htc vive

[sonatine]

holy fucking shit.

dumped my trump bet winnings on a black friday htc vive + msi apache deal for like $2000 total or something and im literally getting lit up on jack herer weed and now im hanging out at the bottom of the ocean with a giant squid.

guys i fuck around not this is the nextest level of all.

[Henry]

it's probably best to stay down there in the aphotic zone and avoid the latest world news

[lol wow]

tines fingers are too fat and uncoordinated to play halo with me so he hangs out with octopuses instead INTERESTING CHOICE BRO

[herbertstemple]

Need to stop watching Westworld Son, its starting to warp your mind.

[Mintjewlips]

Just a matter of time before he's fucking his favorite my little pony character.

[sonatine]

VR thoughts so far:

1) this shit is in its infancy. the platform is fucking breath taking, but the presentation is weak. a great quote from someone who knows their shit:

I'm not sure if there is a general understanding of how bad the current generation headsets are. Resolution has a direct correlation with the distance that you can render objects in vr with any clarity. And clarity has a direct relationship to comfort. It is like having poor distance vision but where you can't get glasses to compensate. So in order to have a comfortable experience you need a fairly close fog of war, or you need to just not render fine details beyond a certain distance. That is going to be really hard with Fallout 4, because there is a ton of far distance ranged combat. And a large part of the aesthetic is content in the distance. I'm excited to see what they can accomplish, but I'm not overly optimistic that this generation will support something that isn't painfully low res in comparison to the desktop experience.

There are a ton of game styles that need to show up in vr right now, I don't think this is one of them, even though it is the one that we are probably most excited about.

VR Hardware devs need to get on higher resolution screens asap so that VR doesn't stall out like 3D TV did. 3Dtv needed at least 4k and VR probably needs 8K, but instead they launch with HD which is essentially 720p for video. Just not up to today's expectations. We need at least enough fidelity that a VR headset can emulate the 1080p video experience and be an alternative to buying a TV.

Ideally a high quality VR headset would be an alternative to buying a monitor. When that is possible it can really take hold.

And don't get me started about those crappy fresnel lenses with the lense flare.

I love some of this VR. But we just aren't there yet.

there is iron in this mans words, this is a master class in the state of VR at the moment.

there are so many hardware bottlenecks that keep this from being a household item; CPU, GPU, memory, protocol overhead, physical weight of the head sets.. we are probably 5-7 years (optimistically) from being able to bring a prosumer quality VR headset to market, aka one capable of presenting its visuals with fidelity we currently expect from monitors/tvs.

regarding the current experience as a whole however, its fucking dope. there is virtually zero latency, and the mind 100% accepts what its seeing as real. some people can get a little seasick but usually thats from the app failing to perform correctly. i sometimes get seasick on boats, i havent experienced any sort of nausea in VR, but when the app glitches either from overloading or from the headset being unable to communicate with the sensors, shit gets unpleasant and can result in a sense of vertigo. that goes away once the app is performing optimally but still..


2) developing VR applications sucks and isnt profitable.

for every hero story ("I spent two weeks on this app and it sold 10k units at $2 a pop in a week"), there are endless horror stories from actual shops about how their smash viral hit game still isnt profitable. the root of these issues is that developers are effectively forced to be platform exclusive because cross-porting to other platforms is a Fucking Nightmare. so yeah ok cool there are 100,000 people looking to buy VR games, but news flash; only 35,000 have a Vive. 40,000 have Oculus. 25,000 have their fucking cell phones. totally made up numbers but you get the idea; you just spent 3000 man-hours developing your game for HTC Vive and it takes 2500 man-hours to port it to Oculus, you basically end up doubling the cost of your development cycle and you still shut out 30% of the market. those numbers are fucked up, and the games being brought to market reflect that:

3) 99% of the games available for VR are straight fucking retarded

here are pretty much all the games available;

You're trapped in a room. Find the key to escape.

Zombies are coming. Shoot them.

You're in a cartoon.

You're in a cartoon. Zombies are coming. Shoot them.

the rest of the games are generally space shooters and driving sims, both of which require 3rd party hardware ranging from $300 steering wheels to fucking xbox controllers to interface with.

that said, the prices are so cheap on steam that you can basically roll the dice and cast a wide net. if you're a "gamer" you will probably have no problems with any of the things i described and enjoy the majority of them.

speaking of steam, its a fantastic platform for getting VR games. maybe 4 button clicks and your game is running in your goggles. and if you really think the game is garbage, steam refunds your order more often than not. its fucking slick and a huge positive. especially since....

