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SwissCM posted:You're awfully dismissive of roomscale. It fundamentally just means "lots of tracked area" and I don't see why they'd deliberately constrict the tracking space in the next gen? A little bit with the Vive and controllers with The Lab and Job Simulator when it worked properly. The implications are downright amazing, but when translating to actual games I'd want to spend a lot of time playing is where I struggle. When factoring in the space requirements and temperamental nature of the whole set up I'm not entirely convinced it has much of a future. When a disappointing amount of people will spend Vive money or more on a surround system and just stack all the speakers in front of a TV I don't have much faith in mass adoption. If nobody buys the software, nobody makes it and less effort goes into experiment. Naturally I'd love to be proven wrong.
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Jun 2, 2016 04:44
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You're dismissing games that haven't even been created yet, that's kinda dumb. The Vive is a niche product, at least the first iteration of it. HTC and Valve are focusing their marketing on PC gamers and business/corp use for that reason. When tetherless setups with inside-out tracking and room scanning become more practical it'll be ready for the mass consumer market.
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Jun 2, 2016 04:53
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SwissCM posted:You're dismissing games that haven't even been created yet, that's kinda dumb. People said that exact same thing with motion controls and virtually nothing worthwhile ever came of it despite ridiculous adoption rates with the Wii. While not an apples to apples comparison, but until there's anything that's really justifies it in the near future healthy skepticism is warranted. Inherent limitations can't be surmounted no matter how much creativity is thrown at it.
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Jun 2, 2016 05:03
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Plus ever single criticism of the tech is always met with "well have you tried it" followed by "in the future it will be better". I'm not sure thats a very honest way to have this discussion. Yes if VR gets about 300$ cheaper and yes if they make it way more reliable and solid and yes if they solve the locomotion issue and yes if VR becomes less cumbersome and requires less room and yes if they get better software then yeah it'll be totally great but that's a lot of ifs to be holding out for.
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Jun 2, 2016 05:09
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The Wii's motion controls are in practice nothing like tracked 1:1 controllers in a VR environment. It was essentially all glorified button presses. I'm sick of pressing the a button to use poo poo. It's nice when I can actually just do the action I normally would use instead. That's the appeal of VR to me and it isn't really possible to replicate that with any other technology.
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Jun 2, 2016 05:10
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Plus ever single criticism of the tech is always met with "well have you tried it" followed by "in the future it will be better". I'm not sure thats a very honest way to have this discussion.
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Jun 2, 2016 05:12
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Plus ever single criticism of the tech is always met with "well have you tried it" followed by "in the future it will be better". I'm not sure thats a very honest way to have this discussion. When I've been hearing that since I was shooting six polygon people over twenty years ago in arcades and giving myself scoliosis with sixty lbs headgear I can't help but take it with a grain of salt. The lack of space/feedback is not an inconsequential issue for worthwhile roomscale experiences, but once again I have nothing to lose by being proven wrong. *gets carried away by low poly pterodactyl* Mr SoupTeeth fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 05:14
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Mr SoupTeeth posted:When I've been hearing that since I was shooting six polygon people over twenty ago years in arcades and giving myself scoliosis with sixty lbs headgear I can't help but take it with a grain off salt. 
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Jun 2, 2016 05:19
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SwissCM posted:Literally every breakthrough tech goes through this cycle. The iPhone didn't come to being in a vacuum and even then the first iteration of that hardware was barely useful. Plenty of 'breakthrough tech' ends up being fads that are forgotten within a few too. But like Soupteeth, I'd like to be wrong. Then I can shoot polygon mans in VR playing on my 3DTV that I bought with bitcoins while recording myself on my google glass, all streamed via my kinect.
