I had two a-ha moments with it that sold me... There was a small demo room called something like Shopkeeper (think an old goblin's hut filled with wares) and I actually reached out to grab a faerie/wisp that was buzzing nearby. The second was a Valve demo app where a Portal like robot came stomping into the room and I actually jumped the F out of the way, only to have the floor start falling out from under me and scrambling back to safety.
For a few fleeting moments at a time there was no virtual, it was reality and it was freaking amazing. And all this without the added immersion the controllers provide.
The Vive is by far the best VR setup I've tried. It's made the rifts we had around seem like toys.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/450390/
I tried a Vive the other day. It's the closest experience to magic I've ever had which didn't involve sacrificing chickens.
"Yeah, it's a game where you get to shoot a variety of guns, all of which are very nicely modeled and have accurate mechanics like bolt handles that work etc in a variety of shooting ranges"
I mean, who would want to play that... but when you do, oh my goodness is it satisfying. The fact that it's VR makes rather mundane sounding experiences incredibly immersive and great. I've pretty much stopped playing all the great "normal" non-VR games that I bought in the steam sale because of VR.
Now imagine if you could create a triple A game on this platform. Holy fucking shit, it's going to be the end of the world.
Integrated audio is definitely nice, but not a deal breaker and the improved ease in reaching a comfortable setup is definitely and advantage, but it makes trade offs in other areas.
You could split hairs about where the trade offs were made (fov vs SDE) but the displays and optics are so similar that those dont matter.
Literally. I can't imagine how they're still justifying the Rift at this point. Is the room scale tracking somehow inferior when you sit in a chair?
Nope. The Rift is definitely more comfortable for most people and looks more like a finished product, but that's about all the good I can say about it. I used a Rift demo station about a week before my Vive arrived and it immediately made me happy about my choices. Roomscale is huge and while Oculus technically can be used that way the official support is still largely based around forward facing.
Oculus is still more focused on non-roomscale experiences for now, but they're already starting to change how they talk about it, no doubt in preparation for Touch. The tech is there, the games are there (from Vive-land), the only thing really missing right now are the controllers.
Oculus has burnt a lot of good will in the developer and consumer communities, with the delays, the shady exclusivity deals, the walled garden app store, the broken promises on open source and Linux and OS X support, etc.
I have money, and I love mac, but I won't be buying Mac Pro for $3k just to play with the tech.
Oculus is playing a game with their specs. On one hand, it makes their peripheral look like really cutting edge technology if it can only run on the latest and greatest hardware. And on the other, it keeps them from having to try to fulfill even more orders over what they have already proven they cannot handle.
Simple graphics + room scale VR is an amazing experience. AAA games need whizbang graphics features to be able to compete with each other because they haven't had any new gameplay features to show off in nearly 15 years. But a lot of this effects are unnecessary in VR--sometimes even a bad idea! Normal mapping, for example, is has been reliably shown to cause motion sickness in people with a relatively high ratio of estrogen to testosterone (not just women, but men with hormonal imbalances. Women with high testosterone seem to do fine).
I think Valve and Oculus understand that AAA game studios don't have a lot to offer to VR. You're not going to really adapt Call of Duty to the Vive. So they are banking on the huge cadre of indie developers to rapidly make the first content for them. And that is going to mostly be fairly new devs using Unity, not really understanding what they are doing other than following tutorials. Optimisation is not exactly a strong point.
This paper talks about some observations and some of the issues that still need to be covered: http://www.danah.org/papers/transtech.pdf
And a further paper from Dr. Boyd going into more detail on virtual reality more specifically: http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf
The new drivers removed my ability to experiment with WebVR. I could no longer use the hardware not due to limitations with my computer, but limitations imposed for marketing purposes.
Meanwhile, I've got a Windows PC that I've thrown together over the years, I just put a new SSD in it, and I'm waiting on buying either a new RX 480 or 1080, and I've got a 3D-capable PC, more capable and also much cheaper than the $3K Mac.
Even if the Rift's touch controllers are released later and are superior, they'd be hard pressed to be much more superior.
Yeah I basically agree with you, I just don't see it as a much of problem for Oculus in the long term given how early all this is.
