Behold the Future of Gaming At GDC

If that's really all there was at the GDC this year, then it must have been fairly boring.
 
Those virtual goggles look really comfortable......:eek:

I can just hear my wife yelling at me now.....

my choice, virtual game or real kick in the ass if I don't take the dog for a walk.:eek::eek:
 
magoo said:
Those virtual goggles look really comfortable......:eek:

I can just hear my wife yelling at me now.....

my choice, virtual game or real kick in the ass if I don't take the dog for a walk.:eek::eek:
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well no we know who wear the pants in the house :p
 
Looks fucking stupid.

I already wear something cumbersome on my head so I can listen to the game and not have my sound pollute the area but at least it is easy to slide off if I need to multitask for a bit. Also, perhaps it is from defensive driving or gaming since birth, but I despise having my peripheral vision blocked under any circumstance as it reduces my spatial awareness. I don't give a shit if I'm sitting at home in my chair, I still want to know what it is going on around me. Also, I want to watch the hockey game in the background.

Can't let me do that, can you, Mr Occulus Rift? lol
 
Looks mind blowing!!! :D I already got my Oculus Rift SDK ordered. Can't believe the negative comments here.
 
I never understood 3d and VR they never cater to the many people that have glasses, at least google glasses will have something.
 
Business6 said:
I want to watch the hockey game in the background.

Can't let me do that, can you, Mr Occulus Rift? lol
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I wouldn't be surprised if folks develop a picture-in-picture mode to view a webcam or some other external feed...
 
Having used VR headsets before, I'm not personally excited about the Rift. It's following the same path of other hardware that came before it that other small companies attempted to sell. There are some games that will support it, but there just isn't a big enough market of people who are interested in it for it to leave the niche. Had that been the case, past attempts would have taken off and VR would be more commonplace or sold by a large company that has the resources to conduct a market feasibility study and determine if there's any profit to be had in soaking up development costs.
 
"Having used VR headsets before" Do you remember what headset you used? and was it a game you played?
 
MavericK96 said:
Looking good, though that guy in the video is OBNOXIOUS.
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Was he crying tears of joy or was it bothering his wee ones?

"The sword gits ya" lol, that dude seemed high or somethin... but ya know, I wish I had that innocence with gaming still...
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Had that been the case, past attempts would have taken off and VR would be more commonplace or sold by a large company that has the resources to conduct a market feasibility study and determine if there's any profit to be had in soaking up development costs.
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Large companies have been selling HMDs to consumers for a while. Sony is one.
 
It's following the same path of other hardware that came before it that other small companies attempted to sell.
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Except the buzz at GDC is that it isn't following the path of its predecessors. Thanks to huge technological leaps thanks to the smartphone industry, the Rift can take advantage of wide FOV, ultra-low latency, and high resolution displays which didn't exist in the 1990s and aren't even being used by Sony's HMD.

there just isn't a big enough market of people who are interested in it for it to leave the niche.
Valve and id Software have hinted that they are very interested in supporting the Rift. I think the market for the Rift is going to be huge with the Steam community. The fact OculusVR asked for 250k on Kickstarter and received 2.4M in donations should be telling in itself. :)
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Decent list of games, many of which I've never heard of, but I hope ArmA 3 supports it. :D
 
wonderfield said:
Large companies have been selling HMDs to consumers for a while. Sony is one.
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Sony has an insignificant presence in the consumer market with VR headsets. There are uses for them, but not so much for general gaming.

Ashok0 said:
Except the buzz at GDC is that it isn't following the path of its predecessors. Thanks to huge technological leaps thanks to the smartphone industry, the Rift can take advantage of wide FOV, ultra-low latency, and high resolution displays which didn't exist in the 1990s and aren't even being used by Sony's HMD.
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Latency is a problem mostly invented by monitor producers to have something else to compete with on paper and is propped up by a few so-called professional gamers. It's, in essence, a non-problem and not a factor. Resolutions get higher with time and people were using the same arguments to discuss the value of moving beyond VGA to Super VGA. A full field of view is also not a big advantage leveraged by the Rift over existing VR headsets.

