Was it the DK1? Because if so, even the Google Cardboard with a Note 4 feels like a massive improvement over that for me.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
"what will be the biggest story of 2015?" Jason Rubin:"the launch of the Oculus rift"
- Thread starter Krejlooc
- Start date
Was it the DK1? Because if so, even the Google Cardboard with a Note 4 feels like a massive improvement over that for me.
It's just another way to watch digital content though, in that sense it's just like a screen. It's just a different way of watching digital content.
As for leaps, I'm not going to bother arguing technical details however I'd much rather have standard TVs with colour than black and white VR. It certainly isn't going to set the world on fire like colour tv.
metareferential
Member
People need to understand that "I tried it at a convention" means nothing.
Pie and Beans
Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
I think my problem with the "it'll never catch on/whats the fuss/just like 3DTV" crowds is that theyre, imo, fighting against the concept of "do you like seeing the world around you with your functioning eyes" because thats what VR is now? "No, I hate turning my head and seeing things with my eyes! Pass the mouse/right analogue stick!"
Resolution is pretty much there from most reports although with some fine glaring at stuff revealing the pixels upon which it is created, the head motion tracking is now perfected, and latency now all well up to snuff. All coming in at a $300-$350 price range supposedly this darn year. Yes, newsflash, you'll need some disgusting beast rig to play Crysis VR at 90fps one day, but then not all VR games are going to be going for bleeding edge insanity, so any imagined worst case scenario future is just that, imagined.
Pointing to 3DTV as the "failure signal" is beyond stupid as well because 3DTV is a tacked on thing to an experience many are already comfortable with, it never had a steady stream of top quality content, and it was always going to be restricted by the frame around your precious rectangle viewer. VR by definition has none of those restraints and changes everything completely. The frame explodes outwards and everywhere your eyes can see is some imaginary shit. It isn't just "boy gee whizz, now Bilbo's chin has some depth perception to it in that 2.35:1 ratio scene" now its "Fuck me I am actually standing in the Shire, there are no black bars, shit is real?!"
I honestly don't really understand where anyone else is coming from when theyre actively trying to discredit VR or downplay it. Is it because its not coming from a company of choice, a feeling that their current status quo of entertainment is under threat, or that theyre just all round terrified of broad sweeping technological change? As a fan of "seeing cool shit with my eyes and head", the now rapidly accelerating future of being able to step into alternate realities and time travel to sports/concerts/events etc is kind of fucking exciting?
Resolution is pretty much there from most reports although with some fine glaring at stuff revealing the pixels upon which it is created, the head motion tracking is now perfected, and latency now all well up to snuff. All coming in at a $300-$350 price range supposedly this darn year. Yes, newsflash, you'll need some disgusting beast rig to play Crysis VR at 90fps one day, but then not all VR games are going to be going for bleeding edge insanity, so any imagined worst case scenario future is just that, imagined.
Pointing to 3DTV as the "failure signal" is beyond stupid as well because 3DTV is a tacked on thing to an experience many are already comfortable with, it never had a steady stream of top quality content, and it was always going to be restricted by the frame around your precious rectangle viewer. VR by definition has none of those restraints and changes everything completely. The frame explodes outwards and everywhere your eyes can see is some imaginary shit. It isn't just "boy gee whizz, now Bilbo's chin has some depth perception to it in that 2.35:1 ratio scene" now its "Fuck me I am actually standing in the Shire, there are no black bars, shit is real?!"
I honestly don't really understand where anyone else is coming from when theyre actively trying to discredit VR or downplay it. Is it because its not coming from a company of choice, a feeling that their current status quo of entertainment is under threat, or that theyre just all round terrified of broad sweeping technological change? As a fan of "seeing cool shit with my eyes and head", the now rapidly accelerating future of being able to step into alternate realities and time travel to sports/concerts/events etc is kind of fucking exciting?
Visualante2
Member
Beginning to think that The Witness has been delayed to launch with this thing.