Kind of reminds me of the Makerbot fiasco. Like Makerbot, Oculus has lost much of the early adopter community, but if they can hang on long enough, they can capture the mainstream adoption wave and it might not matter.
"Valve's work up to 2013 had made real-time tracking in VR a viable proposition. But although it had worked out the fundamentals, it wasn't about to build its own headset. And why would it? The public had already voted with its wallet, funding Oculus to the tune of $2.4 million. In Jan. 2014 Valve announced that it would collaborate with Oculus on tracking to "drive PC VR forward." It also said it had no plans to release its own VR hardware, although it noted that "this could change" in the future.
It's clear that at some point Oculus and Valve's cooperative spirit fell apart. It could be that Oculus and Valve disagreed on what VR should be: The Rift and Vive certainly offer different experiences. But it's also been suggested that communication from Oculus ground to a halt in the months after the Facebook acquisition, which forced Valve to explore other paths. It's unlikely that anyone will go on the record to confirm that for years. All we know is that in early January, Luckey was reportedly calling Valve's tech "the best virtual reality demo in the world," and by late spring, HTC and Valve were meeting to hammer out a deal."
I've had a lot more time in a Vive and am going to get to compare to a Rift again soon but my recollection is that the Oculus had a better display. I also might not have "dialed in" my Vive well. The Oculus was setup for me by a friend who is an Oculus engineer, so I suspect he set it up correctly. I'm going to read up on tuning the Vive display right now. :)
I chased the balloon and jumped up and smacked it in the ceiling. Didn't break it though (as far as I can notice)
The chaperone doesn't help if you're a noob--you drive your controller through the wall regardless of the chaperone. You get used to your room after a while and it stops happening.
I think it will get better as time goes on, but it is already really compelling. I realize I'm an early adopter, but my enthusiasm is only increasing. WebVR is fascinating, and it's possible to create, for example, a really compelling shopping experience where you could see the actual size of objects before buying.
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/447270/
[2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/about_ikea/newsitem/040516_Virtual...
VR is more a different direction, it's hard to take your house and represent it in VR for you to furnish. You could use something like the Matterport, but even then it's an hour or two before you can use it in VR.
The great thing about project tango is that since it has accurate depth sensing and builds a 3D model of the space, furniture placed is accurate to scale. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYwc6nS7qs
Really? So, TV and movies starved audio commentary and discussion for time? I suspect TV and movies became dominant, but they didn't completely eliminate audio. Games are a new medium, and they seem to coexist with other media. Books don't seem to be going away. If anything, new forms of media seem to be synergistic with the existing forms.
That said, the amount of attention people can pay to all media is essentially finite, and new media decreases the hold of old media. In a very real way the internet is killing print newspapers, by drastically reducing the amount of attention that is paid to them.
Likewise, if you look at printed books, they are much less important than they were 100 years ago, largely due to radio, television, movies, computers, and the internet.
That's kind of an arrogant categorization.
1) We all read, regardless of the material the text is presented on.
2) I've bought and borrowed an immense amount of really awful books, and I've read a ton of truly insightful, well worded and interesting stories, posts, discussions online.
Sure internet is ful of crap, but I believe it's equally full of great ideas that wouldn't get a chance to be published on paper, whether that is because the author doesn't feel he/she can fill a book, they are not appropriately confident about their work or any number of other factors.
Online, you can crowdsource the editing process and everything (most) good will be visibly published. If that is not succeeding a medium I don't know what is. Honestly I'm not even comfortable calling them different medias. I believe text is the medium, the same way 2d video is a medium, from 35/70/135mm celluloid through VHS/betamax through all imaginable codecs online. There's really no difference in how you process the information.
And I doubt that the next "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" will originate online either. It might be advertised online, eventually people will pirate it in epub form but no one is putting a great work online first. Because what I'm saying is true.
"I've read a ton of truly insightful, well worded and interesting stories, posts, discussions online"
As have I. It's not worthless, I love the internet. It's just not replacing books. When all the drives fail that store this conversation, there will be a million copies of The Iliad still in existence. I stand by my original statement, books dwarf all these other mediums.
There's no difference between a printed and bound book full of (for the sake of argument) Tumblr posts and the same posts online - or alternatively, a betamax video, and the same video captured and encoded in an MKV container.
Sorry for the ambiguous phrasing.
