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The Big VR Thread

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I started playing Project Cars tonight. I am susceptible to motion-sickness, so I went into it delicately. I think for a while I will just be doing practice races because I am not yet okay with going more than 20mph over what it feels like the speed-limit would be on a given section of road. I have never actually had a sense of going fast like this on a 2d display. usually in racing games, it is not obvious to me when I need to brake for a corner, in VR, I'm slowing way down because I'm used to taking a curve at a legal-limit. It's pretty neat that it can feel this way, but it has downsides. Going over hills and curves at 60-80mph would be a bit much for my stomach in real-life; doing it here isn't as bad as it would be, but it is close enough. This means that I'm not even close to being able to compete with the A.I.
I started a career and they put me in a go-kart. I was like "This will be cool", but then everyone took off and I'm like "Y'all are out of your fucking minds, slow the fuck down!". It's not that I feel that I am so there that a crash will harm me, it's just the sensation of driving so fast that I will lose control and taking turns extremely quickly is unpleasant. Everyone was literally lapping me as I'm tooling along at a comfortable 40mph. I'll be just driving these tracks solo in a variety of cars for a while. No regrets, it is super novel to be in a situation where gunning it on a straight-away in a sports car is a reasonable and safe thing to do. I like that I am forced to wade into this.

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People who say this will be a mainstream device within 4 years are out of their minds. The Oculus Rift is supposedly the most comfortable of these headsets, but it is still like wearing ski-googles or a diving-mask. No one who isn't super into something that is being displayed in VR (like sports or video games or travel photos) is going to put on a diving-mask with any sort of frequency.
I'm into games and tech-demos and travel photos, so I'll be using this device a lot, but non-obsessives won't be using VR headsets until it is way more comfortable than they've managed to make them thus far.

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Do you Vive-owners have the capability/desire to play Lucky's Tale and Farlands? Both of them are games I would have no interrst in if not for the VR implimentation, but I feel like they are really nice inclusions for the Oculus Rift package. Farlands seems like it is designed to pace someone into getting comfortable with VR. I like how I'm just supposed to gather plants, fish, and feed my creatures for about 30 minutes each day. I think it's well made and I'm surprised I haven't heard much mention of it.

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If the idea of visually exploring high-fidelity dioramas and witnessing novel creature animations appeals to you, Farlands offers those. It kinda feels like if Jim Henson did the original Star Trek planet-side missions and there was no drama.

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An acquaintance asked me if I felt the oculus rift was worth my investment and if there were any killer apps so I wrote this. I thought someone else might find my perspective useful:

 

