Valve and HTC Reveal "Vive" SteamVR Headset 96
An anonymous reader writes Today Valve and HTC revealed the "Vive" SteamVR headset which is designed to compete with Oculus and others, which aim for a high-end VR experience on PC. The Vive headset uses dual 1200x1080 displays at 90Hz and a "laser position sensor" to provide positional tracking (head movement through 3D space), and also includes a pair of motion input controllers. The companies say that the Vive headset will be available to developers in Spring and receive a proper consumer launch holiday 2015, though no price has been announced.
Please take my money now Steam!!! I Want!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Please take my money now Steam!!! I Want!!!
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How does dual 1200 X 1080 equal that?
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I have the Samsung Gear VR for my Note 4, I've spent the last few months devouring the content and showing it off to everyone I can. It really is both amazing and impossible to explain how amazing it is. If you haven't seen the current generation of VR you really are missing out.
I'm a cyclops, you insensitive clod! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hopefully, they won't crap it up with all kinds of fancy 3D or stereoscopic viewpoints, or at least have an option to turn it off. Some of us who are blind in one eye really have a hard time dealing with some of this technology.
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If you're blind in one eye, why would you ever buy this in the first place?
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Well, I just tried my Gear VR on, closed one eye...Yep still f@#$ing amazing.
3d is only a small part of the experience. In fact I have a lot of content that isn't 3d yet still give significant experience. Event he 360 degree pictures I've taken are fun to go back to a spot and stand there how it was when I created the picture. And it's all in a 2d like being in the middle of a giant sphere.
Nice resolution (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Nice resolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Michael Abrash relegated to "one guy blogging" ;)
And he now works for Oculus!
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Last updated January of last year.
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Ah yes, that's why my office has plastic sheeting down everywhere..
Motion sickness happens in 3 cases.
1. You get motion sick playing FPS games on a normal monitor.. VR isn't for you
2. Crappy refresh rate on the VR screen, or high latency between physical and VR movement, both Occulus and Vive have pretty much fixed that.
3. Loss of tracking.. DK1 didn't have it, DK2 does, Vive does, but that's because they have things to occlude.
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No, it's basically caused by mis-coordination between the inner ears and visual.
There is no 'fixing it', short of finding a way to stimulate the inner ears.
The best you can do is code around the problem. Keep up mostly up. Don't design too windy roads in the car sims (the hill climb in Asseto Corsa is a problem, no other courses are). etc etc
Somewhat strangely. Switching to a non-swivel chair helps. Having solid controls (e.g. G27 wheel) in your hands helps.
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I've always wondered to what extent it is possible to just get used to the disconnect between your senses (which is something that will never really go away with just optical VR). I'm pretty sure that people who are at sea often don't get seasick (anymore).
Given the plasticity of the brain, it seems that it should be possible to train it to accept the disconnect in general, although you could ask yourself whether you want to go through a month or more of daily sickly training sessions, just to be able to us
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Raises hand.
I mostly got over motion sickness with my old VFX1. Never for Descent II though. It is about software more then anything. Up should remain up. Heli and driving sims work pretty good. Fixed wing less so. 3d shooters are OK but the devil is in the details.
In my experience the DK2 is no better then the VFX1 for motion sickness (Both working side by side). When the VFX1 shipped it was terrible, but once the VFX1 was running on a GHz processor and refreshing at 200fps, which is much faster then
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Fascinating, I wonder whether Descent would make me sick or not. I'm one of the people who could play it for hours at stuttering framerates without ill effect.
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I played descent to the end on a monitor. Descent II was disorienting and pukey as hell on the VFX1. It's 3d did work well.
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The only time I got motions sickness from a game was in the "crashing starship" level in Jedi Knight. Played through the Descent 1 and most of 2 without trouble, though when playing, I tended to throw out any preconceived idea of "up" and "down". But in the Jedi Knight level, there was an up, there was a down, and it was constantly changing. Never got to the point of throwing up, but I did have to lay down for a bit till my head and stomach came to and agreement on up, down, and keeping my stomach conte
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Of course we would like to have it perfect but it's well past 95% range and well past the 85% good enough range. Now the only thing mildly lacking is content. Even though that is arguable at this point as well. I sure have found enough content for my (even more limited) Gear VR to keep me occupied for the last 2 months.
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Or you're looking at the fact that VR is being super hyped up, and it's only a matter of time before some company comes up with a consumer product on the market. I
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You are right about the whole $h!7 or get off the pot for occulus.
That being said the GearVR is pretty f'ing amazing for a labeled not quite consumer product. Especially with the announcement of a new one for the galaxy s6 today, as well as all the new content that just showed up in my store.
Jeez (Score:2)
Whats up with that full hype marketing video? It is a announcement of a developer edition, it doesn't even have built in audio yet. Give me technical details, how does that headtracking work? Does it need a external camera like oculus? It is "really light" and allows you to "walk around in the room" so will it be (eventually) wireless? How are they managing wireless, latency and batterylife? Or is it not wireless at all?
