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Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

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21–30 of 93 posts

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#21
post #9

I think a more compelling idea for having a camera on the outside is to allow for hand tracking within the game. Imaging if Leap-like functionality were added to the Rift. Flying through space in your star ship, you could reach out and actually interact with the controls in your cockpit. I think that could be a lot more compelling than what we are seeing with games on Kinect today.

That would be quite tricky, since both the camera (attached to your head) and your hands could be moving in different directions at the same time.

A stationary, secondary observer (like a Kinect) would be several orders of magnitude more reliable. All that's left is for someone to make a game that actually utilizes that idea.

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#23

Apart from gaming, there's other interesting things this could do especially with a higher resolution display and fast connectivity. For example , virtual tourism. Take a safari by streaming a 4K video via a mounted camera on a pivot on top of a truck. Of course latency induced motion sickness could be a serious issue there but you may be able to get around this by streaming feeds from multiple cameras.

I fully expect the future of video to be 4D camera orbs that record a 360 degree view and let viewers look around inside the recording as it plays, using head-mounted displays. Just imagine revisiting your last holiday and seeing stuff you didn't even see when you were there the first time, being able to explore the living surroundings again and again.

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#25
post #7

There is a really sort of chilling feeling when you get really good head tracking and high DPI visual input, it fools your brain enough to move your sense of place. The absolute creepiest thing I've experienced with this was put the goggles on and have the screens showing the view of a pair of cameras mounted on a telepresence robot in the same room. Then slowly pull the telepresence robot back so that I could see my…

I wonder about trauma from "dying" in a game that is so immersive it "tricks" your brain into thinking it is real -- example from the article about him sticking out his tongue to try and catch snow without thinking about it.

I wonder if we will start seeing more people in therapy for PTSD from gaming.

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#26

This plus body tracking could revitalize arcade gaming.

Head tracking is already available with commercial products like the TrackIR or open source projects like FreeTrack. It does make a huge difference in immersion, especially for things like flight or driving sims. My big concern with the Occulus is that the screens are relatively low resolution; I'm sure that will change over time, but the first generation hardware's screens are a bit lower resolution than I'd like, p…

Technically this is still not the "first generation".

Oculus is releasing a dev kit, and they have stated that the initial retail version will have higher-resolution screens.

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#27

This plus body tracking could revitalize arcade gaming.

Head tracking is already available with commercial products like the TrackIR or open source projects like FreeTrack. It does make a huge difference in immersion, especially for things like flight or driving sims. My big concern with the Occulus is that the screens are relatively low resolution; I'm sure that will change over time, but the first generation hardware's screens are a bit lower resolution than I'd like, p…

There have already been several 1080p phones announced that have screens of the right size. 4k TVs are coming out now which will drive down the price of the control chips required. And OLED can scale to extremely high DPI.

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#28
post #7

There is a really sort of chilling feeling when you get really good head tracking and high DPI visual input, it fools your brain enough to move your sense of place. The absolute creepiest thing I've experienced with this was put the goggles on and have the screens showing the view of a pair of cameras mounted on a telepresence robot in the same room. Then slowly pull the telepresence robot back so that I could see my…

I wonder about trauma from "dying" in a game that is so immersive it "tricks" your brain into thinking it is real -- example from the article about him sticking out his tongue to try and catch snow without thinking about it. I wonder if we will start seeing more people in therapy for PTSD from gaming .

Brainstorm: A team of scientists invents "the Hat", a brain/computer interface that allows sensations to be recorded from a person's brain and converted to tape so that others can experience them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#29

... only if game developers fully embrace it.

They're handing integration with Unity and UDK, so that's a lot of devs who will be able to use it with minimal effort. Whether they do also depends on enough consumers owning them that devs feel it's worth the time.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem; I hope they can pull it off. The 8000 units sold on Kickstarter suggest there's enough demand to make it work.

Re: Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

#30
post #7

There is a really sort of chilling feeling when you get really good head tracking and high DPI visual input, it fools your brain enough to move your sense of place. The absolute creepiest thing I've experienced with this was put the goggles on and have the screens showing the view of a pair of cameras mounted on a telepresence robot in the same room. Then slowly pull the telepresence robot back so that I could see my…

I wonder about trauma from "dying" in a game that is so immersive it "tricks" your brain into thinking it is real -- example from the article about him sticking out his tongue to try and catch snow without thinking about it. I wonder if we will start seeing more people in therapy for PTSD from gaming .

DFW predicted the rise of an entertainment so engrossing that people lost interest in doing anything else[1]. From bookworms to couch potatoes to video game addiction[2], we have seen ever-enriched simulations develop over the last few hundred years. People are already dying from neglecting their "meatspace" selves[3]; this will only increase in popularity. This does give some hint as to what people will "do" post-singularity[4].

1: Infinite Jest

2: Videgame Addiction was rejected from the next DSM, but I believe that we will see a form of it added within our lifetimes.

3: This has been happening for almost ten years: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

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