Oculus Rift - Development Kit 2

[MSCoder610]

I have a Developer Kit 1 (and told myself I wouldn't order a Dev Kit 2, but did anyway).
If anyone is interested in following along with the development / what people are working on more closely, I can recommend the subreddit and the official Oculus forums, both are pretty good:
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus
https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/
I do use my dev kit more for trying other peoples' demos than development right now, but it's fun to see what other people are working on, and I'm considering playing around with Unreal Engine 4 (and I took a stab at getting Duke 3D to work with the Rift also).

As far as some of the points / questions raised in this thread:

- Head tracking is definitely 1:1 if the game developer implements it correctly. Some third-party solutions to play existing games in the Rift (Vireio / Tridef / VorpX) map the head tracking to mouse emulation, so if you've seen a YouTube video of someone playing a full game in the Rift, it might have used one of these third party programs, and that could explain the non-1:1 head tracking.

- It's definitely easier to use the Rift with gamepads than keyboard / mouse. A lot of the VR demos target the XBox 360 controller. I'm interested to see if Oculus announces anything about input devices before the consumer version - so far, they've mostly suggested gamepads. There's also various motion devices like the Razer Hydra (and the wireless version, Sixense STEM), and PrioVR, but it's unclear what the adoption of those will be in games.

- re: Roller Coaster Tycoon, there was a Kickstarter for Theme Park Studio which will allow designing rollercoasters:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/254590/
It's early access on Steam right now. The Kickstarter promised Rift support, but I don't think that's available yet.

- There's already some virtual cinema apps available, and desktop replacement apps (basically showing your Windows desktop in a 3D world). The resolution of the DK1 is a bit too low for those to be practical though - the DK2 should be a bit better, and the consumer version even more. But still, I doubt the Rift will completely replace monitors / TVs for a while.

Edit: And Half Life 2 is really promising in VR, but I haven't made it more than a chapter or two in so far. The DK1 definitely can hit you with motion sickness (due to the motion blurring on the display, and no positional tracking), and HL2 seems to be one of the games that can trigger it most easily.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

The problem is that anything where you'd be using pedals and a joystick effectively, the response of a mouse is completely unrealistic. Take flying a helicopter for example; there is not a single machine that can maneuver in change of directions as I can do with my mouse, so the agility and responsiveness are bad for realism (and in the event developers actually add in something to compensate for that, gamers whine because it isn't responsive). Even FPS responsiveness is unrealistic. Nobody can turn around as fast as you can with a mouse, or change directions instantly (unless you're Deion Sanders). But, god forbid it takes more than 2ms to make a full 180 from a sprint! I only concede the FPS argument because you don't have control over your head and eyes, so they have to make a some concessions to accommodate some things.

Right but games aren't primarily made to be realistic, they're primarily made to be entertainment and so movement through the game world has to be pleasing to do and easy to use, especially considering most games are competitive to some degree and hindered movement when battling to win is frustrating.

Only when you consider simulators or games which are highly tailored for people who are fans of a specific niche market, like say F1 driving, or flight simulators are people really willing to trade off the entertainment factor for increase realism and difficulty, that remains niche though, with respect to broader gaming.

 

[Midwayman]

The problem is that anything where you'd be using pedals and a joystick effectively, the response of a mouse is completely unrealistic. Take flying a helicopter for example; there is not a single machine that can maneuver in change of directions as I can do with my mouse, so the agility and responsiveness are bad for realism (and in the event developers actually add in something to compensate for that, gamers whine because it isn't responsive). Even FPS responsiveness is unrealistic. Nobody can turn around as fast as you can with a mouse, or change directions instantly (unless you're Deion Sanders). But, god forbid it takes more than 2ms to make a full 180 from a sprint! I only concede the FPS argument because you don't have control over your head and eyes, so they have to make a some concessions to accommodate some things.

Have you looked at the best practices on the Oculus VR website? A ton of things they go in current games simply won't work with VR. They won't make sense, or will make you sick. VR isn't something that is going to work well tacked on to a existing game. Its going to require experienced designed around it with attention paid to real world scale and plausible movement rates, etc.

 

[Aikouka]

<lots of interesting stuff>

Your post is tempting me to put in a pre-order! :$

Am I to understand that to get these to work properly to prevent motion issues you need 60fps minimum (120fps total) in each eye? At 1080p, does that mean a heavy hitter card is required? Or is there something that makes that not be the case?

I can't speak from hands-on experience, but just thinking about the tech, I would say... yes and no. It's important to keep in mind that the Oculus Rift does not work the same way as most 3D setups that you see. For example, NVIDIA's 3D Vision works by sending two frames to the monitor: one for each eye. To achieve what is an effective 60 FPS, you need to be able to generate 120 frames per second. However, the Rift doesn't use alternate frame display. The Rift (and Sony's Morpheus) display the image for both eyes on the screen at the same time. Technically, the machine powering the image still has to generate both scenes at the same time, but you're also displaying the scene at a reduced resolution (you only get 960x1080 per eye), which may mean less processing power to manage it.

