"I've always been the first kid on my block to recommend an awesome, transformative gaming experience, from the Atari 2600 to the Kinect"
Kinect was an awesome transformative gaming experience? Really?
I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
31–40 of 139 posts
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#32Jeff is speaking from a position of not having tried the good stuff that delivers a sense of 'presence' in the virtual world. That is the game changer, the thing that is making people believe something special is on the way. When he says "I have experienced modern VR. A lot. I've tried both the Oculus DK1, the Oculus DK2." he's just flatly wrong, he hasn't. Those headsets at not modern VR and using them as the refere…
To be fair, most of the people who are excited about VR (including myself) have been that excited already about DK1 and DK2, so your comment feels like it's just moving goalposts without seriously engaging the article.
Personally, I'm very excited about VR. But I know for a fact that other people have tried the same gear that I've tried and have been way less excited about it.
Overall, I'd say it's a good thing to see a bit of hype-reducing commentary on here from time to time.
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#33My only disagreement is with the "gloves" idea. I thought we learned from the Wii that motion controls without force feedback is anti-immersion. Imagine "firing" a 12 gauge shotgun and seeing considerable recoil in VR while your hands stay still. Without haptic feedback I'll have to rely on imagination for the full experience, which I thought video games were supposed to skip.
Maybe they could make it so you have to mimic the recoil motion yourself, with your own hands, to fire your shotgun. You would have to make sure to always turn the safety of your shotgun before putting it away, otherwise if try to quick-draw you will shoot yourself in the foot. edit: grammar
That's anti-immersive, too. When you fire a shotgun in real life, you don't have to do the recoil motion yourself -- you just pull the trigger, and the recoil occurs on its own.
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#34LOL. I lived through the first VR hype bubble, and it's pretty remarkable how similar this is to my recollection of VR back then -- the only difference is that at the time, the goofy, uncomfortable headset was tethered to a refrigerator-sized SGI machine at the science museum, and there was no hope of getting it at home. Instead, we got the Lawnmower Man on VHS.
It sounds like technology has advanced enough that we have finally miniaturized the underwhelming user experience for the home viewer, but we still haven't addressed the bigger problem of coming up with something compelling to do with it. Plus ça change...maybe soon we'll get to see investors salivating over "multimedia experiences" delivered via some futuristic version of CD-ROM!
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
VR is going to be the thing to save the Rainforest This is proving the article's point about excessive hype.
You pick that quote and not the Mars one? Because that particular reference is already happening. Excessive hype is when Magic Leap spends two years lighting up the tech press without showing any hard tech to people not locked up under an NDA. You can experience, right now, being physically in a certain place, seeing it on TV, and being in it virtually. VR really is closer to being there, even in simple forms like Go…
How is it "saving the rainforest"? Doing so is a matter of policing in Brazil, funding anti-deforestation projects globally, and limiting the international market in hardwood.
Seeing trees in VR is absolutely not going to make more than a tiny difference to people's political beliefs on the importance of rainforests and their willingness to spend money on them.
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#36My only disagreement is with the "gloves" idea. I thought we learned from the Wii that motion controls without force feedback is anti-immersion. Imagine "firing" a 12 gauge shotgun and seeing considerable recoil in VR while your hands stay still. Without haptic feedback I'll have to rely on imagination for the full experience, which I thought video games were supposed to skip.
Yeah, and unfortunately haptic feedback is even farther away in terms of emersion than VR.
I imagine we might possibly come close by using a some sort of full body contraption that would somehow stimulate all your nerves. But it would need to be sophisticated enough to emulate muscle movement.
But then that's fundamentally incompatible with motion controls. So you'd have to then create something that's able to detect and interpret nerve signals from the brain to such a degree it wouldn't contradict the VR Headset and Haptic Pod version of the world. Otherwise immersion would tank.
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... delivers a sense of 'presence' in the virtual world I keep re-reading your comment and it keeps getting stuck in my marketing filter. What do you mean by a sense of presence?
I've interpreted presence as "how much can you fool the brain that you really are there". The screen-door effect is still moderately high in DK2. I've heard the CV1 has much reduced the size of the pixels, so the effect is greatly reduced. Also the refresh also needs to be jacked up further. I'd prefer 120hz or 240hz. That would assist in faster and more seamless head-tracking. I don't think HDMI can handle that much…
The increased framerate only helps is the latency is low enough. If there is a very high framerate but the frames lag a few 10's of milliseconds behind the movement of the head of the user then that won't help one bit.
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#38LOL. I lived through the first VR hype bubble, and it's pretty remarkable how similar this is to my recollection of VR back then -- the only difference is that at the time, the goofy, uncomfortable headset was tethered to a refrigerator-sized SGI machine at the science museum, and there was no hope of getting it at home. Instead, we got the Lawnmower Man on VHS. It sounds like technology has advanced enough that we h…
Do I really have to be the one to say it. .. the four (or more) letter word starting with "p"?
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#39I'm most excited for VR headsets to replace my desktop monitors. Infinitely sized displays in 360 degrees around me...I think that's where the real future is for these things. And doing that won't require nearly the hardware power that a 3D game does. The main thing holding it back is that the displays in the Oculus are still a little too low-resolution to make text 100% crisp and clear. I fully expect that a couple of years from now, though, I'll be ditching my monitors for a VR headset.
Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
You pick that quote and not the Mars one? Because that particular reference is already happening. Excessive hype is when Magic Leap spends two years lighting up the tech press without showing any hard tech to people not locked up under an NDA. You can experience, right now, being physically in a certain place, seeing it on TV, and being in it virtually. VR really is closer to being there, even in simple forms like Go…
How is it "saving the rainforest"? Doing so is a matter of policing in Brazil, funding anti-deforestation projects globally, and limiting the international market in hardwood. Seeing trees in VR is absolutely not going to make more than a tiny difference to people's political beliefs on the importance of rainforests and their willingness to spend money on them.
> Seeing trees in VR is absolutely not going to make more than a tiny difference to people's political beliefs on the importance of rainforests and their willingness to spend money on them.
If you think that, then I think you have to also think that seeing it in person is not going to have much of a difference, either. I fundamentally disagree.