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Oculus Rift

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Re: Oculus Rift

#71
post #28

The Xbox controller is really surprising to me. Years in development and it will ship with an Xbox controller. Oculus Touch didn't even get demonstrated and "prototype" was mentioned time and again.

"The oculus will ship with... A wireless.... Xbox one controller" I closed out of the stream at that point.

You might want to get that checked out.

Turn around and sell the Xbox controller on ebay if you feel the need, nothing says the two are wedded or the controller is required to use Oculus.

Re: Oculus Rift

#72
post #7

I am still not sold on VR, but I feel that AR (Augmented Reality) really is the future. 1) AR seems to help in real world situations vs VR which actually makes you feel vulnerable due to lack of vision and impaired hearing of what is around you. 2) VR also has the issue with physical issues with nausea and 10% of people with lazy eyes or other optical issues that make them unable to see 3D clearly. 3) Star Trek Holos…

I feel VR will be strictly a gaming toy and even then will be something of an eccentric item considering the cost/hassle of it all, not to mention all the side-effects. AR seems promising, and this hands on review has me really interested in Hololens.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/30/hololens-is-real/#.ciyefr:x...

Its crazy that we have a wearable hologram headset that produces real world opaque holograms but no one is really talking about it. Yet an ugly VR black box mounted on your face projecting a cell phone into your eyes somehow gets all the press. If anything, Oculus shows us how gamer-centric the tech press is.

Hololens is pretty much a wearable holodeck. The money I had earmarked for the Vive or Oculus is going to sit in my savings account until the Hololens comes out. I doubt I'm the only one sitting this first round out. AR might just strangle VR in the cradle - and that's a good thing. Let's face it, Oculus didn't firesale itself to the evils of Facebook because it had a bright future. It did so out of desperation.

Re: Oculus Rift

#73
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is likely going to be the biggest turn-off. People don't have those big PCs any more. Most people have just laptops/MacBook. I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift. They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience. World has long moved on…

The entire PC gaming industry would beg to differ, which is likely the initial target market. Of course that will change. Also I wouldn't exactly consider my desktop a beast. Form factors are pretty small these days.

Sure, this will be a hot product among PC gamers but they are not the mainstream consumers. I wanted to buy the device for my mom and have her use it. I think the vision should be to bring VR mainstream that is usable by all without technological friction.

Re: Oculus Rift

#74
post #42

Does anyone know of a list of PCs that meet (or exceed) the recommended hardware specs for the Rift? Not that I'm going to run out and buy one of these machines in anticipation of the Rift's release next year, but I'm interested in knowing roughly what a premium VR experience costs today (excluding the headset, obviously) Edit: To rephrase my question, can anyone point me to a list of PCs manufactured by companies li…

This is likely going to be the biggest turn-off. People don't have those big PCs any more. Most people have just laptops/MacBook. I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift. They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience. World has long moved on…

>People don't have those big PCs any more.

People who play video games on them do.

>Most people have just laptops/MacBook.

Not people who play video games.

> I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift.

If they like to play PC games in their living room, they already have a PC there. If they don't, this won't change that.

>"They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience."

So... sell the Oculus together with a gaming PC? What's the difference between that and getting your own separately?

>World has long moved on from knowing which graphic card you need for your PC.

Except for those people who play video games on their PC. Those people generally do know what video card they have.

>I really hope this has good enough performance on typical Lenovo/MBP at least.

It will not. A powerful desktop gaming computer is absolutely required for acceptable VR performance in any interesting game.

Re: Oculus Rift

#75
post #62
post #28

The Xbox controller is really surprising to me. Years in development and it will ship with an Xbox controller. Oculus Touch didn't even get demonstrated and "prototype" was mentioned time and again.

Why reinvent the wheel? The xbox controller is widely considered the gold standard.

Exactly; Microsoft invested approximately $100 million into development of the Xbox One controller[0], and it shows.

[0] - http://www.gamesradar.com/video-designing-xbox-one-controlle...

Re: Oculus Rift

#76

I'm a bit of a sound nerd, but the on-ear headphones are really underwhelming. No noise isolation, most likely low quality drivers... this would make for a pretty terrible VR experience. Simply upgrading them to closed back, over the ear headphones would make a big difference - you'd be able to use lower volumes (at which point even cheap drivers aren't oto bad), and you'd be more isolated from the environment, simil…

The Crescent Bay prototype used the drivers from porta-pros, which are pretty good. The point of included headphones:

A) Based on Twitch and YouTube a lot of people didn't use headphones, losing most benefits of headtracked and spatialized sound. Integrating them makes them much more likely to be used.

B) Standardized frequency response and built-in DAC/amp means their HRTF (head related transfer function) spatialization tech can be tuned precisely, without worrying about the EQ of thousands of different variations. Though people are still free to use their own and lose the fine tuning.

Re: Oculus Rift

#77
post #19
post #7

I am still not sold on VR, but I feel that AR (Augmented Reality) really is the future. 1) AR seems to help in real world situations vs VR which actually makes you feel vulnerable due to lack of vision and impaired hearing of what is around you. 2) VR also has the issue with physical issues with nausea and 10% of people with lazy eyes or other optical issues that make them unable to see 3D clearly. 3) Star Trek Holos…

But AR requires several technological leaps beyond VR in terms of transparent screens and location tracking. So I'd expect to see usable VR headsets to appear in homes a generation two before AR ones. I mean, the HoloLens is additive . That means if you want to show a dark object in a room with white walls, you cant .

Hololens hands on show it to be a ready product. It doesn't require any breakthroughs.

One reviewer was shocked at how opaque the holograms were. I think the situation you're describing with a black object has already been solved:

>What did surprise me, though, was how little opacity there was to the holograms. I expected them to look somewhat transparent, with the background shining through. That really wasn’t the case, though. They looked really solid and there was almost no transparency.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/30/hololens-is-real/

Re: Oculus Rift

#79
post #57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palmer claims the headphones are very high quality. If you don't like them you can replace them with your own.

Oh yeah? I can't find where it says you can replace them with their own. That'd be cool though.

In the submission, it says the headphone arms can be removed.

Re: Oculus Rift

#80

I'm a bit of a sound nerd, but the on-ear headphones are really underwhelming. No noise isolation, most likely low quality drivers... this would make for a pretty terrible VR experience. Simply upgrading them to closed back, over the ear headphones would make a big difference - you'd be able to use lower volumes (at which point even cheap drivers aren't oto bad), and you'd be more isolated from the environment, simil…

So the way to signal that one is an evidence based aficionado of sound is to call yourself a "sound nerd?" In today's parlance, "audiophiles" are all deluded woo-woo proponents who are deserving of ridicule. (I find that to be a form of shallow prejudice: One can simply evaluate the science behind what someone is saying.)

I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
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