Microsoft Reiterates 'VR For Console Is Not a Focus For Us' (theverge.com) 50
Microsoft has once again reiterated that VR support for Xbox was not a focus for the company, following reports earlier today that hinted it was working on a VR headset compatible with the Xbox Series X/S. The Verge reports: The rumor first surfaced after IGN Italy reported that some Italian Xbox users received messages, which translated to "[a]n update for the VR headset is available" and "[u]pdate VR headset," when connecting the recently released Xbox Wireless Headset to their Xbox Series X or Series S consoles. A Microsoft representative told The Verge that "the copy in this error message is inaccurate due to a localization bug," while again reiterating that "VR for console is not a focus for us at this time."
Microsoft has yet to explore the VR space for its Xbox consoles. In 2018, the company pulled back on plans to support virtual reality headsets for Xbox in 2018, explaining that it wanted to focus "primarily on experiences you would play on your TV." In late 2019, Xbox boss Phil Spencer tweeted out that although he played "some great VR games" such as Half-Life: Alyx, console VR was not Xbox's focus ahead of the Xbox Series X / S release.
Microsoft has yet to explore the VR space for its Xbox consoles. In 2018, the company pulled back on plans to support virtual reality headsets for Xbox in 2018, explaining that it wanted to focus "primarily on experiences you would play on your TV." In late 2019, Xbox boss Phil Spencer tweeted out that although he played "some great VR games" such as Half-Life: Alyx, console VR was not Xbox's focus ahead of the Xbox Series X / S release.
Good sign for VR (Score:2)
Re: Good sign for VR (Score:1)
Re: Good sign for VR (Score:2)
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VR is a lemon, get over it. If gamers wanted real life exercise they would get real world exercise, they would not be gaming. The difference between typical gaming and VR, you must be upright moving, dodging and weaving, a typical gamer would last minutes, where as they normally game hours.
The only reason to put glasses on your head, the cheap way to get visually a 125" screen at a fraction of the price, and energy usage, no motion, makes all those who get seasick, get sick. So fixed point of view unless yo
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We get it. You can't afford it. Don't worry- the price will keep coming down, and the recent heating up of the war between AMD and nVidia means hardware that can do it well will be available for a decent price too.
I couldn't be happier with my Index purchase, and the market itself has had *fucking insane* year-over-year growth.
The difference between typical gaming and VR
All of your complaints about it seem to be when comparing it against the paradigm of traditional gaming.
I shouldn't have to point out why that is stupid. Are you stupid? I d
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> VR is a lemon
I'm not sure I would go that far. Yes, VR is extremely niche but it does very well in a specific context. Getting over zerophobia [sciencedaily.com] (fear of heights), virtual surgery, and practicing dangerous high voltage [youtube.com] scenarios are some of the niche areas VR does extremely well in.
But, yes, VR as a mass consumer input device from a sales perspective it is yet-another-fad and flop. A product that can give you motion sickness is never a good selling point!
I'm not sure of ANY input devices other then keybo
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When VR pulls back an accepts people sitting in a chair, at a keyboard, with a mouse.... then you will have finally seen it settle and then you will discover the future of gaming.
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This. I want to watch VR movies, and I want to play VR games where I'm not constantly worried about bumping into things or hitting my arms on something, or scaring the cats.
Elite Dangerous is high up on the list of games I'd play in VR (if the idiots hadn't discontinued the Mac version). I don't need VR to feel a game is complete, I have enough imagination to fill in the gaps and been doing that for decades. But to marvel at the size and beauty of the environment - yeah, sign me up. Many games would profit
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You don't have to imagine Skyrim in VR - Skyrim VR has been out for like 3 years. It works pretty good, and you're right - some of the landscapes are pretty neat.
And it's not in my top 10 best VR games.
To cover off yours and the regular liturgy of complaints, all of which are repeated every time a VR article gets posted: I've never really worried about bumping into things. You clear out a bit of space, then SteamVR warns you when you're getting too close to the edge (though one time I punched my ceiling a
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I live in a pretty damn small condo in downtown Seattle.
My "space" experience mirrors your own. I punched my piano once. Didn't need to repair my controller, but it felt like I needed to repair my hand for a day.