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Jun 2, 2016 05:25
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Mr SoupTeeth posted:When I've been hearing that since I was shooting six polygon people over twenty years ago in arcades and giving myself scoliosis with sixty lbs headgear I can't help but take it with a grain of salt. 2D games are boring as poo poo, why would you want to watch some sprites bounce around all day? Street Fighter sucks. And gently caress Battlezone, who would really want to play some lovely wireframe game in 3D? Videogames are a passing fad and will never escape the arcade 
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Jun 2, 2016 05:25
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One thing I do find cool as gently caress is that genuine sense of presence even with the limited FOV of existing hardware. Something goddamn big above you often triggers that "something huge is legit above you" sensation, with the early gear a literal gigantic predatory lizard bird monster seemingly came out of nowhere evoking more confusion than any real feeling.
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Jun 2, 2016 05:30
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A pool game just came out today http://store.steampowered.com/app/269170/ and it is the coolest loving thing since sliced bread. When you're sitting there with a real person just chilling playing some pool it actually feels like I could be there. You guys have a chat. All I need is some way to see my real life beer to drink and I'll never leave the house again. Maybe I can shark some money out of people too. WHAT A WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN
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Jun 2, 2016 07:19
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Nitr0 posted:A pool game just came out today http://store.steampowered.com/app/269170/ and it is the coolest loving thing since sliced bread. When you're sitting there with a real person just chilling playing some pool it actually feels like I could be there. You guys have a chat. All I need is some way to see my real life beer to drink and I'll never leave the house again. Maybe I can shark some money out of people too. WHAT A WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN
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Jun 2, 2016 08:13
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SwissCM posted:You're awfully dismissive of roomscale. It fundamentally just means "lots of tracked area" and I don't see why they'd deliberately constrict the tracking space in the next gen? So basically,  The (Virtual) Reality based on the upcoming Motion Picture based on the Novel based on the 80s
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Jun 2, 2016 14:51
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wyoak posted:So it's like actually playing pool, but worse in every way since you have no physical feedback and limited social interaction. What a future we live in. I dunno what limited social interaction means cause I was slammin bottles of real life beer and hurling insults at my opponent over the microphone and then I would put a beer bottle on the table in their way when they were trying to hit a shot. so yeah. Just like real life except they can't kick me out. You could get a table if you really wanted physical feedback and lean on that. I can do without and I hit shots the same I would in real life. Just some great fun murphy brown.
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Jun 2, 2016 15:56
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So, I just got my Oculus this Tuesday and have been playing with the tech demos. I've also played a bit of Lucky's tale and Elite dangerous. One thing I feel compelled to point out after reading this thread is that while the Oculus doesn't have the whole room thing down pat like the Vive does right now, it also isn't only capable of"sitting in a chair" as some are saying. Playing through DreamDeck, you can absolutely walk around in a 1:1 fashion during those demos. The Spaceship and Skyscraper ones are particularly effective. I could walk to all 4 corners of my (small) space and walk around the spaceship. I could move around on the catwalk in the skyscraper demo and look over the sides or back away from the edge. Farlands is simlar, it can track me 1:1 at the limits of the space I'm in. I only have the space for this in a small area right now and the single sensor seems to be doing pretty good at tracking walking moving 1:1. It can glitch if you happen to be facing an angle that the sensor doesn't have a great sight of the tracking dots on the back or the front and I'm sure you would run out of the range of the sensor in a larger room, but the hardware is clearly capable of doing the 1:1 room tracking. Setup on my end was completely painless. I unpacked it, ran the software installer, followed the instructions telling me to plug certain items in at certain times and it worked right out of the box and has been solid so far since. You can use your computer as normal and just put on the headset which automatically launches the Oculus home. I've done "consumer" level VR before in various attractions and so far I say it isn't even in the same league. The immersion is pretty awesome and I can't wait to see what sort of content comes out for it. Even playing something simple like Lucky's Tale (a bog standard 3d platformer) is just so.... comfortable. It renders the play area about chest height in front of you with your character about a foot and a half away. It's nice not fighting with an AI camera and just leaning in or changing your seating position to get a better view. What really caught me out are the areas where you go underground. It's presented as sort of a cross section diorama to a pretty memorizing effect. I also played around with Mythos of World Axis which is pretty much just a short demo now, but feels pretty fresh. Being able to look at a 3rd person 3d dungeon game as if it was a tabletop minature is pretty novel. You can walk closer to it, lean in, crane your head to look behind things. All just as if it where a physical model and you were trying to pilot a remote control character through it. It's party piece of