I watched about 15 seconds of it the other day and then turned it off. Too many spoilers and consumer release is so close. I really doubt that it will be Vive exclusive, but any headset manufacturer is going to have to build their device to Valve's VR SDK. I'm not sure if Valve will have a version without motion controls. I could see it going either way. It means that Rift buyers will almost certainly have to wait for the touch controllers before getting to play.
Would not surprise if it was exclusive. Oculus rift have already said they would have exclusive titles. Problem is Valve has a huge list of titles it could easily get on side as exclusive. Valves VR SDK will have to be followed for title support just like OR will for there's. Not really sure why OR mensioned they would release exclusive titles they are not a big games dev and have surely more to lose than gain by trying to fight for exclusive content. Valve has all the contacts to make a big list of AAA titles exclusive and quickly. OR as a open platform is a lot more enticing than confusing buyers even more. If you buy OR will it not play any Valve exclusive and vice versa is just adding more confusing to the end user. In the PC games sector can only see one been successful long term. With OR not releasing controllers at launch if portal only works on Vive then they have a big initial advantage over OR for the Christmas push. ( which is the biggest time selling products)
There's no competition at Xmas at all. OR won't even be available until Q1 2016. Oculus aren't making any exclusive titles - they aren't a games dev at all. They are just working with some developers to make games that are guaranteed to work well with the Rift at launch. Both platforms are entirely open anyway, developers will learn to work with both SDKs, just like the do with drivers, Windows/Linux, engines and all the rest of it.
do you guys think its going to be possible because we are in the UK to miss the pre - order window for the vive (even if they are going to ramp up production to 25,50,100k units?) And we basically wake up one morning to find we are too late to pre order and they are all gone ?
Depends how many units they have for sale if they do region launches. Lots of things will influence the initial availability. 100k units is nothing, if VR is going to succeed they need more like 500k units at least. Even in the tech foke there is enough people after VR. If they come to market with below 100k chances of getting one will be small. We don't know if that's the financial Q1 or the year, Facebook never did confirm. Don't dash the hopes for Christmas launch man. They be mad to miss that window.
Its steam behind the HTV vive right? They have to know that as many as they make they will sell, easily they will sell 100k. I think its fair to say they will easily sell 200k. Maybe however on your the run of a first gen product they don't want to run off the production line so many? If there is some small or major product defect issue that comes up then you have to fix or replace a huge amount of units, is that a possibility that would limit the first run of units and bring it down to only 50k or so units? Ideally steam will work with HTC and given its HTC you have to think if they want to make between 100k and say 300k units, with 6months lead time they could do it. When HTC / steam VR open for pre order, man they are going to get a lot of pre orders, I think they might even get 300k A lot of people are watching VR now, HTV vive is soild first VR hud with guaranteed huge games support. In theory HTV vive will get VR support for assetto, war thunder, DCS, all the current big VR enabled tittles? I cant imagine or dream how good war thunder will look in a HTC Vive, I mean you are basically talking about my holly grail right there, being able to re-live in HQ quality VR battle of Britain stuff. All my juices are salivating, forum is going to go flipping nuts one this units start hitting and fokes start turning them on. want to see inside a star vr so I can figure out what the actual future of VR is going to look like with huge fov, that's the ultimate isn't it, huge almost complete FOV with high refresh 3d sound etc. going to be hugely interesting just to see how VR explodes, there will be twists and turns no one thought was going to happen or could see from today
Not really known what HTC vive will get. And yes its Valve / Vive same thing. HTC is basically manufacturing the product using there links to the industry. HTC have alot riding on it been a success been a while since they had a major hit in smartphones. Id imagine they will get VR support for Valves big titles not sure it will be the 3 you listed though. Since none of them are made by valve. Project cars could be added to the list as well since it has native VR support. Depends what the expectations are if they expect to sell 300k and make 200k your loosing money. If you expect to sell 50k and make 300k your loosing money. Id imagine somewhere between 300-400k is the base expectations with a 500k production run. They could even wait till pre orders and base a figure off that.
No, we know, Oculus Rift is 100% not launching this year. It's Q1 2016. The motion controller is Q2 but can be pre ordered with the Rift. Also HTC came out today and said they were hoping to hit Q4, but they now weren't sure. Purely speculation but I think Q1 2016 the two will go head to head.
Does anyone know any locations in Surrey where I can try out the Rift? I have the joys of being reg/green and blue/yellow colour-blind and blind in my left eye so I'm highly doubtful Oculus Rift or any other "3D" or VR technology is going to work for me. 3D movies simply don't do anything as far as I can tell. That being said I have seen 3D technology that does work for me so I know it's possible. I'd like to try the Rift out though just to see if it works. Once I know that I can decided if I want to get excited about it or not.
