VR is here

sherbz

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So i am curious. Has anyone in the community taken the plunge and bought a VR headset? And if so, what are your thoughts?

I have not, and i dont really intend to. For one i do not have the space. Second my computer would struggle and i would need an upgrade, which on top of the rather hefty price tag i could actually afford, i would probably rather spend on something else.

Having said that, it does usher in a new and interesting era for PC gaming. If the games dictate that i must get one then i rule nothing out. But at the moment i am a wait and see type of person.
 
Another smartass who didnt even tried it i guess.
 
Saving my money for generation 2, but the Vive is look really, really good. Oculous... eh, not looking quite as hot. It will be a slow start but they have a lot of use for sure, especially in sim games.
 
So i am curious. Has anyone in the community taken the plunge and bought a VR headset? And if so, what are your thoughts?

I have not, and i dont really intend to. For one i do not have the space. Second my computer would struggle and i would need an upgrade, which on top of the rather hefty price tag i could actually afford, i would probably rather spend on something else.

Having said that, it does usher in a new and interesting era for PC gaming. If the games dictate that i must get one then i rule nothing out. But at the moment i am a wait and see type of person.

I am not an early adopter typically (I prefer to pay less and get a more polished product), but this has me tempted. Partially because I'm a bit burnt out on standard games (having been a gamer for a couple decades+) and something new like this just sounds fun.
 
Ultimately I spend most of my gaming time playing strategy games so its not that appealing. Also I quite like to be able to look up and see the real world periodically when playing.
 
Ultimately I spend most of my gaming time playing strategy games so its not that appealing. Also I quite like to be able to look up and see the real world periodically when playing.

Yes, i am more of a strategy gamer too. I do quite enjoy survival horror games like alien isolation and outlast though. And the thought of playing one of those with a VR headseat fills me with an odd feeling of dread and wonder. I also quite like space flight sims like Elite, which should also be decent with a VR head set. Trouble is i dont have much room at home where my computer is and i dont think i have the space.
 
I preordered both vive and rift. Vive will arrive this week if HTC fix the mess the whole launch is, rift will arrive for the end of April or maybe May, who knows :rolleyes:

I will try both and resell the one i like less, which will be the rift probably. Maybe even earning some profit if i do it before retailers start selling it.

About strategy games, RV is not limited to simulators, FPS and such. There are platformers and RTS games already available. People say they works amazingly. I will try it all soon and post my impressions here.

Cant wait... :drool:
 
I'm following it with some interest, but haven't bought one, in part because I would need to upgrade at least my graphics card to be able to run them (also a bit below the Haswell CPU specs, but I reckon I could probably get away with Sandy Bridge OC'ed to 4 GHz or so). And with 14nm GPUs around the corner, I don't want to upgrade that right now.

I've tried the Oculus Dev Kit 1 in person; I have to say I was not that impressed with it. But there have been a lot of improvements between it and the release version, as well as between it and the Vive. So, I'd certainly be curious to try the release versions in person. I saw that the Microsoft store is supposed to have the Vive in certain locations; I'm hoping that my local one, or another local retailer, gets Vives later this year. Not sure if the Oculus is planning to have brick-and-mortar availability, but if it did that would increase the chances I'd buy one since both are fairly pricey, and thus it'd be easier to convince me with a good in-person demo.

Overall it'll have to be a pretty impressive demo since there are other options competing for my entertainment dollars as well, but if it really is immersive it stands a chance.
 
idk dude I get sick at 3d movies, not sure how VR would feel for me. It's also darn expensive considering you need a high end pc to start with. Plus I want to see if it's a fad like 3d tvs were or if it really sticks.
 
Sickness and nausea kick in when your eyes and the rest of your body dont agree. For instance when you run in VR but are sit down in RL. There is a number of ways to avoid or go around this issue but the game needs to be built for VR from zero. So you need native VR games. Dont try to play Skyrim or GTA V in VR if you are even slightly sensible to motion sickness or it will end pretty bad.
 
Yeah, I'm going to have to take note of that - I have some proclivity towards motion sickness, but as Thorgalaeg says, it's when the eyes and the rest of your body (in particular, the tubes in your ears) disagree. Very turbulent airplane descending through clouds - bad idea. Boat - fine if I can see the horizon.

