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HTC Vive is $799, ships early April 2016
- Thread starter Enter the Dragon Punch
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Nice explanation and I get all of that. The limitation to a room is quite limiting at the moment though. Couldn't they just add an analog stick as well? And for the full immersion effect, 1st person will be the way to go and that's quite limiting as well in terms of game genres.
Ahh gotcha. Thanks.
Smushroomed
Banned
I think my paypal was charged already
bloodydrake
Cool Smoke Luke
welp i watched that whole thing this am then promptly went and preordered.
amazing preview
They charge Paypal users immediately. Debit and credit card users get charged when the product ships.
I played that Portal Demo on Vive with the full setup, head tracking, walking around in a space, and the two controllers. I thought it was really interesting, and definitely felt very immersive. But after playing it once, it's pretty much just a long cutscene, so there isn't really anything else to the experience afterwards. The mechanics were basically pushing, pulling, and moving objects around in space. Again, very cool, but not something I'd want to do more than once.
I had more fun playing the sword fruit ninja clone, simply because I had something that was repeatable.
I had more fun playing the sword fruit ninja clone, simply because I had something that was repeatable.
$1 showed in pending transactions for me. (card validation)
The problem with 1st person and a thumb stick is that it makes many people, including myself, sick. There's a reason why Palmer Luckey said game pads are shitty VR controllers. If you want to play a 3rd person game or cockpit game with the Vive, there is nothing stopping you. It will still work with your game pad, hotas, driving wheel, etc.
Room scale itself is the exact opposite of limiting though. Physically taking cover, peaking around corners, throwing things, shooting, painting, golfing, sword fighting, building a Rube Goldberg machine in mod box or whatever other action you want to perform is way more satisfying when you're actually doing it instead of just pushing a button and opens up 1st person to a whole new set of experiences. Tilt Brush, mod box, budget cuts, job simulator, the gallery, hover Junkers, audio shield, mini golf, sky world and whatever else I'm leaving out are all completely different types of games that support room scale and the device hasn't even launched yet. Give developers more than a year of development time and we should see a lot more unique experiences.
jabberwocker
Banned
then why does rift ship with gamepad?
I think it has more to do with the partnership between Oculus and Microsoft moreso than it being a good inclusion. It's one of those things that got a lot of flak since most folks buying a Rift already have a controller and viewed it as an extra, unnecessary cost although Luckey/Oculus is quick to say the added cost is next to nothing.
Traditional controllers are totally fine for VR in any case, but I'm excited for the Oculus Touch and am a bit jealous of the Vive folks who don't have to wait for that kind of experience.
bigwinnerx
Member
I'm inching closer to canceling/flipping my Rift. I have a March/April number, but, I won't lie that the room scale stuff would be hard to not try out as soon as possible and I have an April Vive order. Decisions, decisions...
Their VR controller is not coming out until months later, so it's either gamepad or delay the launch again and let Vive be first to market.
jabberwocker
Banned
I have both on order but the more i see of the vive the more i think its the right choice if i have to choose one. They both have there positives and faults but the rift room tracking seems like it could be an issue. If it wasnt they would have launched with it. They will need a second tracker and that means more wires all over and more computing power aswell as more usbs.
DouglasteR
Member
Thanks for the help !
wanderingprostheyltite
Member
That plus they don't really have a lot of content ready for Touch outside of Toybox. Most of their in house titles have been in development for 1-2 years and designed as gamepad games. I'm sure they're cookin up full fledged games for it too, just not ready for primetime.
It's not really as black and white as that. It's also hugely because the games that were developed with Oculus Rift developer kits over the course of the last 3 years didn't have any kind of motion controller standard either. Most of them have been developed with xbox controllers in mind because that was the easiest and best thing available.
As awesome as Vive's packed in controllers are, there's simply not going to be a lot of software to take advantage of them early on. Developers have only had 1 year MAX with those to create content.
Oculus has been developing something that they think is a better motion controller than the wands that the other 2 big players are using. They are also waiting on more polished content to be ready for said controllers before they put them out to the general consumer. They feel they have enough gamepad-based content to keep people occupied in the meantime. We'll see whether that pays off or not.
