New VR Headest actually looks viable for average gamers

[mr_centipede 31]

Did I heard right, the res in rift will be downsize and thus, improve fps a bit. or was that an assumption from the hosts?

Anyway, it sure is fun... I hope IL2 CoD (that sounded so wrong, it's Cliffs over Dover) will make use of this... or was is battle of Britain: Cliffs over Dover?

[Brain 12]

Anyone knows already how much CPU/GPU capacity this will estimated cost? Like an estimated percentage of performance drop?

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Anyone knows already how much CPU/GPU capacity this will estimated cost? Like an estimated percentage of performance drop?

Launch a game in 720p resolution, then enable Stereoscopic 3D - you'll have the same performance with this headset.

[Tonci87 163]

I guess the resolution is that low because of that. Stereoscopic 3D has a huge performance impact.

One thing that concerns me is the effect this has one the eyesight. It can´t be healthy to stare at something only centimeters away for a long time....

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

They couldn't source 4-5 inch 1080p screens, so the dev version got 720p.

Weapon floating point in TF2 - GabeN is winning the Game. FUCKING AWESOME.

The tracker is already better than my TrackIR5 - precise, true 6-DOF, 1:1 ratio of head to in-game movement - set it to 0.7-0.9 for long playthroughs and it will do great.

Edited April 8, 2013 by Iroquois Pliskin

[dmarkwick 261]

The tracker is already better than my TrackIR5 - precise, true 6-DOF, 1:1 ratio of head to in-game movement - set it to 0.7-0.9 for long playthroughs and it will do great.

Well, aside from no translations (rotations only), a (current) inability to see controllers, keyboards joysticks etc, and when you bring your weapon up to ironsight/collimated sight, it'll be aligned with your nose ;)

Increased resolutions, wider view per eye, ability to see under the goggle and separate left-right eye separation properties and I'm in though. To be fair I had less use for translation anyway.

[Tonci87 163]

But seriously, that can´t be healthy....

[dmarkwick 261]

But seriously, that can´t be healthy....

There's no problem with the screen being 5cm away from your eyes - the focusing mechanism sees to that.

What you will get to greater or lesser degrees is eyestrain due to forcing your eyes to converge on objects at different distances but at the same focal range. Your eyes naturally want to focus wherever they're converging, so your weapon will be close in and your eyes will want to focus at about 50cm or so when you look at that, but your target might be 50m away so your eyes will want to focus at that range when you look at at that. But your focus will be clamped to whatever you've set it to.

After a few hours you get headaches etc. Mileage may vary, I watched Avatar and didn't suffer too much, but 3-4 hours of ArmA in 3D caused me some eyestrain.

[sqb-sma 66]

There's no problem with the screen being 5cm away from your eyes - the focusing mechanism sees to that.

What you will get to greater or lesser degrees is eyestrain due to forcing your eyes to converge on objects at different distances but at the same focal range. Your eyes naturally want to focus wherever they're converging, so your weapon will be close in and your eyes will want to focus at about 50cm or so when you look at that, but your target might be 50m away so your eyes will want to focus at that range when you look at at that. But your focus will be clamped to whatever you've set it to.

After a few hours you get headaches etc. Mileage may vary, I watched Avatar and didn't suffer too much, but 3-4 hours of ArmA in 3D caused me some eyestrain.

Could you fraps it? I'd love to see Arma3 in 3D on this.

[dmarkwick 261]

Could you fraps it? I'd love to see Arma3 in 3D on this.

Unfortunately I don't have the drivers installed on my gaming laptop at the moment. I used it in its red/cyan 3D mode, which made some ArmA features (like the red collimated sight dot for example) a little problematic, but in general it worked very well. The driver can also use proper 3D glasses but I don't own any.

Especially nice for this driver (and as far as I can tell uniquely) you could specify the eye separation per eye, which means that instead of moving the left eye left 3.5cm and the right eye right 3.5cm, you could just move the left eye left by 7cm. This meant that ironsights were still aligned with your right eye when you raised them, and not your nose :) it was VERY cool.

3D in ArmA is cool and all, but I found that you had to exaggerate the 3D in order to make it worthwhile. Otherwise the 3D effect was sort of limited to a few tens of yards around your immediate area, which made most of the 3D rendering work pointless. In order to get 3D effect out to 100-200m or so you had to exaggerate your settings. Not a problem, just an observation, it kind of made everything seem "small". :)

Edited April 21, 2013 by DMarkwick

[johnnyp 10]

I guess the resolution is that low because of that. Stereoscopic 3D has a huge performance impact.