being able to press a button and shift from 3rd person to first person and then actually be able to walk around in 1:1 tracking is pretty sweet and lets you explore things from a different perspective. I really look forward to someone taking these concepts an running with them. You absolutely could play the same game with much the same mechanics on a monitor, but it feels a ton more involved. Also, I've stood through the short tech demo Showdown about 5 or 6 times already and even though I know the ending is coming, I still flinch every.single.time. Knowing that it's going to switch from bullet time to real time and have the giant monster lurch at me does nothing to dull the visceral jump of when it actually happens. Yes, full format content is thin right now, but we're also just a few months into launch. But what I'm seeing so far is so promising to give enhanced experiences to VR. The thing is, there's a huge gamut of what can be done here. There will be purpose built VR games and yes the audience for those will be limited right now. However, normal games that can be played traditionally can absolutely be enhanced in some way in VR beyond just doing stereoscopic vision or sticking the game on a virtual 80" screen out in front of you. Lucky's Tale and Hitman Go: VR are prime examples of that. What's funny is critisim I read about Hitman Go: VR is actually one of the reasons why I think it's compelling. quote:Virtual reality requires a commitment: you need to put aside time to put the headset on and cut yourself off from the world. Unfortunately, Hitman Go VR doesn't provide enough of an escape to make it worth the extra hassle. And that's where i disagree. I find it hard to put aside time to game in general. So, completely dropping myself into a game and cutting off all other stimulus is oddly relaxing in a way even if it doesn't add significantly to the experience. It makes simpler games more enjoyable honestly.
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Jun 3, 2016 03:58
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I got my Vive about two months ago and I must say it's been probably the one thing that I've been most pleased with since I bought my super Nintendo back in the 90ties. I also don't understand the complaints about room scale taking space, I honestly don't get it, my one room tiny apartment has enough room to do it, and that's a fairly messy apartment at that. I understand that some people live more cramped than me but that it would be a minus in like every review. Fredrik1 fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 10:24
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So according to this: http://notbuyinganything.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/average-house-size-by-country.html The average size of a new house in the US and Australia is about 200m2. The Vive has a minimum required space of 3m2. And for that matter to play party games with the wii you had to have a decent amount of space, and that was pretty popular.
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Jun 4, 2016 14:21
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Tehdas posted:So according to this: For the Wii, you didn't need a "decent amount of space". You need to be in front of it and had line of sight to the infrared detectors. It worked with a range of 3 feet to 30+ feet and if you had stuff strewn about your apartment (like tables, chairs, people) it didn't matter as long as you could point your wiimote at the sensor. As for your data source, that is new units. New living space addition rate in the US is about 2,952 per month, this year. And since the data set is both unbounded and unconstrained (Even though the blog talks about sizes of "15,000 to 55,000 sq foot monstrosities") that means that half of that number are less and half of that number are more in the 0 to 4000 sq ft range. So the new 700sq ft apartments that are being built is a lot harder to squeeze 9 square feet of space out of. Do you realize how much space that is to carve out of your one-bedroom apartment? So that's half of the newly built spaces taken right out, so you have about 1500 NEW spaces a month that you can probably find a legitimate amount of space to run your room scale VR. Note that this "new" number is expansion in roughly 75-80% of circumstances. The cities are getting bigger, they aren't redeveloping what's already there into larger living spaces. So you still have 40s-80s era houses, mobile homes, apartments, and such that were all built tiny - probably maxing out at 1200 square feet. Additionally, area calculations of living space size doesn't take things like walls into account. It is the total size of the "inside space". It also doesn't take into account that rooms have functions and we fill those rooms to suit the function. So, a vast number of people can't find that space because they don't live in TV-show ideas of space use where there is a single couch, living room table, and TV sitting in a space you can march a parade through. I say this because people envision stuff like this as "there's enough space there!"   When, in reality, things look like this:   You can't go squeezing room out of places without rearranging the space completely and usually buying new furniture so that when you aren't using VR you can still use it as a living room OR constantly re-arranging the furniture every time you want to strap into your VR goggles. Arsten fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 15:16
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It just seems like such a profound lack of imagination when people deride consumer VR. I strapped on one of those bullshit grainy Samsung things two years ago and had my mind blown like it hadn't been since I was a kid and first booted up Mario 64. It was like another dimension had been added to my experience, even just floating around on a hot air balloon controlling a 360 camera. You could look up and see the flames! You could look down and see the earth! I didn't even have to move to feel immersed in this. It's fine if you're not interested in this technology, but to say it won't be revolutionary disingenuously ignores the enormous benefit arising from being able to feel like you're in a place that you're not.
