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Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

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Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#71

Post by sciurus »

the_rosentotter wrote: post #48
monk_e_boy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that about the Wii, but me and my lads still stand to play that. The games are a bit crap, so we only play for an hour or so, but standing to play isn't an issue for us (much to my surprise)

The Wii may actually be a case in point, since it never really got that much consumer uptake, and no other platform has picked up the mantle with physically active games. As with the Vive, it seemed like the future at the time, the concept games were a lot of fun, and it scared competing platforms to rush out imitating products (Xbox Kinect, PS Move). But neither have ultimately had much adoption.

The Wii was Nintendo's most successful console, selling over 100 million units.

Like you said, Microsoft and Sony both introduced motion controllers for their consoles. The Kinect was the fastest selling consumer electronics device.

Source: http://nintendoenthusiast.com/article/the-false-success-of-t...

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#72

Post by cwyers »

nilkn wrote: post #65
cwyers wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're talking about a lot of features here that don't even amount to a percentage point of Steam users. Go look at the Steam Hardware and Software Survey results. SteamOS doesn't even show up in the top five Linux distros that Valve reports. There may be Windows users who are using the Big Picture Mode, but I'd guess not a whole lot of them. There may be Windows users who are using the Steam Controller, but…

Just to be clear, SteamOS is not needed for Steam Link and I've never used it. Steam Link just streams content from your PC.

Valve doesn't publish figures on the number of Steam Links sold. But just look at the Steam Hardware Survey[1]. Valve recommends a quad-core PC to be used as the host[2]. But half of Windows users have two CPUs or fewer. The number jumps up to 64% when you look at OS X users. Meanwhile, the top 10 graphics cards are pretty well split betweel the latest NVIDIA cards and a bunch of Intel on-motherboard cards. I don't think the sort of enthusiast that buys a Steam Link is anywhere close to the bulk of Steam's audience; there are a lot of people who are playing games on laptops, not gaming laptops but just laptops.

1) http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ 2) https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3629-RIA...

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#73

Post by the_rosentotter »

vessenes wrote: post #57
the_rosentotter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sceptical about this. People like to sit down for their entertainment, that is unlikely to change. Turning, swerving, swiveling, sure, but I bet most would quickly get fed up with having to get on their feet and move around in order to play their games.

So far, you're wrong. I have a Vive and four kids. The Vive sees at least two hours of play time a day, with kids often sneaking time at weird hours. They were even getting up before 6 am, dressing and doing chores in order to play before school until my wife halted the practice. When friends come over, it's the most offered activity; it's a very compelling experience. Not a ton of long form content yet, but seriousl…

Does it fit a child properly? I have been planning on getting one for the kids, but I read several complaints that it takes some work to to get a good fit on an adult, let alone a child, plus the fact that it seems very front-heavy.

I don't doubt that it will get a lot of play from the novelty factor alone, but I remain sceptical that it will make sedentary gamers change their habits in the long term.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#74

Post by errantspark »

phoboslab wrote: post #68
errantspark wrote: post #53

Been working on VR side projects for 3 years now, I've built against the DK1, DK2, CV1 and the Vive and I have to say there's zero question in my mind that Oculus is FAR behind the curve. The Vive was love at first sight, the Oculus was quite the opposite. The Vive is stunning, not only because room-scale VR is fantastic. (I don't share the opinion that the future rests solely with room scale, there's plenty of stuff…

Valve's Lighthouse tracking system isn't particularly elegant from a usability standpoint. I see Oculus' and Valve's current systems as a temporary solution. The future likely is in inside out tracking (i.e. one or more cameras on the headset, looking out). Oculus is working on that. I'd be surprised if Valve isn't. I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher wal…

I'd like to hear you expand on that, perhaps we don't align on the definition of elegant? I think the Lighthouse system is elegant specifically because it doesn't use cameras at all. That's what makes it so cool is that it's not limited by sensor resolution, to get really accurate tracking using cameras you need to crunch a LOT of data really quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if it's order's of magnitude less computationally expensive, especially since IIRC in the Lighthouse system most of the heavy lifting is done using an FPGA.