Re:Jeez (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, did you SEE the video? It was awesome! Never has the back of someone's head looked so incredible! HypeHypeHype! WantWantWant!
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I just wonder if it will be as successful as the Steambox.
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If you read carefully you'll see it's more a competitor to the Rift than to GearVR. Meaning it's a stand-alone unit (no need for a mobile phone), tethered (although the controllers, whatever they will be seem to be wireless. Also, no batteries.) and need a powerful PC to get the most out of it.
The refresh rate on the displays (plural, one for each eye) is 90Hz so latency for that part at least should be really good.
Head tracking seems to use kinect-like lasers, cameras and other sensors, not much detail the
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Well I say "read carefull" but it turns out that http://htcvr.com/ [htcvr.com] now only says "coming soon", yesterday it showed a lot more.
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It's all still there. You have to click the tiny hidden circles on the left side of the screen.
Because that's what 3D visors are these days (Score:2)
For whatever reason, the games industry has decided that these things are amazin' and everyone has to do it. Of course nobody is doing it, I mean Occulus has a prototype out that has some pretty major issues and no release date for final hardware but that's it. Everyone else doesn't even have any hardware at all.
So of course what companies lack in deliverables they make up in hype. Talk about how damn cool their shit will be, how the world will be changed, etc, etc. Particularly since it doesn't seem any of
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We have some hardware, both Valve and Occulus.. Morpheus is a nice solution as well, but it's PS4 only.
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What are these "major" issues with Occulus? Right now they are just refining the details. They will be on smaller and smaller incremental improvements from now on. The days of nearly everyone being sick has been whittled down to really only the small minority of people that are very susceptible, which like with 1st person shooters may never be able to be resolved. It still creates an experience that I have found nobody yet that doesn't think it's anything less than amazing.
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the bye bye wife!
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Really? Like the dedicated "computer room" everyone had? Where have the space in the big-box office supplies was devoted to "computer furniture"? And now all they sell is office chairs?
I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years that most people have dedicated VR rooms.
And I wouldn't be surprised if all the junk is sitting by the curb in 20 years, same as those big-screen projection TVs and computer desks.
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Most people don't have desktop computers any more. They have laptops, tablets, phones, but desktops? Nope.
I know of one exception - one of my neighbors. She has a computer desk and desktop - but they're piled under a ton of junk because nobody uses them. She has 3 tablets, a smartphone, and 2 laptops. When the grand-kids come over, they use the kitchen table for homework, same as we did when we were kids.
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don't always agree with ya , but yep. this is the exception =/
Hype is, and always will be, hype. People have not changed -- gadgets come and go.
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Thank you! It's amazing how quickly that's happening. Who needs a "computer desk" for a laptop, tablet, or smartphone? And when you don't need a computer desk, that frees up that space (in many times an entire small room) for something else.
The other advantage today is that you don't take turns sitting at the computer desk. Laptops work fine at the kitchen table, and handhelds work on the couch, in bed, or wherever.
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"All that junk"? I'd imagine a "dedicated VR room" would mostly be an empty room free of junk you could bang in to while flailing around blindly. Maybe featuring an undersized rug/mat that gives your feet some warning when you're wandering too far from the "sweet spot" and risk punching the wall. The sort of room which would double nicely as a meditation/yoga/aerobics/etc space. (and yes, I'm sure there's a "padded room" joke in there somewhere...)
Unless you're going the omnidirectional treadmill route, b
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Current 2d treadmills are just slippery surfaces and socks.
Think about making a treadmill that lets you move in two directions. It would have to be a 3 story 'mouse ball' with only a small relatively flat part exposed on top, Mass of the ball would make the whole thing impossible, not just uneconomic.
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Inside the ball or outside doesn't really change the problem. The ball will be too massive to move when you move your feet. You'd need to put strain gauges on the surface or in your shoes and motorize the ball to move with your feet.
You'd be better off with 'roller ball' skates or just sticking to slippery floor and socks.
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It is a truism of engineering: Nothing scales linearly. Not even hamster balls.
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It is a truism of engineering: Nothing scales linearly. Not even hamster balls.
Never said it did. However, hamsters also don't scale linearly to the size of humans - if they did, they wouldn't be able to move.
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Name a material that you think you could make a useable human sized hamster ball out of?
One that will run on gimbals. No inflatables.
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A 2 meter diameter sphere has a surface area of 12-1/2 meters. 6 layers of 125g fiberglass requires 10 kg of fiberglass matting and 14 kg. of resin. If it's good enough for boat hulls ... probably less effort than pushing an empty shopping cart because most carts have crappy wheels.
here we go again... (Score:1)
So a company desperate to grab a toehold in an up-and-coming industry rushes a barely developed product to market, people buy it, become massively disappointed so when the other companies try and release a better and more polished device everyone brings up 'we've seen this before' and kills the market dead..
