrenades, Budget Cuts, or Kingspray Graffiti Simulator look, they're not really 'full' game experiences, but rather (super neat) toys for VR.

If someone came out with something like the HL2 VR mod, I think that could be a killer app that would help get things rolling, but I'm not aware of any team working on something like that, presumably because of the monetary risk in making something that large scope for a platform that hasn't become ubiquitous yet.

We also need to get movement figured out in a way that doesn't involve teleporting or causing mass motion sickness (which apparently happens sometimes with analog stick movement), and isn't limited to the Vive's detection circle. Once that falls in place, I think VR will properly take off. But that'll be Generation 2 VR at the soonest.

I agree with Ross Scott, VR is just ice on the cake and it's more of a market rather than anything else. Standard 3D is more than enough and I think there is still a lot to explore.

What I don't understand is why isn't it easier to be able to play 3D games with a 360° vision, optionally in 3D? It's already possible to use a smartphone to get a 360° vision, so it's technically supposed to be very simple.

Even if you do have the fastest PC of the world, you would loose a lot of FPS on modern games. We live in a world of WYSIWGR (What You See Is What Gets Rendered), 360° means killing that because it would require more cameras, more cameras = more scenes to render, more scenes to render = more CPU/GPU work, more CPU/GPU work = lags.

UPDATE : AFAIK, VR developers have a set of standards to respect in order to prevent motion sickness, so it's either the standards are bad or the developers don't care.

A VR club opened in my city, but an hour costs about 17$. I'm gonna go there sometime to test VR for the first time. Until then I only know stuff that people said in reviews, and your opinions.

I was at a tech event last year where I got to put my camera aside and test a first-gen Rift (I think it was first-gen... but it was long enough ago that I don't remember). It was quite impressive as far as immersion but the picture was shit. It was all pixelly and blurry.

I can't afford any anyway, so I'll wait for the second generation of VR devices. It's only an educated guess but I'm sure the second generation will be battery powered and wireless. That will be something I look forward to.

"Even if you do have the fastest PC of the world, you would loose a lot of FPS on modern games. We live in a world of WYSIWGR (What You See Is What Gets Rendered), 360° means killing that because it would require more cameras, more cameras = more scenes to render, more scenes to render = more CPU/GPU work, more CPU/GPU work = lags."
No, I mean one camera rendered on your smartphone's screen. There are "helmets" (casque?) which allow you to use a smartphone's screen like some sort of VR devices. It allows you to attach your smartphone right before your eyes to get full immersion. But then, the smartphone would have to detect precisely enough the head's movements.
Right now, it's only for watching movies I think.

Discuss? Don't tell me what to do!

Mobile VR is a thing and tbh is quite decent for what it can do.
GearVR with an S6 or was it an S7 (don't remember) produces about the same quality picture as the Rift Dk2, granted you are not going to play hardcore games on it, but for watching videos its more than decent, and the price is reasonable if you got the phone already.

360 video and 3D 360 video are different things, 360 is just a lot of cameras with their images stitched together to form a sphere, but i don't believe it produces a true 3D environment since its essentially 1 camera for 1 picture. To produce realistic 3D environments you need 2 viewpoints (2 cameras), in games that translates to rendering the same scene twice with some offset, that kills performance. Though now that VR is moving forward the underlying tech, namely stereoscopic 3D rendering is getting a facelift so to speak, with more advanced GPU's being able to render the scenes using different techniques rather than just putting a second viewpoint in, NVIDIA has something for this i believe.