I think the system mentioned by jc4p is similarly elegant but for different reasons. Based on a skim through the article he posted I'd say the Lighthouse system is likely cheaper, and can more easily track multiple (infinite really since the tracking is done on the object rather than using the base station) objects, but won't have the same sort of range as MTS. Both are loads better than using cameras IMO.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#75

Post by lux »

cma wrote: post #55
lux wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but I've been working with both controllers for a while and honestly really prefer Touch over Vive's controllers. They have way more expressiveness, which means we're often running into things we want to do with Touch that don't easily translate to Vive's trigger/squeeze/thumb combo. A basic example, you can do rock paper scissors with Touch. Not perfectly since you still have a…

Vive doesn't have any real exclusives. You can already play most of the stuff on Rift with an MIT licensed Razer Hydra driver adapter that Valve released for free. Valve are treating headsets more like monitors, Oculus is treating them like a gaming console. You have to dig in a menu and click a "scare toggle" to even run third party software on Oculus. On GearVR they don't even have the toggle. It will only run Ocul…

I'm aware and don't mean exclusive in that sense, just in the sense of being officially released on the platform. Many of the same games be released on the Rift once the touch controllers are out, negating the controller availability difference.

That said, Vive's tracking will still be the better of the two, as well as their cord length. I do wish the controllers were slightly more evolved though... :P

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#76

Post by errantspark »

jc4p wrote: post #69
phoboslab wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve's Lighthouse tracking system isn't particularly elegant from a usability standpoint. I see Oculus' and Valve's current systems as a temporary solution. The future likely is in inside out tracking (i.e. one or more cameras on the headset, looking out). Oculus is working on that. I'd be surprised if Valve isn't. I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher wal…

Have you seen this demo of Jack McCauley's new laser based tracking? http://www.roadtovr.com/mts-virtual-reality-vr-tracking-syst...

Certainly this is better than camera based tracking but I don't think it's got a significant advantage over the Lighthouse system from a consumer standpoint. Especially when it comes to tracking multiple peripherals I have my doubts when it comes to MTS.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#77

Post by WillPostForFood »

tk32 wrote: post #70
errantspark wrote: post #53

Been working on VR side projects for 3 years now, I've built against the DK1, DK2, CV1 and the Vive and I have to say there's zero question in my mind that Oculus is FAR behind the curve. The Vive was love at first sight, the Oculus was quite the opposite. The Vive is stunning, not only because room-scale VR is fantastic. (I don't share the opinion that the future rests solely with room scale, there's plenty of stuff…

It's so satisfying watching them get their just desserts after betraying their Kickstarter backers by taking the Facebook money and then going back on all their words about keeping the platform free for everybody. Meanwhile that acquisition kicked off a race among the other big players which Valve appears to be winning while having the best features. I mean, Valve isn't perfect, but they're a lot better than Facebook…

They already got their billions from Facebook, so just desserts at this point mostly affect the consumers who just got locked in, months after their purchase.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#78

Post by WillPostForFood »

__david__ wrote: post #4
cma wrote: post #3

The worst part is Oculus sold customers on something more open than they delivered. Now if you buy from their store your purchases are locked to their headset, and if you ever buy anything else in the future. Oculus/Palmer said they didn't care if you modded their games to work on third party headsets, just they weren't going to provide support themselves; instead they went out and broke it intentionally. >If custome…

Interestingly, he abruptly stopped posting on Reddit about a month ago [1]. I wonder if he lost some internal battle on this issue… [1] https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey

I understand why he might drop out of Reddit posting - the Oculus subreddit has been prone to fanboy flame wars the last few months. But he has also been conspicuously absent from Twitter the last few weeks. it does make me wonder about internal conflict at Facebook/Oculus.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#79

Post by istorical »

kybernetikos wrote: post #34
istorical wrote: post #28

The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintain…

> Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit? This is confusing. If it's true that they make no money on hardware, then you'd expect them to be ecstatic that people want to buy their games (giving them money) without taking their hmd (which supposedly doesn't).

They aren't producing the content themselves. They have a few titles that they are funding, but mostly they are working as a distributor through Oculus Home. Most titles are 3rd party. They are trying to start the same business that Valve already has in Steam.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#80

Post by istorical »

pekk wrote: post #61
istorical wrote: post #28

The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintain…

It is grossly deceptive to say that Steam has a monopoly on games distribution when a vast number of the games on Steam are also distributed by other channels. I can't name any "Steam exclusives," which is more than I can say for Origin etc. Frankly it's absurd to psychoanalyze Steam, saying that it wants to do what other companies are doing, and not to recognize that if it wanted to do those things it could easily d…

It's not a de jure monopoly, it's a de facto monopoly. When a gamer thinks "I wanna buy this game", 90% of them go immediately to Steam.

It's a monopoly in the sense that it's practically financial suicide for a games developer to NOT sell their game through Steam. Whether or not they really "have to" is besides the point if the reality is they'll not make a positive return on their game if they skip out on selling on Steam.

A few big publishers like EA avoid this by creating their own alternative stores and just hoping gamers will deal with it and install Origin, but most games studios have no choice but to accept that they're going to lose 30% because the reality is gamers expect to be able to buy any game on Steam.

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