There's a bunch of apps that are trying to make virtual desktops in VR or 360 movies and the like. I don't personally buy into those that much, I think 360 movies are difficult to make interesting and virtual desktops are more for Augmented Reality.
Besides the obvious (VR games), I think there is a potential for a new form of entertainment (maybe a hybrid of theatre/cinema), for more advanced design tools that make faster work of 3D-based design, for educational experiences. Some things might be "replacements", but there are a lot of possibilities that a VR environment opens up for things that would not be compelling or practical on a 2D screen with common input controls.
Theatre is niche whereas once it was mainstream though. And it has been ages since its been culturally relevant in the way movies are discussed etc, even for high-bro audiences (e.g. since the 50s or so in the US, or around the 70s for European audiences).
With VR, you're trying to be 'inside' the media. Imagine a bunch of people feeling around for their drink or bumping heads as they try to whisper. I think if this iteration of VR becomes successful, it will be because they found a niche for themselves. But I can't imagine it becoming the default medium for anything, not even games.
Google at IO/2016 showed some experiment with schools using cardboard where they raytraced where each student in a classroom was looking at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuceLtGjDWY
With full body tracking and depth cameras you could put 3d avatar bodies in.
Obviously the face would be obscured by the headset, but it's dark in a cinema and people are normally looking at the screen when watching TV at home. So it might actually end up being more social.
Even with just simple 3d positioning of the headset and input devices with a simple visual indicator is enough to get a sense of someone being present. Add a microphone and 3D spacial positioning of voices.
Of course the current generation of technology would make that hard and rare. Not too many people you know will buy a $1000 headset. Everyone would need to bring that and a fairly powerful computer to the one place.
Although physically being present in the same room isn't required.
The most successful content in my view capitalizes on this freedom, and provides new spaces for participants to express themselves. You do not have to roll on the floor to dodge lasers in the arcade shooter Space Pirate Trainer, but it is fun to do, gives you a workout, and was not programmed into the game.
If it replaces anything, it will be things like museums, casual sports (ping pong, pool etc that require big space commitment for a singular activity), and social interaction tools like skype.
It depends on how you define VR ... if you define it as covering every sense, then yes, by definition is encapsulates all other media. But if you define it as how its implemented, then no, because net every sense has been implemented. Smell, temperature, wind, acceleration, weightlessness, full-body touch ... we're a long way from the holodeck.
Will also replace pictures in real estate listings I suppose.
Basically a bunch of 360 panoramic shots with spaces you can click on the ground to traverse to the next spot that gives you another view, and it fades between the two, kind of like moving down the street in Street View with Google Maps.
It did a pretty damn good job of giving you a feel for the apartment (we toured many of them afterwards).
Obviously actual VR would be better, but what they've got now is pretty darn good already, and definitely a lot better than pictures.
That being said, I think most home listings still rely on low-res still pictures, which is a shame.
If facebook and google have any say, then America will too.
It was really quite incredible, and I was skeptical coming in. However, it was incredible in a "super high tech sparklers" kind of way, that I'd like everyone to check out once for fun. I don't really see any future in them.
Maybe we should stop chasing that elusive high of extensive growth and just come to terms with the fact that computing is now a mature industry. There will be no more double-digit growth rates.
I think VR is incredibly hyped, just as it was 15 years ago.
What do you imagine this new medium replacing? Games? Movies? Monitors?
The difference from 15 years ago is that the hardware is actually here and practical. We have the tracking and displays and they are actually really good. It really creates presence, there is 0 comparison between Oculus/Vive and VR experiences of yesterday, such as the Aladdin ride in Downtown Disney. Hell, HTC is literally pivoting the entire company to the Vive. HTC/Valve + Facebook + Sony + Samsung is a ton of top-notch engineering effort being put into just the first generation of devices/software.
See my comment above, but basically I imagine it'll create new media/experiences rather than replace. I don't think "floating monitors in space" will ever be compelling (maybe in AR), and I don't think "movies" as we think of them now will be practical (though I do think there is room for a more "theatre-like" approach).
If only I could find a way to convince my employer that this conference is related to the job at hand...
