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The Big VR Thread

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Waiting a day made the decision to wait much easier since if I ordered one the day after, it wouldn't arrive til June anyway.

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On the plus side I'll have, nor not have, my bonus before then so I guess we'll see how things look. I'm glad i didn't already upgrade my video card, since I can probably wait and score that for cheaper too.

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Waiting a day made the decision to wait much easier since if I ordered one the day after, it wouldn't arrive til June anyway.

Don't think they charge you until it ships though.

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I have to do a computer upgrade anyway in 2016, but yeah, now I'm imagining Vive with controllers will be around 800...

Hmm... nailed it :)

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I was expecting it to be more expensive, so yay! :tup: Not that I'm buying it, but I was totally expecting it to be $1k or up, considering the Rift's price. I suspect people are complaining about this pricepoint, though.

 

I saw a recommended specs thing for the Rift vs. the Vive and it seems the VR-Ready specs for the Vive are considerably lower than the Rift's. I thought it would be the other way around! :tup:

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Now I guess we'll just have to find out how much Playstation VR is.

 

I'm kinda hoping my bonus gives me enough cash to order an Occulus, but I assume at this point I won't be getting it until the end of the year, right?

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I am really excited for VR, and not just for gaming. A number of my friends are working with VR for data visualisation, which sounds incredibly promising. Then there are applications like aversion therapy and virtual tourism.

I think I will get a Vive as soon as I am able: it seems the more complete package, and is already working well with Elite Dangerous.

I borrowed a Rift DK1 from work nearly 2 years ago, and was convinced even then, playing Elite but also a wide variety of demos. It's amazing how you can be immersed even when the graphics are nowhere near photorealistic.

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Does anyone here use overclocking software on your cpu during its latter years?

I've never overclocked anything before, but I'm considering trying to use software from my motherboard's manufacturer to reach the required VR specs. I figure I might be able to get a few more years out of my set-up this way but I have no idea if this is a bad idea. I would hate to damage my RAM or GPU for instance.

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Overclocking is nice, but it will NOT get you a few more years. You can delay an upgrade a little bit, but not a significant amount of time. It can boost your cpu performance a good little bit, but it's not going to be anywhere near the gain you'd get from a newer processor. The point of overclocking is really to reach the next tier price upgrade, more or less (or to boost the top tier if that's what you have), but each new release will blow it out of the water. If you've never overclocked things before, you can simply increase the multiplier, without futzing with the voltage (which can start breaking things for real) without any real harm. Just make sure that you monitor the temps and do stress tests and you'll be fine. 

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My adventures in overclocking started and wnded last night. I installed a program from Gigabyte and a program from Intel and made no further changes. My pc went into an infinite loop of blue-screening and restarting. I'd rather just buy a new CPU and motherboard for a total of $300 when I get a headset than deal with computer-problems like that.

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I ended up buying my wife a Samsung Edge 7 last night which comes with Gear VR, I haven't had any type of VR experience before.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on things to check out?

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I ended up buying my wife a Samsung Edge 7 last night which comes with Gear VR, I haven't had any type of VR experience before.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on things to check out?

 

 I have more than that, I have general advice.

 

-Tell her that if she starts feeling nauseous, to quit immediately. It will just get worse and if you aren't careful, you will start to get nauseous just from putting the thing on (psychosomatic type thing). Keeping it on after you start feeling woozy is a great way to ruin the next few hours. To be clear, I'm just saying take it off during that session, not take it off and never put it back on.

-Sit  on a chair or stool that swivels.

-Get in the habit of not moving your head in any way but rotating it when your eyes are open. The headset doesn't have positional-tracking and this is largely what causes nausea (the other thing is the games where you move around). The trick is to close your eyes if you straighten your posture or lean down to the floor or whatever isn't purely head-rotation.

-Games where you move take some getting used to for some people. Start with stuff that doesn't require movement, save the movement stuff for the end of your session until you see if you can do it.

-I don't know if the S7 overheats, but with the S6, it's a bad idea to download stuff while using VR. This is rather inconvenient since a lot of the content can only be downloaded in VR. The overheating does not damage the phone, but the heat on your face is uncomfortable and the device will tell you that you can't play anymore for a little while. After the first few sessions, we got into the habit of starting downloads (for the movies and stuff we wanted) when we were done using it for a hour or so. The apps themselves can be downloaded through the oculus-app normal phone-style, but some of them will then require an additional download once you load it up in VR.

-The face-plate doesn't need to go on over the phone.

-Make sure to take the time to make the straps comfortable. The main things is to make sure that the horizon is level (this is no adjustable in software, it's only by angling the headset on your face in a level way) and making sure it isn't putting a lot of weight on the bridge of your nose.

 

THINGS TO CHECK OUT

Stuff where you don't move.

-Cirque Du Soleil: Kurios is really cool, much better than the other Cirque Du Soleil thing which is just a 360 video with no depth-data.

-Oculus 360 photo-viewer, specifically the OTOY section. The OTOY dioramas were one of those "Holy Shit, this is what gaming will look like in the future" moments for me. Also check out some of the photos from around the world. I thought Rome was especially interesting.

-VrTime is another this-is-the-future types of things. You have to set up an account which is much easier to do on the desktop. It's just a VR chat-room, but people tend to be impressed by how much VR changes a chat room. It uses the phone mic automatically.

-Don't underestimate the 360 videos and photos, it can be really disillusioning (in a cool way) to see the scale of things in digital media.

 

Stuff where you move:

-Smash Hit is pretty cool.

-The Night Cafe' doesn't have much to it, but its free and gives you a good idea what standard 3D movement feels like in VR (mostly bad). It's also really cool to be immersed in an art-style like that imo.

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I forgot to mention BluVr which is one of my favorites (I recommend this as an early introduction to camera-movement).

 

I just went in to look at some updated stores and stuff. I ended up looking at a bunch of 360 photos of Columbia. Columbia looks nothing like what I thought it would look like. Some of those living rooms make me envious.

Also, this is an awkward recommendation, but in Oculus video, in the Facebook 360 video section, there is a white thumbnail that says "Sundance". It's a recreation with 3D models of a non-fictional murder-suicide including the audio from the 911 call. It was pretty intense. This is an awkward situation because the recreation of this real-life tragedy is the most compelling narrative in VR that I have seen thus far. Even though the models look like GTA (playstation2 era) characters, the sense of space and the simulated proximity to the tragedy was affective.

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I have an HTC Vive Pre! Ask me questions if ya want

 

Here's what the camera passthrough thing looks like (at 100% opacity, which isn't how you'd see it if using it as the chaperone)

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1. Is there a store-front in VR?

2. Is there some sort of media browser through which you can browse 360 photos or 3d models?

3. Can you do the thing where you can edit an Unreal project in VR yet?

4. What's an example of a piece of software that has impressed you?

5. Are Google Tilt Brush results exportable? If so, what formats?

6. Have you played any driving games? Are you experiencing any motion sickness?

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AMD just announced a new headset that doesn't require a pc(?). In the demo, it maps the room and adds augmented reality stuff to it. I'm starting to think teh headset market is going to be creating significant revisions rapidly for a while. The headset is called Solon Q (I think, the stream stopped when I loaded this page.)

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