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Jun 4, 2016 19:58
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:It just seems like such a profound lack of imagination when people deride consumer VR. I strapped on one of those bullshit grainy Samsung things two years ago and had my mind blown like it hadn't been since I was a kid and first booted up Mario 64. It was like another dimension had been added to my experience, even just floating around on a hot air balloon controlling a 360 camera. You could look up and see the flames! You could look down and see the earth! I didn't even have to move to feel immersed in this. It's fine if you're not interested in this technology, but to say it won't be revolutionary disingenuously ignores the enormous benefit arising from being able to feel like you're in a place that you're not. You misunderstand why I think it'll go nowhere. First and foremost, if you enjoy it: enjoy the poo poo out of it. Every technology has a following that absolutely loves it, even if it doesn't catch on in the mainstream. There are countless cult games, movies, albums, what have you. In no way do I think you shouldn't strap that poo poo on and go for an immersive ride to whatever game you think perfectly represents your interests. I don't care that people loved their Zunes even as they were upset that Microsoft was killing off the hardware. It's their thing. That being said, what you are describing here is a novel experience. How awesome was it the first time you got into a car? How awesome was it the 10,000th time? Ditto for the first time you drove vs the 10,000th commute to work? The novel experience will wear off and when it does, if you truly enjoy it, you will keep your VR and be happy - just like the motor head who loves his car. Just like I'm sure you shake your head at motorcycle riders who boast about coming within inches of death while intentionally riding in the blind spot of a tractor-trailer combination. Yeah, to you, crazy. To them? Awesome. It's their thing, and they enjoy it, but they don't pretend that it's profound or awesome to anything but a subset of people. What I argue with is the idea that it will create an experience that is above and beyond the annoyance factor with the new technology for the average user - and don't forget that key statement. Outside of people that are with it, which is the average consumer you have to suck in for commercial success, there are a number of annoyances big and small that go with each of the VR headsets on the market. Whether the general consumer is on board with it despite all of the annoyances is where this will take off or fail. And, since i look at this and see those annoyances, I'm betting that your excited gamer has a 30-40% chance to buy into this generation and play with it for six months or so - enough to spawn a second generation - and that will be enough to poison the idea for a decade unless the second generation comes out and goes, basically, "All those issues are GONE!" as the primary marketing push. It is too expensive (the price of a console in the best circumstances) to buy every year, so you have likely lost most of that initial generations' buyers unless you give them a goddamn great reason to buy Gen 2 - and those that didn't buy Gen 1 hardware will listen to those that burned out after six months and not bother with Gen 2 unless all of those complaints are specifically targeted in the revision. But some of those complaints are just how the hardware has to work right here right now, mandating additional purchases (e.g. Samsung's VR backpack to untether yourself) to resolve, which isn't what semi-interested and/or casuals are looking to hear.
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Jun 4, 2016 21:13
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But you can do anything and go anywhere you want in VR with only human creativity and imagination limiting us.....and a 15x15 space. The promise of roomscale VR reminds me of Shenmue. It's amazing and enticing at first to see a fleshed out and lovingly crafted approximation of mid 1980's Yokosuka with an unprecedented level of detail, but once the novelty wears off it sinks in that most of the time is spent waiting for buses and rummaging through drawers, or playing real games in a pretend arcade. Sure roomscale VR can take you virtually anywhere in a constrained space if available, but the question is what the gently caress do you actually do in it and will it be enticing enough to justify the effort and expense? The gimmicky nature of the not exactly rushed launch offerings don't strike me as a lack of creativity, but a fundamental limitation in the depth of the experience.
