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Skybird · 11-24-17, 10:19 AM

Almost one week with VR now, time for a sitrep and assessment.

It has blown the top of my skull up and high into the air.

Its not as if there are no visual setbacks. Due to the current technical implementation, some disadvantages cannot be aovided: the grapjhcis are somewhat blurry, think of it as an oldfashioned CRT TV and you with your nose close to the screen, then you get an idea of wehat it is about. The further and deeper you look into the distance of VR space, the blurrier it becomes, ion close vicinity, say up to three meters, it is pretty much clear, and some titles put more techncial emphasis on making graphcis in close vicinty sharper, than others. You always wear a ski mask: the outer rims of your viewing field are blocked, but not much, at top and bottom one finger wide, at the sides two finger wide.

Does all this limit the joy? For me, not at all. The mask effect I am not aware of anymore since minute two of my VR exploration. The blurriness is somethign one gets used to, in some games it is more apparent, on others less.

The Oculus introduction and then the first demo with the small flying robot, were moments of pure magic like I have not felt for many, many years. I probably grinned all the time like an idiot, babbling stupid words like "Das is' nicht wahr!" and "Verdammte Scheiße!" and repeating them endlessly, for more variation in prose my brain had no reserves left to produce, it was too occupied with processing what the headset fed in signals via the eyes. I then, ten minutes later, tried Google Earth in VR. And it was then when the first contact with the virtual world really became overwhelming. I was speechless, and felt that my emotional control was starting to get shaken. I could not belie it, the visual impression was absolutel overwhelming and - well, yes, overwhelming, there is no better word for it. I was floating in space, and this big orb that Earth is was floating before my eyes and I was levitating in empty space and stars and the milky way around me - then zooming in to Florence and seeing it laid out under my eyes like the 3D landscape of a model railway landscape of unlimited proportions, and this little god that I suddenly had turned into, flying and moving and handling it all like he wanted - it started to become too much. Not due to nausea, and still have not suffered a single minute from it, but my emotional reaction became more and more intense. All this beauty around me! Unbelievable!

I then zoomed to Neuschwanstein Castle, and here used the function of Streetview, suddenly standing in the inner yard of the castle that surrounded me as a true 360° panorama, and all the people stood around me, and I turned and it was as if I were there. I had to stop here and give it a break, my emotioins went on a rollercoaster ride. System overload, my inner system shut down and took a break.

Guys, this is madness.

Since then, I only made as intense and overwhelming new experiences with VR, no matter what I tried. The tracks in Assetto Corsa and now sitting inside the car and watchigng my alter ego behind the wheel, it is a completely new ball game, the tracks have nothing to do with those I remember from screen. That cars in a distance are hazy and blurry, it just does not matter that much, when they get closer, all the stunning detail in stereoscopic 3D becomes apparent, you race in the middle of the pack, you see and think you feel the car shakign and rollign around you, you scratch off paint from others and look scared out of the window, you naturall turn your head towards turn apex or to watch the mirrors - its super-hot stuff, the devil pales in envy. With the even more detailed tracks in Raceroom, it became even better. Yesterday i did the Nordschleife, trying to kill my new rig and push it into maximum fans acitivity (a fail, btw.

) by driving with almost 100 cars. The noise! the sights! The experience! You see, all external cameras, TV cameras, car body cameras, they are still there - just in 3D. You want to reach out and touch it. Its unbelievable.

What also impresses me, is how they solved latency. There is none you can note. I love to play Eleven Table Tennis, and you depend on the game releasing your movements and reactions in zero time. And as far as human perception is concerned - it does. The movements I do are natural, and like in reality, the game - to me, while I play - is like the real thing, they physics are excellent and absolutely convincing. After 30 minutes of excercising

, I am wet with sweat, breathing a bit heavier than before. Its unbelievable how good this game is in catching the real thing. I also saw Racket Fury, which is better in presentation, but a bit lighter in AI and physics, still: also a very good table tennis game. Just that Eleven is as hardcore as it can get, gameplay- and physics-wise.

This morning I installed Battle for Stalingrad. I have not set up the controls and did not tune the game, I just went into a quick mission and let the autopilot fly and fight. Holy cow, once again I was kicked out of reality. They did an excellent job, a most excellent job in recreating the cockpits in 3D, and making all the instruments readable, and easily so, and the blurriness of distant planes also got toned down, but I recommend to play with labels on in VR. I expected the experience to be unusable, due to the open space and huge distance and the blurriness this implies. Somehow they managed to significantly tone it down. Like with racing before, flying now is a completely new ballgame.

Point is, the scaling of objects in stereoscopic 3D gives you the impression to be different, bigger, than you are used to know things from 2D screen. a screen does not transport the informaton for the eye that gives you a correct idea of how big and massive objects actually are. It was like this in my race sims, and it was like this in Sturmovik Stalingrad as well. The tracks in race sims appear to be flat and even, even the laserscanned bumby and steep ones. on a screen, you just do not become aware of it. with the Vr headset on, you deal with a new world and are stunned of how steep it goes up and down on the N ordschlweife, and how uneven the track is.

There are many free programs to be tried, demos and small games, I tried Robo recall, like somebody recommended, and indeed it is good fun and shows some really nasty humour, and it is a nice pistols and rifles shooter in the streets of Robo City. A good demonstrator.

I already own Dirt Rally, like the other racing sims, so I get VR for it free, I just need to tune the options and settings a bit. The experience of driving rally I had already. It was the most intense driving of them all!

And the world looks fantastic.

My rig is a monster, and no matter what I throw at it, it happily digests it, and the Rift gives me 90 frames all the time. You can get away with less frames and then some software solution to extrapolate additional frames, but this comes at the cost of a.) being less precise, and more important: b.) increasing the risk of nausea. Whe you consider to try VR, keep this in mind. You can get away with a less beefy system and lower specs than I have, but you may be faced with a price.

