Is there any kind of region locking on the Vive
I'll be in the USA next month and $599 is apparently only £464 at the moment, thats pretty tempting
What games exactly are people playing with their VR headsets these days? Still thrilled I sold my CV1 rift for no loss after having it as a dust collector for few months last year. Have zero reason to get one again and I highly recommend anyone on the fence reconsiders unless you have a nice disposable income.
Hope you have a big suitcase or are happy to ditch the packaging - the box is ridiculously big.
What games exactly are people playing with their VR headsets these days? Still thrilled I sold my CV1 rift for no loss after having it as a dust collector for few months last year. Have zero reason to get one again and I highly recommend anyone on the fence reconsiders unless you have a nice disposable income.
heyyyy that's a rift
Glasses generally work better with the Vive, because it has more space and adjustable eye relief.Ah k. Is the Rift okay for glasses aswell? I've read Vive is fairly good for that. And finally, does the Rift work with SteamVR games?
Not at all.How difficult is it to play Oculus exclusives on the vive?
Hope you have a big suitcase or are happy to ditch the packaging - the box is ridiculously big.
Ah k. Is the Rift okay for glasses aswell? I've read Vive is fairly good for that. And finally, does the Rift work with SteamVR games?
That depends on how comfortable you are with spending the money on something which will be superseded technologically within a year, give or take a few months.Edit: @durante, do you recommend the give for someone who has been on the fence for awhile?
That depends on how comfortable you are with spending the money on something which will be superseded technologically within a year, give or take a few months.
I'm a huge proponent of VR, particularly 360°/room-scale VR, and the Vive does that amazingly well. It's also on the right side of history by supporting OpenVR, so it's unlikely that it will be left behind immediately when new hardware is out, and your game purchases will migrate to future systems.
However, VR tech is still improving rather significantly, and when you buy anything at this point you need to be aware that something better at the same (or a lower) price might be around relatively soon.
This just makes Facebook look stupid with their temporary sale for Oculus + Touch.
The Oculus headset is still well worth getting at $200 less than the Vive. However, when the sale ends, the new price will sit at $500. At that point, everyone should just stick with picking up the Vive. It comes with roomscale by default and doesn't cost anything extra to get that 360 experience.
This just makes Facebook look stupid with their temporary sale for Oculus + Touch.
The Oculus headset is still well worth getting at $200 less than the Vive. However, when the sale ends, the new price will sit at $500. At that point, everyone should just stick with picking up the Vive. It comes with roomscale by default and doesn't cost anything extra to get that 360 experience.
If you don't mind that (that is, the quick pace of technological advancement), then I can fully recommend the system.I think I can live with that part of it (tech being superceded). I'm also a fan of room scale VR (and is the reason I stayed away from Oculus, among other things). I think I'm going to pull the trigger
What games exactly are people playing with their VR headsets these days? Still thrilled I sold my CV1 rift for no loss after having it as a dust collector for few months last year. Have zero reason to get one again and I highly recommend anyone on the fence reconsiders unless you have a nice disposable income.
Just a bit...Your point notwithstanding, the current box is a lot smaller than the human-sized one the originals shipped with.
That depends on how comfortable you are with spending the money on something which will be superseded technologically within a year, give or take a few months.
I'm a huge proponent of VR, particularly 360°/room-scale VR, and the Vive does that amazingly well. It's also on the right side of history by supporting OpenVR, so it's unlikely that it will be left behind immediately when new hardware is out, and your game purchases will migrate to future systems.
However, VR tech is still improving rather significantly, and when you buy anything at this point you need to be aware that something better at the same (or a lower) price might be around relatively soon.
The current estimates for "optimal" VR image quality is 16K resolution PER EYE (at 144 hz). Might as well enjoy it as-is in the meantime, because there is a LOOONGG way to go.
Even if you get a headset that doubles current resolution in a year, your PC is going to have some serious problems keeping up.
Technically we're already rendering far above the panel resolution and then downsampling that for the current generation panels. Rendering double the current native resolution and dumping that directly to higher resolution displays instead of downsampling isn't outside of the realm of possibility with current high end hardware. That said, the key to super high resolution displays is foveated rendering. Used along with eye tracking (something we really want in VR regardless), the rendering burden from higher panel resolution will be largely offset by only rendering a small fraction of it at full fidelity. We won't need GPUs capable of rendering natively to 16K displays in the future. Not even close.