In order for an open source, or even open but proprietary (e.g. DirectX) VR API is not going to happen for a while. Simply because any 'universal' standard is going to be the lowest-common-denominator featureset, and there IS no standard featureset yet. VR relies on very low-level device specific optimisation. At a low level, VR headsets re not similar enough to share APIs and achieve acceptable performance. This can be seen with SteamVR functioning with the DK2, but with very poor performance (lacking features like timewarp, late latching, etc). And then you have controllers; Oculus Touch has analog sticks and capacitive finger-extension sensors, Valve's controllers have haptic-feedback touchpads and no analog sticks or finger-extension sensors, and both have different numbers of buttons, different locations of triggers, and different grip styles. Neither support 'add-ons' (e.g. plastic gun or sword shapes the controller can socket into), ubnlike e.g. the Sixense STEM, both are optically tracked but using different techniques, etc. It may take several years before even a 'minimum acceptable featureset' is agreed upon. Even "what does a VR controller look like" is not a solved problem, and not even one where the problem space is well defined. About the only thing that can be said reliably is "wave-your-hands-in0the-air is NOT an acceptable primary input method". Then there are wildly varying headset geometries and optics (anything from microdisplays with fused fibre lightpipes to large panels with high-power singlet lenses), different methods of display driving, different tracking techniques, sensor fusion, etc. Then there are still those low-level latency optimisations that are different for every headset. It takes a lot of development time just to optimise a game for ONE HMD, trying to get it to work well on multiple HMDs is going to be more than double that work (because of different optimisations being needed, e.g. Valve not using timewarp in favour of longer forward-predict and predictive masking). It's nowhere near as simple as 'proprietary bad, open good'. Ah, Valve Time.
Good news: VR will provide a 3D effect that stereoscopic TV and film will not. This is because stereoscopy is only one of the tools your brain uses to detect depth. The major one that the DK2 and Vive (but not Google Carboard, the DK1, or Gear VR) will provide is parallax; the ability to move your head and have your view of the world update accordingly. This applies even when viewing with only one eye. Accommodation, another depth cue, is not yet replicated (blurring of foreground/background objects as you focus on near/far objects) due to the lack of rapidly adjustable lenses or viable lightfield displays, but the main problem here is accommodation/vergence (eyes rotating to be closer/further apart depending on focal distance) will not e an issue when only using one eye. Other depth cues like scaling, contrast-shift, etc are down to the game engine to handle. Best Practices guides help developers to maintain Orthostereo (keeping objects the correct size, not having them warp at the edges of the scene, etc). I can't comment on how VR will affect colour-blindness, but the OLED displays used are near identical to those used in Samsung phones, so any issues you may have with them would likely also occur with the HMDs.
Well that's good to know I've been doing a bit more reading myself and it seems it should work to some extent. I might have to follow this Oculus stuff more closely. I assumed I was doomed to a life of no VR in much the same way 3D movies don't work. Amnesia: The Dark Descent would be freaky as hell on Oculus I'd imagine.
Xbox Elite Wireless Controller looks stunning. http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/xbox-one/accessories/controllers/elite-wireless-controller
Very unlikely. The 'Elite' controller's MSRP is $150, and all the material shown by Oculus has featured the regular XB1 controller.
pretty much no chance unless Facebook is willing to subsidise the cost and take a loss on every unit sold. Depends how much they sell it OR For I guess if its £500 then adding in a controller like that could happen. If its around the £300 mark as most hope then can not see it happening. Even including the xbox one controller is a cost that they are going to have to eat.
Wonderful, very inspiring experience in the rift, in the cockpit all your senses go ape. Real deal gets a go!!!
Concerning the system requirements - do people think the minimum spec details that were released will be correct or is it one of the those things were a) they're actually a bit short and loads of people will be watching VR slideshows or b) we'll immediately get a load of people showing how they can run it on a 486 with a voodoo 3 2000 without any real problems just by adjusting some settings?
I have been lucky to have tested the dk2 with the 780ti, 980HOF, and now a 980ti If you are happy to run your games as med and not ultra then I think the 970 with maybe a good OC and decent CPU will be more than fine, but if you want the games to look their best, we all really need to be looking at the 980ti. btw just tested this dirt rally from codemasters in the rift and its flipping awesome, I always wanted to be able to drive a rally car through a forest to see how I would get on, I just drove the Lancia Stratos Only two things I can say above just the standard omfg this is awesome. 1- the set up for the rift is ridiculously easy, you simply turn on your rift set it to direct mode and then start the game and it mirrors on screen the direct to rift. 2- Game would look better with sweet fx, the trees look like the trees before assetto got the sweet fx mod available which made it look HUGELY better, (night and day difference). Some one needs to give code masters some serious credit here for this "experience", those guys flipping this game on the back of their mind for some time obviously and have finally made their dream rally game. I might have to look up their office tomorrow and call their reception tomorrow lol and leave a huge thank you note for this game if that's possible good experience in the rift, such a difference between screen gaming and in the rift, rally driving amazingly demanding its like a work out on a gym elliptical
