VR News

Do you ever have to re-center that thing like you do with TIR?

I haven’t had to recenter mine in game as long as when I launch it I’m sitting and looking straight ahead. There is an option to do it in game, but I’ve never had to do it. (I’m using two sensors…but for seated you really only need one I think…)

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I usually lock the door or my daughter will sneak up and scare the crap out of me! She loves that! Followed by a “Dad, can I try?” :girl:

As long as I don’t skip house chores and playtime with my daughter, I’m allowed some VR game time. She who must be obeyed figures that it’s prefferable to me going to the pub. :wink: That said, I try to keep my simming to when I’m alone in the house, which happens a few days a week, since I work shifts.

I also use two sensors because of the touch controllers. I only need to recenter view after I have rebuilt the simulator. My sim is situated in the guest room, and need to be dissasembled from time to time, because of guests.

I did experience some tracking issues when I used only one sensor and the LCD Screen got in the way.
I solved that by getting a mounting arm for the screen, so it could be flipped away, and then I got the second sensor when I got the touch controllers. I remember TiR going wonky when I leaned in closer to the sensor, or approaching the extremes of the view field.

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@fearlessfrog and I had an absolutely hilarious time exploring Steam VR Home this evening. Thanks for his patience in getting me up and running… We were throwing beer bottles, rolling balls across Mars, painting in the air, playing instruments, playing catch…it was pretty darn cool. Hard to explain it…but the presence and scale and watching the beachball physics and properties on Mars was really nifty. Apologies to NASA that we littered up Mars to bad…

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The head tracking with the Rift is significantly better than the Track-IR. It also doesn’t seem to care about lighting conditions in the room. Track-IR uses just three reference points (both for the hat clip or the LED track clip pro). The Rift uses many LEDs. It is like Track-IR on steroids when it comes to head tracking. The Vive uses a different method again, which is generally considered to be even better when it comes to room scale VR (not really a factor for simming though).

Oh yeah, I forgot about that point. I have my computer set up in my living room, which is extremely bright, and no achievable way of blocking all the windows. Thus, I was always unable to use TIR during the daytime. My Rift doesn’t care…it works the same in daylight as night. And the tracking…yeah…insane with the 1:1 feel. If you lived wihin a couple hours of me @Linebacker, I’d have you over and give you a whirl with it. I somehow think the Best Buy type demos wouldn’t totally do it justice for our type of gaming…

For those waiting for Gen 2, it looks like it might be a considerable wait. There are lots of exciting enhancements in the pipeline but they are not ready for production at this point.

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I guess waiting won’t hurt. Just as long as the VR interest won’t decline…

Next Gen VR will have to have:

Higher resolution
Wider FoV
Hardware to run it

…to succeed.

If that can’t happen now, it’s better to wait.

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Yep, I’m happy to wait it out! two years are gone before you know it.

Ain’t that the truth! And we probably need at least two years worth of PC hardware advancement to be able to run VR in higher resolution and bigger screens. Unless, of course, the VR devs are getting really clever with the proposed foveal eye tracking thing, or similar.

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Two years is far enough away that the current gen is still worth buying IMHO. I will still be near the front of the que/line for Gen 2 though.

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Well, if I had the budget for it then yes! :stuck_out_tongue:

No one is close to fully utilizing the current hardware, 2 years might even be rather early.

Well, let me put it this way then: VR requires a lot more performance than 2D does. Bigger and higher resolution VR screens will probably not require less performance than todays VR units. But as I stated earlier, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.

Project Cars is a good simulation. Im playing it on PS4 with a Wheel and pedals. Its awesome. Might just get it on PC so I can do VR.

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It works pretty well in VR for sure. Also, if you see Dirt Rally going cheap then that’s one of the nicest VR driving titles around.

Anyone remember Black & White? Used to love it, and this sort of looks a touch controller offspring…

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That looks like fun! :slight_smile:

For those still on the fence a good comparison of Rift vs Vive for driving sims, he mentions some pros cons that I think might be useful to flight sims as well I think (FOV, level of detail, super sampling, what hardware you have powering it):

I still spend 95% of my VR time playing Elite:Dangerous and loving it… one of these days I need to make time to spend with VR flight sims and racing sims.

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While a nice cartoon, I do agree that it is expensive stuff at the moment. For me all I would recommend is really considering changing the order that you’d buy hardware in, i.e. I’d probably put a VR headset for flying / driving sims now before buying a Warthog set or a second (or third) monitor. It’s sort of a ‘third base’ expensive purchase still, and the prerequisite expensive CPU/GPU PC is already pretty eye-watering in reality.

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