I’ve never had the chance to try it, but when I do, I want to try it in a scenario that does it justice.
I have a friend who works for a large studio and they are integrating Oculus Rift into their engine, and he tells me it has not exactly “shone that brightly” in terms of expectations.
The complaints, apart from the pains of development are human factors including nausea, disorientation and an unwanted disconnect from reality. In all, he deemed it as being inferior to a large, high quality monitor where you can disconnect and resume the illusion at any moment.
The OR certainly has been hyped, more even than perhaps other previous immersive gaming fads such as gamer vests, domes and walking platforms. What is unsettling for me is that none of these devices ever added to my gaming experience. It was always a challenge to work/play with them. They were undeniably fun to try at a demonstration fair but they were not something that I could blend into my gaming rig and increase the game immersion. My brain rejected these devices as too foreign to align the senses.
So I still rely on a good, large monitor screen, and I’m going to be patient and let the technology settle before trying the OR, because I don’t want to disappointed yet again. A feeling deep down tells me that when I do get to try the OR I will be returning to the good old tried and tested large monitor screen.
I haven’t strapped on an Oculus Rift yet. Most of the reason is because I haven’t seen much support outside Windows for it, and I don’t wander around from convention to convention to try such things out anymore.
I used to run an industrial VR lab, and we had some nice toys in it. One was a $40k headset (2006ish) which gave independent 1280x1024x60Hz eyes. It was heavy and the umbilical was pretty stiff, but otherwise a joy to use. That was sub-HD1080p. I’ve also used all manner of NTSC and VGA monoscopic headsets, which are invariably trash. The only cheap one I like is the FatShark, when piloting radio control vehicles by first-person video.
I like the idea of the Oculus Rift but I don’t run the lab anymore. The key will be the optics, and I hear that they did a good job with clarity and focus across the field. I haven’t read anything that says it’s able It would just be a waste of money for me to buy as a personal toy. You can’t wirelessly transmit video that can drive stereo HD, nevermind 4K display, so you’ll always be stuck to an umbilical.
“unwanted disconnect from reality”?
If you buy a VR headset and complain about that, then you really bought the wrong thing : p
I have the devkit and i don’t regret buying it, its really cool.
Yes its very low res and i do find that annoying, especially with some demos/games, but the experience is still very cool.
Don’t buy it if your a gamer only, better wait for the consumer version that will be higher res, lighter and have head tracking.
I’ve tried the original (1280*600) at the GDC - due to the large pixels (perhaps it was the setup of the demo, dunno) I was impressed but not so much as to spend my eastern european salary on the gen 1 dev kit - however I am set in buying the consumer version when it comes out in 2014
I would absolutely not buy the dev kit as a consumer device. It’s great for testing out your game (you know, “development”). I was disappointed by the dev kit, but you can see the potential there. If you’re wanting one to just play games on, definitely wait for the consumer version.
On a side note, integrating Oculus Rift support in Unity is pretty easy. There’s an issue with Unity skyboxes, but there are known workarounds.
Got the 720p one.
Easy to integrate in Unity.
Tracking is fast and accurate.
The lack of pixels makes it unusable for me until now:
I’m pretty sure that even 1080p will end up in visible pixels.
Quad HD could be ok, should be no problem, LG is already developing quad Hd on 5.5 inches.
There are some solutions where you put a mobile into a wearable frame.
For me this is pretty clever, since mobile devices already have all necessary hardware and you won’t need any cable connection.
So you want 4k resolution games running on a mobile device? I have a $300 video card and I can’t run 4k on most modern games, unless you’re hankering to play angry birds with a VR headset.
I played with mine for a few hours and then it went into the closet. Meh… I can see the potential but it’s 10 years away from being ready for consumers.
10 years are a huge overestimation, Oculus already have OLED prototypes working and im sure that in just a year or two OLED panels will be a lot cheaper than they are now, and modern GPUs are still evolving with decent speed.
Its very very good, its not ready for a commercial product, but those who0 have not used it or very similar technology cannoy possibly comment on it, nothing special about the headtracking, its the optics. Its both surprising and alarming sometimes. But usually pretty amazing, when youre not getting ill
Half life 2 seems like it was designed for it, years before it came out. Dear Esther is probably the best thing ive ever seen on a computer with it. Although bioshock infinite is pretty great until you start hitting peole. Nauseas a problem, but there are several known reasons and the biggest one is games arent designed for it, if you ever lose control of your head in a game animatio or wotnot, youll get sick fast
I’ve created a not perfect but does work (with some faff) to get oculus working for unity free, in case your extended pro trial has run out, soz if its a pain, it gives 2 ways to offer barrel distortion, ones fxlab on the unity store for 20 dollars or oculus overlay, which is free but a pain
I tried the 1080p version at Indiecade. Thought it was pretty awesome, but not quite as mind blowing as I’d hoped. I could still see the pixels pretty easily. Once they bump up the res some more it will really rock.
That’s interesting. I see what my friend meant about disconnect from reality. That’s the advantage of a monitor. It disconnects you from elements that are undesirable to be immersed in. You don’t necessarily want to be playing everything out literally because you’d just feel ill.
I guess this is why games would have to be designed differently to accommodate the interpretation of immersion.
In your opinion what scenarios work well? Maybe FPS isn’t that great for this, but something like a cycling simulator?
While it’s absolutely understandable that people using it for gaming purposes are turned off by the current low resolution, it’s worth to note that non-gaming industries are interesting markets for this device. So are so many different applications to this that it’s hard not to find a market with no potential for this.
What worries me is the idea to integrate a 4k display. As PrimeDerektive said: Most current machines cannot handle that resolution…