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Jun 4, 2016 22:34
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Mr SoupTeeth posted:But you can do anything and go anywhere you want in VR with only human creativity and imagination limiting us.....and a 15x15 space. While I don't think it'll catch on, I don't think the fact that right now not being able to fully utilize the system is going to be the limiting factor. Even on hardware designs we know well, it takes a year or two for the new video cards or new DirectX/OpenGL/etc to be fully used. That's a matter of experience that gaming has come to know and design for. I'm sure at some point in the next two years, we will get a Must Have game out of the VR development, I'm just not sure it'll be enough to make people want to jump on board.
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Jun 4, 2016 23:11
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Arsten posted:While I don't think it'll catch on, I don't think the fact that right now not being able to fully utilize the system is going to be the limiting factor. Even on hardware designs we know well, it takes a year or two for the new video cards or new DirectX/OpenGL/etc to be fully used. That's a matter of experience that gaming has come to know and design for. I'm sure at some point in the next two years, we will get a Must Have game out of the VR development, I'm just not sure it'll be enough to make people want to jump on board. Can't say I have as much faith, but you undeniably nail the crux of the issues.
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Jun 4, 2016 23:21
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Well shenmue was loving dope.
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Jun 5, 2016 06:25
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Not to mention a lot of the more interesting mechanics from the game are now in almost every AAA title nowadays.
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Jun 5, 2016 07:31
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I think VR arcades will become a thing. The tech is to expensive for a typical consumer, but seems just right for some sort of establishment. That and they can probably have more hardware to simulate a particular environment
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Jun 5, 2016 10:36
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awesome-express posted:I think VR arcades will become a thing. The tech is to expensive for a typical consumer, but seems just right for some sort of establishment. That and they can probably have more hardware to simulate a particular environment I don't think VR arcades are likely to succeed, at least not in the US. Arcades are not very popular in the US anymore, and net cafes never have been. A VR arcade would essentially be a net cafe with a much higher cost per unit, with the units requiring more space. A more likely scenario would be a VR jerk off booth.
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Jun 5, 2016 12:16
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So I haven't been following VR since I'm old enough to have played one of those VR arcade shooter games and I'm pretty firmly in the it's a gimmick like 3d tvs camp. I was generally aware of the oculus rift just from osmosis from the Internet yet in this past month I have been seeing a ton of stuff talking about the vive. Was vive something that was in development at the same time as the rift, or did valve see the nerd enthusiasm for oculus rift and then poo poo all over them with a better product?
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Jun 5, 2016 14:17
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SwissCM posted:The Wii's motion controls are in practice nothing like tracked 1:1 controllers in a VR environment. It was essentially all glorified button presses. I'm the opposite; Wii is a pain in the rear end for me to play when I just want to laze on the couch. I'd rather hit A to make Link swing his sword than flail my arm like an idiot and then complain that it didn't lock up the motion accurately enough (loving moblins with electric prods in Skyward Sword) I got an S7 in March and have used the included VR once or twice. Seems pretty cool for the novelty, but I haven't seen anything that completely sucks me in yet.
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Jun 5, 2016 17:33
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BitcoinRockefeller posted:Was vive something that was in development at the same time as the rift, or did valve see the nerd enthusiasm for oculus rift and then poo poo all over them with a better product? Valve actually developed a lot of the hardware internally as prototypes but didn't have the capability to take it to fruition. They actually more or less gifted a lot of the basic tech to Oculus, but then after the Facebook acquisition things immediately started going south in the partnership and Valve realized they needed a competitor before Facebook completely froze them out (which has recently proven to be a 100% accurate fear). Enter HTC, a consumer-electronics company looking for a new product to diversify away from the stagnant smartphone market - Valve jump-started them too, and they went from prototype to consumer product in about a year, while also developing a new tracking system that turned the old model inside-out to make roomscale possible. Unlike Oculus, HTC had in-house expertise developing hardware and established supply/manufacturing relationships, so they were able to do this a lot faster than some kid loving around in his garage (and also actually ship units out to consumers, lol) So actually neither is true, the Vive was a product rushed through development late in the process, but Valve actually developed the core technologies involved in both products. However Oculus fanbois would like to point out that Oculus did contribute ~evangelism and momentum~ to the development process. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 20:34
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Year of Virtual Reality on the Facetop will be solely decided by the same criteria we've been asking for forever now: [X] being carried off by a pterodactyl [X] race cars [X] space ships [ ] lightsaber fights [ ] pornography We're more than halfway there but I think 2017 is gonna nail it when Trump is elected and virtual reality becomes a lot more appealing than reality.