4) 1% of the games are just fucking incredible.

i think ive spent about 12 hours total in VR, and at least 11 of them werent really playing games at all, per se. TheBlu is an environmental emulator; you can hang out underwater. like super literally. it has a few different scenarios and they are all astounding. cost like $5 and its just fucking outrageously impressive, and is usually how people experience VR for the first time at trade shows etc. Universe Sandbox is another non-game that blew my mind. you basically create planets, stars, so on in the middle of deep space and they interact in physics-realistic fashion. its totally and completely fucking nuts.

lastly youve got video players. plus: its basically a fucking movie theater screen in front of you. negs: read dudes quote above about pixels so on, everything looks like a cam-quality recording. still tho.

also just to be clear; porn.

there is some porn out there that is optimized for VR.

it is trashy/generic/basic af. if youre good with totally generic porn, your ship has come in, apparently its an incredible experience, but its also just a shitty stereo-image type affair and 100% not any sort of actual VR immersive environment. nature abhors a vacuum however so i expect someone will up the ante sooner or later by investing in the resources to do it right'ish.

[Kuntmissioner]

Not sure which platform I used, but had my first experience with VR headset last wkend in Pawtucket. Based on my expectations, the VR far surpassed it. I felt like I was "there". Didn't think the experience could get better, and then I looked up. Excited for the VR forthcoming.

I totally can see now how one might want to invest in VR porn.

[sonatine]

i feel like i sorta made this point earlier but it really deserves to be driven home; i think the worst thing about VR and specifically Vive is that it seems married at the hip to 'gamers'. from the marketing to the culture to the app development, virtually 100% of the VR gestalt is gamer related, and those dudes are faaaaaaaaaags yall.

the most obvious fallout from this is, again, the apps being brought to market are just.. fucking.. terrible.. and whats most alarming to me (and is why im making this post) is that every so often a really legit breath taking demo comes on market and then vanishes into development limbo because probably 60%+ of the consumer audience are looking to spend $6.99 on a zombie shooter, horror story, or room escape app that they will play for abooout 2 hours before buying the next app.

again there are "AAA" apps like Serious Sam, Arizona Sunshine so on but those quality apps cost about as much as a PS4 or xbox 360 game, and constitute maybe 1/3 of one percent of the games coming onto market.

honestly one reason im thinking of picking up a Rift is because i think the facebook money getting redirected to it is going to be the key to pushing it beyond superior platforms like Vive. the free market is not on Vive's side here; there is no future in spending $8000+ to develop a video game thats going to get sell for $6.99 and probably get less than 500 purchases. and id say at LEAST 90% of the games i see on steam for Vive are going to die that death.

[sonatine]

as of the 'great winter sale' on steam last night ive dropped about $300 total on games/simulations/apps.

- virtually all of them are garbage.

- you dont know what nausea is until you play one of the games made before people realized this was an intrinsic design threat within the platform. i played a downhill skiing game last night and within maybe 30 seconds i thought i was going to spontaneously die to escape the existential horror of it all. i dont think its possible to describe how awful it is accurately to someone who hasnt experienced it. in very tiny portions it can be exhilarating and lend itself to immersion even, but beyond that it can fuck you up for days.

- no one and i mean no one is creating apps that take full advantage of the platform, and i feel like its going to be a while before anyone does. im literally studying C# AI/machine learning code because real talk everyone else seems content to bring $7.99 zombie shooters to market.

- one of the greatest failures is the ongoing obsession with 'full room' environments. i want to get litted in my big comfy chair and bug the fuck out. most people cant even afford to dedicate a whole fucking room of their home to a goddamned gaming system, but if you dont, 90% of these games basically cant be played. /r/Vive is absolutely littered with people posting shattered flat screen tvs, cuts/bruises, crushed laptops that are victims of people getting a little too situationally unaware with their headsets on. but again with probably 95%+ of the target audience being 'gamers' i dont see this changing.

- oh oh oh tons of games sold through steam *cant be played when offline* as some sort of licensing validation deal. punch line: steam gets dropped regularly, and during all those outages, the majority of high end vive games dont fucking work.

[sonatine]

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rofl.

[sonatine]