Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble? Is it jettisoning an unprofitable money pit or is it the opposite - that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels? Both (VR not doing well, HTC needs $)? Not familiar with the numbers.
Fuck. If Google ends up with Vive and Facebook has Occulus that'll about kill my interest in the tech. Both of those companies would rather flail aimlessly at making money over providing a quality product and the last thing I'd like to do is invest in their ecosystems further. Though Google is capable of subsidizing the tech for awhile, which might be nice...
It's finally starting to get reasonably priced for what it is (I have earned the right to complain; bought a Vive a ~year ago). Haven't touched it for about 8 of those months because the games weren't fundamentally better than non-VR and in a lot of ways were worse.
So much potential there, though. Play Quake in VR and realize what 21 year old (and free) tech is capable of.
Having used Oculus, Daydream, and Vive, I still think Vive provides the best experience. Vive is "room scale", whereas Oculus and Daydream both are "pivoting in an office chair scale". (Oculus has experimental tracking cameras now, but you can't assume the whole install base has them.)
But VR as a whole is still in its infancy. Some experiences don't work for users who are too tall or short (say, children). The install base is also still too small to run a profitable business creating just VR content.
The Oculus camera tracking system is not experimental, it's been in user's hands for years and you can safely assume the whole active install base has them without any risk...
The big room scale situations are the only cases in which Vive is better. The VR is smoother on Rift, the apps are better, the headset is more comfortable, the Touch controllers are better, the optics are less blurry to the view extents, the software is much less buggy, etc.
I now have both and it's close enough that I still tend to use the Vive over the Rift day to day. I was surprised that the Rift controllers weren't so obviously better that I wanted to switch. Familiarity trumped other factors on that front.
I actually greatly prefer the vive controllers. The Rift controllers have thumbsticks, which I detest with a passion and find painful and uncontrollable. The Steam Controller touchpad feels completely different and natural.
Of course, people who have grown up playing on controllers with thumbsticks will disagree, but I suspect the touchpad comes more intuitively to the non-gamer market.
I'd say even small room scale benefits from the Vive tracking. My VR space at home (aka living room) is just barely 2x2m, but setting up the Rift in there was an exercise in frustration and a mess of USB cables.
I first tried the experimental 2 camera 360 tracking which sort of worked but had plenty of dead zones. The official line on that is to add a third sensor, which I did. It came with a 5m USB extension cable which wasn't long enough to reach the back of the room so I had to hunt around for a 10m extension instead; that in itself is a gamble as everyone's mileage seems to vary as to what will work for them.
After setting up all the cameras I still had to ignore lots of "low quality tracking" errors reported by the setup - apparently that's because my motherboard couldn't provide enough juice for all the cameras and the headset.
The lighthouses in comparison are just great. I just screwed them into the wall, plugged them in to an outlet and that was it.
I do prefer the touch controllers. The capacitive buttons are superb and well used in many Rift games. The headset itself is more comfortable than a vanilla Vive, although the Vive's deluxe audio strap make them equally as comfortable for me (at significant additional expense!)
"Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble?"
No, it's gaining speed in fact. Most of the applications are not in consumer but in business. See the new Microsoft VR platform and the headsets from HP and Asus. Those are the reason the current Vive is not so hot anymore - they manage full movement without large cables and without difficult to set up beacons.
If Varjo's varied resolution technology with eye tracking which enables high resolution rendering only where it's needed succeeds as promised that could be a huge boon (http://www.varjo.com)
What is the new Microsoft VR platform?
I never heard of it and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they would throw money to a VR platform after all their investments in AR.
This is kind of old news but the devkits are only now coming out - and who knows when the devices reach consumers en masse.
The difference with these new devices and Hololens is that Hololens is a standalone selfcontained device with compute unit and display with AR capable optics while these new headsets are full block-the-real-world vr headsets, more like Vive, except they don't need beacons for head tracking but use device mounted cameras. In effect, they are lighter and need less setup than Vive.
This has nothing to do with VR.
I know very well hololens, and exactly for this reason I said that would be very strange for Microsoft to invest in VR given all the huge time and money investment in AR.
Hololens is AR not VR.
"I said that would be very strange for Microsoft to invest in VR..."
The fact remains they are selling very VR capable helmets with display and optics which block the view completely. Maybe Microsoft is displaying a different page for you from the page I linked?
I tried the new Asus devkit headset only last week. It's not the hololens. It's sold on the same page, though.
They are selling it for AR as the "mixed reality" in the name of the product explains.
The difference with the hololens is that it is getting the world images from a front camera rather than using a transparent display.
Ergo, as I was pointing out from the beginning, MS is investing massively only on AR, could not care less for VR.
The cameras enable room scale head tracking. Projecting the camera image as a backdrop is optional. If I'm not using the camera image as a backdrop I think the experience would be characterized as VR.
I don't really understand why you insist on this AR/VR dichotomy - a good AR headset is a pretty good VR headset as a basic requirement.
AR can obviously do VR but it is much more.
And the opposite of course is not true.
That said I don't think that anyone would choose to do VR when they can have mixed reality.
Aside from the better room scale tracking, the Facebook VR system is better than the Vive (and all other VR systems) on almost all other counts. So I don't understand what you are talking about regarding a quality product.