In the short amount of time I tried the Dev Kit 1 I didn't have any problems, but it wasn't long enough to get really immersed, or have lots of activity. Not sure if the DK1 would've worked for me long-term.

Reading up some more on it, the Vive's more immersive controller sounds like a solid point in its favor. But, there's also PlayStation VR coming down the line in about six months, and the Rift plans to introduce technology similar to the Vive's at some point for more immersive experiences, although I wonder if it will catch on for the Rift or if it will be like the Kinect on the 360/XBoxOne, where not everyone has it and thus most games are built assuming you don't have it. While I am currently pretty much exclusively a PC gamer, it must be admitted that if the PS4+PSVR is $850 combined, it could be compelling versus the Vive at $800 if the experience is similar, even if I do have my PC upgraded to Vive-compatible levels by the time PSVR comes out.
 
How good is it really going to look on a ps4? If you read some of the reviews of vive like on tom's hardware the amount of pixels it has to render is astounding and that's why it has a min gpu requirement of a gtx 970 which is like a $300 card. A ps4 uses from what I can tell a modified hd 7870 which is really old and like a gtx 660, way slower. So my guess is all the VR on ps4 and xbox is going to be massively scaled down from what you can do on a PC.

But another reason I can't get it, my pc's too slow. I'm still running a i5-760, don't think that'll cut it, and I have upgraded my gpu but only to a very modest r9 270, not fast enough.

Plus I kinda wonder at the content. It seems fun for sure but in the way that wii bowling and sports was fun when it first game out. Fun to play with a group, fun to play just to chill now and then, but not serious for gamers. After a couple weeks I was back to civ and dota and dragon age and whatever else.
 
How good is it really going to look on a ps4? If you read some of the reviews of vive like on tom's hardware the amount of pixels it has to render is astounding and that's why it has a min gpu requirement of a gtx 970 which is like a $300 card. A ps4 uses from what I can tell a modified hd 7870 which is really old and like a gtx 660, way slower. So my guess is all the VR on ps4 and xbox is going to be massively scaled down from what you can do on a PC.

But another reason I can't get it, my pc's too slow. I'm still running a i5-760, don't think that'll cut it, and I have upgraded my gpu but only to a very modest r9 270, not fast enough.

Plus I kinda wonder at the content. It seems fun for sure but in the way that wii bowling and sports was fun when it first game out. Fun to play with a group, fun to play just to chill now and then, but not serious for gamers. After a couple weeks I was back to civ and dota and dragon age and whatever else.

Yea, i kind of agree here.

I did read an article that actually made some sense. And that was basically to say that VR will see a rebirth of the video arcade. When i was a kid arcades used to hold the best of the best in gaming. Because the machines and power required were very expensive, and also quite bulky for people to have at home.

So, maybe the same might happen with VR. With an arcade VR you could have a giant room all to yourself. You could have a whole team of people one one side and another on the other and play a virtual game of paintball or COD. Maybe the future of VR is not in the home, but in the arcade.
 
That would be pretty sweet actually, maybe like how 3d is still popular at theaters but not at home? If they could do augmented reality paintball or something that would be awesome like a VR overlay over real objects. So you'd see your friends running and light em up like laser tag but a million times better with effects and actual hit boxes not just a light sensor.

Vive sort of does this, it'll show you objects in the room in green lines looking all matrix'y if you turn it on so you can be sure not to run into obstacles and stuff.
 
That would be pretty sweet actually, maybe like how 3d is still popular at theaters but not at home? If they could do augmented reality paintball or something that would be awesome like a VR overlay over real objects. So you'd see your friends running and light em up like laser tag but a million times better with effects and actual hit boxes not just a light sensor.

Vive sort of does this, it'll show you objects in the room in green lines looking all matrix'y if you turn it on so you can be sure not to run into obstacles and stuff.

Yes, given time you should be able to build a game over real life objects to make them look like something the are not. So build 2 forts out of mdf and then build a Piece of software to overlay on the existing structures. Give everyone guns that have recoil, then play. I think that would be amazing. Maybe I should go on dragons den.
 
