melmer

Oculus rift

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I had some colleagues ride the roller coaster level today while standing up. It's a pretty low-fidelity experience; you can rotate your head but not move it, the track and cart are not realistic, and the view doesn't bank with the track. Also, as mentioned, the resolution of the Rift is pretty bad. And even with all these problems, this simple little ride gets people's hearts racing and arms flailing. It's amazing to watch.

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Can you post a screengrab or something to show the low res? Or is this readily available somewhere..?

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You sort of have to see it for yourself, since it's a result of the resolution and dot pitch of the screen, it being so close to your eyes and having the lenses transform everything so the resolution varies depending on where you're looking.

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The claim at least a while ago was that the consumer kits would have a higher res display.

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It's a pretty believable claim, since small, high resolution displays are presumably getting cheaper and more available all the time because of the way smartphones are going.

 

Much restraint has been needed to stop myself ordering a dev kit, but I think I'll be much happier waiting for the consumer product if it delivers. I'm a sucker for this kind of shit (I have an old crappy HMD and a Novint Falcon and all sorts of other gimmicky bullshit of the sort). 

 

I feel like I'm missing out now that the dev kits are in people's hands, but I must be strong. Also, I don't know anything about programming or anything, so I'd have nothing to offer to the development community.

 

edit: oh my god I want this

 

 

  ("Spacewalk -- An Oculus Rift-enabled space exploration game")

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Yeah, I'm pretty sure they've straight out said the dev kits are getting lower-res screens than they're aiming for for the retail versions. Makes sense in all sorts of ways.

 

Another slightly annoying thing with it is how I have to add it as a monitor in Windows, messing up all my window positions and sizes on account of the fact that it has this weird resolution. Hopefully they'll be able to do that in a better way at some point.

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I gave HL2 a short whirl today, as they recently added Rift support to it. I only played the first minutes at the train station, so I can't comment on the combat or advanced maneuvering. It was pretty sweet to just walk around the station and get up real close to people and public phones and stuff. Just standing in front of a guard and looking at him was kind of creepy. One step too close and he gets out the baton, which feels a bit more dangerous this time around.

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I ordered one of the devkits; couldn't keep it in my pants (my wallet, that is).

 

Which means I'm probably also going to throw money away at the Razer Hydra or Leap motion controller, because obviously it's not a real VR experience until you're flailing around with your hands. 

 

Then again, I could try to get the power glove hooked up, or dust off the Falcon.

 

I am a stupid person.

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I tried getting the Falcon up and running, but it's basically a dead project at this point.

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I tried getting the Falcon up and running, but it's basically a dead project at this point.

 

That's a shame. It's a well-designed and made device, even if I could never find a use for it. 

 

Looking at their website, there's a lot of support for fairly current games. http://www.novint.com/index.php/games

 

Of course, they're mostly shooters in which you don't interact with the world around you in a way that would be particularly interesting. Recoil is neat and all, but it's all about picking up and nudging objects around!

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I may be wrong, but my impression is that, other than Valve's L4D experimentation, nobody was actually willing to support it in a game, so they made some weird drivers that read stuff off the screen or something.

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Interesting to find out about the ASMR thing. I think I am somewhat susceptible, but it happens pretty rarely. Most likely induced by soft voices, I think. Usually not when my hair is being cut, but then I usually get it machine cut and I do remember one time at a different hairdresser who used scissors more that I felt it. Hmm... the next time I'm going to a hairdresser I'll ask him/her to use scissors and whisper softly into my ear so that I can have a brain orgasm.

 

About Oculus Rift, I'm kind of sad to not have backed the kickstarter and missing out on this for now, but I hope the consumer device will be better. And also the video someone made (using portal guns in the demo) made me think that maybe it has room to improve with more kinds of head/body tracking -- or have they improved that already?

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Someone ported Salome, Increpare's first-person John the Baptist rolling head simulator to the Oculus Rift:

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Holy shit, also the comments on that story are all making me angry at the world.

Oh god. I wish you hadn't brought my attention to that. Poor guy:/

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This may have been mentioned already, but how awesome would it be to have a space walk simulation? I might need to get on top of making that, then a moon walk demo. (like on the moon, not a MJ experience sort of thing)

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This may have been mentioned already, but how awesome would it be to have a space walk simulation? I might need to get on top of making that, then a moon walk demo. (like on the moon, not a MJ experience sort of thing)

 

 

  ("Spacewalk -- An Oculus Rift-enabled space exploration game")

 

Your wish is granted! It's kind of a small studenty demo type thing, but people who have tried it in the rift are really digging it. 

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I was thousand yard staring a bright red object and then I turned and looked at an off-white wall. That ghostly image optical illusion occurred and it reminded me of how I'm experiencing the visual world through imperfect stereoscopic cameras that are attached to my head. I like the idea that the Oculus rift can remind us of how surreal our abilities of sight are. I wonder if a developer makes the game camera show the front view of a first person game in the left eye and shows the rear view in the left eye, and I walked around the game world for two days and put a blindfold on when I wasn't in game, if my brain would adjust to my right eye being on the back of my head and creating a single 360 image in my mind.

Anyway, thinking about camera tricks being applied to VR for the purposes of coming up with game mechanics is kinda fun. I was thinking that it would be an interesting mechanic if you look around an environment in the oculus and when you press a button it takes a screen shot. Then it puts that screen shot in your view as a low opacity image while you continue to look around (like the panoramic apps, or like that cloning game in Double Fine's Happy Action Theatre.; I think there might also be an indi game called Snapshot that does this, but I'm imagining the full frame of view being superimposed). When you press the button a second time, it melds the first image with what you are looking at now, but builds it all in the 3d environment so you can jump on a car that is now stuck in a wall. It would be even awesomer if when it built the juxtaposed world, it applied physics so some objects would topple.

This seems like it would be a novel puzzle mechanic in the oculus. The risk reward would be that you can keep on juxtaposing upon juxtapositions, but you may accidentally obscure your objective. It could get very disorientating.

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