I'm really not surprised. Cardboard is very prone to inducing nausea as there's not any attempt to ensure decent latency.
Daydream/GearVR is the base level for mobile VR and even they are much more disorientating than PC VR due to the lack of positional head tracking.
Currently it's Vive/Rift or don't bother calling it VR as far as I'm concerned. We'll see what Microsoft and the standalone Daydream with inside-out tracking bring to the table.
> that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels
As a division, Vive is doing very well but HTC is primarily a phone company which has been dying a slow death. From an overall strategic perspective it looks like HTC has no choice but to look for a buyer but as the article points out "A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer".
I tried out a VR kit at the mall. It was a novelty experience for me.
I’d have been living the dream if it was 1995. But it was just OK to me now. Back in 95 I was in college and did a project using an SGI Origin something or other with an infinite reality engine, VR headset and inductance based flock of birds tracking system.
They felt about the same to me, although the graphics then were like that Duran Duran video.
The main reason I’d want a car system today would be to free myself from a fixed screen. Not for games in particular but for general computing use.
We’re getting there but the resolution isn’t there yet.
If your jaw didn't hit the floor, then it was either poorly set up or the choice of demo content was bad. My immediate reaction to trying to Rift CV1 was to open my wallet.
I think the biggest barrier is people setting their friends up or people running demos and not properly adjusting the headset (vertically, in/out, and the IPD slider) before starting. Or not cleaning the lenses, etc.
There is definitely a "wow" factor to a properly set up headset, but incompetent demos won't help you there.
Wait a a minute, why are those the only two options?
I'm a long time AR developer and have seen nearly every generation of VR since the early 2000s (NASA, Sensics, Oculus) and have never had my "mind blown" or "jaw hit the floor."
I think people just have a super low bar for being impressed.
A few weeks ago I discovered that the CSS 1.0 spec (1996) uses a VR scene as an example of an environment in which to apply the rules. It was certainly in the tech zeitgeist back then!
No, just a comment in the spec: "Note that an application may reinterpret an explicit size, depending on the context. E.g., inside a VR scene a font may get a different size because of perspective distortion."
I used to be a pretty hardcore gamer. Now I'm a bit older, have other responsibilities, and considerably less time. Also, home improvement is expensive.
I desperately wanted to love VR, but could not bring myself to buy a unit. The demos I tried just could not bring me to pay that amount of money given the limited games and limited quality of them. Many of the ones with the greatest potential seem like they require multiple friends to also have VR.
I have a Daydream View headset and have barely touched it since getting it with my Pixel XL. Discoverability for Daydream apps on the Play store is a horrible experience right now. There's not even a filter, and no way to sort by newest, so you end up seeing the same crap over and over mixed in with generic VR apps that aren't made for Daydream (and thus a lower quality experience), or random apps that show up when searching for "Daydream" because that's the best way I've found to filter.
I DESPERATELY want VR to take off, and I've wanted this my entire geeky life. But it just isn't there yet.
Once the price comes down and quality comes up, and ideally isn't tethered, then I think we'll see a huge market open up. But I spent $5k on my last gaming computer (excluding peripherals) a few years ago, and I couldn't bring myself to purchase this.
I was a casual gamer and I agree with whats written here. I did actually try the Vive for a week but passed on buying. I am actually pretty excited about AR these days though. Apart from games, productivity apps will be big on AR
Same. Here in Shenzhen there are VR gaming houses where you can try the tech from various companies in a pay-to-play environment. Nothing I played really convinced me to buy... a lot of the issues are with FPS movement in a walking scenario. (Car steering wheel systems and joystick based spaceships are less destructive to the illusion.)
The most fun I had was on a moving horse saddle thing, where you basically hold a gun and play cowboy with your feet in the stirrups against zombies in a virtual desert! Awesome experience :)
I own a Vive and I demo it to people constantly. I've never seen a tech that makes ordinary people (as in "non-tech/non-gamers) gasp with delight with such regularity.
It's wrong to consider VR as a gaming peripheral - the appeal is much wider.
Music visualization applications are astonishing and photogrammatry is compelling. I've often just sat in a virtual location enjoying the ambience. Music making and 3D modelling (both for leisure and for professional use), social VR, fitness, narrative/story-based, virtual tourism and educational applications - these are all genres that work much, much better in VR than on a flat monitor.
> given the limited games and limited quality of them
This is quite simply not true unless you have very specific tastes or unlimited free time. There is more good content available now than I would ever have time to play.
There is a lack of big-budget, AAA, 60+ hour gameplay titles mainly due to the economics of game production (creating a typical AAA title solely for VR would require it to sell for something like $1000 a unit to coup costs given the current user base) but there are several VR ports in the works including Doom, Skyrim and Fallout 4 from Bethesda by the end of the year.
But I can list a dozen incredibly good gaming experiences in VR off the top of my head. I rarely touch non-VR games now.
Yes - VR has room for improvement (FOV, lens quality and weight would be top of my list - the resolution is far from being a major problem and most others agree) and the cost needs to drop further for it to be mainstream.
But the tech is already compelling in a way that no other technology in my lifetime has shown itself to be. Count me as a true believer. I'd buy another rig immediately if I had to choose again.
Thus far I've always felt its been a wonderful demo. I feel like the killer app should be here by now, what with so much huge names and money behind it.