Valve and id Software have hinted that they are very interested in supporting the Rift. I think the market for the Rift is going to be huge with the Steam community. The fact OculusVR asked for 250k on Kickstarter and received 2.4M in donations should be telling in itself. :)[/QUOTE]

ID has jumped onto other now obscure VR headsets so that's not a shocker. They had full support in many of their games for the VFX-1 and VFX 3D. Just because a company says they'll add support doesn't mean mainstream end users will provide enough monetary backing for a company to sustain their operations past a generation or two of development.

I understand you want to see this thing become successful. You do, after all, have a monetary interest in it and a desire to see games support it because you've made a purchase. That's commendable and entirely expected. For my part of it, I'd like to see some additional development go into a more immersive experience, but I don't see this being anything more than a brief pop of interest that might see a few years with a small amount of developer support before it vanishes. If, in the meantime, people who want get sucked into a few games experience them in a manner that brings the screen closer to their eyes, that's great for them.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I don't see this being anything more than a brief pop of interest that might see a few years with a small amount of developer support before it vanishes.
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I kinda have the same feeling... but do you think these VR "pops of interest" are larger and longer lasting each time? At what point, if any, do you think it will be satisfactory in your eyes? When it's something as light as regular glasses and under 100 bucks? ...or until we can just mind-hack the experience completely? I think both of these scenarios are on their way, it's only a matter of time and enthusiasm to help push us to get there, even if that means a few more iterations of these clunkier/expensive designs.
 
Really it depends on two things right now.

1) Developer support - looks like it should be decent.

2) Price - This is the big one. If it's $500 it's going to fail. If it's $200 or less, quite possibly. Ideally it would be in the $100-150 range to really take off.

There are also issues like, how responsive is it, how sharp is the resolution, etc...but hopefully those things will be a non-issue by release.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Sony has an insignificant presence in the consumer market with VR headsets.
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I'm not debating that. Sony is a large company, however, and their recent HMDs have been profitable.

CreepyUncleGoogle said:
ID has jumped onto other now obscure VR headsets so that's not a shocker. They had full support in many of their games for the VFX-1 and VFX 3D.
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Not quite. id is jumping on VR internally. Prior, id only allowed outside HMD manufacturers/integrators access to their codebases to do VR tie-ins. They did this because they were paid by these companies, and only because Carmack thought the technology was "kinda neat".

It isn't the same situation at all.

CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Latency is a problem mostly invented by monitor producers to have something else to compete with on paper and is propped up by a few so-called professional gamers. It's, in essence, a non-problem and not a factor.
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True of monitors in some respects: most displays are "fast enough". Not true of head-tracked HMDs.

CreepyUncleGoogle said:
A full field of view is also not a big advantage leveraged by the Rift over existing VR headsets.
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Total head-scratcher of a comment. It's like arguing that 32-bit color isn't a big advantage leveraged by modern displays over their 8-bit predecessors. When the entire purpose of VR is to be immersed in a virtual world, not having any information displayed in your periphery, and not being able to move your eyes without your focus falling out of the edges of the display is obviously a pretty big problem.
 
wonderfield said:
Total head-scratcher of a comment. It's like arguing that 32-bit color isn't a big advantage leveraged by modern displays over their 8-bit predecessors.
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Oh, I think the point is that Oculus isn't doing anything the others aren't already, which is basically true. The VR stuff is really in it's infancy, as you noted the problems are pretty obvious. It's much like at a place where graphics were at 8-bit IMO. When it can solve eye-tracking and focus along with the other slew of issues to tackle, then it'll be reaching 32-bit era comparability.
 
