My experience with vr

Got an oculus rift 2 weeks ago. The thing is very cool have probably spent half my time gaming in it but there are some considerations.

The performance required is significantly higher than what you would need for the same frame rate and settings on a normal screen. I estimate you want to be able to push about 180fps solid on a 1080p screen in order to get 90 fps on a rift/vive. This is partly because of the barrel distortion the vr needs to do. The pixels are rendered out normally in a square shaped screen space like they would for a regular monitor. They then have to be shifted to adjust for the lenses and your eyes so that everything shows up in the right place. When this happens some square space pixels will end up halfway over multiple vr barrel space pixels. The advantage of this is it has some anti aliasing properties smoothing out edges. The disadvantage is that the image gets blurry and less precise. Since the vr headset is already showing your eyes huge pixels compared to looking at your monitor, the blurryness becomes unacceptable. The natural workaround is to increase the initial number of pixels drawn so that there is more precision in the barrel distortion process. This is called hmd quality or pixels per screen pixel or similar names in each game. If you turn it up you get basicly a supersampled more precise image and the experience is much better. I find myself turning off things like shadows and ambient occlusion just so that i can turn this setting to 1.5 or higher in every game. 1.5 might not seem like much but you are essentially rendering 2.25 times as many pixels. I am using a 6700hq and 1070 (restricted to 120w). I think that a 1080 or higher and an unlocked i7 would be desireable for a decent vr experience.

All in all though its really cool. I love elite dangerous in it. I just got subnautica and will play it once i have some days off.

Seeing how demanding it is and how few big games support it and how low resolution (per radian) it is right now i would wait untill the next gen if you are unsure. But yeah its still really cool to have the feeling of being surrounded by your enviornment even if it doesnt totally convince you that you are there.

 

I can tell right away that you only have the Oculus touch headset. Do yourself a favor, and get the Oculus Touch controllers. And the replacement headphones.

I owned the Oculus Rift retail model since day 1 (I was in first wave of pre-orders shipped. June 2016) , and had the same reaction as you... Neat little gimmick, but overall underwhelming.

Buy the Oculus Touch controllers for $100. It comes with a game called Robo Recall. Buy the replacement headphones for $50, because they are in-ear monitors and block external sound (adding to immersion). Buy Space Pirate Trainer for $10. It's the "Wii Tennis" of VR, that really showcases the new gaming experience that you've never seen before.

Do that, and THEN come back and tell us what you think. I can promise you that you won't be able to, because you'll be having too much fun in Space Pirate Trainer, getting sweaty as you dodge and duck incoming lasers. It's unfortunate that Oculus still packs the HMD and touch controllers separately, because the touch controllers and body motion are really what give you the quantum leap in gaming experience.

The touch controllers are what put it all together. You already know that the Oculus Right helmet changes the visuals of a game, so it can make it LOOK like your character is standing on the edge of a space station loading dock.

But space pirates don't fight gunfight attack drones using Xbox One controllers in their belt holsters. That feels unnatural. They use handheld quark guns, or SMGs, or grenade launcher, or rail guns, or handheld riot shields. So put down what clearly feels like a game controller in your hands, and pick up what feels like two quark guns instead.

Space pirates also don't fight sitting down. They stand up on that space platform to face the incoming waves of attack drones.

Space pirates also don't just stay motionless, only turning their heads to look around them. No, space pirates dodge and duck incoming lasers. They block shots with their handheld shield in one hand, and lean their bodies around that shield to see and shoot enemies with the weapon in their other hand.

Space Pirates don't stay quiet. They constantly shout stuff like, "Stupid attack drones! Eat my quAARRRRRRRRks!"

Seriously. Buy the touch controllers and headphones from Amazon, and Space Pirate Trainer from Steam. Try it. If you love it, come back and tell us why it's awesome. If you dont like, return all of that to Amazon and Steam.





Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

 

I have a Vive, and it doesn't really show that many distortion problems except in very dark environments with small bright objects, or if you give a static environment a really close look, not sure if that's a big difference or I'm just not noticing it, but it totally goes away for me if there's any movement at all. Also, as @kent1146 mentioned, you really want controllers. While I love the Vive's controllers, Touch controllers you can get for Oculus felt way better when I tried those, and I wish there was a Vive controller version that was more like them.

