Happy Birthday!
You should totally buy a VR headset, OR a chainsaw. Whatever looks less dangerous to you. 
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Well, that settles it. I already have a chainsaw…! 
Happy birthday and a cheesy suggestion. A little money to your favourite charity.
Well if you still can’t think of anything…maybe… Just maybe another thought may pop into your head…
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Happy birthday, @BeachAV8R! I’m surprised you didn’t a load of new animated gifs for your birthday.
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I have the perfect gift:
Happy Birthday Beach!
You give a lot to the community. Give yourself something nice. Wish I had Steel Beasts!
Do it!
I find it hard to comprehend that you don’t have a rift. However, its not for everyone. Some people might find it to low res. I just got a hand from PaulRix. He told me about VR Zoom and Recenter. This has transformed the experience for me. Now training on new aircraft where I need to read the small labels and instruments. So it is useful again.
The Rifts biggest grab is that it makes the aircraft feel like it is strapped to your butt.
Maico, eventually either his resolve will crumble or he will get one just to shut us all up… 
. And then he will thank us for pushing him over the edge.
Can you break this down for us? What is this?
Paul, I think its hard to recommend the Rift sometimes. On the one hand the feeling of being inside the world of (Insert game tittle here) is incredible. On the other hand I thought the res was unusable for the first few days. My experience has improved a lot. .Mostly because my PC is optimized to the edge.
Like Beach I thought there would be a CV2 by Xmas. But after dismal sales of CV1 and Vive, we may be waiting longer than we want to. So we may be on Gen 1 for a while. That means its time to buy one now.
Like how I did that? 
Basicly if you force the resolution to something higher than the device can support each pixel will actually display the ‘average color’ of what the graphics card had calculated. This can cause the game to look more smooth, less jagged and a bit more detailed.
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Were the sales really considered as dismal? It will take awhile for the technology to be accepted by the mainstream audience. I think the Playstation VR might go a long way towards helping with that this Christmas season. For us simmers though, The Rift and Vive are where it’s at right now.
As for next gen headsets, I read that the planned cycle lies somewhere in the middle between a cell phone (typically a year and a gaming console (typically several years). My bet would be when the GTX11- series is on the immediate horizon.
Not dismal, but doing ok so far. Hard to get super accurate numbers, but ballpark (heh) about 300,000 HTC Vive’s and about 280,000 Oculus Rift’s sold so far. About 10% of these were dev kits issued for CV1’s. The projections were about 500,000 each by Xmas, so they need a decent Holiday Season run with Touch coming out and some packages tweaks.
Yep, 18 to 24 months is what they wanted for the cycle and it really depends how they respond to each other and if Sony makes much of a mainstream impact with the PS4 PSVR. The exact ‘when’ of a v2 is also a little out of their hands in that mobile panel tech advances and also people getting more powerful GPUs/PCs is something they just have to wait for and time.
Yep, what he said. The next big jump in the tech will be techniques that mean the render doesn’t have to go over 4k (or even 8k) resolution for the entire field of view. Eye tracking and so called foveated rendering is something that could potentially revolutionize the version 2’s, in that we won’t need impossibly high resolutions to get some amazing advances, as the panels only render in super detail where the eye can physically see the best.
@BeachAV8R It is generally accepted that the Rift is the most refined for sit-down experiences (the Async Timewarp really helps out titles on the edge of being usable in VR) but before you drop the cash it is probably worth getting both a Vive and a Rift demo. Best Buy will have Rift Touch demos very soon and the Microsoft Stores having been doing a lot of Vive demos where you get a good idea of room-scale VR. If there is any interest of VR outside of the ‘cockpit’ games (albeit here on Mudspike 
I can see the appeal of just sit-down) then it might be worth a ‘try before buy’ on both.
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Cool. Now how do you do that?
As I read it, sales for Vive and Oculus are real slow now. This points to the fact that most people are in wait and see mode.
Sony has a way of making EVERYTHING mainstream. If you were around when the yellow Sony Walkman hit the scene, then you know what I mean. As a teenager in NYC I saw children wore them on their bikes, skates and on the way to school. Adults wore them on the subway, and you could not swing your head in any direction without seeing a Sony Walkman hanging off some ones hip. It was prolific. Overnight there were headphones everywhere. Sony killed the boom box and became the first real portable music device. In portable music they created and cornered the market overnight.
I agree 100 percent that not only will Sony be most peoples first VR experience but regrettably it may be their last. In other words, Sony’s device might be so perfect as to further reduce the PC gaming market. This is not good since DCS in PS4 would make me vomit. However, I will rock the COD and Formula 1 tittles. Now I just had an epiphany, If Sony came out with a device that worked on PS4 and PC… Good buy competition… They would corner the market again.
I just got a Sony phone, I own a Sony stereo and PS3 and PS4. I put great faith in the quality of their products. When the Sony hammer falls, it falls hard. So bring it On!
You can do it generally for all games for the Rift here:
…and the same technique for Vive (incase people look later):
Note: You do need a decent graphics card to do this as you are pushing some very high resolutions which can hurt framerates. For games that are CPU bound (like DCS) then with a Nvidia 1080 etc you tend to have some head-room to be able to do this.
For DCS you can set the ‘Pixel Density’ slider directly within the game’s Config / VR settings. This is from the Open Beta, not sure if the mainline has it.
For some it really helps clarity of the HUD etc:
Fearlessfrog,
Thanks for your clarification and awesome tips. I fooled around with pixel density after I got my PC running ok. I have mine at 2,0 to 2.2. 2.5 just gets too slow. Since I am lucky enough to have a decent machine I do OK. Of course we all want better. But I am limited by hardware. Here is what I got.
EVGA 980ti SC 6GB / i7 5930 6core CPU with Liquid cooling/ 32 gigs of DDR4 3000.
I should liquid cool my GPU.
Thanks You Fearlessfrog.
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That is the expected cycle for new hardware from Oculus and Rift. Anything that they put out now is going to be incremental, at best and since that involves a whole hardware development cycle, the return on investment of the original is diminished. Unless you have a base like Apple and Samsung have for their phones, a yearly cycle is not possible. Plus, asking people to turn over $800+ a year to keep current, is not going to work with a small market. Phones have the benefit of carrier incentives.
The base for VR was considered to be small from the start and needs time to grow. Sony is helping this by, in essence, being second to the table. This time lag provides a bump in uptake at a time when PC VR is slowing, which should translate a complementary VR presence in the eyes of the public. A sales campaign in time for the holiday season will help the market grow but this tech is still in ‘early adopter’ territory for a while yet.
Happy Birthday AV8R!