"Worth the investment" depends on how you frame it. If our new computer and the oculus rift got fried from a lightning storm that damaged nothing else, I'd probably wait another few months or even possibly a year before I replaced them. But if the oculus rift alone got fried, I'd probably buy another immediately.
I'm far more interested in it than Chrissy is currently. I was already playing with making stuff in Unity and I spend a lot of time examining 3D models in games, I already have an interest in digital 3D models and aesthetics in computer-games so this display technology is especially novel for me. The oculus rift comes with two free games on the store, Lucky's Tale and Farlands. I would have no interest in either of these games if they were on standard or simple 3D displays. Even though they are controller-games, its obvious that the method of presentation was something that the designers had in mind for the entirety of the projects. Lucky's Tale feels like playing a polygonal Mario game while inside of a slow Disney-ride (like It's a Small World); it is super novel. I've been playing about one level of it a day (I'm susceptible to simulation-sickness, so I'm taking my time (I am noticeably increasing the amount of movement I can do in a game without feeling queasy)) and last night I was climbing the inside of a windmill's tower. I told Chrissy at the time that I really got a sense that I was in a place that was different from the living-room. It's never really made me feel like I'm completely there, but it isn't like using a standard 2D or even 3D display. I've noticed that I really enjoy the scenes in games in which everything is small-scale. Both Lucky's Tale and Farlands have elements that make you feel like you are looking at a toy-model world and I've always been attracted to things like that such as Hallmark Christmas Villages and model-train sets.
I've been playing Farlands for about 20 minutes each day (which is what it was designed for). It's like Animal Crossing mixed with StarTrek and you are guided by Claptrap from BorderLands. Again, I wouldn't have any interest in it outside of virtual reality, but it works pretty well. There are these diorama sets that you can teleport into and around. It's a bit like a Natural History museum exhibit that has little bits of interactivity. So you can fish, feed pets, gather fruit, and take pictures of animals. It sounds boring, but what it does well is just give you an excuse to experience the same few places in virtual-reality with some amount of frequency. I'm sure I will start to remember it as a place I walked around in.
Speaking of walking around, the range of movement is surprisingly large. I've cleared an area of the living room that is 7'x7' and I have no tracking issues. I can sit on the floor, turn around, everything works until I get out of that 7'x7' range. I put a shelf about 2.5' above my desk and the sensor looks down. I can also sit at the desk and rest my hands on it as I play.
The rift is supposedly more comfortable than the vive and I got that confused with being comfortable. My pajama pants are comfortable, the oculus rift is bearable. You can feel the heat from the screen after a little while and it's like you are wearing a diving-mask the entire time (though not as tight). The weight of the device is well balanced and I feel no neck-strain at all.
I was concerned that using the device while Chrissy was around would make me feel like we aren't in the same room, but that has not been the case. It is more distracting to play Overwatch than to play Lucky's Tale or Farlands. I just lift one of the headphones on the side and the fact that we share the ambient sound of the room and can hear each other's small-chat (in combination to the fact that she can glance at the desktop monitor to see what I'm looking at) makes me feel like we are still hanging out in the same room.
I see complaints online about the devices lacking content, but it isn't a problem for me. There are a lot of free apps, I bought Pinball FX2 and  Project Cars, I got two free games, and there are a few other titles I have mild interest in available. I'm not going to use this thing for more than a couple of hours a day, I don't need a full Steam library of games. Pinball FX2 is amazing in its presentation, it is MUCH closer to the real thing than even the 3d version on the Playstation3. The only problem with it is that they picked three of my least favorite tables to start with and haven't announced any others yet. Project Cars is too much for my stomach right now. I've been doing a track a day, not even racing, but just driving the course slowly (about 50mph); I have to build up to be able to drive. The same is the case for Lucky's Tale to a lesser extent (the camera is on rails). Farlands and PinballFX2 are completely comfortable. Project Cars is really cool though. Typically in racing games I'm more than willing to try and go full-throttle through all the turns the first time I play, in virtual-reality it feels different, I find myself braking  before curves and crests because it will be physically unpleasant to take at speed. When I gun it on a straight-away, I get nervous. I'm sure all of that will pass as I become desensitized, but I'm enjoying the novelty of my immersion.
I've only briefly tried Altspace (virtual chat-rooms), but there are people with vive controllers there who can pick up objects and throw them and it makes me envious (...soon (sometime in 2016)).
360 photos and 3D/360 videos are novel, but uncomfortable because they have no positional-tracking. Sketchfab has started uploading models of interiors that have positional-tracking capabilities, it is obvious that this is a much better form though it might be a ways off especially for videos since there isn't even a consumer-device for capturing 3D/360 video yet.
 
I think it's really neat.

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I went into VRChat for the first time last night. It was nice to download an executable and run it in VR without it being on Steam or Home. I hadn't done that yet and it feels liberating. Here is the first room I ended up in.

Remember that this is displayed more like an art-installation rather than something on a screen (the way the video is)

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I've been poking at VR stuff more this week and started playing Selfie Tennis, which I'm in love with. The core gameplay of hitting tennis balls to yourself feels pretty good, but the surrounding weirdness and reactivity of the world makes it feel a lot bigger than it is. The selfie stick is a weird feature, since realistically you can't even use it during normal gameplay (it'd be nearly impossible to hold the selfie stick at a good angle while actually playing tennis), but it adds to the absurdity of the whole thing, and...kind of grounds the weirdness, I think. Like, it's sort of psycopathic to miss a shot, then turn around and start whipping tennis rackets at spectators, but being able to (and I think encouraged?) to capture it on video makes it an absurd performance rather than a violent rampage somehow. I donno.

