VR News

Checked out a few video’s on this

Pretty nice actually, and works with nearly every VR device out there. There is a short video with some classic warbirds and vets talking about their experiences. What I actually found to be pretty cool was one of the NHL movies. Was nice really being able to watch the game like you would in the stands, although they had much better seats than i usually do. Now just have to wait for those VR broadcasts :smiley:

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I’ve been very cautious of the first generation of VR units and I won’t even touch VR until Gabe Newell thinks it’s cool.:slight_smile:

I copied the following off another website …

Interestingly, he even says that the HTC Vive is “barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience.”

Unlike public companies, Valve can afford to be cautious about VR’s potential. In a clear jab at rival Oculus, he pooh-poohs overblown expectations of a mass market any time soon.

"Some people have got attention by going out and saying there’ll be millions of [VR unit sales] and we’re like, wow, I don’t think so. I can’t point to a single piece of content that would cause millions of people to justify changing their home computing.

“It’s a great thing for enthusiasts and hardcore people. Where we are today is way further down the road than we were a year ago. But it’s just going to be this slow, painful fits and starts kind of thing. So while we are really happy with how things are going, yeah, it doesn’t match up with what other companies are saying.”

The big obstacle is price. A Vive currently costs $800 and requires a high-end PC to work. Despite expectations of first-year price decreases, this does not presently look likely.

"If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 percent cheaper, that’s still not a huge market. There’s still not a really incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR.

It is expensive but is compelling - hard to describe. For flight and driving sims it is a really good fit and hard to go back to a 2D screen.

For land combat, I’ve heard great things about Onward - people love it, to the extent they are building rifle stock holders for the controllers:

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There is absolutely no going back to a 2D screen for me. Having the Rift has reignited my interest in the simulation hobby. Will Gen 2 be better than Gen 1? Without a doubt, and I will one of the first in line when that hardware is released. Until then, Gen 1 is pretty darned awesome. 10 months after getting my Rift I am still blown away by it, especially when used for flight sims. Also, don’t get too caught up on the “poor” resolution. It’s not terrible by any means.

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My feelings as well…
VR are a few steps backwards in some areas, and quantum leaps forward in others.
Sum total=awesome!
But yeah, anyone owning VR headsets today will be even happier when the resolution is doubled and we have PC:s that can haul flightsims at max detail with 100FPS… Of course.
One thing is certain… If everybody sat on the fence, waiting for the next gen, there would never be a next gen and VR would be dead and buried.

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Yeah, I agree with much of what has been said - and I actually agree with Gabe when it comes to non-simulation stuff thus far.

The first time I tried my Oculus last year I was simply blown away. It really is exactly HOW I imagine that flight sims were supposed to be played all along. When I sat in that Metroliner in P3D or the An-24 in X-Plane or the A-10C in DCS - it was an incredibly surreal experience to see all the knobs and the up-front controller popping out at me. Trying to hook up to a hose in CAP2 was insanely easy. Flying helos was a whole new feeling with ease of depth perception.

Same for car driving sims - the “presence” is just so compelling.

Most of the non-sim (non-flight, non-driving) games are very VR-gimmicky at the moment. Now, I don’t have touch controllers, and I only play things seated, so my experience is limited. The market is really saturated with “shoot the dinosaur” or “float through space” titles right now…but there are some real stand outs as well. I’d imagine there will be a thinning out of both hardware and software developers for VR.

Whatever the case - once you put on a VR headset and experience a cockpit in that way - it is very, very difficult to imagine any other way forward other than that. I’d be like eating a filet mignon, and then being made to eat flank steak the rest of your life. (The price comparison might be about right too…LOL)

And I’ll once more endorse Off-road Paradise Trial 4x4 as one of the coolest non-sim VR titles out there. It’s so much fun to play…

I’m completely hooked on VR for flight simulators. I check the forums every day for word that VR for Il-2, F4, CLOD or ROF has been released. The only non-VR sim that I fire up is F4, and only because the dynamic campaign and my hardware (MFDs, switch panel, etc…) almost makes up for the lack of VR.

If someone were to mod Il-2 1946 with native VR support, I would rot in my simpit.

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See I bought mine planning on using it only for flight Sims and racing Sims. Then I found out of the reaching and I have with VR, only project cars really worked with the Vive. That also made me sick after about a lap and a half. Parts of dcs VR look real nice, others still seemed rather flat to me, I wasn’t really blown away. I know that it’s not complete in that regard though so no biggie.