Other than that? Never had a problem.
Skyrim VR- and all the games that attempt to shoehorn traditional games into VR are pretty fucking cool to play around in, but as you noted, that's just not the right format. Like I got legitimate enjoyment out of a couple of fights and just
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When VR pulls back an accepts people sitting in a chair, at a keyboard, with a mouse....
VR is just a headset with head tracking and some optional tracked controls.
Many VR flight sims are made for sitting with non-tracked controls (controller, KB+M, joystick)
Don't conflate a game's input with the actual VR tech.
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The Oculus Quest 2 is probably the closest thing to mainstream and is definitely taking the right approach - cheaper, wireless, standalone, but with a tethering option. If a VR headset turns up for consoles hopefully they'll take note. Better yet if the headset works on the PC too and comes with an SDK.
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The Oculus Quest 2 is probably the closest thing to mainstream and is definitely taking the right approach - cheaper, wireless, standalone, but with a tethering option.
100% agreed. They've got the magic formula.
If a VR headset turns up for consoles hopefully they'll take note.
The best-selling VR setup is currently console-only (PSVR)
Better yet if the headset works on the PC too and comes with an SDK.
Ya. PSVR "works" (with sufficiently constrained definition of "works") on PC, through unsupported channels. It's not ideal.
As for SDK, the big vendors have pretty good SDK support.
OpenVR supports just about everything.
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Microsoft has never been a visionary on anything.
Sometimes they're right, eventually, on somethinb, but usually only after they've abandoned it.
For example, remember Kinect? Kinect would have been immensely useful to the current generation of Vtubers, but nope, guess everyone has to buy a $500 iPhone instead which now has that tech in it.
Likewise with the Windows RT and Windows Surface. They utterly screwed up by adopting cheaper, less-accurate nTrig rather than stick with high precision Wacom batteryless p
good, no need to focus on niche (Score:3)
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PSVR has a couple good things going for it (lack of screen door effect, and comfort, more big name dev/games than PCVR or Quest) but it's way behind every other VR headset out there in almost every other aspect. Quite low resolution, Very limited (only 180 degree) 6DOF tracking and small tracked volume, crappy motion controls...Despite all that it's still sold something like 5 million units by Jan 2020 [arinsider.co] which probably means it's still #1 selling VR headset. Although Quest 2 has been selling like crazy [uploadvr.com] since
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I haven't tried PSVR but either it has no "screen door effect" or it has low resolution; effective anti-aliasing goes hand-in-hand with higher resolutions.
And the PSVR sure as fuck doesn't have a 180deg FOV.
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180 degree tracking volume not FOV... I'm saying it's tracked with a front facing camera so if you turn around you are no longer tracked. Most other headsets do not have this restriction.
The Screen Door Effect it's specifically seeing the black space between pixels. Higher resolution generally also means less SDE but it's not exactly that simple. It is not a product or really tied aliasing in any meaningful way.
You could have two screens with the same size and resolution but have vastly different SDE proper
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I agree that 5 million vs the entire PS4 market is kinda small...
However comparing Kinect as a failure despite selling 5x as many units isn't quite apples to apples... Kinect had life over two console generations and a market on PC for hackers using it for computer vision. It failed to gain critical mass for consumer use but I think the core technology still lives on in Hololens and is used by hackers for cheap 3D video.
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Wow, Wikipedia says 35 million by Oct 2017 [wikipedia.org]. Xbox360 and Xbox One sold about 150-200 millions units combined so that would put it near 20% adoption. That seems pretty high for a console peripheral let alone one considered a failure.
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Hmm I think I figured out how PSVR is a success while Kinect isn't despite the large discrepancy in sales figures. It's not about hardware it's about software.
Look at the number of Kinect games [wikipedia.org] vs PSVR games [wikipedia.org]. PSVR has somewhere around six times as many titles listed as Kinect.
Then look at the actual games.. Nearly 15% of all Kinect games are literally "Just Dance" sequels. Another 10-20% are just various other dancing or fitness based franchises. Many of those Kinect games are not really Kinect games but ju
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VR (Score:2)
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It's always just a few years away.
Just a few more years until I can take my Fusion powered, AI controlled, self driving, flying car to the store to pick up my fancy new VR rig.