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Jun 6, 2016 00:05
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Paul MaudDib posted:Valve actually developed a lot of the hardware internally as prototypes but didn't have the capability to take it to fruition. They actually more or less gifted a lot of the basic tech to Oculus, but then after the Facebook acquisition things immediately started going south in the partnership and Valve realized they needed a competitor before Facebook completely froze them out (which has recently proven to be a 100% accurate fear). Enter HTC, a consumer-electronics company looking for a new product to diversify away from the stagnant smartphone market - Valve jump-started them too, and they went from prototype to consumer product in about a year, while also developing a new tracking system that turned the old model inside-out to make roomscale possible. Unlike Oculus, HTC had in-house expertise developing hardware and established supply/manufacturing relationships, so they were able to do this a lot faster than some kid loving around in his garage (and also actually ship units out to consumers, lol) Thanks, all the behind the scenes stuff is more fascinating to me than the actual finished product at the moment.
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Jun 7, 2016 20:34
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Mr SoupTeeth posted:When I've been hearing that since I was shooting six polygon people over twenty years ago in arcades and giving myself scoliosis with sixty lbs headgear I can't help but take it with a grain of salt. Comparing the Rift or Vive to early 90's VR is like comparing the Osborne 1 to a Macbook. Though I have been wondering when some developer will get the idea to remake Dactyl Nightmare. VulgarandStupid posted:I don't think VR arcades are likely to succeed, at least not in the US. Arcades are not very popular in the US anymore, and net cafes never have been. A VR arcade would essentially be a net cafe with a much higher cost per unit, with the units requiring more space. A more likely scenario would be a VR jerk off booth. Arcades and net cafes went out of style because as technology moved forward, they could no longer offer anything that the average person couldn't easily get at home. With VR, not everyone has $800 to spend on specialized hardware or the space to get set up for room scale play.
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Jun 8, 2016 03:21
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Cockmaster posted:Arcades and net cafes went out of style because as technology moved forward, they could no longer offer anything that the average person couldn't easily get at home. I believe net cafes generally had above average hardware (ie. at least had dedicated graphics cards), so that would be offering something that the average consumer, couldn't easily get at home. Especially more than kids or teenagers can afford. If each computer/VR set up is going to take up 10x as much space as just a computer, a desk and a chair, and cost 3x as much, is this going to be a viable business model? In areas where rent isn't crazy expensive, you probably won't have the traffic to make it work. In areas where there would be the foot traffic, rent is crazy expensive.
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Jun 8, 2016 04:22
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VulgarandStupid posted:I believe net cafes generally had above average hardware (ie. at least had dedicated graphics cards), so that would be offering something that the average consumer, couldn't easily get at home. Especially more than kids or teenagers can afford. Think of it more like a laser tag setup rather than something with individual booths.
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Jun 8, 2016 04:39
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SwissCM posted:Think of it more like a laser tag setup rather than something with individual booths. Yeah. Even just transposing that type of activity would be huge. Laser tag where your environment is the gates of Hell on Mars? Awesome. You know those escape rooms that are all the craze right now? Enhance that with VR and suddenly it's a hell of a lot cheaper to run different scenarios. It would be really easy to equip a room with sliding panels or wall partitions that change configuration to give real physical feedback of what you're seeing. We could get REALLY drat close to the holodeck with tech that's not too far from now.
