VR Megathread: Valve's VR Has Entered The Game

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somethingawful bf: Jun 17, 2005

Has there been any studies done on people who drink heavily or do a lot of drugs and if they have a higher resistance to motion sickness? I would think alcoholics or heavy drinkers would have built up a tolerance to vestibular mismatches, but I'm curious if there has been any research on it.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 00:16

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# ? May 25, 2024 14:31

ChickenArise: May 12, 2010; POWER
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Anecdotally, my years of abusing my body and mind have not made me any less susceptible to motion sickness in VR than anyone else I know. :unsmith:

# ? Aug 28, 2016 00:27

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

Poetic Justice posted:

Has there been any studies done on people who drink heavily or do a lot of drugs and if they have a higher resistance to motion sickness? I would think alcoholics or heavy drinkers would have built up a tolerance to vestibular mismatches, but I'm curious if there has been any research on it.

I don't know what the research is, but I don't think people get motion sick from being drunk. They get toxin sick, really, which I don't think would help build up a useful resistance.

I can say that being tipsy and doing some of the Touch demos is pretty hard. Something about those hand positions just didn't click with my 3-beer brain.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 00:42

somethingawful bf: Jun 17, 2005

Subjunctive posted:

I don't know what the research is, but I don't think people get motion sick from being drunk. They get toxin sick, really, which I don't think would help build up a useful resistance.

I can say that being tipsy and doing some of the Touch demos is pretty hard. Something about those hand positions just didn't click with my 3-beer brain.

Yeah I can't really do VR if I'm tipsy or drunk, mostly because I have a hard time focusing my eyes and it messes up the 3d effect. I was more just thinking how when you are drunk and lay down and close your eyes the world swirls around you or something, especially for heavy drinkers or alcoholics that might experience that every day. I dunno. Seems like it could be something interesting to research, get on it science!

# ? Aug 28, 2016 00:47

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Just to stack another anecdote on the pile, I smoke weed all day and usually have a few drinks in me when playing VR. It has the expected effects on my ability to play really physical titles for an extended period of time but that's about it. Never had the feeling that either was affecting any "VR sickness" type symptoms one way or the other.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 00:53

Sky Shadowing: Feb 13, 2012; At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)

Also anecdotally, I have never been drunk or high and I seem immune to VR motion sickness.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 02:08

somethingawful bf: Jun 17, 2005

So I wonder what the deal is with why some people are more susceptible than others.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 03:05

AndrewP: Apr 21, 2010

I am very susceptible to car sickness, thought VR was going to kill me. So far driving games are fine, Elite is fine, Lucky's Tale etc. is fine. War Thunder gets to me after a while.

The queasiest I ever got was Subnautica, which sucks because as a VR game it's pretty incredible.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 03:09

CapnBry: Jul 15, 2002; I got this goin'; Grimey Drawer

Subjunctive posted:

Per-eye billboard orientation seems like it would be better, but I'm not certain. Mostly I bet billboards are used far enough away that the screen space error between orientations is beneath the noise floor.

Yeah this is right, billboarding textures is bad enough already that you can't tell the difference from one eye camera to the next. It might be a problem if we weren't fully rendering trees now-days and still used as single texture right up until depth 0, but that's not the case. Billboards are still too far away to notice and even grass polys (which are billboards but not orthogonal to the eye) still look "fine", which is to say that they look just as crappy as they do in a normal game, but not crappy enough that the look wronger in VR. Shadows are another area where you can do one shadow pass and it looks just as good for both eyes.

Single pass stereo rendering seems like it would be a godsend for VR, double the perf right?! But really GPUs these days have gotten really good at processing the ole fixed function pipeline so pushing the same geometry and textures twice with a different camera doesn't hurt as much as you'd expect. For (waggles hand) somewhat complex geometry scenes you're looking at _maybe_ 20% perf boost.