What is the application that goes mainstream? Maybe 360 video? Google Maps?
360 video can be great but it's not really "VR". You don't need a Vive/Rift and positional tracking to watch 360 video. Anyone with $5 Cardboard goggles can experience it.
VR is the killer app. Or rather it doesn't need a single killer app - it just needs to gradually accumulate interesting content in the way the web did. What was the "killer app" that made the web go mainstream? From my recollection is was the breadth of content rather than having a single specific trigger.
Cost is probably the biggest factor holding back adoption with maybe ease of use coming second. The following needs to happen:
1. We'll need good inside-out tracking in a consumer device so that room setup is painless and quick (should be here by the end of the year either from the Microsoft partners or the Daydream standalone)
2. There has to be either a good standalone headset at a reasonable price - or the PC upgrade cycle needs to do it's magic so that most people don't need to buy a new PC specifically for VR. (I suspect the Daydream standalone will be underpowered - we might need another year for this to resolve itself)
3. The headset itself needs to be less bulky and more comfortable. Casually dipping in and out of VR and passing the headset around while in company needs to be much less effort.
For me the killer app for half a year has been Climbey. I have done exercise frequently by playing that game several times a week with a friend, and has hundreds of user created levels, some are much better than the few built in levels. Some are very long and difficult but the challenge is frequently fun (not always, some are just bad).
I think it shows the future of VR controls. In every other VR game I play I miss Climbey controls. Except Echo Arena, which also it's the best VR single player campaign to date.
Climbey has arm-swinging for walking and jumping and a climbing mechanic central to the gameplay. It's just wonderfully immersive (as long as you've got a head for heights).
Climbing is a satisfactory 1:1 movement because you "move the world" exactly the distance you move the hands, so it feels very natural, unlike any other artificial movement system in VR games. Lone Echo does this but even better (I said Echo Arena before by mistake, it's the multiplayer version of Lone Echo)
Jumping can be hard to get used to for some, it's like throwing yourself, and requires the same skill as throwing a ball to a target. But once you get the hang of it, it feels VERY good, it's an incredible sense of freedom, esp after playing other VR games with teleport or other systems of artificial locomotion. I'd like just to jump everywhere like that. The jumps are superhuman but your brain accepts it as perfectly possible (which is important for immersion).
Walking is done through arm swinging. I think it's kind of weak but I still prefer that form of locomotion over any other if there's no jumping.
OK. I'll focus on games with reasonable length or replayability - there's some amazing short games and experiences that are still good value for money but I'll leave them to one side. I'll also avoid non-games - even ones that are primarily for entertainment.
1. Rec Room
2. Sairento
3. Arizona Sunshine
4. Doom BFG (with the VR mod)
5. SuperHot
6. Elite Dangerous
7. Climbey
8. Pavlov (some prefer Onward but I haven't tried it)
9. Vivecraft
10. Subnautica
11. Vanishing Realms
12. Robo Recall
I can keep going if you like. The bottom of the barrel is a fair way off.
Space pirate trainer ... I love it!! It is so simple but so perfect with touch controllers. I used to be a gamer back in my youth but little time these days. This game is instant action as soon as you start.
Darknet on gear vr. Same deal ... loved it and a very quick fix.
Landfall. I played like a demon the entire open beta. My wife was very annoyed at me :-p But I think I unlocked all the mechs. This is a controller game though.
Thanks! some of these do look quite good.
I wish I had the opportunity to try them out, so far I've just been able to try experiments on the Vive, not finished games.
I like VR too but a product that makes people gasp with delight is not the same as a product that people want to use regularly. The problem with VR as a standalone product (and not just as peripheral) is that when using VR you have to give it your full attention. It's a separate activity. As such it must be weighted against one's other competing interests. Is VR really compelling enough for most people as a standalone activity? Are they really that interested in carving out hours of their time to (verb) VR?
I think the big breakthrough in VR will be social, and it will be more "active-social" than "passive-social". (Examples would be VR parties and MMOs.) Only then will VR as an activity have mass appeal.
I've tried the Vive in different settings and with different demos.
First: it's always impressive. You just get teleported to a different world in which you can move around and look around. You can notice the screen at first but you just quickly forget about it as you immerse yourself in this new dimension. It's just incredible.
Second: a lot of demos you can try are kind of shitty. For example here in London you can play Serious Sam for 10 minutes for 6 quids and I wouldn't recommend that as a first experience as it's too simple and too limited.
To understand VR you need to try tilt brush, job simulator, the lab, the portal demo, ... These experiences are incredible and I haven't seen someone not impressed by them.
Having said that, I myself haven't bought an HTC Vive although I've been wanting for a very long time... just because I do not have a PC and this would increase the cost ten folds.
The most fun I've had with my Vive, personally, is playing two player Rawdata. But when I show someone the Vive I always start with Job Simulator. It's such a great start and when you experience the "presence" people talk about, it really is staggering.
Totally agree. For someone who is pretty busy and doesn't have much time for gaming, the current VR experience is simply too cumbersome, especially if you don't have a dedicated space for it.
I own both a Vive and Rift, and apart from freelance work where I use those devices, I never take them out. Untangling all the cables, setting up the lighthouses, recalibrating the software, making sure the lighthouses are positioned well so there's no interference, asking my wife to stay out of the play area... It's a lot of work for an experience which ultimately leaves you with a headache after one hour of play (either from motion sickness, which I don't suffer from, or from the tightness of walking around with a heavy helmet on your head).