Youn said:
I kinda have the same feeling... but do you think these VR "pops of interest" are larger and longer lasting each time? At what point, if any, do you think it will be satisfactory in your eyes? When it's something as light as regular glasses and under 100 bucks? ...or until we can just mind-hack the experience completely? I think both of these scenarios are on their way, it's only a matter of time and enthusiasm to help push us to get there, even if that means a few more iterations of these clunkier/expensive designs.
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I'm not sure at what point it'll shift from niche to mainstream. I don't think it'll come around with this generation of hardware to include the Rift. If I could estimate a parallel, I'd call it Windows XP's Tablet Edition for VR. It's not a bad thing as it sits, but it just doesn't seem like it'll take off. In fact, with us being potentially at the cusp of a shift between laptops and desktops to tablets and smaller devices, it might just be that affordable, practicle application of the technology will come too late because the underlying computing model is no longer viewed as relevant by a society that has the whole if its attention on things that fit in their pocket and have a very different usage model. All of that's just theory and guessing on my part so if I'm wrong, I'll happily admit it when a few Rift iterations have happened and its selling briskly with the backing of some larger firms. :)

wonderfield said:
I'm not debating that. Sony is a large company, however, and their recent HMDs have been profitable.
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Profitable, but the cost and the number of units sold don't indicate a very large market.

Not quite. id is jumping on VR internally. Prior, id only allowed outside HMD manufacturers/integrators access to their codebases to do VR tie-ins. They did this because they were paid by these companies, and only because Carmack thought the technology was "kinda neat".

It isn't the same situation at all.
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I'll have to take your word for that. I'm not at all an industry insider.


True of monitors in some respects: most displays are "fast enough". Not true of head-tracked HMDs.
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That I'm going to disagree with. I think that current LCD latency is low enough to more than outpace a human brain and its chemical senses already and has been for quite a few years now. This just isn't something that VR has to overcome at this point and I don't think that's been the case for a long time.

Total head-scratcher of a comment. It's like arguing that 32-bit color isn't a big advantage leveraged by modern displays over their 8-bit predecessors. When the entire purpose of VR is to be immersed in a virtual world, not having any information displayed in your periphery, and not being able to move your eyes without your focus falling out of the edges of the display is obviously a pretty big problem.
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Youn got it already. :D

Youn said:
Oh, I think the point is that Oculus isn't doing anything the others aren't already, which is basically true. The VR stuff is really in it's infancy, as you noted the problems are pretty obvious. It's much like at a place where graphics were at 8-bit IMO. When it can solve eye-tracking and focus along with the other slew of issues to tackle, then it'll be reaching 32-bit era comparability.
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CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Latency is a problem mostly invented by monitor producers to have something else to compete with on paper and is propped up by a few so-called professional gamers. It's, in essence, a non-problem and not a factor. Resolutions get higher with time and people were using the same arguments to discuss the value of moving beyond VGA to Super VGA.
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You misunderstand the latency being referenced here. Oculus is not talking about screen latency, they are talking about head tracking latency. The time it takes for the gyro's to process movement so that the game can update the display with your new relative position. Old VR systems have terrible latency. You can literally move your head, and count the seconds it takes for the screen to turn your view to match where you are looking. The oculus' design is to have the latency so low, that it is completely imperceptible to the human eye. The screen moves in perfect harmony with your head, so you feel like you are looking through a pair of goggles into the real world.

A full field of view is also not a big advantage leveraged by the Rift over existing VR headsets.
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Wrong. The FOV is the single most important factor of the entire rift design. Completely encompassing your peripheral vision is the only way to bring total immersion into play. If at any point you can see a black border around your eyes, "the edge of the screen" basically, you are immediately whisked out of the game and aware you are staring at a screen in front of you. FOV with ultra low latency is the only way to completely absorb your senses. It's the difference between watching a video of someone on a roller coaster, and actually sitting in the seat yourself. You simply cannot underestimate the profound effect of having your peripheral vision encompassed. It may seem trivial to you, afterall how often does one really use their peripheral vision. But the entire premise is based on the subconscious. Your periphery is in constant use whether you realize it or not (afterall I could throw a baseball at you from the side and you would reflexively react) and will make all the difference.