As Alex Vlachos has explained, the problem is the number of pixels especially because so many post processing effects are rendered at the pixel level (in image space). A 1080p monitor at 60Hz is shading 124M pixels/sec, the vive is shading 457M pixels/sec so the real gains come from reducing the number of shaded pixels. Fixed FOVeated Rendering, Lens-Matched Shading, Multi-resolution Shading, and Radial Density Masking all are techniques that reduce the number of pixels to compute, especially useful around the edges of the FOV because you can't resolve poo poo out there anyway so why are we doing blur, bloom, emissive lighting, ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering shaders on that anyway. Reducing pixels by 40% in a scene that's not loaded with all those cool effects can increase performance by 30%, and way more if you're doing fancy deferred rendering or have some jackass fresh out of college who insists that his authentic Kubreckian film grain effect shader is worth that frame rate hit in the flashback sequence because it reminds old Generation Xers of life before Instagram filters. But gently caress you, Baron, I digress.

The point is that you won't see these coming into AAA games for at least another year, and even though they're being built into the engines it doesn't "come free" because all of these require your title's shaders to have this baked in. I do want it so hard and not to be ATI TruForm, which only took 15 years to come to fruition somewhat as hardware tessellation

CapnBry fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Aug 28, 2016

# ? Aug 28, 2016 03:57

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

Sky Shadowing posted:

Also anecdotally, I have never been drunk or high and I seem immune to VR motion sickness.

Add to that that I get sick in cars super easily. It just doesn't seem connected to anything.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 04:15

Angrymog: Jan 30, 2012; Really Madcats

Is there a way to change the orientation of your Vive Standing Area without having to redo the entire calibration?

# ? Aug 28, 2016 10:21

NRVNQSR: Mar 1, 2009

CapnBry posted:

Single pass stereo rendering seems like it would be a godsend for VR, double the perf right?! But really GPUs these days have gotten really good at processing the ole fixed function pipeline so pushing the same geometry and textures twice with a different camera doesn't hurt as much as you'd expect. For (waggles hand) somewhat complex geometry scenes you're looking at _maybe_ 20% perf boost.

Absolutely, the win on the GPU is pretty minor. What I care about as a developer is the win on the CPU from instanced stereo rendering, because it means that stereo rendering is no longer submitting twice as many draw calls. Even in VR it's still surprisingly common for games to be bottlenecked on single-threaded CPU performance, simply because it hasn't been keeping pace with GPU improvements for many many years now. Until engines get really good multithreaded rendering support we're still going to be chasing draw calls for a while.

CapnBry posted:

As Alex Vlachos has explained, the problem is the number of pixels especially because so many post processing effects are rendered at the pixel level (in image space). A 1080p monitor at 60Hz is shading 124M pixels/sec, the vive is shading 457M pixels/sec so the real gains come from reducing the number of shaded pixels. Fixed FOVeated Rendering, Lens-Matched Shading, Multi-resolution Shading, and Radial Density Masking all are techniques that reduce the number of pixels to compute

This is where you get your GPU wins, yeah; in many ways I see the various single-pass and instanced rendering techniques as a stepping stone to these, because if you're drawing to 9 (or even more) lens-matched subscreens per eye you really don't want to be submitting 18 times as many draw calls.

I'm still a little skeptical of the value of density masking on high-end cards, mind you. I know Valve reported ~10% wins from it, but it's inevitably going to be very hardware dependent; I'd be interested to see tables of results from it on different GPUs, particularly AMD ones.

CapnBry posted:

The point is that you won't see these coming into AAA games for at least another year

I'm definitely expecting to see these techniques - or ideally not be able to see them - in at least some of the PSVR launch titles in a few months. Meanwhile on PC I think it'll still be another year before we see AAA VR games at all.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 11:26

Zsinjeh: Jun 11, 2007; :shoboobs:

Poetic Justice posted:

So I wonder what the deal is with why some people are more susceptible than others.

In my highly anecdotal research I believe VR sickness is to some extent psychosomatic. I used to be pretty fine with most kinds of motion sickness, however during a severe storm that lasted all night and most of a day out at sea while in the Navy I got so sick I just wanted to kill myself (Force 12 storm, it sank a cargo ship and put an oil rig adrift).