If demo'ing this tech in a convention setting isn't able to sell people, then that bodes pretty poorly for its future. It's not as if other chances to try VR (arcade, retail showroom) are going to be ideal either.
Like anything, it depends on what is being demoed. They never, for example, seem to demo sightline at conventions.
One dude on neo gaf was arguing with me (without knowing what I work on) about how fps games have no benefits in vr. After much prodding, he admitted his experience with Oculus rift was 5 minutes playing zdoom with an injection diver (even if he didn't know it was an injection diver).
I can, for example, make the snes look real shitty by only letting you demo noahs ark 3d and captain novolin.
I'd say there's a good chance she'll have an easier time with VR than a flat screen, as long as it's at least a DK2 for the head position tracking. Looking around in VR is a lot more natural than trying to map mouse/controller movements to view changes on a flat screen, so it gets rid of that disconnect. It could still be an issue during movement, but it's worth a shot.
So the terms for general vr sickness, sometimes erroneously called motion sickness, is actually an umbrella term for several similar sicknesses caused by different things.
Some people get vertigo from playing vr - technically not a fault of the tech (its acting as intended) but rather poor software design. I can easily induce vertigo in a demo by placing someone high up, as you would get vertigo in real life doing this. Which is to say, doing things in VR that would make you sick in real life, will probably make you sick in VR as well. You can't expect to be Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes - part of the reason we don't do backflips left and right all over the place is because doing so, for an average person, would end in vomit. It's no different in VR. Some early demos do stupid shit like making you run at the IRL equivalent of 70 mph through rotating corridors and people wonder why they get sick. With Half Life 2 VR, we've actually spent significant amounts of time adjusting walking and running speeds, redesigning areas to cut back on crazy jumps you need to make - because expecting players to do that is unfeasible. We're not superhumans IRL.
Some experience sickness because they can perceive the latency between their head moving and the world updating - low persistence strobing oled has effectively solved this. By strobing the display with essentially black frames fractions of a seconds after they scan out, our bodies take advantage of a natural phenomenon our brains use to "fill in" the gaps of the missing pieces of animation. Hence, by simply not drawing anything to the screen at all, our brains will do the missing work for us, which winds up feeling much more comfortable.
Some experience vestibulochoclear disconnect, where there cochlear fluid in their ear isn't moving the way their eyes say they are. This is essentially unsolvable at the moment and depends on your personal limits. There are two frames of thought on how to solve this:
1) electric stimulation of your cochlear to make you feel like your choclear fluid is actually moving (good luck getting a guinea pig for that, zapping your brain with an electric charge)
Or 2) actually make the person move irl to cause harmony between their cochlear and what they see.
In terms of vestibulocochlear disconnect, not all motions are created equal. Cardinal translation isn't bad - moving forward, backwards, stafing - we use parallax cues to figure out the expected motion and our bodies adjust, only feeling discomfort at the start of the motion, and mild at that. Rotation is the killer, so the solution is to either place the player in a swivel chair so they can physically rotate or some other omnidirectional treadmill.
Our studies have uncovered an interesting phenomenon, however - expected motion severely limits your discomfort. To conceptualize this, we built a demo using positional tracked hands. In the demo, you can reach out and grab the world by closing your hand, at which point the movement of your hand translates the world around you. In essence you are grabbing and shaking the world.... nobody gets sick. Play back the same translation without using your hands, people get sick to their gills.
With that in mind, we're toying with a hand operated method of locomotion where you basically "swim" through the environment without using your feet, and it's producing neat results.
Still other people get sick because they can perceive the screen flicker - 90 hz is where it becomes imperceptible pretty much universally. At 75 hz on the dk2, I can perceive it in my peculiarity periphery but it doesn't make me sick. 120 hz is preferred over 90, however, because 60, 30, 24, etc divides evenly into 120, allowing for native frequency playback of, say, standard television or movie content within the context of a virtual screen. Samsung can actually drive Gear VR up to 70 hz, but since it has a focus on media playback, 60 hz was deemed a better refresh rate because it could natively play back movies at their natural frequency.