 

[mizzou]

I have a Developer Kit 1 (and told myself I wouldn't order a Dev Kit 2, but did anyway).
If anyone is interested in following along with the development / what people are working on more closely, I can recommend the subreddit and the official Oculus forums, both are pretty good:
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus
https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/
I do use my dev kit more for trying other peoples' demos than development right now, but it's fun to see what other people are working on, and I'm considering playing around with Unreal Engine 4 (and I took a stab at getting Duke 3D to work with the Rift also).

As far as some of the points / questions raised in this thread:

- Head tracking is definitely 1:1 if the game developer implements it correctly. Some third-party solutions to play existing games in the Rift (Vireio / Tridef / VorpX) map the head tracking to mouse emulation, so if you've seen a YouTube video of someone playing a full game in the Rift, it might have used one of these third party programs, and that could explain the non-1:1 head tracking.

- It's definitely easier to use the Rift with gamepads than keyboard / mouse. A lot of the VR demos target the XBox 360 controller. I'm interested to see if Oculus announces anything about input devices before the consumer version - so far, they've mostly suggested gamepads. There's also various motion devices like the Razer Hydra (and the wireless version, Sixense STEM), and PrioVR, but it's unclear what the adoption of those will be in games.

- re: Roller Coaster Tycoon, there was a Kickstarter for Theme Park Studio which will allow designing rollercoasters:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/254590/
It's early access on Steam right now. The Kickstarter promised Rift support, but I don't think that's available yet.

- There's already some virtual cinema apps available, and desktop replacement apps (basically showing your Windows desktop in a 3D world). The resolution of the DK1 is a bit too low for those to be practical though - the DK2 should be a bit better, and the consumer version even more. But still, I doubt the Rift will completely replace monitors / TVs for a while.

Edit: And Half Life 2 is really promising in VR, but I haven't made it more than a chapter or two in so far. The DK1 definitely can hit you with motion sickness (due to the motion blurring on the display, and no positional tracking), and HL2 seems to be one of the games that can trigger it most easily.

You seem to have a good grasp on what VR is going to offer...at least in the "beta" form it's in now.

So what do you think, is this....
-1. An immersive game changer, a completely new experience
-2. Like going from 480p to 1080p
-3. Like going from a 27inch TV to a 60 inch TV
-4. More or less like playing the game at a movie theatre.



My main curiousity is whether or not these systems can deliver perspective.

Perspective is almost always completely lost. Mountains don't seem ominous...giants don't feel giant. Sure they LOOK bigger, but someone in a news site said., "If you take a small cup and move your direction closer to it, the smallest cup will look just like the biggest cup you've ever seen."

But why do we lose perspective? In a same reason we lose it by watching movies. The movies do a perfect job in representing size, because it's a real image. But how many times have you seen something in real life that you said to yourself, "Damn, this is so much smaller" or "This feels completely different actually being here."

I think VR may give us that experience

 

[KeithTalent]

Being purchased by Facebook for $2.0 Billion dollars!

http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/25/facebook-oculus-vr-2-billion/

KT

 

[Red Storm]

Facebook buys Oculus for $2 billion.

I wish I was joking. WTF. My expectations for this have now been lowered. No longer a day one buy for me either.

 

[SAWYER]

OMG if you have to have a facebook account to use OR I will be furious, dont ruin it

 

[smackababy]

Well, I am no longer interested! Seriously though, lol, I hope this helps fund quicker development!

 

[SMOGZINN]

Facebook buys Oculus for $2 billion.

I wish I was joking. WTF. My expectations for this have now been lowered. No longer a day one buy for me either.

Wow. I bet the people that kickstarted this is feeling a bit betrayed right now.

 

[norseamd]

wtf

oculus rift was not particulary interesting to me over any other vr model but now i am pissed off entirely

why?

 

[norseamd]

Wow. I bet the people that kickstarted this is feeling a bit betrayed right now.

entirely

and this is different than the obsidian and paradox deal since paradox is only handling the marketing and distribution for obsidian games

 

[smackababy]

I don't think they have anything to be pissed about. Oculus never said "we will always be independent!" and it isn't like they pissed away all their money (from the looks of it, at least). They have a real product that they've been working on.

From the sounds of it, they aren't even getting rid of the staff. They are simply buying the name and giving an additional $300 million in incentives based on mile stones. How on earth could more investment in something be a bad thing? "omg it's facebook!" As if Facebook hasn't already shown that with literally zero technical innovation, they can't take over a market... Imagine if they had some genius level people behind them (which this project does).

 

[SAWYER]

If OR gets to be its own company but have the deep pockets of fb then I am fine with this

 

[SMOGZINN]

entirely

and this is different than the obsidian and paradox deal since paradox is only handling the marketing and distribution for obsidian games

After thinking about it some I agree that the obsidian and paradox deal is (to me) worrisome but not really that bad. This is something else entirely.

