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Oculus Rift: VR has to be done right or not at all
donpopuki
Member Posts: 591
I got my DK2 a few days ago and I'm very impressed by demos like Buddaclubatron and Kira. It feels like you are in another room and expect your hands to show up. However I did try the Zelda Wind Waker VR and had a very nauseous experience due to the head movement causing tons of vomit inducing judder. The judder due to head movement is not due to the Rift's hardware, demos like Kira are as smooth as silk. If the game isn't optimized for VR from the ground up you can run into these sorts of technical issues that tanks the whole experience.
Next Gen MMOs need to take VR seriously if they are going to include the feature in their games. Minimal effort will not do because a slightly less than perfect experience can be extremely nauseating.
Comments
Not at all .
Virtual reality is about feel , not see or hear .
see + hear = 3D with sound .
Feel = reality .
Taste + smell don't necessary for virtual reality.
by simple definition, virtual reality is all the 5 senses being replicated digitally. so it isn't just feel. its all 5 senses.
Well someone gets it.
There was a huge jump between DK1 and DK2, so I am sure the technology will keep on improving at a lightning pace.
When it comes to software optimization, it is going to be behind for quite a while. It must take a decent amount of workload to develop any game with Rift support up to a high standard - especially with the hardware improving so much.
I have very little experience with VR, but many say it feels more immersive with first-person "sitting" games (racing, flight, etc.). I think optimizing the camera to prevent nausea is one thing, but making VR make sense is another. I'm predicting the nausea will be "fixed" once the leading engines will support VR natively and devs get more experience.
Then we have to ask ourselves what kind of MMO would actually make sense with VR. Star Citizen to me seems the most reasonable - and they have a team working on Rift support. But would you enjoy WoW with Rift support? Perhaps not as much.
The biggest problem with VR is why do it at all?
The problems with motion sickness, jitter etc all shrink to minor issues when faced with the question of:
Why do it at all?
OK Star Trek holo decks were cool, but if you actually look at what they were in terms of the internal logic of Star Trek, they were a way of providing an interactive exercise environment that got you "off the ship" without the need to find a suitable planet.
Nearly all of us have the option of getting out from behind our computer screen and going out in the real world. What we are looking for in our computer games is a form of entertainment that does not involve walking and looking around and smelling the roses.
Just remember how quickly people went from making realistic full arm movements with the Wii controllers and went to little wrist twitches. We do not want to simulate reality at the granularity that the developers and enthusiasts of VR think we want.
I kind of question the market for VR. I can't imagine everyone sitting with VR headsets in front of their PC. It's just something that's not going to happen. The masses don't even accept 3Dglasses.
Let's say a hardcore niche group does embrace it, will that provide the platform for some developers to design their game around VR.
It's not only a matter of doing it right, I think it's also a matter of economics, is there enough long term commitment from a grup that they will actually game day in day out with VR headset. We're not talking trying it for a few hours, actually using the device like you do a mouse or keyboard.
Moving your head around left to right, for an hour at the time. Most videos I see of people who gamed for 10 minutes with a VR headset are both mentally and physically exhausted. Does VR really have the commitment of gamers to game for long periods with a headset?
I know I'm not part of that group, but I think a lot of people who think they're part of that group who is willing to play with VR headsets, just aren't, and will be put off by it after a while.
VR will be cool once it gets down to the size of a BB, implanted in your forehead. It'll be always on, so Google can listen in.
Hey wait! Who ARE you?! Get back! Noooooo......arrrrgh.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
There are issues with VR that can't easily be fixed.
Part of the nausea in VR comes from the fact that you can move your head faster than a game can update the VR image.
When you move your head to the right...
-VR sensors need to capture it
-VR goggles need to proces it
-VR send it to the PC
-Game engine accepts the data and needs to render the image
-image needs to get sent back to the VR goggles
This is very different from moving your mouse, since the mouse tracking movement is simple, it doesn't involve tracking head movement with multiple sensors in 3D space.
We also accept from a game that it lags, what humans don't accept mentally, is that if you turn your head........the image you see doesn't change....that makes you physically and mentally sick. Your brain, rightly so, doesn't accept what is going on. Your brain knows you turned your head, yet what you see hasn't changed in accordance to the speed you're turning your head.
And there's no solution for this atm.
.
Nvidia proposed a solution to this, but this would still make people sick and has it's own complications.
Nividia suggested letting the game engine render a much larger field of view. and only letting the viewer show a small part of the image. When the user turns their head, the prerendered image just shifts.
A few problems with this are:
-the massive extra processing power needed
-GPU aren't ready for this, GPU aren't made to render 8k by 8k images, the memory simply isn't there, so you'd have to scale back the resolution for VR users to below HD
-the image won't be 100% correct...since the larger field of view hasn't accounted for yawn / sideway movements or updates that happened in the game.
This is something that will not be fixed, and probably can't be fixed in the near future, since the brain expects really fast updates a game engine can't deliver, which for many results in extreme motions sickness.
Are you allowed to change settings?
From the few articles that I have read one main problem with VR is that everyone has different tolerance levels for the visual settings, and developers are having difficulty finding a standard. If there is a choice to change setting, then maybe you should mess around with that and see how it goes.
However it's not perfect.
1. Screen door effect. The resolution needs a bump to 4k. Reading small writting can be difficult especially in the 3d Windows desktop.
2. No head tracking while the back of your head is facing the IR camera. My favorite position while using the Rift is standing up. You feel more immersed in your environment but you easily get turned around.
I am sure some die-hard will be early adopters. But it seems to me that most masses will look at this and see a lot of additional work/costs without a huge amount of added fun.