EDIT: Forgot one - some people got sick with Dk1 simply because the tracking wasn't close enough to their IRL position, and we have strong proprioception in our head and hands (the ability to know where we are in 3D space without visual cues). Our heads would say we were moving into one position, and our eyes would say another. The biggest offender was the lack of any positional tracking in DK1 at all - only pitch, yaw, and rotation, no X, Y, or Z. DK2 does X, Y, and Z in a forward 180 degrees. CV1 and Morpheus will do X,Y, and Z in full 360 degrees.
This is often something people miss - the need to match our proprioception as close as possible is incredibly, massively important and something that didn't really approach acceptable levels until the last 5 or so years. You hear it repeated often - we need sub-millimeter accuracy with our positional tracking, or else most people can tell that it's "off."
In short, nobody can tell you if your girlfriend will get sick without knowing why she gets sick playing fps games in the first place. She'll just have to try it. My sister in law got violently ill from dk1 for over a day, yet she could do gear vr for hours. Apparently the low persistence solved her sim sickness.
EDIT: I typed this on my phone, I'm going through and correcting all the mistakes.
Only the people making it felt that way, and they said it before anyone even knew what it was. When it was revealed, everyone laughed and felt let down. The two are in no way comparable.
Thanks for the information!
I'm personally hesitant to use the tech after a nasty bout of labrynthitus..not using VR but more of a irrational fear it will somehow trigger it again
Great post!
So this is also an interesting phenomenon - we use all of our senses to generate our perception of reality, and such such, each sense has strong pathways to stored memories. One funny thing that's been observed happening is that people would get sick with DK1 after demoing it to people, and they'd basically form a connection through classical conditioning to associate the smell of the foam with getting sick. Thus, even if DK2 wouldn't make them sick (something that can be checked by removing the foam), the smell of the foam itself would trigger memories of their sickness.
This is part of the reason oculus doesn't want people demoing this stuff in public out in the open, and it is also why Gear VR comes with multiple pieces of foam (so you can have one that you demo with that absorbs everyone else's smelly oils onto, leaving you a safe, personal piece of foam.)
Of course, if you never become classicly conditioned to get sick from the smell of that foam in the first place, this is never a problem to begin with. But for some poor unlucky people, the smell of VR is linked to them getting ill.
Betta Lines
Member
Yep, this was a strong reaction for me when I moved from DK1 to DK2. The foam housing is identical, with an identical smell that I immediately associated with some bad experiences with DK1. I would feel sick (or at least, think I should feel sick) literally as the foam reached my nose, before I even looked through the lenses. It took many hours to lose that association - the smell is still there (albeit faded) but now it doesn't trigger anything for me thankfully.
Luckily, Gear VR's foam is very different, and it sounds like CB is using the same kind of foam. I wonder if trying to disassociate with the smell is part of the intent.
Neuromancer
Member
Thanks for the breakdown Krejlooc! As always you are a goldmine of useful information.
Neuromancer
Member
From what I hear the Oculus does not play well with glasses but Project Morpheus does. I haven't tried either myself but I'm in the same boat as you.
You can wear glasses with the rift
3) Anchor the player's sense of space to a fixed point. (according to Oculus' own internal research).
e.g. a cockpit or a room with a 3D window/TV.
I have an idea that maybe you'd like to try out based on 3. Where significant vection occurs, show a fixed VR room (that increases in opacity with faster motion up to a limit) that stays stationary to the player's movement.
Make this an option for VR players that experience motion sickness, and allow the details of opacity and or speed (curve) of activation be user configurable.
It seems to me that would be a good way of providing users with a compromise between immersion and motion sickness cure, given the individual variability of it.
I think compromising the entire design for a significant number of players to satisfy the physiological issues of another significant number of players can leave for... a compromised design.