 

I picked the Rift up on the current sale price, mostly for Elite Dangerous. It came with the Touch controllers, but I can't picture not using a HOTAS for Elite.

 

Thats sweet man. I love elite dangerous in it. One thing I like that you might like is turning down the graphics settings so that you can turn up the HMD quality setting. The higher you put the HMD quality the clearer things look.

OMG 400 for the touch and rift! I paid 500 for just the rift.

 

Thanks for the tip. Should have my new laptop next week and the anticipation is killing me! Been playing since early beta but I think VR will make it a whole new world. CMDR Auslander if you'd like to add me.

 

I've got Elite, but no HOTAS and you're right, it's almost essential.

 

I use a controller but elite has way WAY WAY too many functions for an xbox controller. Good thing it has such a great settings menu letting us set 2 key combinations.

 

When I played on the screen I could get by with basic controller functions and the occasional keyboard press, but with a headset on I wouldn't be able to see my keyboard. Otherwise I likely would have got a good setup to start.

 

A friend of mine had LCD floor to ceiling windows in her condo. With the flick of a switch they went from transparent to opaque. That's my wish for the next gen headsets. Just have a hotkey set up and it would eliminate one of the major drawbacks. I didn't press my face against the glass to see if there 0 light transmission. But I think it has potential.

 

Looked into this for my house once and I recallit would cost more than the entire house to get all the windows done. Cool concept though. For VR, are you thinking something like a mode that uses a built in camera to switch on the fly between pass-through camera mode and the VR display?

 

That level of pricing wouldn't surprise me one bit. In her case, it came installed with the condo in downtown Chicago. It was already a ridiculous price for the square footage and I'm guessing it was there to be shiny and sucker people into it! Actually your idea is much better. Wouldn't add much to the build cost to throw a cell phone style/size cam on the front. Heck, a stick on that could be hotkeyed would probably sell like crazy right now. Even more so if it could be done without eating up another USB port.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

The Vive's got a built in camera already, not sure about the Rift (though I think it doesn't). There aren't many applications that use it though, I think, and I don't recall ever actually using the interface for passthrough. I have used that type of function on the GearVR and while it was a bit laggy (you'd get really disoriented trying to walk around in that mode) it was otherwise fine.

 

Unfortunately the oculus doesn't include front facing cameras, although I don't believe there are many apps that utilize the passthrough. Would make for some interesting augmented reality experiences.

 

Agreed, but I think the current state of the hardware doesn't really support that kind of thing very well, even thought it does a little.

 

Makes me disappointed that their hasn't been proper consumer device that explores AR to it's potential. We have Microsoft's Hololens and Magic Leap that are on the leading edge, but haven't properly demonstrated consumer worthy product.

 

AR's going to take off in other sectors long before it's a consumer thing I bet. Nearly everything I've seen in demo leans towards "useful" and the stuff that leans "social" or "fun" which will drive consumer sales was less emphasized. I have my thoughts on why this is, but no real evidence at the moment to back up my suspicions.

 

You have nvidia prototyping a 16000hz display for AR. Its clear that there are benefits to tech that will need some developing before its fully ready. I know my computer probably isnt 16000hz ready yet.

Im unsure that 16khz is needed but i know that when latency is broken down to a difference of distance, you can easily see something that is lagging 1ms behind. Probably a total pipeline latency of 1ms would be where it is acceptable but noticably imperfect and could be maketed an sold. With most games if you have 20ms latency from mouse to screen you have reached the top teir of latency setups (from game code to hardware). So 1ms will need to be something different. And it helps if the screen is only a fraction of that.

 

Sounds like it's going to be really big in industrial design and modeling first, they have the compute power to spare.

 

Im just waiting for pokemon goAR

 

There was an idea a while back for a paranormal investigation AR game that resembled the glasses from Thirteen Ghosts. Don't remember what it was called but that would be kinda cool if it ever got off the ground.