To be fair HTC and Valve don't really have a LOT of content for their full system yet, either. They seem to be more willing to just put it out there anyway and let the community have at it with their consumer product, much like Oculus did with their dev kits.
jabberwocker
Banned
Fragmenting user base doesnt help. If something doesnt ship with the system adding back in usually is hard to achieve. May be looking at shipping with rift cv2.
wanderingprostheyltite
Member
That is what it seems like, yes. Those early days of dk1 pumped out some of the coolest demos though, and based on what we've seen so far it doesn't seem like it takes a ton of time+resources for indies to pump out compelling concepts for the Vive. Big titles will take some time to come out though for sure.
People like to throw "CV" around but with how iterative and niche this tech is I still look at these hmds as devkits for the most part, meaning fragmentation doesn't really mean a whole lot right now. This is assuming everything remains peachy with FB and Oculus' coffers are not in want come "CV2".
Good question. I'm guessing probably because Touch wasn't ready yet, but it also helps keep the up front costs down and doesn't require those who don't want Touch controllers to pay for them. They are getting xbox controllers cheap enough and developers haven't had a lot of time to work with Touch so at least this way everybody has an input device that will work. Down side is you are fragmenting an already small user base and if it doesn't sell well for whatever reason, developers have less incentive to use them.
I thought this was an interesting quote from the developer of Budget Cuts and it makes a lot of sense. He does have development touch controllers.
jabberwocker
Banned
audio port.
Reallink
Member
Well yea, this is what most have been saying since Xbone pad was announced, the inherent problem with after market accessories. PC VR is unfortunately already doomed to a relative niche (cost/power requirements), and Touch will be an even smaller subset of that. A literal niche of a niche. This 4 way fragmentation of Oculus Vs. Vive and Pad Vs. Motion will be a major source of frustration for consumers and clear impediment to VR uptake--and that's just on the PC side. Hopefully Oculus does a 180 on their "choice" rhetoric and force bundles Touch either once it comes out, or at least with CV2.
There's a ton of issues with first-person movement in VR games, that's clear. It's gonna take a while to figure out. 'Blinking' from place to place isn't going to work for most game designs.
So the killer app for me at the moment would actually be just a simple fighting game. Preferably Dead or Alive 6 (after all, DoAX3 is going PSVR). You're in the stands, 'watching' the fight. You can see other spectators all around you. You can hear them cheering. But when the round begins, it's you controlling the character down there in the ring / stage / whatever.
I love going to sporting events, so watching a virtual fight but being the one controlling it would be absolutely incredible.
Also, I've been hyped for Vive for over a year now, and yet only today did I discover it's called 'Vive' as in 'alive', rather than 'Vive' as in 'Vive la France'. It'll always be the latter to me.
So the killer app for me at the moment would actually be just a simple fighting game. Preferably Dead or Alive 6 (after all, DoAX3 is going PSVR). You're in the stands, 'watching' the fight. You can see other spectators all around you. You can hear them cheering. But when the round begins, it's you controlling the character down there in the ring / stage / whatever.
I love going to sporting events, so watching a virtual fight but being the one controlling it would be absolutely incredible.
Also, I've been hyped for Vive for over a year now, and yet only today did I discover it's called 'Vive' as in 'alive', rather than 'Vive' as in 'Vive la France'. It'll always be the latter to me.
loganclaws
Plane Escape Torment
The killer app for me would be a full on open world "rpg" (but without any stats naturally) where you can walk around, interact with npcs, complete quests and do all kinds of things in this immersive world. They would need to figure out how you can walk around in the game world by having the player really walk around in his room.
Well yeah, but I meant something we might get in the first two years.
I think everyone wants that pure virtual world eventually.
Finally, a world where I'm not ugly! Rejoice!
Try SOMA, perhaps that'll bring you to see why sometimes a closer-to-reality mechanism of a simple thing as opening a door can be more immersive for many. In VR this effect can be done even more pronounced.
If you don't know what to expect behind that door? Definitely.
I expect/hope that will change. Oculus needs a room scale option along with touch to compete with vive.
Also I disagree about the fragmentation of the market. In the six months it'll take to get oculus touch out, almost all of the rifts will be bought by early adopters and those interested in VR. I would expect a very large number of those to buy touch. Based on the price alone, vive may sell a lot fewer units than OR, so you may reach a point this year where the number of OR+Touch owners is actually higher than vive owners.
