Half Life 3 will have VR confirmed!
A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
61–70 of 203 posts
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
While I enjoyed the DK2, I got unbearably sick from Half-Life 2 within a half hour. Playing with Tilt Brush on the Vive, I didn't feel the slightest bit queasy. Not sure if the difference was the hardware or the software, but it seems like a solvable problem.
FPS games are inherently a million times worse for VR sickness than room-scale walking around, since the former has the mismatch of the avatar walking around with the player sitting in a chair, while the latter is 1:1
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#63So one third of Valve is working on VR... absolutely definitely not working on Half Life 3 or Portal 3. Which pushes their possible/probable/hypothetical release dates even further into the future. :-(
Or... they could be working on Half Life 3 in VR?
Valve's Chet Faliszek has said pretty clearly in the past that Half Life 3 won't be a VR game, and I think that's pretty realistic. First person action based shooters don't translate well into VR. Any kind of locomotion that isn't walking around your room-scale space or teleporting just feels incredibly jarring, and it very quickly makes you feel motion sick.
So it'd be a pretty significant change to what we've come to expect from the Half Life games if they made it a VR title.
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#64The 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.
So what can be learned from this tidbit? Don't get decapitated.
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dis…
We already have virtually zero latency in VR at the moment thanks to predictive tracking and rewarping of the frames to the predicted head pose and direct driver support.
The motion sickness is mostly coming from vection now, when you move in VR but not in real reality. It's an active area of research, people are experimenting with things like reducing the FOV while moving, using interactive overlaid grid to pull the scene around, etc.
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#66I've come to realise that Valve is no longer a game developer.
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#67Side observation. So Valve now has an better VR Set then Oculus. And all of a sudden every news on VR seems to flowing in Valve direction. This reminds me a lot of the early days when we move from iD 's Doom to Valve's Half Life. Note: ( John Carmack = CTO of Oculus and Founder of iD )
I like competition as much as the next guy, but I'm happy as long as the more open platform is more popular. Wish Oculus took a different route.
My prediction: Valve VR will be the choice for hardcore games/gamers. Oculus VR will shift focus to more casual gaming (quick, fun, not graphically superior), and more importantly media consumption (think: Facebook live 360 video of major media events like E3, or ComicCon, and eventually paid subscription for viewing of live sporting events like courtside NBA games)
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#68VR 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 own a Vive. We are quite a few years from having HMDs where you can't see pixelation. I estimate we need a tenfold increase in density.
However, and this is something you need to try to believe, pixelation does not affect immersion. The human brain is amazing at coping with vision defects. When in a game, you absolutely forget about pixel visibility. You are just "in there".
So, it is true that you can't get detail for showing stuff in detail at 20m. It limits applications, but there's already plenty of activities that are possible now, instead of having to wait ten years.
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have a rift and I don't get sick and nobody I've shown it to has gotten sick. I think that concern is way overblown.
I own a Vive. Zero motion sickness on room scale games, zero when flying around in Elite:Dangerous. However, get me in something with wheels and it's hell. Rolling in the buggy in Elite is bad, driving in Project Cars is worse.
I've learned that, in Elite, if I look at where the buggy is going (it power slides a lot), then I almost avoid motion sickness. Project Cars, though, I can't play. Cornering, at high speed, completely immersed, with no lateral acceleration, triggers some alarm in me.
Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR
#70VR 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.
I am pretty sensitive to motion sickness ... get sick easily in cars, awful in boats and have suffered week-long bouts of pretty nasty positional vertigo a few times in my life but I can stay in the Vive for hours with no ill effects at all. It doesn't feel like my vestibular system is under any sort of stress at all, the tracking is super tight. My assumption is that the majority of people that experience nausea do so due to either defective hardware, or under-powered systems.