Technically we're already rendering far above the panel resolution and then downsampling that for the current generation panels. Rendering double the current native resolution and dumping that directly to higher resolution displays instead of downsampling isn't outside of the realm of possibility with current high end hardware. That said, the key to super high resolution displays is foveated rendering. Used along with eye tracking (something we really want in VR regardless), the rendering burden from higher panel resolution will be largely offset by only rendering a small fraction of it at full fidelity. We won't need GPUs capable of rendering natively to 16K displays in the future. Not even close.
You should be able to get the TPCast outside of China very soon.I will jump in when the wireless version is released, no matter the cost. I feel like the freedom of movement is vital in certain games.
A $100 saving, superior controllers, far better pack in software and better native software is still a pretty compelling alternative.
Piecing together the context clues of your statement, is foveated rendering effectively only rendering at resolution that high "where the eye is looking" and the periphery of your vision is way lower (where you presumably can't see the difference anyway)?
That really depends on what your space looks like. For my VR room, even with 3 sensors it would be impossible to cover as large an area as well as 2 lighthouses do. (due to the limited FoV, and my play space extending right up to the wall on all 4 sides)Sidenote: For those who still think the Vive blows the rift out of the water, the roomscale argument is probably a moot point for the average user. Vive works reliably up to a 15x15 foot room size out of the box, and the Rift easily handles a 12x12 foot room with an additional sensor purchase.
Piecing together the context clues of your statement, is foveated rendering effectively only rendering at resolution that high "where the eye is looking" and the periphery of your vision is way lower (where you presumably can't see the difference anyway)?
This is fantastic news, but c'mon... $500 is the price I'm hoping, with that $200 delta I'd still get an Oculus first, but I want a Vive.
When are second gen headsets expected? Or else, when is the next big VR convention where we can expect announcements regarding the future? I'm not sure if it's safe to invest in one right now, with foveated rendering coming.
Not everyone wants or can even accommodate room scale VR. The out of the box Rift package offers a very compelling standing forward facing VR experience.
I think expecting Gen 2 headsets in a year to year and a half is an optimistic but possible estimate.
Correct. Will go a long way towards keeping the GPU cost down.
Yes, foveated rendering takes advantage of the natural properties of the eye where visual acuity falls off greatly from looking dead center at something:
Rendering at the highest resolution possible throughout the entire panel is a massive waste of rendering resources if you know where the eye is actually looking. We want eye tracking in VR anyhow for other things like contextual interaction and social purposes. That said, it's a toss up whether we'll see eye tracking in the next generation of HMDs, and whether it will have high enough accuracy/speed for foveated rendering even if we do have it. I fully expect it by the time gen 3 rolls out though.
This just makes Facebook look stupid with their temporary sale for Oculus + Touch.
The Oculus headset is still well worth getting at $200 less than the Vive. However, when the sale ends, the new price will sit at $500. At that point, everyone should just stick with picking up the Vive. It comes with roomscale by default and doesn't cost anything extra to get that 360 experience.
Cool. Thanks for the explanation (and image). Makes a lot of sense. I suppose this would be more exclusive to VR, than to something like 4K TVs, where you're further away and view is more broad and therefore more likely to need full rendering of the image?
Foveated rendering is certainly geared more for VR. The total FoV in VR is extremely large, and there's only ever one person looking at the screen. The same concept could theoretically be employed for traditional screens, but you'd get much less out of it. At average seating distances, a typical screen takes up much smaller chunk of your FoV (less than half that of current gen VR). As such, you'd be looking at a 4x reduction in potential performance gains in the very least. It'd also completely break down with more than one viewer.
You can play Oculus games using Revive software. But the thing is that it's a third party app and not everything is compatible with Oculus exclulsive mechanics and sometimes it suffers from janky graphic bugs. Couple of examples are Lone Echo, Edge of Nowhere, and Climb.Where are the Vive games though? Oculus games seemed like they are way more polished. I also would prefer not to use some third party hack to get access to more games.