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Jun 8, 2016 04:53
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Full disclosure: I've been developing for the Vive, have a Vive Pre, and have used my wife's Oculus quite a bit. We're not yet developing for the Rift because we just don't have the desire right now. We hear the touch controls aren't yet up to the Vive's quality. As an example: the Job Simulator guys were supposedly making a front-facing version to avoid making the player interact with things directly behind them for the Oculus. The market's pretty small, so we have our hopes up that Oculus Touch will be directly competitive upon release so our roomscale games port over. Oculus vs. Vive personal opinion: Oculus screen looks slightly clearer, FoV is utilized differently so it feels slightly smaller. Build quality of the device is nicer and lighter, but until there's a faceplate that fits better with my glasses it's very annoying to take on and off. They claimed the lenses would work well without wearing your glasses and that's just not true for anyone I've shown the device to. SteamVR's interface in the Vive still needs some work, while Oculus Home is very polished. Choosing the 'white smear' you get in Oculus vs. the 'white rings' you see in the Vive is a matter of preference. The Vive fits very well with glasses, the roomscale and tracking is incredible, and it's my preferred device at this time. When I show others both devices, they seem to have similar opinions. The bad: I do believe the software isn't to the standards of the average consumer. I see complaints about software like #SelfieTennis costing $20, and those are legitimate concerns. The cost is high because the market is small, the market is small because the cost of entry is too high, and that's a legitimate issue for the near-term future. As developers, we have some ideas what a full-scale game in VR might look like, but there's very few titles like that right now (I consider Hoverjunkers one of those titles). For the average consumer, waiting is the right option. The good: I don't believe VR is too hyped. There's a lot of unique experiences here that feel like game-changers. As an example, something I don't see brought up enough is AltVR, a social platform for VR. My first experience in AltVR was booting it up when an improv show happened to be going on. I visited the show to see 30 or so people gathered around a stage with two actors. I waved to a guy and spoke to him for a bit. Later, I visited a maze and ran into another guy trying to explore it for the first time. We headed over to a gameroom where someone else was juggling mugs. HoverJunkers currently uses IK better to fully animate your body, and it's quite possible to wave and shake hands with others. The feeling is unreal: especially with location-based voicechat going on, you really get the sense that you're in the same room as these people. Comparing these controls to wiimotes is a shame: this isn't in the same ballpark (and for the price, it better not be). You could never pull off something like Job Simulator with wiimotes, and I think the amount of interactions in that game show how versatile this style of control can be. I think the concerns about space needed for room-scale may be a little overblown. For some titles, it's absolutely a problem (Unseen Diplomacy is one of these). For the majority of titles you do not need much space, as a lot of games let you teleport around rather than actually requiring you to walk. Teleportation plus standing-room is generally enough for most games.
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Jun 9, 2016 14:05
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bull3964 posted:Yeah. Escape rooms are primarily a social experience (and they're really cheap to design and setup, so tacking on 10 HMD's per room and the computers to power them probably isn't happening), I don't see VR catching on there. Now maybe someone starts making escape room games for people with VR, but they're not going to replace them and those games probably aren't going to be system sellers. I do think that if VR blows up in the mainstream it won't be games driving adoption (but they'll come along for the ride which would be good for us nerds). There are potentially some very cool social aspects to the medium like Atoramos said.
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Jun 10, 2016 23:13
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wyoak posted:Laser tag is probably a good example because it's something that got exponentially less fun each time you did it. The first time was awesome, each time after that was getting more and more annoyed at the shortcomings of it. And the leaps you're talking about here are much much bigger than you're giving them credit for I think - you need wireless video transmission and some way to accurately track HMD's (and accessories! and external obstacles! and other people!) in a huge space. This ignores the obviously huge problem of actual physical feedback as well. The Vive's tracking takes care of most of this stuff already. It can be set up to be tetherless if you use a PC backpack. https://www.zerolatencyvr.com/ Zero Latency is a VR lasertag-esque thing that already exists, they're using a customized version of the kind of tracking Sony use.
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Jun 10, 2016 23:59
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