One thing that concerns me is the effect this has one the eyesight. It can´t be healthy to stare at something only centimeters away for a long time....

Actually there are no issues for the eyes with prolonged use. The lenses are focused to infinity so your eyes are completely at rest while using the Rift. This in effect means that it's more of a strain to look at your everyday monitor than it is to use the Rift. Positional tracking and a higher density screen are what's needed next and both of those are going to (supposedly) be what's happening for the consumer version.

My dev kit runs at 1920x1200 but the density of the screen is such that you can easily see the individual pixels - makes playing a lot of games pretty hard - sniping someone off in the distance would be almost impossible as you wouldn't be able to very easily see them. Even games like Dirt are hard to play as the road in the distance breaks up so much you can't really see where it goes. Frame rate is OK for me with most games running somewhere around the 60frames (stereoscopically) - I have a single GeForce GTX 670.

[dmarkwick 261]

Actually there are no issues for the eyes with prolonged use. The lenses are focused to infinity so your eyes are completely at rest while using the Rift. This in effect means that it's more of a strain to look at your everyday monitor than it is to use the Rift. Positional tracking and a higher density screen are what's needed next and both of those are going to (supposedly) be what's happening for the consumer version.

My dev kit runs at 1920x1200 but the density of the screen is such that you can easily see the individual pixels - makes playing a lot of games pretty hard - sniping someone off in the distance would be almost impossible as you wouldn't be able to very easily see them. Even games like Dirt are hard to play as the road in the distance breaks up so much you can't really see where it goes. Frame rate is OK for me with most games running somewhere around the 60frames (stereoscopically) - I have a single GeForce GTX 670.

Well the nature of simulating 3D at a fixed focal distance does introduce some strain. You eyes naturally want to focus at appropriate distances when say looking at a close object, then looking at a far object. Your eyes are converging & diverging etc to do this - but you must maintain a fixed focus.

[gonk 0]

some people's comments on the HD version....catch the last guys comment... :)

So far my best experience with the Oculus is flying. Tested with Warthunder, I can hardly wait for be resolution though. I have not tried a HD version but I think even the HD version will not be good enough for the general public.

Edited September 2, 2013 by gonk

[Tonci87 163]

some people's comments on the HD version....catch the last guys comment... :)

So far my best experience with the Oculus is flying. Tested with Warthunder, I can hardly wait for be resolution though. I have not tried a HD version but I think even the HD version will not be good enough for the general public.

That´s what I fear....

[froggyluv 2136]

So far my best experience with the Oculus is flying. Tested with Warthunder, I can hardly wait for be resolution though. I have not tried a HD version but I think even the HD version will not be good enough for the general public.

That´s what I fear....

Not sure what you guys are talking about? Every one of those guys loved it and said first day buy but you guys are saying it's not good enough for the general public :confused:

[Sniperwolf572 758]

Not sure what you guys are talking about? Every one of those guys loved it and said first day buy but you guys are saying it's not good enough for the general public :confused:

Video editing and the setup of the experience leads to the "testimonials" you see in the video to show people who gave specific type of feedback. The device itself requires specific types of games/interfaces to work well and I believe Hawken has received "VR polish" to give the best experience. You'd have a pretty shitty experience with Arma (and most other games) currently as is due to the interface being a 2D overlay and many other things. You wouldn't be able to read it and it would be quite blurry. Occulus Rift is not a plug-and-play thing, the games themselves need to support it to get the feel they're getting at the booth. Look at the feedback from the TF2 VR integration, most of it seems to be "Yeah, this is really cool, but you can't really play seriously/effectively with this and some things feel really wrong".

Even in the video you can see them commenting about the low resolution of the HD model. But each of them said that the experience is the thing that would drive them to buy it even with the bad resolution and the experience with the VR can be ruined by very small things. It's trying to emulate reality to your eyes, and your eyes and brain will go "yeah, fuck that" the moment they notice even the slightest thing wrong with the visual feedback you are getting.

