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Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

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Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#91

Post by metasean »

GFischer wrote: post #81
metasean wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a sports person, but your "live action content" made me wonder how awesome it would be to be a sports fan who could view 'the game' from the sideline, or an aerial cam, and to be able to turn and zoom a camera or to switch cameras – as desired! Better yet, to be able 'be the athlete'. Cameras aren't there yet , but imagine being able to watch the scenery as an Olympic down-hill skier as flying downhill - AWES…

Cameras are here, the software is here too, I've actually toyed around with some implementations and they're definitely good enough. The big problem that scares me is sports licensing and all the legal stuff attached. VR will allow lots of cool stuff like that :) . One possibility I was thinking about was putting the cameras on the referees instead of the players themselves (for sports such as soccer). But I think it…

Are there really cameras currently available that are light enough to provide 360° view without interfering with the athlete's performance?

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#92

Post by ryandamm »

metasean wrote: post #73
ryandamm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content is precisely the problem. Carmack even admits as much here: http://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-talks-difficulty-mobile-pos... That guy's pretty outspoken. (And yes, he's referring to live action content; I presume mobile VR will be tilted more toward video streaming etc than gaming, but I could be wrong.)

I'm not a sports person, but your "live action content" made me wonder how awesome it would be to be a sports fan who could view 'the game' from the sideline, or an aerial cam, and to be able to turn and zoom a camera or to switch cameras – as desired! Better yet, to be able 'be the athlete'. Cameras aren't there yet , but imagine being able to watch the scenery as an Olympic down-hill skier as flying downhill - AWES…

http://www.nextvr.com/

Also, OTOY is talking about live streaming. That said, I have spoken with more than one startup that wants to put cameras on athlete's heads/helmets. Dunno how practical it is, but I guess it'll happen eventually.

With VR, the question is (and has always been) "when". As in, "man, that's awesome, when will it actually happen?" Because everything is possible in VR, and that's part of the problem.

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#93

Post by ryandamm »

lux wrote: post #65
ryandamm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it uses a Note 3 screen. An executive from Samsung corrected me when I said Note 4. It's significantly lower res than a Gear VR, and you can tell. EDIT: your link confirms it's note 3, not note 4.

That it is. DK1 resolution was comparatively pretty awful. Even DK2 isn't great. Crescent Bay and Gear VR felt fairly similar at GDC (rendering capabilities aside), so I'm really curious how much better the Rift CV1 is going to feel. My time with Vive was very short, and felt so good I kinda forgot to look for flaws, but I hear CV1 is roughly the same (aka AWESOME!).

I heard at a VR conference that the CV1 is likely to use the Note 4 screen, but that's hearsay. I had stronger confirmation that it will at least be the same resolution... the Note 4, S6, etc all are 2560 x 1440; we were hoping for 4k but it's not gonna happen this cycle. CV2, perhaps?

(And there are no guarantees, so this could be wrong... but probably not.)

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#94

Post by ryandamm »

metasean wrote: post #91
GFischer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cameras are here, the software is here too, I've actually toyed around with some implementations and they're definitely good enough. The big problem that scares me is sports licensing and all the legal stuff attached. VR will allow lots of cool stuff like that :) . One possibility I was thinking about was putting the cameras on the referees instead of the players themselves (for sports such as soccer). But I think it…

Are there really cameras currently available that are light enough to provide 360° view without interfering with the athlete's performance?

No, unless the athlete is doing power lifting or something trivial.

It's possible an athlete already accustomed to encumbrance wouldn't mind more -- like a few cameras on a football helmet -- but keep in mind that even a GoPro is ~80g, and you need about 3-4 of those to get 360 (mono). Stereo is actually super important, and that requires a lot more cameras.

Personally, I put this in one of those 'future, maybe' categories.

Now, a VR view from courtside seats... well, that's literally already happening. Just look up NextVR, among others (that I'm probably not allowed to talk about).

2016 is the (first) year of VR, for real.

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#95

Post by Tepix »

julianpye wrote: post #17

From OC2, but semi-offtopic - What did people think about the Michael Abrash lecture "These are the good old days"? For me it was one of the most inspiring lectures on engineering solutions for HCI solutions. The cool part was that it positions Oculus as a technology company supporting senses far beyond vision.

I loved it. It was much presented than his previous talks, that said, they are always interesting and inspiring.

These are the good old times of VR. Cherish them.