Fumbling with the headset to have a quick peek around the room to see where you're standing is also annoying, especially for people (like me, and many gamers, I presume) wearing glasses. It's so uncomfortable I risk damaging my expensive glasses and fall back to wearing an older pair. A screen works much better, especially if you can afford a nice 4K setup (which until recently boils down to the same price as a full-fledged VR setup).
I do have some hope for Microsoft's Hololens, though. I believe that augmented (or mixed) reality has a much better chance to lead to much richer experiences, in games but also video and creative work. Being able to play Minecraft on your living room's floor seems much cooler to me than in VR. You still have spatial awareness of what's around you, and there's hope that solutions for nearsighted people will be more elegant.
Agree about the dedicated space. Or rather - a space where you can leave it permanently set up. I'm lucky enough to have an office with 2m square of clear space - so all I have to do is roll my office chair out of the way if I want the whole room.
Inside-out tracking will help enormously with this.
> Fumbling with the headset to have a quick peek around the room to see where you're standing is also annoying
The Vive has a front-facing camera especially for this purpose. I wish the "welding mask" hinge seen on the new Lenovo was more widespread.
> A screen works much better
For what? You lost me here.
> I believe that augmented (or mixed) reality has a much better chance to lead to much richer experiences
AR and VR are just different ends of the same spectrum. Ideally you want both as they lend themselves to different types of experience.
By the way - I have fairly large spectacles and I don't find wearing them in VR problematic at all. There's easily 5mm of clearance even when the Vive is set to it's closest setting.
> The Vive has a front-facing camera especially for this purpose. I wish the "welding mask" hinge seen on the new Lenovo was more widespread.
Does it? I must never have noticed it. How do you enable it in-game?
>> A screen works much better
For general, short-session gaming. At least for me.
> I have fairly large spectacles and I don't find wearing them in VR problematic at all. There's easily 5mm of clearance even when the Vive is set to it's closest setting.
The main issue for me is putting on the headset and taking it off without the helmet grabbing and smudging them.
Double press the system button of any controller or the left of the HMD. There's also a button in the Steam overlay. Make sure the camera is enabled in the settings, and you may lower the refresh rate if there are USB issues. It's a very shitty camera but it's good enough for finding the controllers, obstacles, etc.
> without the helmet grabbing and smudging them
It must be put on front first, and it must be removed back first. That way you never move the glasses from your face. Worst case they get stuck to the HMD, but doing it correctly they don't smudge anything.
> Double press the system button of any controller or the left of the HMD. There's also a button in the Steam overlay. Make sure the camera is enabled in the settings, and you may lower the refresh rate if there are USB issues. It's a very shitty camera but it's good enough for finding the controllers, obstacles, etc.
Okay, you have just blown my mind. This increases usability a lot! Months of owning this and I had no idea... Thanks!
> Untangling all the cables, setting up the lighthouses, recalibrating the software, making sure the lighthouses are positioned well so there's no interference, asking my wife to stay out of the play area...
There's your problem. I just roll the cable at the end of the play session so it's not tangled with other things, and put it safely oriented in a particular spot, without disconnecting anything. I only have to calibrate the lighthouses when I move them accidentally or when I move the whole setup to demo it elsewhere, either of which happen every several months.
Also add a "playing VR" sign on the door and close it. Problem solved.
> or from the tightness of walking around with a heavy helmet on your head
You have the straps incorrectly adjusted, probably. Also there are solutions that don't rely on pressure, PSVR style.
> There's your problem. I just roll the cable at the end of the play session so it's not tangled with other things, and put it safely oriented in a particular spot, without disconnecting anything. I only have to calibrate the lighthouses when I move them accidentally or when I move the whole setup to demo it elsewhere, either of which happen every several months. Also add a "playing VR" sign on the door and close it. Problem solved.
Sadly, my little office space is shared with others in the house, which is not large. Leaving the cables next to me is not really an option, and I have enough of them already coming from my PC.
> You have the straps incorrectly adjusted, probably. Also there are solutions that don't rely on pressure, PSVR style.
No matter how I adjust, it always starts feeling heavy after a while. PSVR is indeed much better in terms of comfort, agreed.
I hang it under my table http://i.imgur.com/hNSuSyG.jpg and I could put it behind the leg and deeper under so it could be barely noticed; and the controllers are usually charging in another room (but in this photo they're hanging just behind).
HTC sells a "deluxe audio strap" for the Vive that is PSVR style, and I've made a mod very similar to this one: http://i.imgur.com/OkF6WSV.jpg (for a friend, I still use the stock straps but will probably make the mod for me too). I've followed these instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uDf6ayUQtk
I really think that gear VR is the best and most cost effective experience right now. The app store is great, there are a lot of options. An important thing is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. It's meant to be enjoyed 30 minutes at a time and that's the perfect duration for enjoying VR right now. You don't feel dizzy and you don't feel disoriented. The cost is also minimal. The headset is literally $100 or free with your phone. Apps are a bit expensive, but nowhere close to the PC based systems.