 

I also goofed around with Modbox (VR Garrys Mod?) and ViveSpray (a Vive clone of KingSpray, a spraypainting app which was recently announced to be an Oculus exclusive). Modbox seems like it has a TON of potential...after playing some Fantastic Contraption, I wanted a more freeform sandbox for building, and Modbox seems to be that. It's kind of fiddly though, so I'm not sure how much time I'll spend with it. ViveSpray seemed neat and does what it says, you can spraypaint onto a wall, but in terms of features it's really light right now. 

 

Also @Clyde...assuming it's the same guy, the author of that weird America room, MikeAlger, is also a Google VR guy who gave this talk I linked in the gamedev VR thread

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The latest Giant Bomb VRodeo had a few games in it that looked really cool. Cosmic Trip, Pool Nation VR, and Sound Stage to name a few.

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Yeah, I have next to no interest in VR, but that video made me really want to play around in Sound Stage.

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I picked up SoundStage after watching that VRodeo and it was really neat, but I couldn't figure out how to...do anything useful with it? I could set up some loops and make music, but I couldn't figure out how to actually record anything out of it to an mp3 or whatever. The UI is really intuitive to a point, but some of the controls, like adjusting sequencers, was really fiddly.

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VR is so cool. I just spent an hour talking with a high-school teacher from Denmark, a pilot-in-training in Oman, and a highschool-student in Canada. I realize that there are similar mixes on internet forums and Twitter, but it feels significantly more intimate to have a conversation in VTime.

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Played a little Windlands tonight (grappling hooks vr, basically) and that game is barf city. Perfect example of why having movement mapped to controller buttons is a bad idea. The grappling hook movement was fine, but moving around with the controllers made me sick almost instantly.

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Interesting:

 

"Doom VR takes this same tact but ends up feeling far more elegant thanks to a few subtle yet crucial tweaks. Rather than instantly shifting the camera from point A to point B, Doom makes you feel like you're dashing through the world with super speed: when you hold down the trigger of HTC Vive's left handheld controller, the world slows down, the audio drops into a deep rumble, and a bright blue aiming cursor appears. When you release the trigger, you see the world rush past as you dart to your selected destination. Being able to see how you got to where you're going while feeling like a time-bending badass in the process feels worlds better than the instantaneous, unceremonious perspective shift found in other VR games."

 

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/doom-may-have-solved-vrs-traversal-problem/1100-6442439/

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PSA

I just read some Reddit posts about how the displays in these devices can easily get fried when sunlight goes through the lenses and burns the display. It hasn't happened to me, but I didn't know this was a big vulnerablity.

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PSA

I just read some Reddit posts about how the displays in these devices can easily get fried when sunlight goes through the lenses and burns the display. It hasn't happened to me, but I didn't know this was a big vulnerablity.

 

My headset lives around the corner from a window to prevent this. I remember seeing mention of keeping it out of the sun somewhere in a manual or tutorial

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I'm interested in doing a BigScreen Beta meet-up with any of y'all who are interested. The frame-rates of the displays are very much internet-speed dependent though. My download-speed is 3Mbits/s and upload is 0.5Mbits/s. So that means that I'll be able to see your displays at about 10fps and you'll be able to see mine at around 1-2fps. 

STILL! I think it might be fun.

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I don't know if peasant VR counts, but for the smart phone cardboard VR thing, is there anything that is worth checking out? That isn't porn.

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So this looks pretty cool. Google's next VR iteration and headset spec, Daydream, includes a wand/air-mouse thing and automatic calibration with headset.

 

 

 

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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.

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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.

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