Just because a company says they'll add support doesn't mean mainstream end users will provide enough monetary backing for a company to sustain their operations past a generation or two of development......I don't see this being anything more than a brief pop of interest that might see a few years with a small amount of developer support before it vanishes.
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The problem has always been lack of consumer interest, not lack of developer interest. VR has failed not because the public is fickle or developers were lazy, but simply because IT WAS BAD. There just wanst any enjoyment factor out of it because we lacked the technology to do it. It'd be like someone trying to make "Avatar the video game!" with graphics that look exactly like the film, in 1998. There simply wasnt enough rendering horsepower to produce such a thing. Now imagine they tried it anyway, and what you got was a horrible laggy, horribly buggy, horribly slow, and horribly UGLY experience. It took generations of upgrades to reach the point of UE4 today. We started with doom, then quake, then source, and so on. Each generational leap was met with developers tweaking performance and visuals together. Early VR was simply too ambitious for its time. However now that time has come. We have the technology. We can build it.

I think it will still be a niche product, but only because clearly you cant properly play TF2 with a headset the same way you can with a monitor. Super fast twitch shooters will demand the accuracy of a mouse/keyboard or locked crosshairs of a console controller. Having an independent view and aiming reticle cant work. It can be done for fun, and you could certainly enjoy something like the single player experience of a game like halo or CoD, but you'll never be able to play competitively with it. People will try on the rift, and then eventually go back to the screen for deathmatch. Even in simulator type environments such as racing and flying, you would still far much better in 3rd person view holding a controller than in the drivers seat with 2 viewpoints to control.

Since the rift merely requires implementation of an SDK, which aims to do nothing more than provide and API for syncing viewpoints and movement direction, I think it should be relatively painless for dev's to include rift support for a vast majority of future titles, just for those of us who have one. Hopefully they'll do this just to be nice.
 
McFry said:
You misunderstand the latency being referenced here. Oculus is not talking about screen latency, they are talking about head tracking latency.
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They're really talking about total I/O latency, of which tracker, rendering time, engine frame buffering, and display panel post-processing and pixel response time are all a part. Having a 1ms tracker latency is a nice bump over 8ms trackers, but the bulk of the latency is still going to be tied to the exact same influences that FPS players know about today with traditional monitors - namely framerate, refresh rate, lack of additional frames buffered, lack of monitor post-processing, and pixel response time.

CreepyUncleGoogle said:
That I'm going to disagree with. I think that current LCD latency is low enough to more than outpace a human brain and its chemical senses already and has been for quite a few years now. This just isn't something that VR has to overcome at this point and I don't think that's been the case for a long time.
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According to Michael Abrash, the rough target for total latency between input and visual response looks to be <20ms (ie. where the brain can't really notice the discrepancy any more). This latency is particular sensitive in situations where you're tilting your head side to side, as the brain is fairly adept in keeping track of where it expects a stable horizon to be. This is not something that can really be compared to traditional TV/monitor usage where there's an inherent disconnect/disassociation between your 'self' and the content that's moving on the screen in response to your mouse or joystick input.

Right now, given perfect circumstances (assuming a 1000hz (1ms) mouse input, 144 fps w/ 144hz monitor, (~7ms draw + ~7ms scan-out), and 1ms pixel response time), you're looking at around 16ms of input lag. However, swap out that 144fps/144hz figure for the typical 60fps/60fps that most people game with (and all mobile screens that VR is required to use), and that input lag is suddenly 35-40ms. Display refresh rates and pixel response times are absolutely crucial, and in the mobile sector they're only now just barely adequate for use in VR.
 