Daydream is a low effort also ran. It lacks good hardware, the quality is noticably worse than gear VR and supported phones are rare to find. Now that the galaxy S8 and note 8 are slated to support daydream, it will finally have decent hardware support. Let's see if Google does something interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.
As someone who owns a Vive, what I hear is: "it's still too expensive" which is really encouraging to me because I think as the technology continues to progress it will become more and more appealing to a wider audience.
Eh, I don't think so. It's huge in the haunt industry right now. The real problem for home use is how much space it takes, and how expensive the entire experiences are. a short demo "game" is insanely expensive.
Last leg? It hasn't started yet. Yes there is a hype, yes we read everywhere about it for a while but thats it.
Prices are still to high, people need to get more experience in it and investors need to be convinced.
This takes a while.
Only because tec is so fast, doesn't mean vr is dead.
In the next years i'm guessing things like this will come or are on the way already:
- VR Cafes
- VR lighter, cheaper and with higher resolution
- VR for industrie (especially training people in VR will be huge)
- VR experience centers where you have VR / AR by having a VR Headset and interact with the Environment
- VR for building houses, renovating flats
I don't really think so.
AR is not very far in the future and it will really be a mind blowing experience, especially with multiple focal planes.
VR is born dead if it doesn't manage to become mainstream before the huge AR revolution.
It doesn't help if a lot of people get nauseous trying it... That seems a bigger hurdle then the price or investors. It's even worse then with the 3D-movie fad where people only complained about headaches.
I've had the Oculus Rift for some time but in the end I sold it. At the current stage with the problems the platforms still have I honestly don't see it as worth investing my time in it. If I would place a bet short-term it wouldn't be on VR but rather AR.
Then again there are certainly niche's where it has his place but as a general usage device? Nah.
As to price, if production costs can't be sufficiently reduced, subsidizing might be needed. Would iPhone have been as successful without carrier subsidies?
VR won't be a huge knockout until wearable contacts get developed. I would imagine that would be followed by implants. Until then VR is a cool novelty and it will be spread by actual interesting apps/games being developed for it that aren't just ports.
Honestly they only thing I'm interested in when it comes to VR is virtual desktops. I've not played any games on VR but I don't game much anymore. Really I just want to have unlimited virtual desktops for work.
Agreed, I really want n-1 of my screens to be virtual and 1 to be physical for sharing with coworkers (until they all get AR/VR headsets of their own which we can share virtually.
HTC vive is in trouble. The tech is basically licensed from valve (I say licensed, valve give it away for free I believe). There are multiple competing headsets (LG) due for release soon also licensing the valve lighthouse tech.
But no one is interested in the HTC app store, everyone gets their content from valve via steam.
So HTC can't sell their headset as a loss leader and make the money back on games, because they don't have any monopoly on the games channel.
The other major competitor Oculus is owned by Facebook who basically have infinite money. They have undercut the price of the vive significantly (presumably selling it at a loss) and throw money at all the studios to make Oculus exclusive content.
I have a vive, I think it's amazing tech. I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus. I far prefer the open philosophy, and the strategy of not making content hardware exclusive. I want it to succeed (and maybe it will via other partners with valve). But right now, i think HTC are going to struggle to make it work for them.
> I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus.
This is the real secret sauce for Vive, and it's completely designed and owned by Valve. Combined with their lackluster new phone, I think the future is pretty grim for HTC.
Lackluster new phone except for the awesome screen, top notch specs, nice battery life, comfortable UI close to stock Android, zero lag in the UI (ahem, Samsung, are you listening?), lightning fast fingerprint reader at a comfortable position at the front (still there, Samsung?), great camera (best mobile camera according to dxomark), rather handy "squeezable" option (customizable, as opposed to e.g. Bixby button), best sound in any smartphone hands down, impressive noise-cancelling in-ear headphones included (this comes from an owner of the Bose QC25's), and quick charge 3.
But yeah, it has bezels and now the latest fad is bezelless (making phones more prone to break on falls and to accidentally touching the screen if you grab them incorrectly). Plus it's not Samsung and they don't have money to put all the tremendously biased smartphone press in their favor. So it is automatically labelled as lackluster, like everything HTC has made for the last 5 years or so, including fantastic and innovative phones like the M7, M8 and 10. Meanwhile, others make phones that freaking explode and still get undivided praise by the press.
If I wasn't averse to paying flagship prices I'd be a HTC customer. They deserve credit for the innovation they brought to smartphones pre-iPhone and they've never released a stinker (I'll give the Dream a free pass for being a v1)
But mid-range is where it's at, unless you're Samsung or Apple. There's not room for two premium brands and I don't have a need for an $800 device when the $400 devices are so good.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadFuck. If Google ends up with Vive and Facebook has Occulus that'll about kill my interest in the tech. Both of those companies would rather flail aimlessly at making money over providing a quality product and the last thing I'd like to do is invest in their ecosystems further. Though Google is capable of subsidizing the tech for awhile, which might be nice...
It's finally starting to get reasonably priced for what it is (I have earned the right to complain; bought a Vive a ~year ago). Haven't touched it for about 8 of those months because the games weren't fundamentally better than non-VR and in a lot of ways were worse.
So much potential there, though. Play Quake in VR and realize what 21 year old (and free) tech is capable of.