Since then I've had a hard time traveling in any method where I can't see the horizon. Like a subway, or in a car doing something other than looking at the road or VR experiences where the camera or world moves a lot.

I think most of it is in my head since I've been fine before and my otherwise sense of balance isn't changed. So my thinking is that there's some sort of self-preservation at play. If you've either consciously or subconsciously remember a really bad motion sickness experience, you'll more easily go into "early warning mode". The body remembers that last time and tries to get you out of that situation.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 12:56

Cojawfee: May 31, 2006; I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius

Well yes, you had a traumatic experience so now your body reacts to what it thinks is similar. Many people just can't naturally deal with their inner ear and eyes disagreeing with what is happening.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 13:17

CapnBry: Jul 15, 2002; I got this goin'; Grimey Drawer

NRVNQSR posted:

Absolutely, the win on the GPU is pretty minor. What I care about as a developer is the win on the CPU from instanced stereo rendering, because it means that stereo rendering is no longer submitting twice as many draw calls. Even in VR it's still surprisingly common for games to be bottlenecked on single-threaded CPU performance, simply because it hasn't been keeping pace with GPU improvements for many many years now. Until engines get really good multithreaded rendering support we're still going to be chasing draw calls for a while.

Oh man that's a very valid point I hadn't considered and you are absolutely right. I did some demo testing of various methods and looked at overall frame rate and GPU utilization but didn't even think about the CPU time being wasted. This will free up CPU cycles especially on mid to low spec machines. You're also right about titles for the PSVR using stereo geometry and some method of pixel count reduction via multires or something, I keep forgetting about the PSVR.

About the radial density masking, I wonder about it working very well too. According to their presentation, it is the last-ditch bin to try and make framerate. If it worked so well why not use it more! But either way it is still a pretty novel idea. I'd be interested in seeing some side-by-side comparisons in the vive to see if I could detect the quality degradation. I have a feeling you could render the outer third of each screen at like 1/4 resolution and I wouldn't notice.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 13:34

MrBadidea: Apr 1, 2009

NRVNQSR posted:

Instanced stereo rendering shouldn't require any changes to post effects; it only changes how you draw the scene in the first place, the scene output is unchanged. It does affect shaders, though; if a game's just using Unity surface shaders or Unreal's material editor then it should be fine, but any games that write their own shader code will likely need to rework it.

I mean, technically you could change the post effects to use instanced stereo rendering as well, but the savings from that would be minuscule so there's no reason to bother.

ISR in UE4 isn't a fire and forget job. We tried it and we lost FPS in a lot of circumstances, but we never had the time to actually dig into it and try and figure out what was going on. So we disabled it and slammed Multires rendering in, which basically gave us a "free" 50%+ increase in resolution scale.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 15:23

BriteNite: Feb 28, 2004

Angrymog posted:

Is there a way to change the orientation of your Vive Standing Area without having to redo the entire calibration?

You want ChaperoneTweak

# ? Aug 28, 2016 19:34

Mordaedil: Oct 25, 2007; Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?; Grimey Drawer

I just wanted to say I've been using a Geforce GTX 790 this whole time and have suffered no serious framedrops or felt particularly ill despite the inferior card.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 09:20

Angrymog: Jan 30, 2012; Really Madcats

Mordaedil posted:

I just wanted to say I've been using a Geforce GTX 790 this whole time and have suffered no serious framedrops or felt particularly ill despite the inferior card.

Same. Only thing that causes problems is when people throw suns into each other in Universe sandbox. Autolaunch Canis Majoris VY is such a tempting command to just keep pressing the trigger on though.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 09:35

Angrymog: Jan 30, 2012; Really Madcats

BriteNite posted:

You want ChaperoneTweak

Thank you.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 09:37

Dehry: Aug 21, 2009; Grimey Drawer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwQHIsH4Ew

DOAX3 VR first look.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 13:51

Zero VGS: Aug 16, 2002; ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE; Lipstick Apathy

Sky Shadowing posted:

Also anecdotally, I have never been drunk or high and I seem immune to VR motion sickness.

