An interesting article on VR market
Press kit with full specs.
https://app.box.com/s/en9tt3ib5d1o1pnzrhjv4fdmh9g60rhk
Sort of looks like ‘better than Gear VR but about 1/4 of anything a Vive/Rift recommended PC spec could do’. I think the Augmented Reality (AR) side with the two forward cameras could be the key thing, plus ‘Big Screen’ viewing apps (which would be nice to be able to do anywhere).
Press kit specs snipped out:
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System specs are nice, but I want to see it in action. I’m still heavily leaning towards the Vive 
It looks like the market is splitting a bit, in terms of devices that work well with existing games/software and things that need to have new titles written especially for VR as a new ‘medium’.
I think the Rift and Vive are both great choices for things like flight and driving sims, as they both offer good ‘sit down’ experiences. There are going to be some rough edges in terms of adapting the current sims as the frame-rate challenges and general way of interacting isn’t like how we expect desktop things to be. Getting 90Hz over two UHD stereo screens is a tough slog for things like ARMA, and it may be the case that some existing titles just don’t make it over to VR. 3D space for control inputs is another field that will take some time getting right too.
For new specially written VR games, I think the Vive has the slight edge as it is first out the gate with 3D controllers. I think Oculus know this enough to have a high degree of urgency for their touch solution, and that by the end of this year it will have flattened out to just a ‘Pepsi vs Coke’ equivalence in terms of price/capability between the big two. I don’t think there is a ‘wrong’ one to buy.
The GearVR and Sulon seem to be aimed more at ‘VR as its own market’ crowd rather than simmers or people that build expensive hot & heavy PCs.
With DX11.3 and DX12 having some features that could help to elevate that. I just hope DCS will be support those features soon. Probably not.
Volume Tiled-resources, is an evolution of tiled-resources (analogous to OpenGL mega-texture), in which the GPU seeks and loads only those portions of a large texture that are relevant to the scene it’s rendering, rather than loading the entire texture to the memory. Think of it as a virtual memory system for textures. This greatly reduces video memory usage and bandwidth consumption. Volume tiled-resources is a way of seeking portions of a texture not only along X and Y axes, but adds third dimension.
Conservative Rasterization is a means of drawing polygons with additional pixels that make it easier for two polygons to interact with each other in dynamic objects.
Raster Ordered Views is a means to optimize raster loads in the order in which they appear in an object. Practical applications include improved shadows.
Async Shaders
Multi-Threaded Command Buffer Recording
The command buffer is a game’s “to-do list,” a list of things that the CPU must reorganize and present to an AMD Radeon™ graphics card so that graphics work can be done. Things on this to-do list might include lighting, placing characters, loading textures, generating reflections and more.
Modern PCs often ship with multi-core CPUs like AMD FX processors or AMD A-Series APUs. One notable characteristic of DirectX® 11-based applications is that many of these CPU cores in any multi-core CPU go partially or fully unutilized. This lack of utilization is owed to DirectX® 11’s relative inability to break a game’s command buffer into small, parallel and computationally quick chunks that can be spread across many cores.
In addition to modest multi-threading in DirectX® 11, a disproportionate amount of CPU time is frequently spent on driver and API interpretation (“overhead”) under the DirectX® 11 programming model, which leaves lesser time for executing game code that delivers quality and framerates.
In DirectX® 12, however, the command buffer behavior is radically overhauled in five key ways:
Overhead is significantly reduced by moving driver and API code to any available CPU thread
The absolute time required to complete complex CPU tasks is notably reduced
Game workloads can be meaningfully distributed across >4 CPU cores
New “bandwidth” on the CPU allows for higher peak draw calls, enabling more detailed and immersive game worlds
All available CPU cores may now “talk” to the graphics card simultaneously
Much like going from a two-lane country road to an eight-lane superhighway, the shift to DirectX® 12 allows more traffic from an AMD FX processor to reach the graphics card in a shorter amount of time. The end result: more performance, better image quality, reduced latency, or a blend of all three (as the developer chooses).
Article on Sulon Q
I’m definitely interested in the OR and the Vive but the price is a little steep for me to be in as an early adopter.
Last I heard, VR platforms were having issues reading gauges in flight sims and that’d be a deal breaker for me. I’m curious if there’s been any updates to this.
Plus I’m not a huge fan of the whole “walking blind around a room with a cable attached to your head” concept. I’d basically be playing Minesweeper with my roommate’s cat. Though, obviously, that doesn’t really apply for a sit-down game like a flight sim though.
I think that the EDGE DX11 update helps an awful lot with that, as in it was a good time for a new render engine as it opens up to many more API steps up now.
It won’t be perfect (heads will get bumped), but the Vive’s ‘Chaperone’ system is meant to help with this. It actively scans the physical environment and then provides cues within VR, i.e. a ‘green grid’ when you get up close to a wall or piece of furniture (or cat!)
Sony VR @ $399 USD/EUR, $549 CAD and coming in October 2016.
Specs:
- OLED 5.7 screen
- 1920 x RGB x 1080
- 120Hz refresh rate
- 360 degree tracking with 9 LEDs
- Less than 18ms of latency
…and obviously a P/S 4.
A nice entry to the market, as in not massively expensive for those with a console.
EDIT: $549 in Canadian pesos:
The console is expensive! 
But I gonna buy anyway because Ace Combat 7 
One nice feature of the Sony VR that could be important for a lot of people:
“With the headset on, users can also go into ‘cinematic mode’ to see the entire 16:9 PS4 menu and play all of their PS4 games.”
It sort of makes cheaper than a big screen TV. Pretty sure Sony are eating some of the cost of the units too. Lots of competition emerging.
I’m not a huge fan of horror movies, but games like Paranormal Activity’ in VR seem like a definite ‘nope’. 
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Interesting app for general VR use:
Comments by the developer on resolution and the ability to read text:
Q. how close to useable is it on the CV1/Vive? Is it enough for you to want to code in it?
A. The difference is huge. Text is easily readable on a 2560x1440 screen. The improved optics and pixel fill rate really help.
So I guess the 3D aspect of games and movies (if encoded like Bluray 3D releases etc) comes through?
Kinda neat.
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Heres a vid
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What a cruel name for a VR game…
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Katana’s are very SnowCrash, but Light Sabres would be good too 