davej

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    14

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by davej

  1. Posted

    Wireless/mobile positional tracking is very much an ongoing project at any of the large vendors you'd care to mention. It's just a very complicated problem that's very hard to optimise for mobile devices :)

     

    Oculus showed off a prototype wireless headset at OC3, Occipital have a hardware devkit for mobile vendors and, i'm sure, Apple and other large mobile vendors are working on the same problem.

     

     

    I was really expecting their Project Tango stuff to provide positional-tracking, but they didn't seem to mention that at all, so I guess it didn't work out.

  2. Posted

    I wouldn't get too down heartened - this is a first production run on a brand new product. It was bound to be expensive.

     

    This is just the start and, from what i've seen of the commercial prototypes from Oculus, this is going to be a great out-of-the-box experience for people. It'll only get better and cheaper, and pretty quickly.

  3. Posted

    I'm stoked for the release of all 3 major, high-end, HMDs in the next 6 months or so - I think the price could put off the general consumer to start with though.

     

    I'd guess that Oculus might go $500 to begin with though, if Facebook subsidised some of the device on initial launch they'd struggle to sell it for more later.

  4. Posted

    The Oculus with the controllers has walkin-around VR? I was pretty sure that wasn't the case

     

    As Lu notes, it's not quite the space that you can have with the Lighthouse/Laser technology from the Valve ref (and the HTC Vive) technology but it's big enough for /most/ people I'd wager, it's surprising how much you can do in a reasonably small space.

  5. Posted

    Vive requires space.

     

    Oculus doesn't.

     

    Both of these statements are untrue in some cases. If you don't want a huge play area the vive can be used seated, likewise if you want a large Oculus play area you need some space.

     

    If you buy an Oculus with controllers you'll receive 2 tracking cameras that do the same job as the Vive reference lighthouse tech. I have both these units at work and, although the vive seems the most robust at the moment, the Oculus commercial product is shaping up to be pretty solid too.

  6. Posted

    I wonder if stereoscopic equirectangular videos exist, or is even possible? It's not exactly 'as easy' as doing two stitched 360 videos off-set from each other. That feels like it wouldn't work, it'd be like looking at a projected 3D movie sideways. Googled it a bit, yeah it's a whole different can of worms.

     

    Stereoscopic equirectangular does exist but is broken in some fundamental ways. Jaunt / Google / Milk VR all have done some stereoscopic 360. It's pretty decent when you're looking at the horizon but looking up and down won't work and tilting your head completely breaks it. If anyone wants a further explanation of why give me a shout!

  7. Posted

    The VR-aspect was that it was like I was inside a sphere in which the screen covered the inside (though it didn't distort as that visualization would imply).

     

    This is exactly what happens with 360 video - it's stitched in a spherical projection and then stored in (usually) equirectangular mapping (to make it rectangular). It can be quite good but, as you say, the limitations are obvious. You'll notice that if you look up and down you'll probably see some distortion too - think texture stretching on badly mapped 3D models.

  8. Posted

     Oculus seems more aimed at home use, but the space requirements of the Vive seem to restrict who can use it, and the quality seems higher too.

     

    The 'quality' on all the headsets that will come to market in the next 9 months or so are roughly the same, at least in terms of the technology. The software is going to be the real issue but I don't know anyone who's yet developing on more than 2 platforms - with 4 in the running at the moment.

  10. Posted

    I think it's slightly cynical to say that mobile gaming is just candy crush caliber pap although I do see where you're coming from. The quality and breadth of mobile games is wide and it's generally focused on quite a small locus around free to play and super-casual.

    I only really mentioned mobile as it seems like a home run for the technology, not necessarily the content. Input problems are relevant in mobile, dedicated or casual home and event spaces at the moment. Just interesting to see what other gamers think on the matter.

  11. Posted

    As part of my day job I've been researching the state-of-the-art VR stuff for a few months now, glad to see there's a reasonable level of excitement amongst the intelligent gamer community.

    I was wondering what your thoughts are on mobile? It seems pretty obvious that mobile could be the biggest, quickest adoption of this technology in the near-term. Do we think there's scope for interesting gaming or narrative drive content on a mobile system or is everyone hyped about Half Life 3 in VR too much?

  14. Posted

    Halloween, The Thing, Suspiria to name just 3 classic horror films. I guess it depends on where the demarcation of horror and scary is for you ...

     

    I played through a few scenes from Evil Within and wasn't blown away. I found the letter boxing really debilitating, obviously it's meant to feel claustrophobic but I felt it was a similar conceit to the "tank controls" of RE that seems to be retroactively be claimed to increase tension and frustration from the player.

     

     

    What scary movies are in 2.35:1?