I think VR movies are a still a bit off, though I could be totally wrong. The reason I say that is because some of the fundamental theories used in making a movie are different in VR. Namely, you can't be certain you know where the "camera" is. :) Also, VR movies require a lot of new and developing camera hardware and editing software to come along. There are some cool things out now but my understanding is it is all very new and developing. Ultimately, I still buy in on VR movies, though. I am a believer in VR movies mainly because of my own experience watching short films in VR was super cool but also from watching videos of people curled up in the fetal position as they were being shown some scary movie in VR. It's visceral in a way that has not been achievable up until now.
I also think AR well be a widely adopted medium and there might become a pretty gray distinction after a while. I could imagine headsets or glasses that you can increase or decrease how much external light comes through. I can see doing things like checking email, facebook, etc. being done in AR but still allowing you to go about your normal routine like making coffee and breakfast or walking the dog. Seems far more compelling than looking at notifications on my watch.
Eventually, I also suspect that we will be "mainlining" these experiences and not be wearing headsets at all. Implanting some device that directly stimulates the necessary parts of the brain (or other parts of the body needed).
I definitely agree though. You can't just take what works in film and expect it to work in a VR film. It'll be interesting to see how filmmakers experiment with the medium as more and more start pushing what it can do.
That link is cool. I'll read it in depth. Thanks! I am excited by the possible shakeup in film theory caused by VR. I believe some really cool artistic innovations are going to come coupled with the technological ones.
The consensus at /r/vive is that VR porn is pretty terrible. You either deal with uncanny valley stuff for 'real' 3D scenes or just awkward camera placements and other issues for 360 movies. There's also a psychological effect of being 'too close to the action' or 'first person porn being unsexy' many have complained about.
I think the "tech will succeed because of porn" is a problematic mantra nowadays. I don't see facebook, Apple, etc succeeding because of porn. If anything, those platforms either outright block it or give a substandard porn experience. I don't think porn tells us anything nowadays.
Aren't you assuming that they would allow the wearer to change the camera position?
You could film a movie or design a game such that the camera location is fixed or on rails. You're more like an observer than a participant.
Eg. Chronos and Edge of Nowhere
The main issue I was thinking about was that you cannot say for sure where your audience is looking at any moment in time.
VR might stay as a somewhat specialized medium, but within the medium the possibilities are very compelling.
Why would it? It supplements my other recreational activities. The same way a Xbox didn't replace PC gaming or flat screen TV's didn't replace movies.
>I think VR is incredibly hyped, just as it was 15 years ago.
I own a Vive. Its kinda amazing. No, people won't be "locked in VR and refuse to leave" and other hysterics, but what we are able to do right now is exceptional. Its the most interesting thing I've bought in a long time. I see these breathless essays on HN and reddit about new cellphones or some new laptop that you have to squint to see the difference between the old and the new versions. I think some level of hype is justified here. If people can lose their shit over the annual new iphone or ipad then can certainly lose their shit over VR.
That said, there is a lot of hype, but that's part of being in a competitive marketplace full of marketers and advertisers. Arguably, if the hype was toned down then a lot of people interested in VR would have never heard of the Vive.
Hype/marketing/pr serves a purpose.
Maybe someone can chime in here, but doesn't the Hololens team already do some dev by wearing them in place of monitors at this point?
The one scenario I imagined working at that resolution that would really be helpful is if you were actually working on the the code in your current view? Then updating and reloading wouldn't require you to take the headset on and off.
But stories of the engineers not using regular monitors anymore seems a bit far fetched.
I tried the vive demo and was blown away (I could play the spice pirate trainer game until my body gave out) but the low resolution was noticeable (along with the screen door effect) and I had trouble reading text.
And being able to control your screen just by moving your head will be pretty crazy.
Wearing a stereoscopic headset is one thing, but the presence that room-scale brings is just another thing altogether. I had tried Oculus demos at conferences and such, and I kinda started to think maybe VR was over-hyped.
Then I got my Vive on pre-order, put it on and went into the tutorial. There was a part where you can inflate balloons coming out of your perfectly-tracked controllers. I instinctively bonked one with a controller, and I FELT it (thanks to haptic feedback from the controller and diagetic sound). I basically forgot I was wearing a headset for the rest of the tutorial, I was present.
That's when it really clicked for me that this is happening this time. This is something new. I'm 100% convinced VR is the new medium going forward.