The Vive: Valve enters VR
mod
Oh crap! This thing has all the sensors that I want!
Finally someone has invested money into what can only be called the ultimate VR device (so far).
http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/1/8127445/htc-vive-valve-vr-headset
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As a developer I'm very excited. This may preemptively change the course of my career should an opportunity to work with this device presents itself.
What do you guys think?
Finally someone has invested money into what can only be called the ultimate VR device (so far).
http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/1/8127445/htc-vive-valve-vr-headset
As a developer I'm very excited. This may preemptively change the course of my career should an opportunity to work with this device presents itself.
What do you guys think?
Replies
I'm also curious about pricing. Those screens and sensors can't be cheap.
Otherwise, everyone trying to stick their fingers in the VR cake is just going to implode the whole thing.
as far as VR goggles go the oculus rift was already exciting enough for me. have been playing with one for a long time now.
actually i'd well be more excited about new types of VR controllers that support game-type movements. walking around in your room does not seem very practical if you cannot see your physical surroundings and the ever popular hand-waving does not make for good body motion control.
i agree the VR space should not end up totally fragmented by platforms and hardware capabilities. hope this will all be compatible and interchangeable.
unlike another poster i am glad headphones are not integrated on most headsets. i'd prefer my own particular type of hi-fi in-ears any day over some also-ran that was cheap enough to include.
PS. I stole the quote from other site.
The Valve prototype I played with was really convincing, though. The positional tracking and how much the optics make it feel like you're just looking at a real space, was incredible. Really intrigued what the actual consumer device will be like, and especially how much it might cost!
I still wonder how much traction VR will gain outside of tech enthusiasts though, especially with having things on your face for more than 10 minutes, or trying to navigate a small, hazard laden living space with these positional-tracking systems.
Only way to pull that off is one of this stupid looking VR tredmill things like the Virtuix Omni.
First, you would need an empty room of fairly decent size for it to make any difference at all if the device supports this kind of movement or not. (probably less than half a percent of potential owners will have this available to them in their "gaming area", so it ends up never being used in content designed for the thing)
Second, you would always be relegated to fairly small, flat-ground surroundings in virtual space, else you start walking into furnature or walls, making it very uninteresting after the initial "oooh aah" factor wears off.
Also I totally agree with the too many fingers in the pie at once thing said before.
If VR is to gain any traction on a consumer level, companies need to get behind ONE system to start with to get the ball rolling.
Make ONE of them good and viable to make the mass market, so content gets made for it.
If VR gets a foot hold, then, and only then start opening up "options" for people.
Different systems, different devices, different features.
Otherwise this will go nowhere fast for the average consumer.
I can see it already..
- Get our new awesome lifelike virtual reality experience right now!
** super small print that no average, non tech savy consumer will see to follow.
If you have the Occulus, you get X and Z feature available.
If you have the Valve headset, you get X and Y but not Z.
If you have the Samsung GearVR you dont get X, nor Y and partial Z, but only if you have the Smartphone XXI to put in the GearVR.. If not, you get to experience a preset flythrough in semi 3D with a locked view.
Everyone gets confused, lots of people get angry that they spent lots of money on a thing that only gives half the experience of the game, never buy another one and the device gets put on a shelf to collect dust and occationally taken out to show to friends that are curious.
VR dies.. again.. same way it did way way back.q
VOODOO 4EVER!
I somewhat disagree, you could manage to do games with a small cockpit as long your room and the game matched up enough not to cause any issues. It'd actually be cool to play a space game that tracked your keyboard and mouse in the game as controls in the cockpit. Something like that might not be possible today, but I can see having a shared real and virtual desk space as a possibility.
They served their function perfectly, and from there, we got a few options to choose from which all conformed to tech built on, and based around what we had established from the VooDoo cards. (Well for the most part anyway.. SLi in its current form is rather more problematic and convoluted than it was back on the VooDoo´s for some odd reason).
Yet, with all that we know, and what is needed to properly advance both the developers pipeline and production speed, both AMD and Nvidia consistently fight over the most idiotic of features intended just for their hardware that never gets decent traction and ends up falling to the wayside a generation or two down the line.
Its maddening to think of how far we would have come if these two worked side by side instead of having a constant contest of dick-tugging over fraction of speed here and there, or half a gig of marginally faster ram on one version of a card.
Personally I have always thought that both Nvidia and AMD should stop dicking around and focus more. Narrow the selection of cards, and make MEANINGFULL advancements when they release a new generation.. 10% overall speed increase while using 15% less power means nothing to the average consumer... 65 fps or 69 fps in a game at 1080p.. whoopdy doo who cares..