hughJ said:
They're really talking about total I/O latency, of which tracker, rendering time, engine frame buffering, and display panel post-processing and pixel response time are all a part. Having a 1ms tracker latency is a nice bump over 8ms trackers, but the bulk of the latency is still going to be tied to the exact same influences that FPS players know about today with traditional monitors - namely framerate, refresh rate, lack of additional frames buffered, lack of monitor post-processing, and pixel response time.
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No sorry, this is not what they are talking about. The current demos being used for Oculus are easily rendered on any current gen system. There is no difficutly whatsoever in running UE4 at 1280x720 resolution and 60fps on low detail settings. The framerate hasnt been an issue for VR in quite some time, nor has refresh rate or pixel response time. In fact, pixel response time is indicated as being absolutely atrocious on the rift right now. There is severe ghosting that is immediately noticeable by anyone who tries it. Guess what, it doesnt matter though. Screen latency merely affects how quickly pixels can change color. It doesnt look pretty, but it certainly doesnt hurt the immersion factor, since immersion is sensory based which is entirely built upon head tracking latency. There is plenty of processor overhead to deal with the calculations for head movement. The problem has always been getting sensitive enough gyroscopes, magnometers, compasses, and accelerometers to properly detect pecise head movement. Only recently have advances been made in the smart phone sector once it was deemed necessary to have a GPS/Accelerometer/compass in every cellphone.
 
McFry said:
The framerate hasnt been an issue for VR in quite some time, nor has refresh rate or pixel response time.
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Refresh rate is an issue because too low a refresh rate adds potential latency to the output pipeline. If, for instance, you can render a frame within 7.7 milliseconds, you won't be able to output that frame until 9 milliseconds later on a 60 Hz display (assuming you're vsync'ed, which you want to be on an HMD). That's an additional 9 milliseconds of 'drift' that doesn't need to be there. 9 milliseconds of a display just waiting for something new to display.

You really want 120 Hz or greater. 60 Hz is a problem.

McFry said:
In fact, pixel response time is indicated as being absolutely atrocious on the rift right now. There is severe ghosting that is immediately noticeable by anyone who tries it.
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I've yet to hear anyone say anything like this about the Rift.
 
McFry said:
No sorry, this is not what they are talking about.
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Their current trackers poll every 1ms, and yet they're still in that 35+ms range of combined hardware input lag with their current devkit. The only place left for them to eke out latency is with rendering speed and display refresh rate. I don't disagree that consumer-level trackers of today are leaps and bounds from where they were 10 or 20 years ago, just that right now they represent a very small part of the total I/O chain between initiation of input polling from the user and the resulting feedback of photons hitting the retina. Even with infinitely accurate sensors, with infinite polling rates, they would still be looking at 35+ms of input lag with the current display tech.
 
wonderfield said:
I've yet to hear anyone say anything like this about the Rift.
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I've seen it reported more out of GDC (and the handful that have gotten their kits in the last 48 hours) than from previous demos. It might just be the fact that the meandering pace of the Citadel demo is a rather ideal case for hiding poor pixel response, while TF2 and Hawken are among the worst.
 
I am all for new display technologies..as a 3D vision fan, anything that moves us forward to a better way of experiencing our 3d games is a plus for me. Some people just make no sense with their attitude towards new display options..is like they want to forever live in a lame 2d flat display experience even though they keep putting money down for better cards to get much better looking 3d worlds for their games...yeah 3D worlds and watch them in old flat 2D....total logic there!
 
shaolin95 said:
yeah 3D worlds and watch them in old flat 2D....total logic there!
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Many people watch in 2d because they find the current "3D" (stereoscopic) implementation is annoying as fuck and ignores one basic principle concerning how our eyes work: which is the ability to focus on any object in a scene. When eye tracking offers that capability in a comfortable way, then I imagine these people will start to see it as a more logical step forward and start to adapt it.

Of course, if you like this current "3D" stuff then good for you, rock on dude...
 
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