A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR • Hacker News Board

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#31

Post by elementalest » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:08 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #22

jn1234 wrote: post #2

The by far most interesting comment from the thread is this one (It's by Alan Yates who works on Vive/SteamVR) https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4osav8/lighthouse_tra... . >Of course. We want AR/VR/MR to be ubiquitous. Over the past four years or so I've seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic…

It's the opposite. I think you might have misunderstood the quote. SteamVR fully supports the Rift. It even supports the unreleased Touch controllers which likely won't be out until the end of the year. And Valve has made no indication that they're going to change this. In fact, they've suggested that they're very serious about always supporting all HMDs.

Yeah, there was no mention of locking out other HMD:

> In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won't ask that it only works on our platform, we won't stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn't dependant on either party's future decisions.

As long as the HMD supports the steamVR platform requirements, it can play steam/valve games.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#32

Post by duskwuff » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:08 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #20

kin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... they could be working on Half Life 3 in VR?

When you think about it, Half Life would actually be a prime setting for a VR game. The reason being that VR FPS work best when you can teleport rather than physically move (or move the camera through a continuous operation). Half Life always has had characters that can teleport, so it's not a big leap.

That seems like a bit of a stretch. While many of the Half-Life games have involved teleportation as a plot element, the vast majority of their gameplay has used more traditional methods of movement -- either walking or driving small vehicles.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#33

Post by woodman » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:17 AM UTC

conception wrote: post #25

diziet wrote: post #23

VR is amazing and the opportunity is incredible. However, I am worried worried that the technology to produce high enough resolution displays will take some time to get here. Without smartphones driving the demand, will we get to 5-10k dpi displays for VR tech? We have 800 or so dpi displays rolling out, with current generation devices filling their FOV with about 500 dpi screens. We're driving 1.3-1.8m pixels per ey…

I'm also worried about the actual effects of motion sickness once it becomes actually mass consumer affordable. Generally, reports are that VR can be particularly rough for most folks.

As I understand it, the motion sickness is directly related to rendering lag. Outside of VR there isn't much of an incentive to reduce that lag - as the only people who really care much about it now are the most enthusiastic of PC gamers. There is a lot of buffering and synchronization between the software and our retinas right now, so the hardware advancement needed to enable motion sick free VR (low lag GPU and display) is going to have to come from a drive to specifically deliver motion sick free VR.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#34

Post by danso » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:19 AM UTC

The Valve publications page has a few slides and documents relating to Valve presentations regarding VR:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html

One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_...

> Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever. You can see here how the camera follows the motion and rotation of the character’s head and so it rolls. Your actual head isn’t going to roll when you get killed by an Eyelander, so the mismatch will make you sick.

Here's the presentation's video, bookmarked at the aforementioned insight:

https://youtu.be/Gpr0FE2ATaY?t=19m36s

For those of you non-TF2 players, the "Eyelander" is the name of a player-wieldable sword, and when it connects, the victim's head flies off and rolls around the ground. Apparently simulating that effect (changing the user's "horizon line") will make people very sick.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#35

Post by hobs » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:27 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #22

jn1234 wrote: post #2

The by far most interesting comment from the thread is this one (It's by Alan Yates who works on Vive/SteamVR) https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4osav8/lighthouse_tra... . >Of course. We want AR/VR/MR to be ubiquitous. Over the past four years or so I've seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic…

It's the opposite. I think you might have misunderstood the quote. SteamVR fully supports the Rift. It even supports the unreleased Touch controllers which likely won't be out until the end of the year. And Valve has made no indication that they're going to change this. In fact, they've suggested that they're very serious about always supporting all HMDs.

Because VR is just another way to sell games. They want you to know you can play your steam games on everything and that is their primary priority, and since things like games from steam can run on your Oculus (or whatever) they can sell you on a thousand experiences instead of one original sale.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#36

Post by taberiand » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:34 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #34

The Valve publications page has a few slides and documents relating to Valve presentations regarding VR: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_... > Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever.…

To be fair, being decapitated in such a way that your head bounces and rolls around will leave you feeling, at the least, very sick.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#37

Post by JonathonW » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:35 AM UTC

jn1234 wrote: post #2

The by far most interesting comment from the thread is this one (It's by Alan Yates who works on Vive/SteamVR) https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4osav8/lighthouse_tra... . >Of course. We want AR/VR/MR to be ubiquitous. Over the past four years or so I've seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic…

The VR market right now feels kind of like the 3D accelerator market in the '90s, before Direct3D really came into its own, hardware manufacturers were still half-assing OpenGL support, and lots of games were programmed against vendor-proprietary APIs like Glide.

Would be nice if people had actually learned from that and rallied around a standard API/middleware for VR to start with, rather than trying to "console-ize" VR with hardware-specific exclusives. Maybe Valve/SteamVR will end up being that middleware?

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#38

Post by nabla9 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:37 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #34

The Valve publications page has a few slides and documents relating to Valve presentations regarding VR: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_... > Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever.…

Finally a way to have real punishment in video game.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#39

Post by drewrv » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:00 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #38

danso wrote: post #34

The Valve publications page has a few slides and documents relating to Valve presentations regarding VR: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_... > Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever.…

Finally a way to have real punishment in video game.

I look forward to playing an online game that punishes trolls with nausea!

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#40

Post by laksjd » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:01 AM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #12

Jeri Ellsworth of CastAR (ex-Valve AR/VR hardware guru) did an interview recently* where she mentioned that Valve was kind of "painting themselves in a corner" by gearing their system's performance to play AAA-title games. Now owners of those consoles will expect every game to be an AAA title. * http://embedded.fm/episodes/156 @ 53:20

I don't quite follow her argument there. Valve's push for a powerful platform will just mean that games that don't aim to be VR-Crysis have plenty of performance to work with, making development much easier.

The 'office simulator' example doesn't really seem to be about graphics, though, but about game length/most VR experiences being more tech demo than game.

I don't think people are going to be surprised by that. The HMDs are so expensive, and at least right now, so are the GPUs that can drive them, that people won't just impulse buy them. People who are spending that much money on a niche hobby like this will most likely know exactly what they are getting.