I did read an article that actually made some sense. And that was basically to say that VR will see a rebirth of the video arcade. When i was a kid arcades used to hold the best of the best in gaming. Because the machines and power required were very expensive, and also quite bulky for people to have at home.

Sounds logical, but if VR is going to become an arcade thing, we can't really expect anything more complex than the typical arcade game. Nothing that would take many hours and require you to save, since it would simply be too expensive to play something like an Elder Scrolls game for hours and hours in an arcade. VR arcades would probably have mostly casual action games, and maybe a horror adventure or two, although the latter is better suited for playing at home lest one make a screaming fool of oneself in public.
And then there's the porn. Unless you're a real weirdo you'll want to enjoy that in privacy.
 
Got my VIVE a couple of days ago.

Seriously, this is some powerful stuff.

First time i put it on i felt somewhat disapointed: It is clumsy, i had some issues with my glasses at first, resolution is low, there is like a fine net covering all, field of view is not complete but like wearing scuba glasses, imagen clarity is not 100% near the borders...

But all those issues are meaingless once you look around and realize you are "there".

Tracking is perfect, headset and wands, to the point you could grab them in the air, 3d effect is so perfect i could not call it 3d effect anymore but reality effect. Objects feel "corporeus" like if really were there. Several times i found myself trying to leave my wands on some virtual table. My girldfriend even tried to drink of a virtual cup of tea at job simulator. There is a demo where you use a bow and you can really feel the cord tension even knowing that is not possible. Curiosly graphic quality is not that fundamental to perceive things as real. Movement smoothness, precise tracking and real physical behaviour are way more important.

Room scale experiences where you can walk some steps around are amazing, the only way to describe it is saying it is like RL. There is a demo where you look at a skeleton scanned from a real body floating in front of you, you can stare around, cut it anywhere with a moving surface, look inside it... All i can say is i learnt more anatomy in few minutes than in my whole life. Medicine faculties NEED this. Wands allow you to interact with things like if were your hands. Tracking is so good it feels totally natural. Whole room is easily covered. Tried everything to lose tracking, only thing that worked was to hide under the table.

Also tried the sitting experience, flight and racing simulators are whole new things. I tried Live for Speed and i suddenly was making great times. The spacial perception is so much better than seeing it in a flat surface in front of you. In flight sims you have a whole new perception of the real complexity of aircraft cockpits, the sensation of being surrounded by a lot of instruments and technological expensive stuff is very real. You ARE in a plane.

I am very prone to motion sickness and havent felt slightly sick at any moment except at a specific fast turn of a specific track in Live for Speed where you turn right and then left quickly. My body was expecting some heavy G force there and of course it didnt come. My stomach didnt like that very much. My brother otoh drove along hours and was perfectly OK.

Finally tried, ejem, the mandatory porn movie. I confess. It is not a frivolous or banal thing thought. It is not like seeing your usual porn movie at all. At some point one of the girls got his face really close and whispered something dirty in the guy ear (he was wearing the rv cam on his head obviously), i felt her breath in my ear in real life! It gets so ridiculously personal it is insane. It could be not too difficult to fall in love with some random porn star.

Cant think of how powerful could this technology be applied to cinema industry in general. There is not a flat screen separating the movie and the viewer worlds anymore. Dont know about comedy but dramatic movies would get much more intense at an emotional level because you are not in two separated worlds anymore but in the same world, so they are not things in a flat screen but real people habiting the same space along you. It is the same with game NPCs and even more with other human players in multiplayer games and such who you can interact with. I shot some random guy in the face at an online game called hoverjunkers and i felt slightly bad about it. You can really feel empaty towards the other beings in the virtual world... seriously, there is some deep s### here.

Only complain is lack of content. It is too early anyway and developing software takes time. In any case there is enough stuff already to keep me busy for some months. So guys buy it if you can, be it VIVE, Rift or PSVR, we need the largest VR user base as possible. VR is here and you need it. It needs to go mainstream! (and i need loads of content for my VIVE :mischief: )

Conclusion: :faint:
 
Sounds logical, but if VR is going to become an arcade thing, we can't really expect anything more complex than the typical arcade game. Nothing that would take many hours and require you to save, since it would simply be too expensive to play something like an Elder Scrolls game for hours and hours in an arcade. VR arcades would probably have mostly casual action games, and maybe a horror adventure or two, although the latter is better suited for playing at home lest one make a screaming fool of oneself in public.
And then there's the porn. Unless you're a real weirdo you'll want to enjoy that in privacy.