Lots of what-if of course
From impressions I've seen, the vive looks to be better for room tracking, and motion controls. OR seems better for comfort in the head and optical clarity (larger sweet spot).
(Also has built in headphones which for me adds to the convenience of putting it on, but that's a small one)
Owlowiscious
Member
light house stand options (for portability to friends houses and such)
this set of two and two of these (since you need them at an angle?)
sound good?
this set of two and two of these (since you need them at an angle?)
sound good?
edit: actually that should be ok. Just checked my light stands and they have a 1/4" screw thread on the top
you get these in the Vive Pre (assume it'll be similar for the consumer version). Not sure whether that means you can also adjust the angle when attached to a tripod/lightstand?
taken from the setup guide here - http://media.steampowered.com/apps/steamvr/vr_setup.pdf which also has an appendix showing the cables you might need to extend the power etc.
Owlowiscious
Member
You have a pre or something? How is the power done? I was planning on using phone charger batteries with usb ports. I see it won't work on the older dev kits, but is the pre still the same with the plugs? or is there a usb cable type plug that I can use for power?
lol no - I wish. I just have some light stands for actual lights
check the pdf I linked to, it has links to amazon for power extension cables. Looks to use 12v power, so I don't think USB will work and might even be tricky to get battery power cheaply.
It's exactly what it looked like. Something I really want to see and experience at least once but not something I'm dying to play. Most VR experiences seems like this at the moment.
Room-scale is limited to room-scale. If you're looking for world-scale VR, then it's not happening any time soon:
- your room isn't big enough.
- unless you've got super-powers, hills/caves/ladders/steps etc don't work.
A 1:1 open-world RPG would very much require brain-hacking, and that's not on the table.
That's not to say that RPGs don't work in VR, but you need to split the world up into room-sized chunks (or throw away the immersive 1:1 mapping).
almost like it was demo created to show people once at a trade show or other venue, and not a full game you're supposed to play over and over?
Having said that, I'm not particularly wanting any VR-specific game, I'm more interested in existing games that have VR modes - Elite, Assetto corsa (and pretty much any racing game that works), Minecraft etc.
The rest do look a little experimental but thats probably because they are. Luckily as indie games they'll be able to iterate quickly to find what works and what doesn't. And hopefully there will be some great stuff to discover as you try it.
ashecitism
Member
Yes. Valve use 2 base stations for 8 devs as their setup. At shows one game had 2 for 4 people etc.
That sort of experience seems heavy on the novelty factor to me. Personally I don't see a lot of lasting appeal in VR experiences if I am just going to be sitting in a static position as an observer inside the VR world. Especially if there is basically just one meaningful viewpoint as their would be if you were sitting in the stands at a virtual event. Ultimately I think the comfort of not wearing the headset will win out over that novelty.
That's not to rule out all seated experiences, but I think that for VR to feel worth there needs to be some level of dynamism to make you feel more present in a 3D world.
Yes, redirection is totally possible. That said, I'm not sure what can be achieved in the Vive's recommended play area. Here's an example in a much larger area.
Blue = actual walking, red = perceived walking to a distance of 5km. The outer circle of the play area is 40 meters, the inner circle is a 20 meter radius. I think this will be very useful for VR experiences at, say, a theme park.
To provide more information:
As shown, full freedom redirection needs something in the order of 40m radius to work properly - accounting for the fact that a person can get to the opposite side of the circle that they're walking around... and then turn 90 degrees... in either direction.
Other forms of redirection exists... attentional redirection (i.e. introduce dynamic events to get people to turn around and move in that direction), and magic corridors (sends you into a dynamically generated corridor to get you back into the center of the room).
Generally though, redirection is not an adequate solution for standard room sizes, and is only good for a subset of experiences that are willing to design around the limitations of redirection experiences. It absolutely cannot be the standard method of movement in VR - lest VR be limited to strange corridor based experiences.
I think a "god view" for strategy, world building, board, etc games would be great. You would be able to remain stationary but could control things and interact with the game world using your hands
Now get another 980ti so you can have VR SLI!
Which is much easier to support at a driver level than standard SLI - essentially just using each card to render for each eye.
This is cool in many respects... but sadly, the combat looks really uninvolved. A shame, but I'm down to give it a shot!
I think a well done rouge-like for VR could be one of its big killer apps to be honest.
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