Make 3 cards, Enthusiast > Poweruser > Advanced..
Anything below the 950 (or 750) is useless in all ways.. The onboard graphics of the latest cpu´s performs about at the same level, and no gamer is going lower than that so what you are left with is office computers. For which the onboard graphics are more than enough.
Narrow the focus, make it easy for the consumer to choose and follow an upgrade path and make it easier on the people making content for your games to have an easier "recommended spec" for users to follow and maintain.
As is, the line up from both parties is a cluster-fuck at best unless you do your homework.
ZacD: That can easily be done today via something like Leap Motion or a Kinect.
It does not however work very well in actual gaming nor development.
You would have to design a fluid area that could adjust it self both size and function wise depending on what the user has in front, and around him.
As such, the combinations and variations are far too great for anyone to actually want to waste time and resources on making that work without the unfathomable issues that could arise from the simplest of factors.
We had PowerVR, Matrox, S3 and ATi competing with 3DFX at the time, much like all the competing VR solutions today.
I'm not saying that the included headphones need to be completely fixed, Oculus said they are going to include headphones that will keep an audiophile happy, and have them be removable. If headphones are not used by nearly every VR headset user (over 90%), developers won't put any emphasis on things like binaural sound or sound propagation, which is really important for a completely immersive experience.
@Gusti - What I was expecting was just your keyboard, mouse, monitors, desk, and chair to be mapped and tracked, extra space and obstacles in your room could easily be filled by generated meshes. Exact detail on your desk/mouse/keyboard don't need to match, just scale and position. Or you could do a game where you control the game with physical props you move around a simple area you map and set up.
Valve + HTC = Vive
Oculus + Samsung = Oculus Gear VR
Microsoft = Hololens
Google = Magic Leap?
Apple = Recently patented a HMD design
From what I had read yesterday the screens fill all your peripheral vision.
http://www.htcvr.com/
Even more important than resolution.
90 degrees is what Oculus DK2 currently has and they promise it will be higher in the consumer version.
So im quite curious about this one cause valves prototypes have always been more advanced than oculus.
but i think that the NAUSEA that you can get from FPS and latency is more of an issue than the cramped feeling a tight FOV can give you.
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Direct-X 12 (could have more than a 50% performance boost and is also rumored to support different GPU's at once. The future is here! I mean this will change our perception of 3D more radically than many people think.
Because VR makes it possible to see 3D world differently and up-close, 3d assets also have to be far more detailed than normal game assets.
But VR is also much more performance demanding and a lot of graphics tricks don't work well with VR. VR is going to require a pretty decent downgrade in graphics vs non vr versions of games. But the art will be something people spend a lot more time up close and personal with.
It's only a matter of time. 90fps @ 2160X1200.
In millions of pixels:
8.28 - 4K monitor (@90 fps)
5.08 - Vive render target (@90 fps)
3.68 - 1440p monitor (@90 fps)
3.45 - DK2 render target (@90 fps)
2.07 - 1080p (@90 fps)
About the same as 4K at 50fps I would say. That is possible with a new overclocked Titan. We are very close. Even mainstream cards will catch up quickly (and Direct-X 12 and OpenGL-Vulcan will give a substantial performance boost).
Resolutions of VR headsets will increase rapidly, but that does not mean worse performance if resolutions are dynamically up-scaled. The screen door effect can be eliminated with higher DPI resolutions (but the rendered frame could be dynamically adjusted in resolution (lowered) and up-scaled depending on performance to maintain 90fps.
Sony's VR is a gimmick, like 3D before it on the PS3 and the motion controllers. The PS4 is too weak for a good VR experience. It will get sold because of the PS4 user base, but only support few games that are specifically made for it. The image quality will be mediocre because of the low resolution and low polycounts/textures to achieve 60-90fps.
Since Sony probably wants to push 4K anyway, the release cycle of the PS4 and XBox One will be shorter than that of the PS3 and Xbox 360. Either that or they will release a 4K version of their PS4 (PS4K) :-). Since they use standard PC CPU and GPU now, they can also make a next gen console compatible with the current gen games more easily now.
I'm a bit biased when it comes to subject, but this is not true.
They've already talked about this in their presentations. Graphics will take a hit but PS4 can still output modern effects.
PBR for example, doesn't go away with VR. The texture and lighting quality are also still strong.
These are screenshots from some demos they shown running on Morpheus.