I have never been drunk or high either but I always got car sick as a kid, sea sick in the Navy, and have trouble with anything Oculus rates worse than the most comfortable setting.

And yes you read that right I was the one teetotaler sailor.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 15:39

App13: Dec 31, 2011

Zero VGS posted:

And yes you read that right I was the one teetotaler sailor.

I had always heard stories and legends... Never thought there was truth to them.

Granted I was in the pacific, so drinking excessively and paying 300 baht to see a lady have sex with a horse was the only way to cope that I found.

Also, the latest vivecraft update added a walking in place locomotion option. Anyone have a trip report on it?

# ? Aug 29, 2016 16:31

Ludicrous Gibs!: Jan 21, 2002; I'm not lost, but I don't know where I am.; Ramrod XTreme

Dehry posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwQHIsH4Ew

DOAX3 VR first look.

Well, at least that's better than groping strangers on the subway...

# ? Aug 29, 2016 17:06

orange juche: Mar 14, 2012

Dehry posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwQHIsH4Ew

DOAX3 VR first look.

I'm the completely out of place poster advertising Campbell's Tomato Soup.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 17:09

Mogomra: Nov 5, 2005; simply having a wonderful time

Tokyo Sexwhale posted:

I'm the completely out of place poster advertising Campbell's Tomato Soup.

baka gaijin...

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-soup-cans-1962

# ? Aug 29, 2016 17:35

KakerMix: Apr 8, 2004; 8.2 M.P.G.

Dehry posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwQHIsH4Ew

DOAX3 VR first look.

lmao but of course I am not surprised at all

Tokyo Sexwhale posted:

I'm the completely out of place poster advertising Campbell's Tomato Soup.

LMAO

# ? Aug 29, 2016 17:51

Wibla: Feb 16, 2011

Zero VGS posted:

I have never been drunk or high either but I always got car sick as a kid, sea sick in the Navy, and have trouble with anything Oculus rates worse than the most comfortable setting.

And yes you read that right I was the one teetotaler sailor.

You!

You're the one making the rest of us look bad!

There should be a reversed sobriety test to be allowed into the Navy. Getting completely smashed while plowing ( :v:

) through brothels in SE Asia (or the Red Light district in Amsterdam) is the only way to cope during a long-ish deployment.

Somewhat on topic, I only get queasy in VR when I try FPS poo poo or when I do stuff in Assetto Corsa where my inner ear gets all hot and bothered that I'm not moving. Stuff like reversing quickly or crashing really messes with me, but it only lasts for a few seconds. I need a sim rig with actuators...

# ? Aug 29, 2016 18:01

StarkRavingMad: Sep 27, 2001; Yams Fan

Dehry posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwQHIsH4Ew

DOAX3 VR first look.

Finally, someone comes up with a true system seller for VR.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 19:03

orange juche: Mar 14, 2012

The only thing that seems to make me (barely) motion sick is having no agency over my movement in a car, i.e. riding in the passenger seat while whipping through some twisties at high speed. I dont get sick on boats or planes or anything, only high speed "spirited" driving as a passenger can do it to me.

^ you joke but sex sells, that poo poo will move VR sets like hotcakes if Tecmo brings it stateside.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 19:05

Dehry: Aug 21, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Tokyo Sexwhale posted:

^ you joke but sex sells, that poo poo will move VR sets like hotcakes if Tecmo brings it stateside.

KT management decided not to bring it over. Surprisingly it sold more copies than the latest Atelier game.

There's actually a Free-to-Play version on the Asia stores that can be downloaded. It's limited to Kasumi (the one in the video) and disables the casino games, which is the only way for the "owner" money to be earned at a decent rate.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 19:43

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

NRVNQSR posted:

HTC Still In Planning Stage For ‘Vive 2’, so that's quite a long way off. No corresponding word from Oculus, though I would personally say that "within six months" isn't particularly plausible. Within 2017 maybe.

Oh wow, I guess that HTC saw enough potential from the sales of the first model to build v2? I guess that points to a lot of uncertainty in the market to continue with this beyond the first model.

