I remember when I got scammed by nintendo with is fucking virtual boy.

I should have suspected something because it was sold - 80% with 2 games.

But i was only 13 years olds and 3 magic word was written on the box : Virtual, 32 Bits and Nintendo

So something like almost twenty years later i am about to make the same mistake with the oculus rif except that this time i think the promise of virtual reality will be a promise kept.

I think it one of the most awesome ideas to ever come to gaming

And sadly i also think it will flop like a fish regardless.

This is not the first device to attempt what they are doing.  The technology is at the point where we can make this.  The only question will be who makes it big.

If you don't know what that means, I will elaborate.  The first one of these devices to get a full-blown contract from nVidia or ATI will quickly gain worldwide product deployment and support from a major video card chipset manufacturer.  There will be a second one to sign with the other video card manufacturer and the two will be in direct competition over the best implementation of the technology for a while.

Wait until that happens before you (consumer who doesn't have millions of dollars to invest) decide to drop $600 on a product that may not be around for long.

(Yes, I know nVidia and ATI don't really make the video cards, just the chips.)

As a wearer of glasses I have to first check if I can actually use the device. No point buying it when I can't use it.

If the developers have factored in glasses into their design though, I will be ordering a pack asap. Emersion level extreme: here I come.

Originally posted by syntax42

This is not the first device to attempt what they are doing.  The technology is at the point where we can make this.  The only question will be who makes it big.

 

If you don't know what that means, I will elaborate.  The first one of these devices to get a full-blown contract from nVidia or ATI will quickly gain worldwide product deployment and support from a major video card chipset manufacturer.  There will be a second one to sign with the other video card manufacturer and the two will be in direct competition over the best implementation of the technology for a while.

Both AMD and Nvidia have already done everything they need to on the video card side of things.  All Radeon HD 5000 series and later and GeForce 400 series and later cards support OpenGL 4.2 or later, which supports stereoscopic 3D.  Radeon HD 7000 series (and later, though "later" means "not released yet" at the moment) support DirectX 11.1, and future GeForce cards probably will as well.  DirectX 11.1 also supports stereoscopic 3D.  Recent Nvidia cards support the stereoscopic 3D part of DirectX 11.1, but not the full API, so I'm not sure how that plays out.

Support for stereoscopic 3D in industry standards APIs is huge, because it means that game developers can support it in their games without too much trouble, and only have to code things once for them to run everywhere.  Without that, you're looking at having to do various proprietary things, which means you have to go far out of your way to do one thing to make it work on certain Nvidia cards, then something entirely different on AMD cards, and who knows what else if you want it to run on graphics by Intel, Imagination, or whatever.

The problem, though?  The games aren't ready.  How many significant DirectX 11.1 or OpenGL 4.2 or later games that have launched are you aware of?  How many such games that are even in development are you aware of?  A promise of "buy an Oculus Rift now and in several years, there will be a ton of games that it works well with" isn't likely to go over well with consumers.  Even though it's likely to be true, unlike Virtual Boy, which like all consoles, was proprietary rather than based on an industry standard.

It suffers from the same flaws all that have come before it have. It's a neat idea but it's not one that will ever go main stream with current peripherals. Theres a reason VR Arcades go with floater sticks and physical vehicals to sit on and in. Not being able to see what your hands are doing is going to keep way to many gamers from trying this let alone buying it for it ever to go mainstream. Unless you want to see yourself typing and or using a game pad in game then most are going to pass simply because they can't use it. 

With the right peripherals though these are excellent. As far as these going big if ATI or Nvida picks them up, again not likely and it wouldn't make much difference anyways. A company that could really get these type of devices to sale would be razer and only if they paired them with a modified version of the Hydra controller or as part of their package with the new Razer Edge controllers. Something like this may make them worth selling to private individuals but even that wouldn't get them to be mainstream. 

Driving games with a steering wheel and pedals - these would be good

Any game using floater sticks - these would do well

Normal gaming - these fail to allow for what most people are comfortable peripheral wise. 

Unfortunately after working in a VR for some time I know the drawbacks of these types of devices all to well including a number of issues that go beyond weight and causing some to get physically ill. 

