A Third of Valve is Now Working on VR and the Next Generation of Headsets

[krumme]

It goes for all. Go look a standard business textbook. We train and educate people to strive for and build monopolies. Then they call it the free market.

 

[poofyhairguy]

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Right now it seems like just an Oculus vs Vive thing, but I think as more and more steam vr hardware shows up (eg osvr) it's really going to turn into an Oculus vs everyone else thing, and Oculus didn't have a sufficiently strong launch for them to win that fight, and in addition, Oculus store can't just show up out of nowhere and be a stronger platform than steam.



That said, we have seen shady corporate tactics that are detrimental to the consumer pay off in other industries (hint hint)

It's not just those two though. Samsung is into VR and might want to go deeper as hardware advances take away the need for a PC. Google is also investing heavily into VR and might make a play. Don't forget Sony and maybe Microsoft. And then there is Magic Leap, which if it works could make everything everyone else is doing obsolete iPhone style.

We live in interesting times. My personal $ amount I am willing to put into a "possibly bad technology decision for the sake of being an early adopter" is around $300. So for me either the market needs more certainty or fewer (possibly bad) choices. Either way. I am guessing cheaper happens first.

Till then Samsung VR is good enough for me.

 

[Thala]

It's not just those two though. Samsung is into VR and might want to go deeper as hardware advances take away the need for a PC. Google is also investing heavily into VR and might make a play. Don't forget Sony and maybe Microsoft. And then there is Magic Leap, which if it works could make everything everyone else is doing obsolete iPhone style.

Point is, whoever wants to join the PC VR market is going to support OpenVR/SteamVR because that's the only reasonable option. Armsdealer is right, it is Oculus/Facebook vs everyone else, and Oculus is loosing as we speak.
That does not mean Oculus will be gone within the next year because Facebook will be pumping money into it to safe a few further exclusives. But at the end of the day Facebook is only interested to control the VR market via the Oculus Store, they do not want to be just a HW provider or publisher. They want to lock you into their social network, that's where the money is for Facebook. So they are sitting in between a rock and a hard place.

 

[WhiteNoise]

So it seems the Vive is the ideal choice considering it's in bed with Valve. I've dropped a lot of money on stupid stuff over the years but I do not think I'm willing to on VR until I see some really nice progress with games.

The Rift is more appealing to me but I don't like what you guys have to say about it. I mean I appreciate what you'all have to say but it doesn't make me feel any better about the rift.

I suppose I will just hang back and watch.

 

[pj-]

I've just played a few new games that I purchased during the steam sale and I am more convinced than ever that VR is where I want to spend the majority of my gaming time.

If the money is of any consequence to you ($600-800 hw + $300+ software) then waiting is the sane choice. If you can afford it and don't want to wait, there is a ton of stuff to play and a lot of it is extremely fun.

I played an online 4 player, 18 hole round of vr minigolf earlier and it was so god damn fun, even though the course wasn't that great and the graphics are pretty dull.

 

[WhiteNoise]

I have the hardware to run VR. What is the $300+ software you are talking about?

 

[pj-]

I have the hardware to run VR. What is the $300+ software you are talking about?

I meant the games. There are a lot, but a many of them you will only end up playing for a couple hours. To have a big library where you can always fire up the headset and have something you want to play, it's gonna be expensive. $300 might be an exaggeration for right now, but I think I've spent around that for the ~30 VR games I have.

Unless you get really really involved in a driving or space sim game.

 

[digitaldurandal]

When you really stop and consider how much more intuitive, convenient, and portable it is for computing to work in this way, you'll come to the conclusion that computing has to and will go the direction of vr/ar.

It's no different than side scrolled games leading to 3d games.

I'm not sure what you mean here by computing, do you mean you think that system/network administration will go this way? DBA? Or do you mean gaming.

Because if you mean the former I disagree. The trend with administration is going towards centralization, automation, and scripting.

Currently if you are using GUI for administration you are on training wheels. In order to do things like setup security permissions for 500 users in a seconds a good administrator needs to have scripts in place. As time progresses I think we will see less and less admins all working from a central location. It has only become easier and easier to admin remotely, I believe this trend will only continue with more companies virtualizing their environments.

There will never be a time when administrating my current company environment would be faster with motion controls like in Minority Report. I have developed scripting that reads information from Excel and it already does over half the work for requests. By the year's end it will do 90% of requests.