Another thing is, how quickly will the "prepared experiences" go stale, how will the industry embrace the technology and how fast. 3D stuff didn't really hit it off due to the tradeoff of "please the minority with special 3D equipment" vs "cost and attention paid to make the game work good with 3D". There's also the technology limitations and the new problems the developers of the device, the gaming platforms and games face with this new type of display. The VR illusion is broken and cheapened by a lot of things which now have to be given attention to.

Think of this as a positive (re)start of the VR interest and a reach into the unknown. For this to be considered a serious new thing it will probably need improvements in the performance of the hardware we play such games on, better understanding of how the brain-eye-screen interact, heavy attention of the game/software developers on the interfaces and adoption by the customers. If those boxes don't get checked, the whole thing will dwindle out of the public attention yet again and will be back to being considered a gimmick.

[Tonci87 163]

I´m really curious how this will work for people with glasses.

[gonk 0]

I´m really curious how this will work for people with glasses.

Currently there are 3 different cups to fit for Near/Medium/Far sighted people. As luck would have it I found one that suited and I do not have to wear with glasses although I can fit them underneath. This is suppose to change to a mechanical focus setup with the commercial version.

As not good enough for the general public. The resolution of the screen needs to allow for greater than HD per eye so to start to match what people currently see on their monitor. There are some insane specs flying around on the net as to what Oculus are aiming for, lets hope they can achieve them.

[froggyluv 2136]

Thanks Sniperwolf572 - I understand now and you probably just saved me some moneys. Still Ill be keeping an eye one it :)

[Sniperwolf572 758]

Thanks Sniperwolf572 - I understand now and you probably just saved me some moneys. Still Ill be keeping an eye one it :)

It's a good thing to keep an eye on.

It has incredible potential and I really hope they pull it off and and it gains wide adaptation so it can be focused on intensively. It also has amazing applications in medical and other fields. Look at this for example and really, watch it in it's entirety, the more it progressed, the more I was amazed.

(

)

I find it incredibly awesome that someone has built that with the technology we have today. I'm starting to feel like that even in my lifetime, I'll go to the doctors, say my hand hurts and put it in a scanner where the doctor will have a realtime 3D volumetric representation of what's going on with it without even having to make a single cut.

[bigpickle 0]

Whats the HD version is that DK2?

[sqb-sma 66]

Whats the HD version is that DK2?

Yes, Crystal Cove was the first HD prototype they displayed to the public, DK2 is pretty darn similar. 1080p, low persistence OLED @75hz or 90hz (probably 75, but officially not confirmed AFAIK), 6DOF tracking.

Got mine coming in late August, damn excited to play Arma/get Arma working with it.

[ntsarb 10]

I think that the resolution we experience using a monitor cannot be achieved by a VR Head Mounted Display (HMD) for at least another six years. This is because to achieve a wide field of view (FOV), a lot more and smaller pixels are needed. I was trying to develop my own HMD last year and my experiments with optics showed that even a 4K HMD would not look as good as a standard 1080p monitor for 3D design or other precision tasks. We'll have to wait for 8K+ resolutions, to experience an image that becomes interesting in terms of resolution.

Furthermore, HMDs will require significantly more CPU and GPU power; the computer has to render x2 3D scenes (for each eye), x2 the frame rate, close to 100 fps, plus real time lens distortion correction and lens colour aberration correction, with very small latency (to avoid/minimize nausea effects). Given the pace of CPU and GPU development, I am not expecting a reasonably priced, high resolution, VR system (PC + HMD) to become available prior to 2018 (being very optimistic, here). 8K is planned for roll out in 2020 and, given the delays in rolling out 4K, probably the 8K panel prices won't be within reach until much later.

However, the Oculus DK2 offers an amazing new experience. I recall my (emeritus) grandmother saying that when she first saw a TV (in black & white), it was a magical experience, nearly unbelievable. I didn't expect I would ever feel the same but now I think I've been given this opportunity; Even with a fairly low resolution, the experience of using a VR HMD like the Oculus DK2 is magical, cannot be put in words, one has to experience it, to realise how VR will change the world in ways we probably can't imagine.

Edited August 21, 2014 by ntsarb

[SpaceNavy 16]

Just posting to show my support for adding official Oculus VR SDK support for Arma (all Arma games, not just 3 if possible).

TrackIR never sat well with me when it came to infantry or vehicle use.

[bigpickle 0]

my DK2 arrived but even using 3rd party programs I cant get it to work :(