But VR as a whole is still in its infancy. Some experiences don't work for users who are too tall or short (say, children). The install base is also still too small to run a profitable business creating just VR content.
Of course, people who have grown up playing on controllers with thumbsticks will disagree, but I suspect the touchpad comes more intuitively to the non-gamer market.
I first tried the experimental 2 camera 360 tracking which sort of worked but had plenty of dead zones. The official line on that is to add a third sensor, which I did. It came with a 5m USB extension cable which wasn't long enough to reach the back of the room so I had to hunt around for a 10m extension instead; that in itself is a gamble as everyone's mileage seems to vary as to what will work for them.
After setting up all the cameras I still had to ignore lots of "low quality tracking" errors reported by the setup - apparently that's because my motherboard couldn't provide enough juice for all the cameras and the headset.
The lighthouses in comparison are just great. I just screwed them into the wall, plugged them in to an outlet and that was it.
I do prefer the touch controllers. The capacitive buttons are superb and well used in many Rift games. The headset itself is more comfortable than a vanilla Vive, although the Vive's deluxe audio strap make them equally as comfortable for me (at significant additional expense!)
No, it's gaining speed in fact. Most of the applications are not in consumer but in business. See the new Microsoft VR platform and the headsets from HP and Asus. Those are the reason the current Vive is not so hot anymore - they manage full movement without large cables and without difficult to set up beacons.
If Varjo's varied resolution technology with eye tracking which enables high resolution rendering only where it's needed succeeds as promised that could be a huge boon (http://www.varjo.com)
But - for professional applications, not games.
The difference with these new devices and Hololens is that Hololens is a standalone selfcontained device with compute unit and display with AR capable optics while these new headsets are full block-the-real-world vr headsets, more like Vive, except they don't need beacons for head tracking but use device mounted cameras. In effect, they are lighter and need less setup than Vive.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-r...
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality...
The fact remains they are selling very VR capable helmets with display and optics which block the view completely. Maybe Microsoft is displaying a different page for you from the page I linked?
I tried the new Asus devkit headset only last week. It's not the hololens. It's sold on the same page, though.
The cameras enable room scale head tracking. Projecting the camera image as a backdrop is optional. If I'm not using the camera image as a backdrop I think the experience would be characterized as VR.
I don't really understand why you insist on this AR/VR dichotomy - a good AR headset is a pretty good VR headset as a basic requirement.
I got to compile (had to fix some bugs in the source), and played for about 5 minutes before the motion sickness hit hard.
Daydream/GearVR is the base level for mobile VR and even they are much more disorientating than PC VR due to the lack of positional head tracking.
Currently it's Vive/Rift or don't bother calling it VR as far as I'm concerned. We'll see what Microsoft and the standalone Daydream with inside-out tracking bring to the table.
As a division, Vive is doing very well but HTC is primarily a phone company which has been dying a slow death. From an overall strategic perspective it looks like HTC has no choice but to look for a buyer but as the article points out "A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer".
But somehow I'm guessing they probably don't want to manage manufacturing.
I’d have been living the dream if it was 1995. But it was just OK to me now. Back in 95 I was in college and did a project using an SGI Origin something or other with an infinite reality engine, VR headset and inductance based flock of birds tracking system.
They felt about the same to me, although the graphics then were like that Duran Duran video.
The main reason I’d want a car system today would be to free myself from a fixed screen. Not for games in particular but for general computing use.
We’re getting there but the resolution isn’t there yet.
that could have been anything other than an oculus CV1 or vive, without controllers too.
There is definitely a "wow" factor to a properly set up headset, but incompetent demos won't help you there.
I have a long running bet against the future popularity of VR, and that experience certainly shook my confidence in my position.
I'm a long time AR developer and have seen nearly every generation of VR since the early 2000s (NASA, Sensics, Oculus) and have never had my "mind blown" or "jaw hit the floor."
I think people just have a super low bar for being impressed.
You might be an outlier.
For the curious, here is a PC Magazine article on VR from March 1995:
https://books.google.com/books?id=79i1lfAqumUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
I desperately wanted to love VR, but could not bring myself to buy a unit. The demos I tried just could not bring me to pay that amount of money given the limited games and limited quality of them. Many of the ones with the greatest potential seem like they require multiple friends to also have VR.
I have a Daydream View headset and have barely touched it since getting it with my Pixel XL. Discoverability for Daydream apps on the Play store is a horrible experience right now. There's not even a filter, and no way to sort by newest, so you end up seeing the same crap over and over mixed in with generic VR apps that aren't made for Daydream (and thus a lower quality experience), or random apps that show up when searching for "Daydream" because that's the best way I've found to filter.
I DESPERATELY want VR to take off, and I've wanted this my entire geeky life. But it just isn't there yet.
Once the price comes down and quality comes up, and ideally isn't tethered, then I think we'll see a huge market open up. But I spent $5k on my last gaming computer (excluding peripherals) a few years ago, and I couldn't bring myself to purchase this.
The most fun I had was on a moving horse saddle thing, where you basically hold a gun and play cowboy with your feet in the stirrups against zombies in a virtual desert! Awesome experience :)
It's wrong to consider VR as a gaming peripheral - the appeal is much wider.