True, but if you have people pay £15 per month to play WOW then im pretty sure you could get people to join a VR club and pay like £30 - £40 per month, which grants them use of the headsets, use of the software, and use of the facilities. Think of it a bit like a video game club.
 
Got my VIVE a couple of days ago.

Seriously, this is some powerful stuff.

First time i put it on i felt somewhat disapointed: It is clumsy, i had some issues with my glasses at first, resolution is low, there is like a fine net covering all, field of view is not complete but like wearing scuba glasses, imagen clarity is not 100% near the borders...

But all those issues are meaingless once you look around and realize you are "there".

Tracking is perfect, headset and wands, to the point you could grab them in the air, 3d effect is so perfect i could not call it 3d effect anymore but reality effect. Objects feel "corporeus" like if really were there. Several times i found myself trying to leave my wands on some virtual table. My girldfriend even tried to drink of a virtual cup of tea at job simulator. There is a demo where you use a bow and you can really feel the cord tension even knowing that is not possible. Curiosly graphic quality is not that fundamental to perceive things as real. Movement smoothness, precise tracking and real physical behaviour are way more important.

Room scale experiences where you can walk some steps around are amazing, the only way to describe it is saying it is like RL. There is a demo where you look at a skeleton scanned from a real body floating in front of you, you can stare around, cut it anywhere with a moving surface, look inside it... All i can say is i learnt more anatomy in few minutes than in my whole life. Medicine faculties NEED this. Wands allow you to interact with things like if were your hands. Tracking is so good it feels totally natural. Whole room is easily covered. Tried everything to lose tracking, only thing that worked was to hide under the table.

Also tried the sitting experience, flight and racing simulators are whole new things. I tried Live for Speed and i suddenly was making great times. The spacial perception is so much better than seeing it in a flat surface in front of you. In flight sims you have a whole new perception of the real complexity of aircraft cockpits, the sensation of being surrounded by a lot of instruments and technological expensive stuff is very real. You ARE in a plane.

I am very prone to motion sickness and havent felt slightly sick at any moment except at a specific fast turn of a specific track in Live for Speed where you turn right and then left quickly. My body was expecting some heavy G force there and of course it didnt come. My stomach didnt like that very much. My brother otoh drove along hours and was perfectly OK.

Finally tried, ejem, the mandatory porn movie. I confess. It is not a frivolous or banal thing thought. It is not like seeing your usual porn movie at all. At some point one of the girls got his face really close and whispered something dirty in the guy ear (he was wearing the rv cam on his head obviously), i felt her breath in my ear in real life! It gets so ridiculously personal it is insane. It could be not too difficult to fall in love with some random porn star.

Cant think of how powerful could this technology be applied to cinema industry in general. There is not a flat screen separating the movie and the viewer worlds anymore. Dont know about comedy but dramatic movies would get much more intense at an emotional level because you are not in two separated worlds anymore but in the same world, so they are not things in a flat screen but real people habiting the same space along you. It is the same with game NPCs and even more with other human players in multiplayer games and such who you can interact with. I shot some random guy in the face at an online game called hoverjunkers and i felt slightly bad about it. You can really feel empaty towards the other beings in the virtual world... seriously, there is some deep s### here.

Only complain is lack of content. It is too early anyway and developing software takes time. In any case there is enough stuff already to keep me busy for some months. So guys buy it if you can, be it VIVE, Rift or PSVR, we need the largest VR user base as possible. VR is here and you need it. It needs to go mainstream! (and i need loads of content for my VIVE :mischief: )

Conclusion: :faint:

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

I must say that looking at people use the wands makes it look a bit on the clumsy side. But after what you have said it seems as though this isnt the case.

I still dont have enough room for a vive, so cannot get one. Guess i will have to hope one of my friends who has more space can get one. otherwise i would be restricted to playing flight sims and driving games.
 
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