Originally posted by Inf666

As a wearer of glasses I have to first check if I can actually use the device. No point buying it when I can't use it.

If the developers have factored in glasses into their design though, I will be ordering a pack asap. Emersion level extreme: here I come.

From a game development viewpoint, if you're doing stereoscopic 3D, you neither know nor care whether players are using active-shutter glasses, polarity classes, a separate monitor for each eye, or whatever.  All you worry about is computing what a scene looks like at the same time from two different perspectives (one for each eye), and you trust the stereoscopic 3D hardware to handle things from there.  As long as you can get the images correct, for hardware to handle the rest shouldn't be hard--or at least, not meaningfully harder than with a single, normal monitor.

Where things go awry is when video drivers try to take programs meant for a normal monitor and split that into separate images for stereoscopic 3D.  That involves a lot of guesswork and a lot of trial and error, as you're basically taking a program and add additional functionality to it without knowing what the program was trying to do in the first place.  The reasons why it's likely that you'll break whatever the program was trying to do in the first place should be obvious if you've ever programmed anything.

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Unless you want to see yourself typing and or using a game pad in game then most are going to pass simply because they can't use it. 

If you're looking at your hands while you type or use a gamepad, then you're doing it wrong.  You should be looking at the monitor in most cases.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Unless you want to see yourself typing and or using a game pad in game then most are going to pass simply because they can't use it. 

If you're looking at your hands while you type or use a gamepad, then you're doing it wrong.  You should be looking at the monitor in most cases.

Sorry, as usual you misunderstand whats being said. Most gamers aren't comfortable without the ability to see their hands while gaming. You can say they are doing it wrong all you want, but the fact remains that most prefer or even need to see their hands at least some of the time while using mouse/keyboard or traditional game pads. 

Now sure, I and maybe you and most on this site might not need to see our hands while typing or gaming but we are not most gamers. 

Again, the research has been done on this. VR isn't a new thing. VR Arcades and VR amusement parks exist and have for a long time, this is actually a bit low end compared to the tech out there currently. If you'd like to tell all those that will pass on this because they can't see their hands that they are doing it wrong then be my guest, it still won't help the unit sale and all you've accomplished is insulting potential future customers. 

Like I said, there is an actual reason VR gear like this is paired with floater sticks and other periphs geared towards VR gaming. 

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Unless you want to see yourself typing and or using a game pad in game then most are going to pass simply because they can't use it. 

If you're looking at your hands while you type or use a gamepad, then you're doing it wrong.  You should be looking at the monitor in most cases.

Sorry, as usual you misunderstand whats being said. Most gamers aren't comfortable without the ability to see their hands while gaming. You can say they are doing it wrong all you want, but the fact remains that most prefer or even need to see their hands at least some of the time while using mouse/keyboard or traditional game pads. 

Now sure, I and maybe you and most on this site might not need to see our hands while typing or gaming but we are not most gamers. 

 

Again, the research has been done on this. VR isn't a new thing. VR Arcades and VR amusement parks exist and have for a long time, this is actually a bit low end compared to the tech out there currently. If you'd like to tell all those that will pass on this because they can't see their hands that they are doing it wrong then be my guest, it still won't help the unit sale and all you've accomplished is insulting potential future customers. 

 

Like I said, there is an actual reason VR gear like this is paired with floater sticks and other periphs geared towards VR gaming. 

I guess we're kind of talking about two different things.  From an individual perspective, if you have to constantly look at your hands while you're playing a game, you're at a big disadvantage in an awful lot of games.

But as a corporation, you have to get people to buy your product and use it with the skills that they actually have, not the skills that they ought to have.  So if a lot of your potential customers can't use your product, that's a problem for your company, regardless of the reason why they can't use it.  Blaming it on your potential customers (e.g., "you're holding the iPhone 4 wrong") doesn't help your bottom line.  So in that sense, you're correct.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Unless you want to see yourself typing and or using a game pad in game then most are going to pass simply because they can't use it. 

If you're looking at your hands while you type or use a gamepad, then you're doing it wrong.  You should be looking at the monitor in most cases.