Over time there will be virtual AI administrators that handle tier 1 duties. It is the natural evolution of monitoring software and the last MSP I worked for had some of it in place already at least for incident response.

I think this job market is going to shrink quickly and a lot of people in the field think they are somewhat immune to the automation crunch, but I disagree.

On the other hand I hope I am wrong, it would be fun to do everything with motion controls (although impractical.)

 

[HeXen]

If you want to stay seated that certainly doesn't mean PSVR is the only option... Oculus is seated for now, and plenty of the lesser known competing headsets like the Razer one are seated / non-room space.

I cant imagine PSVR will be all that great unless its limited only to PS4 Neo since it just lacks the grunt to push the FPS needed with any modern level of graphics

For now, as you said. That doesn't mean the exclusives going forward will allow traditional gamepad locomotion once the touch is released. And the exclusives themselves are of the only relevance regarding Rift as many games work on Vive as well. I was just initially asking about locomotion options in standing/room scale games. If I can strafe left using the vive's trackpad or whatever instead of my feet, then I'd be all aboard but if say they make games like Half Life 3 and it's room scale only then that is a large gap in my library options when a simple WASD like command might be of more interest to some. It's basically segregating the VR gaming library and how different type of gamers want to play.

Imagine if they made Halo only for Kinect with no other control option...that's how I feel about the lack of a simple option for room scale. (btw) most people would be furious if they did that, but some devs are basically doing similar type thing for VR but suddenly it's ok because it's more physically immersive than seated but some of us just want visual immersion and there are a lot of people on various forums that are only interested in seated gaming.

If you want to stay seated that certainly doesn't mean PSVR is the only option... Oculus is seated for now, and plenty of the lesser known competing headsets like the Razer one are seated / non-room space.

I cant imagine PSVR will be all that great unless its limited only to PS4 Neo since it just lacks the grunt to push the FPS needed with any modern level of graphics

PSVR will definitely reach more gamers. They are touting around 50 PSVR games by end of 2016 and early 2017...or perhaps just whenever the thing releases. It will include a small box that looks similar in shape to the PS4 that somehow allows the PSVR to work just fine. There is already some hands on reviews and is considered a mid ranged VR solution but if I can have a more robust library of seated games on it than Vive/Rift then I'll have to go that route if I want VR.
Unless there is some option/hack or work around to having a seated experience with room scale games....but at least there's VorpX, even if it's function is not the best, games like Metro would be pretty epic with the I'm there feel.

 

[Armsdealer]

I'm not sure what you mean here by computing, do you mean you think that system/network administration will go this way? DBA? Or do you mean gaming.

Sorry, you're right- I wasn't specific. I really just meant personal computing, but I think the broader point is that vr / ar in general should eventually take a lot of share as an i/o device vs m/k + monitor, or even mobile device.

 

[Armsdealer]

I've just played a few new games that I purchased during the steam sale and I am more convinced than ever that VR is where I want to spend the majority of my gaming time.

If the money is of any consequence to you ($600-800 hw + $300+ software) then waiting is the sane choice. If you can afford it and don't want to wait, there is a ton of stuff to play and a lot of it is extremely fun.

I played an online 4 player, 18 hole round of vr minigolf earlier and it was so god damn fun, even though the course wasn't that great and the graphics are pretty dull.

Please share what games you like best and would recommend others to purchase. No need for lengthy analysis just a worth purchasing or not. Which golf game? Would you recommend buying it? I was pretty unhappy with my audio shield and gallery purchase so I'm going to be more careful buying stuff in the future

 

[Thala]

On related news. Seems like Oculus removed the headset-check in the DRM with the latest 1.5 runtime. Looks like they have given up the fight against DRM workaround of libreVR/Revive.

I've only just tested this and I'm still in disbelief, but it looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5. As such I've reverted the DRM patch and removed all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch.

https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive/releases/tag/0.6.2

In essence Vive owners now have a more complete access to the Oculus games library again.

 

[pj-]

Please share what games you like best and would recommend others to purchase. No need for lengthy analysis just a worth purchasing or not. Which golf game? Would you recommend buying it? I was pretty unhappy with my audio shield and gallery purchase so I'm going to be more careful buying stuff in the future

It depends on what kind of stuff you enjoy. Everyone is going to have different standards for "worth buying", and I would feel bad recommending something that you buy and don't like.