Music visualization applications are astonishing and photogrammatry is compelling. I've often just sat in a virtual location enjoying the ambience. Music making and 3D modelling (both for leisure and for professional use), social VR, fitness, narrative/story-based, virtual tourism and educational applications - these are all genres that work much, much better in VR than on a flat monitor.
> given the limited games and limited quality of them
This is quite simply not true unless you have very specific tastes or unlimited free time. There is more good content available now than I would ever have time to play.
There is a lack of big-budget, AAA, 60+ hour gameplay titles mainly due to the economics of game production (creating a typical AAA title solely for VR would require it to sell for something like $1000 a unit to coup costs given the current user base) but there are several VR ports in the works including Doom, Skyrim and Fallout 4 from Bethesda by the end of the year.
But I can list a dozen incredibly good gaming experiences in VR off the top of my head. I rarely touch non-VR games now.
Yes - VR has room for improvement (FOV, lens quality and weight would be top of my list - the resolution is far from being a major problem and most others agree) and the cost needs to drop further for it to be mainstream.
But the tech is already compelling in a way that no other technology in my lifetime has shown itself to be. Count me as a true believer. I'd buy another rig immediately if I had to choose again.
What is the application that goes mainstream? Maybe 360 video? Google Maps?
360 video can be great but it's not really "VR". You don't need a Vive/Rift and positional tracking to watch 360 video. Anyone with $5 Cardboard goggles can experience it.
VR is the killer app. Or rather it doesn't need a single killer app - it just needs to gradually accumulate interesting content in the way the web did. What was the "killer app" that made the web go mainstream? From my recollection is was the breadth of content rather than having a single specific trigger.
Cost is probably the biggest factor holding back adoption with maybe ease of use coming second. The following needs to happen:
1. We'll need good inside-out tracking in a consumer device so that room setup is painless and quick (should be here by the end of the year either from the Microsoft partners or the Daydream standalone)
2. There has to be either a good standalone headset at a reasonable price - or the PC upgrade cycle needs to do it's magic so that most people don't need to buy a new PC specifically for VR. (I suspect the Daydream standalone will be underpowered - we might need another year for this to resolve itself)
3. The headset itself needs to be less bulky and more comfortable. Casually dipping in and out of VR and passing the headset around while in company needs to be much less effort.
I think it shows the future of VR controls. In every other VR game I play I miss Climbey controls. Except Echo Arena, which also it's the best VR single player campaign to date.
Climbey has arm-swinging for walking and jumping and a climbing mechanic central to the gameplay. It's just wonderfully immersive (as long as you've got a head for heights).
Jumping can be hard to get used to for some, it's like throwing yourself, and requires the same skill as throwing a ball to a target. But once you get the hang of it, it feels VERY good, it's an incredible sense of freedom, esp after playing other VR games with teleport or other systems of artificial locomotion. I'd like just to jump everywhere like that. The jumps are superhuman but your brain accepts it as perfectly possible (which is important for immersion).
Walking is done through arm swinging. I think it's kind of weak but I still prefer that form of locomotion over any other if there's no jumping.
Could you actually do it please?
1. Rec Room
2. Sairento
3. Arizona Sunshine
4. Doom BFG (with the VR mod)
5. SuperHot
6. Elite Dangerous
7. Climbey
8. Pavlov (some prefer Onward but I haven't tried it)
9. Vivecraft
10. Subnautica
11. Vanishing Realms
12. Robo Recall
I can keep going if you like. The bottom of the barrel is a fair way off.
Darknet on gear vr. Same deal ... loved it and a very quick fix.
Landfall. I played like a demon the entire open beta. My wife was very annoyed at me :-p But I think I unlocked all the mechs. This is a controller game though.
I think the big breakthrough in VR will be social, and it will be more "active-social" than "passive-social". (Examples would be VR parties and MMOs.) Only then will VR as an activity have mass appeal.
First: it's always impressive. You just get teleported to a different world in which you can move around and look around. You can notice the screen at first but you just quickly forget about it as you immerse yourself in this new dimension. It's just incredible.
Second: a lot of demos you can try are kind of shitty. For example here in London you can play Serious Sam for 10 minutes for 6 quids and I wouldn't recommend that as a first experience as it's too simple and too limited.
To understand VR you need to try tilt brush, job simulator, the lab, the portal demo, ... These experiences are incredible and I haven't seen someone not impressed by them.
Having said that, I myself haven't bought an HTC Vive although I've been wanting for a very long time... just because I do not have a PC and this would increase the cost ten folds.
I own both a Vive and Rift, and apart from freelance work where I use those devices, I never take them out. Untangling all the cables, setting up the lighthouses, recalibrating the software, making sure the lighthouses are positioned well so there's no interference, asking my wife to stay out of the play area... It's a lot of work for an experience which ultimately leaves you with a headache after one hour of play (either from motion sickness, which I don't suffer from, or from the tightness of walking around with a heavy helmet on your head).
Fumbling with the headset to have a quick peek around the room to see where you're standing is also annoying, especially for people (like me, and many gamers, I presume) wearing glasses. It's so uncomfortable I risk damaging my expensive glasses and fall back to wearing an older pair. A screen works much better, especially if you can afford a nice 4K setup (which until recently boils down to the same price as a full-fledged VR setup).