That's nuts. Foot in mouth, I suppose; at launch I presumed that they had already begun work on v2 and would have it out in time for Christmas. But here we are a full two quarters past launch and they're just now formally building a dedicated VR team to build the sequel. Incredible. I was expecting 2K per eye screens now for Christmas this whole time.

Oculus has Facebook funding them, rather than a gun-shy company on the edge of total failure. It's possible that they have been working on v2, maybe launching it with the motion controllers, but wow, this flattens the hardware curve way, way down.

Still waiting for the Google Daydream before I invest in a Vive.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 20:08

Cojawfee: May 31, 2006; I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius

Why would you ever think there would be a version two out in the same year? Phones don't even come out that fast.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 20:11

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

It's not even 1080p per eye, and there's already a "daydream ready" cell phone on the market offering higher than that, second it's just a bunch of cell phone parts with an HDMI and USB ports. Once you build v1.0 it would stand to reason that you iterate on that model with improved specs. Since the spec was frozen for the Vive 1 well over a year ago, it would make sense to use upgraded hardware to improve resolution, refresh rate and internal tracking gyros etc. from cell phone tech now available.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 20:43

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

They need to nail eye tracking before releasing v2. Rendering in high resolution only where needed would drastically reduce render loads while delivering a higher fidelity image. The tech would be worthwhile even on existing hardware if you supersampled in the FOV hotspot.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 20:50

Lemming: Apr 21, 2008

Hadlock posted:

It's not even 1080p per eye, and there's already a "daydream ready" cell phone on the market offering higher than that, second it's just a bunch of cell phone parts with an HDMI and USB ports. Once you build v1.0 it would stand to reason that you iterate on that model with improved specs. Since the spec was frozen for the Vive 1 well over a year ago, it would make sense to use upgraded hardware to improve resolution, refresh rate and internal tracking gyros etc. from cell phone tech now available.

I think you severely underestimate how much work is involved with designing and fabricating these things

# ? Aug 29, 2016 20:52

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

SwissCM posted:

They need to nail eye tracking before releasing v2. Rendering in high resolution only where needed would drastically reduce render loads while delivering a higher fidelity image. The tech would be worthwhile even on existing hardware if you supersampled in the FOV hotspot.

Foveated rendering sounds cool as poo poo, but I'll believe it when I see it. I don't see that being a v2 feature, and none of the Chinese knockoffs will have it. Sounds like a premium v3 feature at best.

Sounds like to me that foveated rendering will always be like SLI: improves performance on paper, but software support always lags or is buggy, and usually it's just easier to buy a single card of the next generation instead for the same performance, but without the added complexity.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 20:57

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

Hadlock posted:

Foveated rendering sounds cool as poo poo, but I'll believe it when I see it. I don't see that being a v2 feature, and none of the Chinese knockoffs will have it. Sounds like a premium v3 feature at best.

Sounds like to me that foveated rendering will always be like SLI: improves performance on paper, but software support always lags or is buggy, and usually it's just easier to buy a single card of the next generation instead for the same performance, but without the added complexity.

Once we start getting to something like 4000x4000 per eye, foveated rendering will effectively become necessary. The amount of power wasted rendering pixels that aren't needed would get ridiculous. For the moment, it's only a bit wasteful.

SLI is completely different in that in order to do it well you need to communicate with the nvidia driver team since it relies so heavily on hacks in the driver, as well as a hell of a lot of work deep in the engine's code to make everything work running on 2 (or more) GPUs. It's a mess to implement and has been from the start, limiting its support to mostly AAA titles. Foveated rendering is an engine-level optimisation that doesn't require anything tricky like parallelisation, if Unreal and Unity support it then almost everything that uses those engines will.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 21:05

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

They really don't need to fragment the market more than it already is and hopefully HTC/Valve and Oculus both realize that

# ? Aug 29, 2016 21:06

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# ? May 25, 2024 14:31

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

The market is open to being fragmented by design, it's the PC market! Any company can make an OSVR/OpenVR headset and motion controls.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 21:10

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