 

[Udgnim]

so what is the news on Valve's VR?

what's the potential patent bullshit that can happen with FB acquiring Oculus Rift?

 

[SMOGZINN]

I don't think they have anything to be pissed about. Oculus never said "we will always be independent!" and it isn't like they pissed away all their money (from the looks of it, at least). They have a real product that they've been working on.

From the sounds of it, they aren't even getting rid of the staff. They are simply buying the name and giving an additional $300 million in incentives based on mile stones. How on earth could more investment in something be a bad thing? "omg it's facebook!" As if Facebook hasn't already shown that with literally zero technical innovation, they can't take over a market... Imagine if they had some genius level people behind them (which this project does).

The problem is this is not investment, this is ownership. Unless they got a good contract saying otherwise, they just gave up all control to Zuckerberg who sees this as more of a social media addon then a new gaming hardware. At any time if Zuckerberg decides that this will not help his social media empire he is able to just scrap the project. It could also mean that it will be much longer until we see a retail version of the OR as they figure out and prepair software to use it with Facebook's primary focus since Zuckerberg is unlikely to want to release it with out a way to capitalize on it.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Well with the FB news I just lost any interest I had in getting this kit. I'll wait and see what the outcome is. I do think this will be an interesting item in the future, but not with FB at the helm. Their ideas and direction doesn't seem to fit my idea of what this is for which means waiting for 3rd parties to make rogue uses.

 

[Worthington]

meh

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Oh for **REMOVED** sakes can we have nothing nice, ever?

Well interest in Oculus just went down the drain, there's no way Facebook is going to dump 2Bn into this project and it come out the other side with the gamers best intentions, god this makes me so mad.



No cursing in PCG.

Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent

 

[Paul98]

This really could go ether way, it is going to depend on how things are handled. That's a lot of money, and a large company to promote the product and increase VR adoption rate. But then there is the concern of bringing down quality, focus, and creating problems that wouldn't be there before. With the first consumer version getting close we will be able to see what effect it has somewhat quickly. As long as it's kept open and you don't have to do something stupid like log into facebook to use it should be alright. But knowing these big companies we now have to wait and see. At least DK2 should be alright lol

 

[PrincessFrosty]

How on earth could more investment in something be a bad thing?

Because when a mega corp dumps $2Bn into a project they want a return on their investment and that means pressure to do all the normal shady rubbish that's involved with this, probably have a headset that reports back to facebook every 3 seconds, that displays adverts in windows, has spyware in the software and exclusive deals with official partners which means locking features out, premium this-that-and-the-other.

It's just how these large corps do business, they don't care about gaming they care about money, the guys who started this were backed by the community because they cared deeply about providing a good experience to the user.

This is practically no different from EA acquiring game studios, it never ends well and all the people who think it will are naive idiots.

 

[Paul98]

Then I have another thought it could be out of necessity with a player like Sony entering the mix. Along with others they will have to compete against. They may have felt that they needed the backing and the money. We don't know what this means for them or what the terms of the deal are. I am still interested in this, and still thinking about getting DK2 when it's actually released as I want to get into VR development early on.

Edit: That said I am not hopeful.

 

[MSCoder610]

You seem to have a good grasp on what VR is going to offer...at least in the "beta" form it's in now.

So what do you think, is this....
-1. An immersive game changer, a completely new experience
-2. Like going from 480p to 1080p
-3. Like going from a 27inch TV to a 60 inch TV
-4. More or less like playing the game at a movie theatre.



My main curiousity is whether or not these systems can deliver perspective.

Perspective is almost always completely lost. Mountains don't seem ominous...giants don't feel giant. Sure they LOOK bigger, but someone in a news site said., "If you take a small cup and move your direction closer to it, the smallest cup will look just like the biggest cup you've ever seen."

But why do we lose perspective? In a same reason we lose it by watching movies. The movies do a perfect job in representing size, because it's a real image. But how many times have you seen something in real life that you said to yourself, "Damn, this is so much smaller" or "This feels completely different actually being here."

I think VR may give us that experience

I would go with #1 (immersive game changer). There'e a lot of demos for Oculus with a really impressive sense of scale. Half Life 2 is pretty good at that (look up at towering buildings; see the Citadel in the distance but it still looks giant). And there are some cool solar system demos that really give off an impressive sense of scale / perspective, and make you feel tiny. One of the best ones is Titans of Space:
https://share.oculusvr.com/app/titans-of-space

That being said, I (like everyone else) have no idea what to think after reading the Facebook acquisition news. I'm currently still on "crushing disappointment", I'm sure that'll change into more of a "wait and see" eventually though.

 

[mmntech]

Facebook will force you to watch a 2min ad after every 10min of gameplay, and tighten the straps so you can't take it off.

I can't help but wonder why Facebook would possibly be interested in the Oculus. They're not a gaming company and it really has no other use beyond that. Instagram and WhatsApp made sense given their industry. I always get the feeling that Zuck doesn't really know what he's doing and every business decision he makes is little more than a roll of the dice. They seem to be blowing a lot of cash on these startups.