I do have some hope for Microsoft's Hololens, though. I believe that augmented (or mixed) reality has a much better chance to lead to much richer experiences, in games but also video and creative work. Being able to play Minecraft on your living room's floor seems much cooler to me than in VR. You still have spatial awareness of what's around you, and there's hope that solutions for nearsighted people will be more elegant.
Inside-out tracking will help enormously with this.
> Fumbling with the headset to have a quick peek around the room to see where you're standing is also annoying
The Vive has a front-facing camera especially for this purpose. I wish the "welding mask" hinge seen on the new Lenovo was more widespread.
> A screen works much better
For what? You lost me here.
> I believe that augmented (or mixed) reality has a much better chance to lead to much richer experiences
AR and VR are just different ends of the same spectrum. Ideally you want both as they lend themselves to different types of experience.
By the way - I have fairly large spectacles and I don't find wearing them in VR problematic at all. There's easily 5mm of clearance even when the Vive is set to it's closest setting.
Does it? I must never have noticed it. How do you enable it in-game?
>> A screen works much better
For general, short-session gaming. At least for me.
> I have fairly large spectacles and I don't find wearing them in VR problematic at all. There's easily 5mm of clearance even when the Vive is set to it's closest setting.
The main issue for me is putting on the headset and taking it off without the helmet grabbing and smudging them.
Double press the system button of any controller or the left of the HMD. There's also a button in the Steam overlay. Make sure the camera is enabled in the settings, and you may lower the refresh rate if there are USB issues. It's a very shitty camera but it's good enough for finding the controllers, obstacles, etc.
> without the helmet grabbing and smudging them
It must be put on front first, and it must be removed back first. That way you never move the glasses from your face. Worst case they get stuck to the HMD, but doing it correctly they don't smudge anything.
Okay, you have just blown my mind. This increases usability a lot! Months of owning this and I had no idea... Thanks!
There's your problem. I just roll the cable at the end of the play session so it's not tangled with other things, and put it safely oriented in a particular spot, without disconnecting anything. I only have to calibrate the lighthouses when I move them accidentally or when I move the whole setup to demo it elsewhere, either of which happen every several months.
Also add a "playing VR" sign on the door and close it. Problem solved.
> or from the tightness of walking around with a heavy helmet on your head
You have the straps incorrectly adjusted, probably. Also there are solutions that don't rely on pressure, PSVR style.
Sadly, my little office space is shared with others in the house, which is not large. Leaving the cables next to me is not really an option, and I have enough of them already coming from my PC.
> You have the straps incorrectly adjusted, probably. Also there are solutions that don't rely on pressure, PSVR style.
No matter how I adjust, it always starts feeling heavy after a while. PSVR is indeed much better in terms of comfort, agreed.
HTC sells a "deluxe audio strap" for the Vive that is PSVR style, and I've made a mod very similar to this one: http://i.imgur.com/OkF6WSV.jpg (for a friend, I still use the stock straps but will probably make the mod for me too). I've followed these instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uDf6ayUQtk
Daydream is a low effort also ran. It lacks good hardware, the quality is noticably worse than gear VR and supported phones are rare to find. Now that the galaxy S8 and note 8 are slated to support daydream, it will finally have decent hardware support. Let's see if Google does something interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.
Ok, that was funny.
That said, from what I've seen, I do think AR is going to be the next big thing.
Prices are still to high, people need to get more experience in it and investors need to be convinced.
This takes a while.
Only because tec is so fast, doesn't mean vr is dead.
In the next years i'm guessing things like this will come or are on the way already: - VR Cafes - VR lighter, cheaper and with higher resolution - VR for industrie (especially training people in VR will be huge) - VR experience centers where you have VR / AR by having a VR Headset and interact with the Environment - VR for building houses, renovating flats
I've had the Oculus Rift for some time but in the end I sold it. At the current stage with the problems the platforms still have I honestly don't see it as worth investing my time in it. If I would place a bet short-term it wouldn't be on VR but rather AR.
Then again there are certainly niche's where it has his place but as a general usage device? Nah.
But no one is interested in the HTC app store, everyone gets their content from valve via steam.
So HTC can't sell their headset as a loss leader and make the money back on games, because they don't have any monopoly on the games channel.
The other major competitor Oculus is owned by Facebook who basically have infinite money. They have undercut the price of the vive significantly (presumably selling it at a loss) and throw money at all the studios to make Oculus exclusive content.
I have a vive, I think it's amazing tech. I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus. I far prefer the open philosophy, and the strategy of not making content hardware exclusive. I want it to succeed (and maybe it will via other partners with valve). But right now, i think HTC are going to struggle to make it work for them.
This is the real secret sauce for Vive, and it's completely designed and owned by Valve. Combined with their lackluster new phone, I think the future is pretty grim for HTC.
But yeah, it has bezels and now the latest fad is bezelless (making phones more prone to break on falls and to accidentally touching the screen if you grab them incorrectly). Plus it's not Samsung and they don't have money to put all the tremendously biased smartphone press in their favor. So it is automatically labelled as lackluster, like everything HTC has made for the last 5 years or so, including fantastic and innovative phones like the M7, M8 and 10. Meanwhile, others make phones that freaking explode and still get undivided praise by the press.
But mid-range is where it's at, unless you're Samsung or Apple. There's not room for two premium brands and I don't have a need for an $800 device when the $400 devices are so good.