It is not 'just like a screen'. Is a hologram 'just like a screen'? No, of course not. Neither is VR.
There is still evidence that you're looking at a screen, but it is not viewed 'like a screen' whatsoever. It is worlds different. Your ability to see and understand scale and your spatial reasoning is just dramatically, dramatically improved. You do *not* get the same information on a standard screen. Not even close.
I don't know how you can say this without ever having tried VR, and more importantly, don't seem to understand what VR even is.
MiloFoxburr
Member
It is pretty uncomfortable though. I can spend a couple of hours in the rift with my glasses but the bridge of my nose will be killing me afterwards. I imagine it'll be more comfortable in the consumer version or hopefully custom lenses will be an option
I honestly hope this technology doesn't become mainstream, it should have important implication in some limited fields like medicine and education, but stop there. Our society doesnt't need further means of alienation and anti-social propellers.
But I have faith in our society that, as many have said, isn't properly represented by NeoGAF.
But I have faith in our society that, as many have said, isn't properly represented by NeoGAF.
Have you ever had a fun online co-op experience in a game?
Imagine actually being in the world with your friend. I think the connectivity between two actual human beings in VR is going to be so much more powerful than it is right now in co-op games. And this is just a very obvious situation. There will be many, many more that show that VR can actually connect people like never before.
No, because millions of people already have tech in their homes that can drive VR, and there will be millions more as prices drop within months. People can also have tech in their homes that can drive VR better than an arcade ever could.
VR in arcades could still be really cool, though. There's lots of things VR-related that would not be practical for most people to do in their home. Using an omnidirectional treadmill, for instance. Or have complicated local multiplayer setups. Or having a room that is safety proof for people to actually walk around in. Or big hydraulic cockpit setups.
They're already being worked on, and they're as cool as you'd expect.
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=949885
Interesting. Sounds like if people have a more physical interaction with the landscape around them, they get less sick. I wondered if you could use foot pedals (the kind you'd get with a flight sim setup) to rotate your body left/right in the game. Thinking was that the physical movement of your legs might tie well into movement in the game - better than a thumb on the right stick anyway. Have you tried anything like that - using the legs while seated?
I think my "misconception" is that they'll want to make profit off of that, what? $2bn buyout? Long term indeed!
Betta Lines
Member
HolyBaikal
Banned
I sure hope it's coming out this year.
I've had a hard time waiting. I almost bought a developer's kit.
I hope all those things things I want to try work with the consumer version.
I've had a hard time waiting. I almost bought a developer's kit.
I hope all those things things I want to try work with the consumer version.
That's what the Oculus Store is for. They basically want to the be the Apple Store of the VR market and dominate the market and mindshare for a long time, and I'd say they are *well* placed to do just that. Hardware sales aren't going to be their money-maker at all. In fact, they've repeatedly said that they are going to sell the headset as near to cost as they viably can.I think my "misconception" is that they'll want to make profit off of that, what? $2bn buyout? Long term indeed!
So yeah, that's another potential solution. Decent in vr isn't awful like it should be, seemingly entirely because of the cockpit graphic around you.
My domain registration has just expired today, actually, and I'm debating whether or not to renew because I'm terrible at keeping it up to date. I honestly think the last time I updated my site was like april or may.
Your bodily proprioception (neck tension especially) is also an important part of the vestibular system. Zapping the cochlea alone doesn't solve it. You'd really need to physically turn people around at the same speed as the game is. Then again cars are a good example. We still use them even though it drives a number of us sick.
This is really cool, did you publish it? Can PM if you don't want your name on here.
I genuinely think the main thing that will hold OR back from mass market success and appeal is the pc requirement. These days most people are going for portable and fast devices which are catered to them getting online as fast as possible. Is Joe Public going to want to drop $300 for a pair of goggles that will only really work if they shell out for a decently powered computer at home too? As we all know, for virtual reality to work it needs look as realistic as possible with minimum lag, a under performing computer isn't going to cut it unfortunately.