My boy is turning 13 in a couple of weeks and he’s been mentioning in passing (!) VR. A friend of his has one and I’m wondering whether to pick one up for him. As far as I can see, it seems like a reasonably good piece of kit. He has a PS4 so I could go down that route but as he has my old pc and the fact you can link the headset to the pc for Steam functionality, I’m thinking this is the way to go! Does anyone have one that can sell the advantages/ disadvantages before I get one? The only real snag is that he wears glasses… Thanks in advance, Ian
It varies from person to person, some people find glasses is fine, others need to get prescription lenses and take off their glasses. I'm in the third camp where I'm long-sighted, VR headsets focus to infinity, so I don't need to wear anything in VR. Advantage: - Quick pick-up and play kit - Stand-alone or PCVR - Good tracking - Easy setup - PCVR anywhere with good Wifi signal (eg. I play in the living room with my PC in the study) Disadvantages: - Real Facebook account required - Tracking isn't as good as Valve's lighthouse system - PCVR is encoded and sent across wifi, meaning minor encoding artifact and tiny tracking latency is noticeable depending on game. (eg. Stormland raining makes everything looks noisy due to compression artifact; Beat Saber on PC has slightly rubber-banding feel compared to on-headset) But for £300, I would say Quest 2 is absolutely worth it.
As a minor aside to the above - You can also run them cabled if Latency is being a bit of a pig. The Cables aren't all that cheap, but it does offer a workaround. Also avoids the whole "Oh crap I've just run out of juice" issue when you're stuck in after a while. On a more practical side; See if you can get some of those rubber grips/bumper frames for the controllers. I have a HTC Vive I snagged off Ebay for just over a hundred quid, and both controllers now have a nice lick of ceiling paint on them where I've accidently tried to disloge roof tiles because I've been so immersed in what I'm doing. The minor bonus to going for what was Oculus is access to their storefront. There's a handful of titles that actually look pretty fun that you can't grab on the Vive or Steam sources, so it'll give a slightly wider selection of titles for him too.
Is it worth trying his mate's first for a decent amount of time, to make sure it doesn't just make him feel ill?
We went ahead and got one - Beat Saber is king followed by Gorn... Beat saber will keep us hooked for a time before I get the cable (amazon knock-off) to attach to PC then I finally get to play Skyrim VR and Elite!
Give it a try without cable, enable Airlink in settings->experimental section. I've got a 5m USB C cable for Link, used it a few times but ultimately playing wireless in a bigger room is much better. Or even in the garden at dusk in summer.
Beat Saber was epic. If you tinker with things you can get a whole array of other songs. Some great ,some not so great, but that was part of the fun. I would also give Half life Alyx a thumbs up if it comes on sale
Can you let us know how you get on with motion sickness acclimatisation and whether you'd normally be affected? I'm really keen to get one and have a voucher that runs out end of Feb, but wary of it just sitting there. My machine is also nowhere your spec - i7 2700K @ 4.6, 16GB DDR3 and 2 x 980Tis so I don't really want to buy the Quest and then find out I need to replace the machine!
I played HL Alyx with exact same CPU and a 970 first time. Although works and I completed the game, the physics isn't feel right. I thought it was due to Quest inside-out tracking thus overhead grenade throws are not tracked correctly. Turns out it's the CPU can't keep up, I upgraded to Ryzen 3600 for a while and all physics feels correct.
I found the lag and motion sickness from the device's own games a non-issue. I was too busy trying to punch things and not hitting the TV. I'll give the airplay option a go!
Cheers both - good to know! @wyx087 - won't the 980s handle PhysX? If not, I could see what the returns policy is before I buy it, I'll just have to make sure I've done all system prep (what would this be?) before it turns up, to maximise usage time and not just leave it siting around until the return period expires.
Source 2 engine uses a Valve in-house physics engine, probably CPU only. https://uploadvr.com/half-life-alyx-rubikon-physics/ Don't get me wrong, it can work on 2700k and 980. With exception of trying to throw grenades accurately, everything worked great on my first playthrough with 2700k and 970. i7 2700k overclocked is about similar speed to minimum i5 7500. But 7500 have faster memory, IPC improvements and PCIe gen 3.