I think what I find more interesting is the prospect of other non game things, movies, live sports. Even if you are in the sidelines to watch, wouldn’t star wars in VR be pretty sweet?

I think though I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t jumped on junk games just cause they were in VR.

It’s going to be interesting to see where VR will end up, currently it’s still a gimmick thing for most people. Hopefully it’ll become something full blown, but certainly the whole “BIGGEST THING EVER” is not exactly true for about 99% of the people that play computer games.

That maybe true. But the fact that most of the sims that I have played in the last year (DCS, X-Plane, P3D, Assetto Corsa, Dirt Rally, Project Cars) either support VR natively, have 3rd party paid app support (Fly Inside), or are under development (IL2 series) indicates that the publishers are seeing it as a worthy investment. They wouldn’t do that on a whim. That’s with the knowledge that computer sims are a niche to begin with.

Most of them already have support for a Track IR like device, it’s not as if the way VR devices communicate is revolutionary. Besides, look how far TIR has come in mainstream gaming. I think Insurgency had some support at some point(in the mod days?), and it has found traction in the ARMA community. Other then that, nobody knows it exists. This is very much how VR might end up if it doesn’t find any mainstream games.

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OK, I think that I follow you now. Yes, the last TIR development was a while ago. Anyway, you could be right, but having experienced just how good VR is in simulations, it’s hard to imagine the technology as short-lived. Maybe it’s such a perfect fit for simulations, that those of us enjoying (addicted) to VR here, are not seeing the big picture. Although there are seemingly a lot of other applications for the technology.

FWIW, when my nephews were visiting over the Christmas holiday, they went giddy over Minecraft VR. Their mother is not going to finance a gaming rig for it though. So, perhaps more accurately it is an entry price issue.

Technological limitations and entry price are massive barriers that will limit VR applications. Time will tell if they can solve that problem. For now I find significant price drops hard to imagine if you look at current developments and predicted technological curves and the way mass production is currently setup.

TL:DR - making it cheap is going to be really difficult.

In terms of numbers, the most popular sector for VR is mobile. Making expensive PC peripherals cheap is hard, but Facebook and Apple doing stuff with new phones is pretty much inevitable. VR’s likelyhood of mainstream pick-up will be via a Google or Sony or one of those maybe. It could be AR that makes it first too. For the PC mainstream side, it might be Fallout IV in VR, it might be Resident Evil or one of the new Valve titles coming, but it’s likely to be something non-PC is my guess.

Positioning that something likely won’t take off because of first gen hardware costs has not been a reliable predictor for a lot of tech in the past.

VR is related to TrackIR like using a keyboard is just like using a mouse - both are just inputs but pretty different. I could make a good argument to explain how you really don’t need a mouse plugged in in Windows, as there are keyboard equivalents for everything, but to someone that is used to a mouse for a while it’s a hard position to justify. Similar for VR and sim/racing/space games.

A lot of these first goes at HMD and input tracking tech, displays and lens are going to seem really anachronistic, both in terms of cost and how they worked. We’re at that stage similar to Cathode Ray to LCD for monitors or 2D GPU cards to dedicated 3Dfx cards. At that stage there were always early adopters paying too much and those that said that it wouldn’t happen due to how much it costs.

And apparently they are making the full game VR…not just a slice of it. That should be pretty nifty (particularly for those of us that have never played it…)

My position is, is that it is simply not a clear cut case of something becoming popular. It really depends on if it is going to find any application or not. There have been so many fads over the past decade that was going to be “The next best thing ever”. AR is one that comes to mind as something being panned for the longest time but has gotten absolutely no traction.

Even if it become genre specific - I’ll be fine with it. I mean, outside of Arma, sims, and racing sims…is Track IR hugely adopted by the overall gaming community?

It cannot survive in a niche, too much money has been poured into it so far. A TIR device never has had a huge research cost or BOM associated with it. And I think exactly that is one of the big obstacles. If in a year or two there is no return on investments then we might see it peter out and die, despite being popular in the simulator niche.

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I agree it’s not certain. What we probably disagree on is how likely it is now of getting over the hump.

For me I wouldn’t want to sim without it, but that’s just anecedotal and sims don’t really count for much. What really counts is that there is Valve/HTC, Facebook/Oculus, Sony, Samsung and Google all today competing for some of your money. It is past the time where we can compare it to a lot of fads when you can go online today, hit purchase and have four different competing units turn up at your doorstep tomorrow.

It might fizzle out for sure, but it feels more like early ‘iPod’ than ‘Apple Newton’.

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