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So a company desperate to grab a toehold in an up-and-coming industry rushes a barely developed product to market, people buy it, become massively disappointed so when the other companies try and release a better and more polished device everyone brings up 'we've seen this before' and kills the market dead..
Yep, those first crappy "home computers" sure poisoned the well for everybody.
Then again, look at how many people don't use the 3d on their 3d tv.
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Well, when they make an affordable TV that can do decent 3D without nauseating shutter-glasses, I'll consider it. Though in fairness a lot of the problem is content that tries to make stuff float in front of the screen, which generates horribly unsettling artifacts whenever line-of-sight from one eye extends beyond the edges of the TV. It's an awesome effect when my FOV is filled by a huge movie screen, but it just gets nauseating in my living room. I'd much rather have the TV act as a window to a seperat
vaporware (Score:1)
I hope it's not another valve vaporware
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Dead in the water (Score:1)
This is dead in the water unless they quickly find a way to add the glove-free hands tracking that Oculus is presently adding to the Rift. Oculus just bought a company that was about to make an add-on for the Rift that sits on the front of the Rift and tracks your hand/finger movements (very precisely) and mirrors them in the VR world so that you can interact with VR without any controllers or gloves.
This is a "Game Changer" that HTC/Valve are dead in the water without.
Re: Dead in the water (Score:1)
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Done, what's the next step?
I've had zero hurling incidents in the 50 ish people that have tried my Gear VR.
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Try 'Alien Isolation' then get back to me. I don't know what's wrong with that one, but something is.
Seriously, the devil is in the details. I suspect you are carefully selecting software if you had no incidents of pukeyness with 50 people.
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very likely as it's with the Samsung Gear VR with Oculus software. The titles are pre-screened and required to be at least comfortable for most.
I do find it somewhat amazing that it can do what it does with my phone as the display and compute power.
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Your phone has much more computing power then my old 486-66 with the VooDoo 1 card.
Granting they didn't write GLQuake in Java.
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Really? Cool. I missed that one.
That would admittedly be truly great for some things, but if you want to swing a sword, aim a rifle left while looking over your right shoulder, or reach over the cover you're crouching behind to fire toward the approaching baddies, you're probably going to need a much larger FOV than such hardware is likely to offer cost effectively. At least for now. And it seems unlikely that you'd be able to aim a pistol precisely based on hand position (plus, it probably wouldn't feel ri
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Well, anything mounted to the helmet like the NimbleVR is going to go wherever you do, so I doubt that would be an issue.
Dead in the water (Score:3, Informative)
This is dead in the water unless they quickly find a way to add the glove-free hands tracking that Oculus is presently adding to the Rift. Oculus just bought a company that was about to make an add-on for the Rift that sits on the front of the Rift and tracks your hand/finger movements (very precisely) and mirrors them in the VR world so that you can interact with VR without any controllers or gloves.
This is a "Game Changer" that HTC/Valve are dead in the water without.
This was my post, I didn't have my password at work. The company Oculus bought was Nimble VR. Here are links including a video of the tech in action, it just works and has a larger FOV than the Rift:
Original Kickstarter (With VIDEO): https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]
CNET Article about the Aquisition: http://www.cnet.com/news/oculu... [cnet.com]
Oculus Blog announcement : https://www.oculus.com/blog/ni... [oculus.com]
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So they could add something like the Myo... depends on how useful your hands are honestly.
https://www.thalmic.com/en/myo... [thalmic.com]
"holiday 2015" (Score:1)
This is just getting out of hand. Not to get into the "War on Christmas" Fox News bit.. but really guys? What "holiday" are you really talking about? =/
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Well, let's see, there's Christmas, Hanukkah, and Pancha Ganapati, among the more popular religions. And dozens more. Or we could go back to the core reason for most institutional celebrations about that time, and the only one with actual physical relevane: the winter solstice. The longest night of the year, and beginning of the return of the sun. Traditional time for all manner of celebrations of rebirth and new beginnings.
Most of what has become "the traditional Christmas celebration": santa, decorated
I don't get it (Score:2)
In other words (Score:1)
To me that headline just says "Valve announces that they're still not working on Half-Life 3".
So when is this amazing new innovation which is absolutely definitely not just me-too-ism coming? I'd appreciate if somebody would clarify the anticipated release order for SteamVR/SteamController/SteamMachine/SteamOS/SteamTrain/HL3/armageddon.
There's also that little Illegal business practices [accc.gov.au] matter. Not to mention the abysmal quality of their "technical support".
So I guess my real question is "why should I care?
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To me that headline just says "Valve announces that they're still not working on Half-Life 3".
To me it says that the next version of their engine is going to have support for this baked right in, so that anyone who uses Source can support it without any extra work. And that will include HL3.