The VR minigolf game is called cloudlands, it has a demo, and it's on sale for $10. Holoball is a fun pong-like game. Pool Nation VR is great if you like pool. House of the Dying sun is a fun space sim and seems to have a lot of content. Battle Dome is going to be a great FPS once it has some more time in the oven. Final Approach is fun and polished experience and it now comes with a free side game where you can pilot the planes.

You can always buy stuff and refund if you realize quickly that you don't like it, even though they discourage that kind of usage.

 

[HeXen]

It depends on what kind of stuff you enjoy. Everyone is going to have different standards for "worth buying", and I would feel bad recommending something that you buy and don't like.

The VR minigolf game is called cloudlands, it has a demo, and it's on sale for $10. Holoball is a fun pong-like game. Pool Nation VR is great if you like pool. House of the Dying sun is a fun space sim and seems to have a lot of content. Battle Dome is going to be a great FPS once it has some more time in the oven. Final Approach is fun and polished experience and it now comes with a free side game where you can pilot the planes.

You can always buy stuff and refund if you realize quickly that you don't like it, even though they discourage that kind of usage.

Does Valve discourage it? I thought that was the point of having it, for people to be comfortable to buy a game they are not entirely sure about so long as they don't play it over 2 hrs..etc. I think that's very reasonable and encourages people to purchase more. I think Origin adopted it too.
I've had half a dozen that I refunded so far. I have a lot of old purchases that I really regretted such as E.Y.E or HH:Cryptic Graves, Nexius (latter two I think everyone should have got refunded since they shut the servers down and pulled the game but it certainly made me a lot more shy about purchases until this refund policy so now I don't sweat it.
Devs do some BS moves and I think this also encourages developers to release a functional game at the least but this is what they abuse Early Access for. I literally have a 2012 game called Paranormal that is still early access...wtf? And it's still a crap game.

 

[agfkfhahddhdn]

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[cen1]

I am taking the SSD approach here. When SSDs were introduced they were expensive AF and had low capacity so I didn't bite. Fast forward a few years and they are much cheaper with greater capacities so it's a no brainer to buy them.

It's the same with VR now. Expensive and still has some quirks which need to be polished. I'm waiting for Vive v2 or even v3 before I spend my money on it.

 

[Qwertilot]

Actually I think facebooks stake in Oculus has a lot to do with them, but not in terms of controlling gaming.

The potential social network style applications for VR are clear cut and could be massive, so they have every reason to be involved at this point.

 

[Thala]

Shit, man, what have they done with Instagram? Have they tightly integrated it with Facebook and used it to lock you in? No, they have not. So if they haven't done this after buying another social network, why in the world would they do it with a VR firm?

I was not implying that they necessarily have to integrate say Instagram with Facebook. But if you think they are not going to spy on your activities to collect user specific data you are mistaken, be it Instagram or Facebook itself.
In addition of course, it would not surprise me at all, if at one point you are required to have a Facebook account to log in.

The potential social network style applications for VR are clear cut and could be massive, so they have every reason to be involved at this point

Sure, could be massive. But for participating or even leading here (social network style applications) they wouldn't have to buy Occulus, neither would it force them trying to lock everyone else out by offering only DRM managed exclusives in their store. That's the typical shady tactics if you are trying to become a monopolist.

 

[Qwertilot]

Buying Occulus is a defensive procedure for FB - it ensures that they'll be in the relevant hardware markets in quite a big way and so makes it much less likely that find themselves wiped out by a social network style thing growing from within VR.

Also huge potential revenues. If people end up buying headsets to do social stuff, then they'd obviously much rather it was them getting that revenue.

The gaming is just very incidental I think, as is the monopoly behaviour for games just recently.

 

[Headfoot]

PSVR will definitely reach more gamers. They are touting around 50 PSVR games by end of 2016 and early 2017...or perhaps just whenever the thing releases. It will include a small box that looks similar in shape to the PS4 that somehow allows the PSVR to work just fine. There is already some hands on reviews and is considered a mid ranged VR solution but if I can have a more robust library of seated games on it than Vive/Rift then I'll have to go that route if I want VR.
Unless there is some option/hack or work around to having a seated experience with room scale games....but at least there's VorpX, even if it's function is not the best, games like Metro would be pretty epic with the I'm there feel.

There are only 2 things you can do to make a relatively slow system like the PS4 output VR. 1) reduce graphics complexity, 2) hack on high FPS timewarp continuously https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-examined/ which means you're not really hitting your FPS but you are compromising somewhere lower than that.

In either scenario, the PSVR experience will be worse than any modern gaming PC VR experience which can push the same graphics at a real 90 fps, as is always the case between PC and consoles.