Sorry, as usual you misunderstand whats being said. Most gamers aren't comfortable without the ability to see their hands while gaming. You can say they are doing it wrong all you want, but the fact remains that most prefer or even need to see their hands at least some of the time while using mouse/keyboard or traditional game pads. 

Now sure, I and maybe you and most on this site might not need to see our hands while typing or gaming but we are not most gamers. 

 

Again, the research has been done on this. VR isn't a new thing. VR Arcades and VR amusement parks exist and have for a long time, this is actually a bit low end compared to the tech out there currently. If you'd like to tell all those that will pass on this because they can't see their hands that they are doing it wrong then be my guest, it still won't help the unit sale and all you've accomplished is insulting potential future customers. 

 

Like I said, there is an actual reason VR gear like this is paired with floater sticks and other periphs geared towards VR gaming. 

I guess we're kind of talking about two different things.  From an individual perspective, if you have to constantly look at your hands while you're playing a game, you're at a big disadvantage in an awful lot of games.

But as a corporation, you have to get people to buy your product and use it with the skills that they actually have, not the skills that they ought to have.  So if a lot of your potential customers can't use your product, that's a problem for your company, regardless of the reason why they can't use it.  Blaming it on your potential customers (e.g., "you're holding the iPhone 4 wrong") doesn't help your bottom line.  So in that sense, you're correct.

Yeah, I was speaking more to the context of the thread where some were calling this "The Future of Gaming". Many in the VR field have abandoned it for good reason. It relies to heavily on the rest of the industry changing then to top it off there are so many liability pitfalls and other issues to be dealt with before anything like this could ever go mainstream that its almost impossible to consider it an option any longer. 

Most of my former colleagues have switched from VR to augmented reality as there are far fewer pitfalls and it has a much better chance of taking off and going mainstream. Augmented reality relies less on the rest of the related fields than VR does as well. 

Originally posted by madazz
I've already got nvidao 3d vision, and it works well. I find it a bit gimmicky, but this could be much more exciting! And while DirectX 11+ may make life easier to incorporate 3d in games, its already proven over and over and over again it's not needed. Like the 3d vision, some people always figure out how to get it to work if the developers don't catch up! I'm all for following it, but I won't be one of the first to purchase it. 

The difference between Nvidia 3D Vision trying to hack something together in drivers and a game that implements stereoscopic 3D via DirectX 11.1 or OpenGL 4.2 or later is the difference between a horribly unoptimized, buggy mess of a game and a highly polished game.  Sure, you can play the former, but that doesn't mean there's no place in the world for the latter.  Video drivers can change how shaders get compiled, but they can't change the CPU-side code in the ways necessary to implement stereoscopic 3D properly.

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Yeah, I was speaking more to the context of the thread where some were calling this "The Future of Gaming". Many in the VR field have abandoned it for good reason. It relies to heavily on the rest of the industry changing then to top it off there are so many liability pitfalls and other issues to be dealt with before anything like this could ever go mainstream that its almost impossible to consider it an option any longer. 

Most of my former colleagues have switched from VR to augmented reality as there are far fewer pitfalls and it has a much better chance of taking off and going mainstream. Augmented reality relies less on the rest of the related fields than VR does as well. 

While I think stereoscopic 3D is a dumb gimmick, I also think it's wise to reserve final judgment until we can see it implemented properly.  If the only games that implement it properly so far are games that you'd have no interest in otherwise, then we're in a situation where an otherwise bad game that adds stereoscopic 3D is still a bad game.

But what if all of the games you wanted to play had stereoscopic 3D implemented properly, with game designers carefully considering how it ought to work in their particular game and making it happen?  Then a lot of people still wouldn't be interested, but it would have more of a chance.

Eventually nearly all new 3D games will use DirectX 11.1 or later or OpenGL 4.2 or later or some other API that properly supports stereoscopic 3D.  That's kind of like how nearly all recent 3D games today use DirectX 9.0c or later or OpenGL ES 2.0 or later.  But it will take several years to get there.

Looks interesting but I dunno if it will ever take off like others have said it seems to be hinging on too many other factors. This Holodeck idea using  Oculus looks neat.