I can hardly wait.
And 640KB was enough for everyone (Score:2)
Bill & Steve just called that they want to revert their bad decisions.
Yes, focus on uptime and security. (Score:1)
MS Office (Score:2)
Microsoftâ(TM)s only contribution to society is MS Office. Besides that what?
What has Microsoft ever done for us would be the shortest Monty Python skit ever.
Re:MS Office (Score:4, Insightful)
Visual Studio. NuGet. XBox. Some really nice mice and keyboards. Age of Empires. Microsoft Flight Simulator. Ori. Minesweeper.
I bet I've forgotten a couple of obvious wins. There's a lot more in the "people may debate that pile".
Re:MS Office (Score:4, Interesting)
If it were not for Microsoft BASIC, Microsoft would not have gotten that deal with IBM for an operating system.
The person that did write (most of) DOS also would not have gotten the deal had they gone themselves.
IBM did not do business with people that didnt already have a track record of delivering. Microsoft was already delivering the BASIC "operating system" for a dozen platforms by that point. Apple, Commodore, TANDY,
Now the C# folks are typing "var x = 1;" because thats a whole lot different from "let x = 1" ! Type inference invented in BASIC in the 70s, dropped from BASIC for a stupid reason in the 90s, and now re-introduced everywhere. Exception handling? BASIC programmers were doing that in the 70s while everyone else didnt discover it until the 90s, and still havent added the full capability of microsofts On Error Gosub/Resume/Resume Next has in the 1970s (you cannot catch an exception, fix the offending value that triggered it, and then resume execution at the exact statement the exception had occurred on. You can still can only do that in an older Microsoft BASIC. Those 1970s BASICS were also structured although few used the DEF FN feature at the time. As far as GOTO, you would have seen far more C code with GOTO in the 1990s than you would have seen BASIC code with GOTO.
I could go on and on about the nearly full circle that has happened. What BASIC really always lacked, as it evolved, was all the native hardware datatypes. Didnt support unsigned integers until the
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Re: MS Office (Score:2)
Wikipedia says exception handling originated in Lisp .. didnâ(TM)t fact check the other stuff you said.
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Re: MS Office (Score:2)
Wikipedia says exception handling originated in Lisp .. did not fact check the other stuff you said.
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The concept in LISP and the concept in BASIC aren't the same.
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Obviously BASIC. I mean, BASIC goes without saying.
But aside from Visual Studio, NuGet, XBox., nice mice and keyboards, Age of Empires, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Ori, Minesweeper, BASIC, Xenix, and Excel,
what has Microsoft ever done for us?
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Aqueducts. No... wait. That was the Romans. :-)
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Visual Studio the Social Network?
How about all this extra fluff be treated as what it is, extra fluff. Its not a part of anyones workflow.
Avoiding a repeat of Kinect (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't have the hardware for it to be frank. (Score:2)
You will notice two small difference on the spec sheets for the PS5 and the XSX.
The PS5 has USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10Gbps and Wi-Fi 6 support at 9.6 Gbps
The XSX as neither, supporting older standards with around half the speed. (5Gbps and 6.9Gbps respectively)
These are both essentially critical infrastructure for modern VR headsets, and in particularly on the Wi-Fi front, Wi-Fi 6 is a LOT
time to invest in VR (Score:2)
So the time has finally come to invest in VR.
MS is famous for missing the bus, so when they announce something like that, it's a good chance that this exactly technology is going to kick off in the near future. And why wouldn't it? We've finally figured out some of the issues with VR, the tech has become both affordable and small/light enough to be actually useful, and with self-contained or tethered-to-your-smartphone devices, zoning out in VR on a long flight is a great way to not bother with the fact tha
VR's time hasn't yet come (Score:2)
VR headsets have been around in numerous forms for many years yet they have never taken off.
I have an Oculus Go and there's a skiing game I quite like for a bit of fun some times. The adult video experience is also interesting but I find the accelerometer quite difficult to get quite right if I'm doing anything other than standing up. And of course it is VR for the eyes only, the experience would be significantly enhanced by synced toys.
My friend has the first version of the Oculus Quest. I had a shot at on