Oculus, PlayStation VR, and HTC Vive

GAMING Video Games
1

Already tried any of those new virtual reality gadgets?

PlayStation VR - out in October
HTC Vive - already available
Oculus Rift - already available

I’ve recently had the pleasure to finally try out the Sony Playstation VR. Before that, I had tested a prototype of the Oculus Rift (as noted on that MCP article).

On the Sony VR, I played two demos. One had me under water, in a shark cage. You could look at a shipwreck and several kinds of fish, until you’re meeting a Great White. Of course it eventually attacks the cage.

Man, I gotta say that as an experience, it was intense. I had to take off the headphones during the demo because it nearly became too much for me. I’ve always played with the idea of one day doing cage diving for real, with big sharks, to cure my everlasting fear of sharks and the ocean, but I guess I’m cured of that. The potential for this is amazing. The immersion was just breathtaking, and I could notice how my brain was visibly fooled. I mean you’re actually just standing in a safe room with your feet on the ground, but due to the overwhelming depth perception you’re feeling as if you’re there. This close to being eaten.

The second demo had me on the passenger seat of a car. A bald guy is driving and eventually you have to shoot drive-by shooters on motorcycles. You pretty much reload by doing the actual reload move, and it’s really intuitive. It is really fun to aim and shoot. I always thought that the displayed levitating hands would be offturning, but I was wrong about that.

Still, I have a hard time believing that this will have an easy future. First of all, the resolution still is really low. Sure, the gameplay and effect may be great, but the lowres visuals really put off, and they’re trying to win over gamers who now own 4K TVs and love the look of Arkham Knight and Uncharted 4. This looks worse than Uncharted 1.

Compared to the early Oculus I tried, there have been some slight improvements. The screen door effect is highly improved, and there’s no longer any lag. It’s a smooth experience. Oh, and compared to the old Rift I did not experience any headache symptons afterwards. The old system had an eye-resolution of 640. The PSVR has an eye-resolution of 960. The Vive even has an eye-resolution of 1080. Still I’m afraid that it won’t be enough, not until it’s 1920 per eye.

Have you tried one of these systems already?

I bet mongycore owns both of the released gadgets already.

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We actually had a small thread going on this topic a while ago:

http://www.chud.com/community/t/154657/o…-vr-thread

Not much activity yet.

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I had an opportunity to try the HTC VIve about a week ago. I was really impressed by how immersive it was - the two wiimote-style control sticks made interacting with your virtual surroundings more intuitive, plus it’s fun pantomiming a bow-and-arrow and whatnot.

That said, despite being in a virtual 3d world, player movement still needs some figuring out. Not sure how you’d do it short of an omni-directional treadmill or something, but until then I think most of the software will fall into the minigame category.

So PS4 VR is coming out in two months? Has anyone in the gaming journalism world had a hands-on experience with one yet? I’m kind of skeptical they’re going to hit that date. PS4 seems a bit underpowered to run something like that, but maybe I’m wrong.

4

I think the VR headsets are a great idea, but don’t over-complicate them with goofy specific-task controls. VR should literally just let me look around freely. That’s all I want from it. I want to look around my cockpit/haunted house/armed forces station without having to thrust with my left-hand gadget and swing with my right. I’m not at a Dave & Busters.

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From what I understand, you basically just described the difference between the Vive and Oculus

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A mate of mine has a Vive set up and I’ve had a brief crack at it. I had a go on a very early Tron-style VR set as a kid in the 90’s (which was pretty terrible, but memorable!), so it was interesting seeing the technology move forward at long last.

My feeling was that it’s impressive, and almost certainly *a* future for entertainment, but it’s still early days. I’d say they’re about where videogames were at at the turn of the 80’s - the potential of the medium is starting to reveal itself, but we’re barely out of the tech demo stage. It really made me wish I had some programming skills because it really is uncharted territory, there’s so much ground to be broken and money to be made.

The games I had a crack at:

Game where you stand in a field in the dark with a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other and have to fight off a horde of approaching zombies. It looked like a PS2 game but was still creepy as hell, and the visceral fear as a zombie loomed over me from behind is one of the things that sells me on this as a future for gaming. The problem is: you’re stuck standing in place. I get the feeling the walking problem is something that will take a lot of trial and error to sort out.

Secondly there was a Tron-style tennis game, which is pretty much what you’d expect. The most memorable thing for me was, weird as this sounds, sticking the translucent rackets into my eyes - this gives the uncanny feeling of being intangible and sticking something directly into your brain. It made be think there may be a bright future for psychedelic freak out games.

Thirdly a bow and arrow thing where you have to shoot a blue cube, which you then have to dodge after you hit it (possibly the one Amos mentions above). This one was was energetic and a lot of fun!

While I felt fine during the experience, I definitely had a woozy hangover sensation after I came back to reality, I’m not sure if that’s something that wears off over time.

So in summary, my thoughts are that this is very interesting stuff with immense potential - for games, for education, just for experiences - but I don’t see it being more than a niche thing for 5 or 10 years or more. It’s not just the graphics, the whole set up is awkward and unwieldy.

Imagine a point where you just stick a fancy looking pair of bluetooth swimming goggles on, put your usual earbuds in, and immediately get an HD experience that can automatically figure out when you’re in danger of walking into a wall or something. Something like that isn’t *that* far into the future, but I don’t think they’ll truly take off until it’s that simple.

