I'm waiting for the Vive, or at least a bunch of a reviews of both platforms. I trust Valve a lot more than Facebook to deliver a gaming device that won't be caught up in strange legal requirements, social media promotion, lock-in, platform exclusives, and potential privacy exploitation. I also feel that the Valve team has been working on the non-sexy issues like controls, motion sickness, advanced eye tracking (rumo…
Some of those arguments would have held more water before the complete security clusterfuck that Valve visited upon the users of Steam over the holidays.
from how i understood it, valve was not the one at fault for the caching bug, it was whoever they use for hosting :^)
Now the real question- go with Facebook and buy an Oculus Rift or go with Valve/HTC and buy a Vive? The Vive has more features (like head tracking) but maybe it will be more expensive? There's been nothing but silence in terms of pricing of either of them... I do have a hard time justifying $500+ for a screen I'll strap to my head that will probably be obsolete in a year or two. I will say though, I recently bought a…
I'm waiting for the Vive, or at least a bunch of a reviews of both platforms. I trust Valve a lot more than Facebook to deliver a gaming device that won't be caught up in strange legal requirements, social media promotion, lock-in, platform exclusives, and potential privacy exploitation. I also feel that the Valve team has been working on the non-sexy issues like controls, motion sickness, advanced eye tracking (rumo…
Fwiw, I read an article the other day that stated that dual-GPU cards are likely going to be ideal for this.
I'm not a graphics hacker, but the gist was that a lot of modern rendering techniques had broken the ability to split workload via alternate frame rendering.
However, since each VR eye can essentially be independently run as its own pipeline, they'd see a much more ideal speedup in "same scene, two eyes" workloads.
Both the Vive and the Rift have head tracking. Positional head tracking has been around since 2014. The Vive has "room-scale" tracking that lets you walk around a large room-sized space, and includes hand controllers that are also tracked in the world. The Rift should support "room-scale" with more cameras, but is not a main focus/supported use case yet for Oculus. The Oculus Touch is like the Vive's tracked hand con…
Is the Vive wireless? Room-scale tracking + wires seems suboptimal.
Wireless solutions would introduce too much latency, so you're always tethered to a box. It takes some getting used to, and I definitely wouldn't recommend a lot of running and jumping, but it's not a major complicating factor in my experience (though that's in an office environment that was set aside for VR testing, so a home installation may differ significantly). Personally, even though the movement area is limited and the wires are relatively cumbersome, I've found the Vive experience much more immersive.
I am truly surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on this thread. The Oculus is the FIRST high-fidelity consumer VR experience. And they've got the horsepower of Facebook's cash-machine as their bankroll. Zuck gets this to the degree that I suspect he believes Facebook & VR will be synonymous within a decade (1) Do I wish that Oculus was owned by some benevolent billionaire trickster like OASIS in Ready Player One? Sure…
How do I try one without buying it? [serious]
If you mean the consumer rift you're limited to the big electronics shows for now, I'm sure that they have plans for broader consumer displays that we'll see in the near future.
But if you mean Oculus in general the Gear VR is an ok start (and widely available) but I'd recommend
(a) Get yourself to one of the many VR meetups that are fairly geographically distributed @ this point http://vr.meetup.com/
(b) Visit www.reddit.com/r/oculus and make a request for a demo in your area if you're in a less populated area.
Did they say they didn't care, or did they say they needed to focus development? There is a big difference between the two. If they were making a game in Unity and didn't release a Linux version, that's one thing. If they're making a brand new specialized piece of hardware and have had numerous delays and just need to get a product out the door... well it's a little more understandable that they would focus on one pl…
The worry is, as time goes on, it will become harder and harder to "bolt on" Linux (or OSX) support. Being cross-platform is a design decision, and it effects how you go about developing your platform (what technologies you use, etc...). So the fear is, they'll go down the Microsoft path and find it difficult to bring in other platforms down the road.
Well, with OS X, at least, there is no retail Mac that meets the minimum hardware requirements previously announced, except possibly the Mac Pro (though it looks like even that benches lower than the minimum for the Rift). Given that and that Mac graphics driver/OpenGL performance lags significantly behind Windows, there's not really any reason to waste resources on the platform. I don't know what the current state is, but last I was aware, Linux OpenGL performance was also significantly worse than on Windows, so it seems pretty reasonable to me to leave it out as well.
Probably the better link is to the announcement of the pre-orders itself: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/oculus-rift-pre-orders-to-... I'm confused though; why do a pre-announcement for an announcement about pre-purchasing a product that's only two days away? They should have simply opened up pre-orders immediately. That being said I can't imagine they expect to sell much. It requires such a beefy PC (of which few…
Gamers tend to own and upgrade beefy PCs.
Hmm I'm having trouble finding any type of reliable statistics. When I used to do lots of PC gaming I was in many gaming groups of which maybe 10% of them would upgrade their computers to be above mid to high end. At most (all of us always complained about how terrible our PCs were and how lower our FPS were almost as if it were a badge of honor). But this is anecdotal so I have no ground to really speak on. Having said that it's hard for me to swallow that PC gamers "tend" to "own and upgrade beefy PCs".
Any sources?
Edit: interesting that when asking for source regarding the parent's claim I get multiple downvotes. I don't really understand why.
I'm more looking forward to seeing the Sony VR. It's rumoured to be around the $250-$350 price mark. Sony have a history of getting traction despite not having the best spec/product, for example, remember HD DVD vs Blu Ray?
I also think the Sony VR specs are pretty high. They want people to buy a PS4 and play games on their VR system.
Both the Vive and the Rift have head tracking. Positional head tracking has been around since 2014. The Vive has "room-scale" tracking that lets you walk around a large room-sized space, and includes hand controllers that are also tracked in the world. The Rift should support "room-scale" with more cameras, but is not a main focus/supported use case yet for Oculus. The Oculus Touch is like the Vive's tracked hand con…
Is the Vive wireless? Room-scale tracking + wires seems suboptimal.
No desktop VR headset is wireless today, and won't be for the foreseeable future due to latency and bandwidth requirements.
Wires are suboptimal but tracked wires (just like the headset is tracked. i.e. you'll see the wire in VR) should alleviate this problem until wireless technologies mature.
Mobile VR will provide room-scale tracking without wires in 2016. Watch this space.
Here are my thoughts on the situation: 1) First generation devices are usually flops/riddled with bugs, but usually exploitable if you don't upgrade firmware/etc. 2) I would probably need to buy a 980TI ($600) or Titan X ($1k) to make up for my i7-2600k's failure. (I want a Titan X for deep convolution neural networks anyways). 3) Nvidia is on the verge of releasing their Pascal architecture. The Titan X was just rec…
The DK2 works fine on middle-line GPUs. I'm certain this one will too.
Here are my thoughts on the situation: 1) First generation devices are usually flops/riddled with bugs, but usually exploitable if you don't upgrade firmware/etc. 2) I would probably need to buy a 980TI ($600) or Titan X ($1k) to make up for my i7-2600k's failure. (I want a Titan X for deep convolution neural networks anyways). 3) Nvidia is on the verge of releasing their Pascal architecture. The Titan X was just rec…