What is the state of VR right now?

zamardii12

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I guess in a way I am writing this with some impatience but the longer I am waiting for VR the more likely it feels like it's not going to happen. Yes, I know it'll happen but with respect to Oculus are they potentially going to be beat? I mean, they were the ones that got me excited way back when they started on Kickstarter about VR. And now years later (over 3 years) we are still getting no solid information about Oculus. Could they be a little late to the game? I personally still think of Oculus when I think of VR, but when the reviews start coming out for Morpheus, Vive, Hololens, Magic Leap, and Oculus which is going to come out on top? I think the decisive factor at least for me is which one will hit the sweet spot as far as price. I highly doubt at this point that we'll be seeing a $300 or even $400 VR unit.

To me, it seems like Oculus is always in a state of refinement. I know they want to make it perfect but it seems like after 3 years they would settle on something and with the competition really building up they might be losing their release window and advantage with being the first ones to bring VR back into the conversation in terms of digital media consumption.

So really I just am curious what others think about the state of VR, and what is the latest news out there?
 
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Come November Vive will be here and Oculus at the very least will have to release a firm date and better specs / pricing than the Vive or risk loosing their customer base.

That's when I think the real fun will start. I plan on picking up the Vive but if Oculus says, "Hey wait 6 months, we got 4k for you brah!" Then I will probably hold out.
 
I have a DK2 and there was a really big push at the beginning but now there seems to be a lull in the scene... although Dirty Rally may be a sign that there is still developer push for the Oculus..

I have had some great experiences that remind me of the 3dfx day (everything seems fresh) like Alien Isolation, Elite Dangerous, Bioshock 2, and Euro Truck Simulator 2 that may me think there really is a great place for VR

and then I've had some really bad experiences (Rift Cave) where there was a clear attempt at a money grab for a VR experience..

Some of this seems that Oculus has really not been making an active push in the last 9 months they have only released 1 updated to the SDK and I was hoping that with the Vive announcement Oculus would have kicked it back into gear but there really is no telling what Oculus' focus is right now. Lucky has been very shifty lately on making any sign that the Rift is still focused on the PC/Gaming side of things..

Maybe the Zenimax Lawsuit has something to do with it, who knows (coverage for that just dropped off the face of the earth, any news - its been a year now with that lawsuit)
 
I think that the biggest problem right now is the software and interface development. We have the hardware for the visual aspect down (oculus, vive) but there is a lot more that needs to be figured out before it can become commonplace. Even if the headsets were released today there would only be a handful of games that they would really work with, Star Citizen being a primary example as you can just sit in your ship and look around while using conventional controls. True VR games and experiences will take a complete re-tooling of how we interact with games as we know it, and will require everyone to agree on a standard for input.
 
GearVR is out now, including tons of porn... that should be enough to hold things together.
 
I think that a major issue w/ mass vr adoption is the pc hardware required to run high detailed games. the rift, vive and the valve option are all going to require top of the line equipment, which means increased consumer cost. Sony has a slight advantage w/ morpheus because developers can create for an exact platform. If sony can price morpheus reasonably then there might be significant adoption but the experience isn't going to be the same quality has the pc options.

i think the first company to announce launch titles for their vr platform will be huge. Imagine if at e3 this year, Lucky walks out during a bethesda press conference and they announce fallout 4 w/ full vr support. or if someone partners with blizzard for an vr mmo. PS4's No Man's Sky seems perfect for VR but there has been no announcement.
 
I guess the lull with Oculus is thanks to Facebook, because now they have to decide what exactly the Rift is "for" and how they can sell it to the FB users who have no interest in proper gaming.

Meanwhile, I suspect no one wants to be first to market because they want to let someone else make all the mistakes in an untested field. You can pretty much bet the first to market won't go on to become the "standard".

Have any of these companies actually got a product which operates at a decent resolution yet? I'm not really interested until the screen door effect isn't an issue.
 
The fact they are announcing GearVR 2 by end of year suggests #1 did well enough:

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/we...s-to-expect-gear-vr-2-end-of-the-year-1287230

For practical and legal reasons everyone admits that wireless is the way to go, but trying to transmit video from PC/console at that quality is a HUGE uphill battle. It's likely that 12k per eye will be needed before resolution is a non-issue for everyone, and more will be needed to reach our natural retinal resolution.

Photorealism isn't as important as we initially suspected, and phones can now provide that in some situations. Just throw in motion controls like we've seen with the Vive, and the option to tether your phone's screen to your monster computer at home for the more intense apps, and I think we are close to finding "the standard".
 
I guess the lull with Oculus is thanks to Facebook, because now they have to decide what exactly the Rift is "for" and how they can sell it to the FB users who have no interest in proper gaming.

Meanwhile, I suspect no one wants to be first to market because they want to let someone else make all the mistakes in an untested field. You can pretty much bet the first to market won't go on to become the "standard".

Have any of these companies actually got a product which operates at a decent resolution yet? I'm not really interested until the screen door effect isn't an issue.


the screen door effect is worse on some games than others, in Alien Isolation and Bioshock 2 never even noticed it.. it wasn't until Elite and Dangerous where I had ot read the smaller text that you start to see the screendoor really effect your game..

IMO some of the screendoor effect can be overcome with good design..
hopefully the next iteration of of the VR headsets will give us the next boost in dotpitch to overcome it..
 
Have any of these companies actually got a product which operates at a decent resolution yet? I'm not really interested until the screen door effect isn't an issue.

What I don't understand, is that if you look at phones... for instance the Note 4 has a screen resolution of 2560x1440 and the GPU in that phone is powerful enough for 4K video capture/encoding, and powerful enough to run some pretty high-end games for mobile on it then why is there this huge discrepancy with how PC games run on the Oculus and such? I guess what I am getting at is that if a phone can run resolutions just fine at what they cost, then what is the hold-up with PCs needing to be so high-end to be able to run the games on a Rift? I understand the retail price for a phone like the Note 4 can be over $700 which you can buy a semi-decent gaming rig for, but still. Is the problem not necessarily with being able to run it, but the latency? As in, the game needs to be running at a very consistent 120fps or whatever?
 
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