In any case my point is that PSVR is not by any means the only seated VR experience. Oculus is too. The Vive / Rift split is definitely not helping the PC VR ecosystem though.

 

[agfkfhahddhdn]

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[HeXen]

There are only 2 things you can do to make a relatively slow system like the PS4 output VR. 1) reduce graphics complexity, 2) hack on high FPS timewarp continuously https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-examined/ which means you're not really hitting your FPS but you are compromising somewhere lower than that.

In either scenario, the PSVR experience will be worse than any modern gaming PC VR experience which can push the same graphics at a real 90 fps, as is always the case between PC and consoles.

In any case my point is that PSVR is not by any means the only seated VR experience. Oculus is too. The Vive / Rift split is definitely not helping the PC VR ecosystem though.

So? Since when did consoles provide an equal or superior experience to PC's? They have already stated they will use some kind of artificial 120fps. That's what that external box that looks like a small PS4 is for. The PS4 Neo should also help in this regard which is what I'll likely get anyway.
The Rift will still have games that require room scale once their Touch controls come out. I don't think you read my post. All of PSVR games will be seated/standing which is the kind of library I'm more looking for regarding VR. I don't want a library where some future titles that I may really want might be room scale only cause that's not how I want to play. For example if a VR version of TES6 ever came out that's room scale only, I'd be limited to the non VR version leaving my $800 hardware limited to my hopes and dreams that most of the future library will offer seated options and there is no guarantee of that.

 

[pj-]

So? Since when did consoles provide an equal or superior experience to PC's? They have already stated they will use some kind of artificial 120fps. That's what that external box that looks like a small PS4 is for. The PS4 Neo should also help in this regard which is what I'll likely get anyway.
The Rift will still have games that require room scale once their Touch controls come out. I don't think you read my post. All of PSVR games will be seated/standing which is the kind of library I'm more looking for regarding VR. I don't want a library where some future titles that I may really want might be room scale only cause that's not how I want to play. For example if a VR version of TES6 ever came out that's room scale only, I'd be limited to the non VR version leaving my $800 hardware limited to my hopes and dreams that most of the future library will offer seated options and there is no guarantee of that.

The external box doesn't do reprojection, it does:

-It carries out object-based 3D audio processing ("really good and important to VR").

-it displays the social screen - undistorting the VR output for display on TV. Quality is lost in this process, so it scales the image up and crops it so you don't see edges.

-"Separate mode" - a completely separate audio and video stream you can send over to TV, as opposed to the mirrored social screen. It's sent compressed to the PU and then uncompressed by the device and sent to the screen. We're told that this was "an innovation that came quite late" in the development of the system.

- It displays PS4's system software interface in cinematic mode, handling the display of traditional 2D content.

The good thing about pc vr is the flexibility. A lot of games are being updated with alternative movement controls (e.g. stick based instead of teleportation), because some people actually prefer that and don't suffer from the nausea that it causes in others. I doubt you will see any large budget VR game that REQUIRES roomscale, especially if it is multiplatform.

 

[HeXen]

The external box doesn't do reprojection, it does:



The good thing about pc vr is the flexibility. A lot of games are being updated with alternative movement controls (e.g. stick based instead of teleportation), because some people actually prefer that and don't suffer from the nausea that it causes in others. I doubt you will see any large budget VR game that REQUIRES roomscale, especially if it is multiplatform.

Well something with the HMD is doing reprojection:

PlayStation VR has a 120Hz display that also supports 90Hz. The lower framerate will be used for titles running natively on the console, though the higher option will be available to developers that are running their projects a 60fps on the console. PlayStation VR is then capable of low latency (18ms) ‘reprojecting’ this content in 120fps in-HMD, though it’s also possible for some times to run at this framerate natively.

 

[Thala]

For example if a VR version of TES6 ever came out that's room scale only, I'd be limited to the non VR version leaving my $800 hardware limited to my hopes and dreams that most of the future library will offer seated options and there is no guarantee of that.

Assuming a roomscale version of TES6 would come out, then it would not be available for PSVR. So with PSVR you cannot play it either.
Don't know how you can construct an advantage for PSVR from that example.
Take SteamVR as example, there are 303 titles for Vive and 149 titles for Rift. Without in-depth investigation, the difference of 150+ titles are mostly room-scale or motion controller titles. (A title does not necessarily have to be room-scale in order to not support Rift, it might just be a motion controller only title)