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The other big drawback for these things, especially in terms of mobility which is limited to begin with, is that the headset still needs all those cables dangling right at your back and feet the whole time.

I’m sure that’s something that’ll be dealt with as this tech develops, but it’s a huge stumbling block for me in terms of reaching the goal of IMMERRRRRRSION!

Well, that and that it needs that clunky headset at all… but that’s really whiny!

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AYeah, the cables have to go.

9

“Which one has the best porn games?” is what we’re all really thinking.

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AMy friend with the Vive openly admitted the most urgent priority after getting it set up was to figure out how to get VR porn to run on it. He didn’t let me test that stuff though.

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I saw lifelike VR 3D scans of nude art models once. It’s so realistic it’s creepy. Imagine the possibilities.

As for cables. Is it really that much of a problem? Or let me rephrase that: do you really want to stand and walk around your room during gameplay? I mean that’s obviously fun for a party evening or to try things out, but can you envision yourself playing something like Arkham Knight, or Witcher, or Eve, or Fallout, or Doom for hours - as we all do - while actually standing, walking, ducking, jumping etc for the whole time? I mean it would solve our generation’s fitness problem, but just remember how long people had fun with their Xbox Kinnect or their Wii Balance Board. Not that long.

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Good point.

For me, I feel like I’d just prefer playing the games you listed on a regular TV screen if the only major value element of the headset was being able to look around with my head (which itself is not particularly amazing once you get over the novelty of it).

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AWith Vive being able to freely move in your designated little cube is a key part of the concept, like there are games based around you exploring rooms, kneeling down and looking under tables etc. Cables are a bit of a problem with that.

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I know I definitely had some problems dealing with the cables (and they’re pretty thick cables!) when I tried out the Vive at a Microsoft store.

Walking around was really cool though.

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My feelings are still the same. The core of the video game experience is being able to play for multiple hours in a single sitting, or as many hours as the player desires, without physical strain. Anything that introduces physical strain/fatigue as a roadblock to the multi-hour immersive experience will inevitably have a limited shelf life.

Controllers where you only have to move 2 or 3 fingers on each hand within a tiny amount of space, and a computer mouse you only have to move in a radius of a few inches: those have been the standard way to control a game for 30+ years for a reason. They are comfortable to play a game with for basically as many hours as the player can stay awake at a time.

I haven’t tested head-tracking myself, but I don’t see how it wouldn’t start straining your neck within an hour. That will limit the user’s desire to play any head-tracking required games for longer than short bursts, which will limit their desire to pay full price for longer head-tracking required experiences, which will limit developer’s willingness to invest the required multiple millions of dollars to make real actual games that require head-tracking.

Sever the head-tracking from the equation (and the stupid ice cream cone Wiimotes ripoffs, Sony. You’re joking with that shit, right?), and you have a head-mounted 3D TV. Now that is something that could gain traction in the market. I could imagine lying in bed, head hanging off the edge of the mattress to negate the weight of the headset, standard controller in hand, playing for a few hours at a time, limited only by eye/brain strain.

I’ve heard one of the key issues with using standard controls and gameplay with a headset is that it’s disorienting to turn your view with a stick or mouse. If they can’t solve that issue, there’s no point in investing long term development resources into the format. Well, except for Star Fox or Rez style forced perspective shooters.

(I’m very curious to see for myself if that’s an actual issue. I’ve heard varying reports on the playability of Half Life 2 hacked to run on Oculus.)

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I think this is a huge point against VR as it is now.

It’s why I can’t wait to finally try out what HoloLens is ideally supposed to be.

Kinda like the way video games should stop trying to be like movies, VR probably shouldn’t try to hard to be video games (as we currently recognize them) and be more like whatever they naturally ‘want’ to become. At least until the tech evolves enough to get rid of the physical constraints holding it back.

17

That head-mounted 3D TV idea sounds nice.

Oculus HL2? Horrendeous nauseau and headache, lasted for hours. But the fact that it was an inofficial mod could have been a reason for that. As far as I know Valve has yet to release any official VR support for their games. I think only Portal has an official VR mode.

I’m just waiting for lifelike recreations of stuff like the Jurassic Park park. Imagine running around the T-rex escape, sitting beside the kids in the car or getting into the lawyer’s position to be eaten by the T-rex. You could even grab into the gigantic pile of triceratops poop and calmly stroke drugged out Malcolm’s chest hair. (I sure get that it’s more like a theme park event concept than what we understand as games)

I wonder how many of our ADHD generation will have a problem with the sheer fact that a head-mounted display demands all of your attention. There’s no way to watch a TV series on the second monitor, to check your smartphone, or to surf 9gag inbetween loading times. It’s one more step away from casual gamer’s interests.

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AYou can already watch a 3D movie on a VR headset. It puts you in a big empty movie theater as it plays, with the brightness of the screen affecting the lighting in the theater.

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That seems like a pretty grim prospect until we get 8k display headsets to offset the resolution loss the movie file will suffer by being rendered in the distance in a 3D environment.

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Aoh sure! But for something I was totally skeptical about, it actually worked fairly well!

The resolution suffers a ton for sure. But still, not bad as a novelty to check out scenes for a few minutes.

The sensation of feeling like you’re looking at a huge screen in the distance is pretty cool.