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#96

Post by dagw »

xanderstrike wrote: post #35
danpalmer wrote: post #5

I wonder how effective this VR actually is. It seems that VR heavily depends on high quality screens, with very high resolution, and low latency and persistence. However this works with a screen that isn't optimised for those attributes. $99 may be good, but it seems likely that it will be much worse than the Oculus Rift, I think is targeting ~$400-500, and could be far better. Is it worth it?

That's $99 plus a $600+ smartphone. If you already have a Samsung phone that's great, if not... it's a very powerful Google Cardboard for $700+.

That's $99 plus a $600+ smartphone.

Poking around ebay I found lots of used Note 3's for less than $250.

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#97

Post by tudorw »

lhl wrote: post #85
dperfect wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inspiring, yes - but it's also disheartening with respect to how far away we are from highly-convincing VR. It's not even a matter of engineering the solutions; we have yet to fully understand so many of the problems, and we'll need years (decades?) of research before beginning to think about some of the solutions. That's not to say it can't be an overall positive technology/experience in the meantime, but it'll like…

In a few months you'll be able to easily try the consumer Rift, the HTC Vive and see for yourself how convincing the VR is. I think you might be pleasantly surprised. While the road toward "perfect" VR is just getting started, these first-gen consumer sets have crossed the starting line, and are qualitatively different from earlier VR experiences. (BTW, while comfort isn't a totally solved problem, for 1:1 motion, th…

Not making me vomit is definitely on my checklist for new tech. Glad we're at that milestone. I am still not sure how we best deal with the desire to move around in physical space without bumping into things, in this way the augmented reality route feels like it will be more useful. Having watched the space for the last 30+ years I heartily agree these are good old times :)

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#98

Post by kriro »

pavlov wrote: post #6
danpalmer wrote: post #5

I wonder how effective this VR actually is. It seems that VR heavily depends on high quality screens, with very high resolution, and low latency and persistence. However this works with a screen that isn't optimised for those attributes. $99 may be good, but it seems likely that it will be much worse than the Oculus Rift, I think is targeting ~$400-500, and could be far better. Is it worth it?

The Gear VR requires a phone with a 2560 * 1440 resolution. That's actually higher than Oculus DK2, which is only 1920 * 1080. I have a Gear VR for Note 4 and it's pretty awesome (especially for 360° video)... But there's just no content yet. I'm really looking forward to Land's End , a new Gear VR game from Monument Valley's makers: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/21/9353235/lands-end-vr-game-...

Just because I've never done it and want to double check. How does one get content to the phone-VR system?

I currently develop my toy VR applications with Unity and only target PC/Mac. I'm assuming I can just publish to Android from Unity and be set (never done it, just know this exists)? That is I target Android and can use the phone-VR setup?

Pretty solid coincidence that I'm currently in the market for a new phone as well. I tihnk I'll go with this and then skip the regular Oculus and get a Morpheus instead since I own a PS4 but the only machine suitable for smooth VR is at work (and I surely want to play around at home, too) :D

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#99

Post by dingo_bat »

bduerst wrote: post #55
monstrado wrote: post #14

I've had a chance to actually test this device and I can say it was comfortable, and the VR experience felt smooth and responsive. I was skeptical since it was powered by a phone, but I was definitely surprised.

The phone is the screen, right? Or is the phone processing the content and delivering it to the screen? What's the resolution like?

The phone has a big part in content delivery and processing too. The screen resolution on Galaxy Note devices (GearVR needs one of those) is 2.5k. That is divided between both eyes. But the thing is that Oculus itself uses the screen yanked out of a Galaxy Note. So screen quality and resolution should be top notch.

Re: Oculus’ New $99 Samsung Gear VR Makes Serious Virtual Reality Affordable

#100

Post by dingo_bat »

danpalmer wrote: post #5

I wonder how effective this VR actually is. It seems that VR heavily depends on high quality screens, with very high resolution, and low latency and persistence. However this works with a screen that isn't optimised for those attributes. $99 may be good, but it seems likely that it will be much worse than the Oculus Rift, I think is targeting ~$400-500, and could be far better. Is it worth it?

The screen is literally the same as what you get in a DK2. Oculus couldn't get any manufacturer to make them a screen that qualified all their requirements. Then they discovered that if they pry out the screen from a Galaxy Note, it is nearly the best they can hope for. So every DK2 right now just uses a screen that they literally tore out of a normal Galaxy Note.
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