Also, nausea risk increases in games that have the player moving at high speeds, and then looking to the side instead of ahead. For your first test, you may want to chose a more slow, gentle animation experience, or something where you can stay steady.

I just got Alien Isolation in steam sales today. Somewhere out there, there is a - working! - 3D patch for it, indeed it has her basic 3D interface build in, but the producer never officially pushed it to release in development, since they did not sell enough units of the game and thus development was considered uneconomical. Not much must be said about the game and its survival mode, its truly creepy. Now that I have a first hand impression of what 3D does regarding me teleporting INTO as game world, I am not eager to check out the manual installation needed for this patch.

As I said already in the Subnautica thread, this is another marvel in 3D VR. The beauty to be seen is incredible ,you must not play the game, just go into god mode and then dive away as far as your heart lets you - and as deep. The feel of pressure in the wide open blue, is intense as well. I feel very intense excitement when diving in this game. At night, it looks breathtaking. Its a SciFi game after akll, and the flora and fauna is an alien one.

A word on the manufacturing quality of the Rift. The visuals are said to be the best amongst all currently available headsets. And I do not complain about visuals and electronics, but about the face rim with foam that they provided, it is cheap, shabby, and did not fit my face at all, my nose's breath streamed back into the mask and the result was not just fogging, but it simply became really wet inside. Very bad. For this price, even at reduced price, the manufcaturing quality is shabby. The foam also started to unpick at the sleeves, where skin might be a bit rough due to shaving having left some stopples of hair. I replaced the face frame with an external product which again is not too good in manufacturing quality considering its too high price, but it has at least a plastic leather skin on the foam, and a piece of cloth to be put on top of that, and important: the fit is suiting my face much better. Hygienics can become problematic, since you tend to sweat when wearing this masks, they become warm, and if you play something like table tennis, you sweat due to the "sports".

My glasses were not a problem to be worn in the mask, but be aware they say here is a limit how wide glasses cna be, not every frame may fit into the mask. Anyway, I ordered lens-lab lenses that get attached to the mask, so that I do no need to wear the glasses at all.

On the cables, they again saved money ion the wrong plac, they are the very lowest minimum only. At the same time, be advised that if you extent them, you enter dangerous terrain already if extensions are longer than 2m, also, not all brands of cakbveols may work with the Oculus Rift. The Rift needs longer cables by default, and a stronger signal amplifier would be appreciated as well.

The runnign software is too obstzrusive, for my taste, coming to life whenever oyu just touch or move the Rift on the table. There is no switch to turn the hardware off, it is always on - stupid, and they said they designed it intentionally so, which is even more stupid.

Its no bad kit, I do not say he image quality ois bad, it isn't. What I say is that they save dmoneys in the wroing places, and that the cable length is too short, and the face frame is too bad - on these things the Rift is overpriced. However, the Vive currrently costs twice as much, more or less.

Virtual Desktop is a must have tool, it projects the PC desktop before your eyes and let you handle it without needing to take off the mask. Its like sitting before a huge movie screen in the cinema. There are severla programs doing this, but VD is said to have the best player for 360° videos, which are another highly fascinating thing. You sit in an open bus and drive through the streets of Havannah, a fluid, smooth movie that is projected on the inner side of a sphere surrounding you from all sides, and yourself hanging in the centre of the sphere. Dolphin diving, parachute jumping, and many touristic introduction videos - very nice!

Programmign games for 3D, is costly, and the first heavy weight in business, CCD who did Eve Valkyrie for 3D on Playstation, already has withdrawn completely again. With games like Skyrim and Fallout coming to 3D, the ultimate fate of VR is still open nevertheless, but I do not take it for granted that it will be a success story - in gaming. Some games' content are nice for VR implementation, some other content does not go well together with VR. However, one must see the other fields where VR can be used, and I gave some example, while not having mentioned others. The possibilities are immense, and fascinating, and technology will improve. Just increasing the pixel in displays will not do the trick, since you need more calculation power in your PC s well.

I think, all in all, this time VR has come to stay. But it will not necessarily be the game genre that pushes it forward. Could be - but must not be. There are tradeoffs in visual quality that you currently have to live with, but I found myself getting overwhelmed and flattened by the compensation. I love VR, and I love it with big passion - just took me one minute.

One minute.

P.S.
The nausea problem is a brain training thing. You can train yourself to form greater tolerance for it. If you are faced by this problem, due to lacking monitor time, do not give it up immediately, but come back next day, but have a calmer and shorter session, and then slowly extend length and intensity of your sessions, from day to day. Most, amost all people seem to agree that this way you can train your brain to adapt to VR. Me, playing a lot and doing a lot of things on PC, has not had a single nausea attack so far. However, if yiur hardware is lacking, no brain trian can compensate for that.

And if somebody knows how to get Stellarium for VR (named Starsight, I think) without needing to file in a Google+ account, please let me know.

Elite can be had for Steam sale price currently, think I go after it. I'm on a frenzy currently.

11-24-17, 10:19 AM	#17
Skybird Soaring Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: the mental asylum named Germany Posts: 40,497 Downloads: 9 Uploads: 0	Almost one week with VR now, time for a sitrep and assessment. It has blown the top of my skull up and high into the air. Its not as if there are no visual setbacks. Due to the current technical implementation, some disadvantages cannot be aovided: the grapjhcis are somewhat blurry, think of it as an oldfashioned CRT TV and you with your nose close to the screen, then you get an idea of wehat it is about. The further and deeper you look into the distance of VR space, the blurrier it becomes, ion close vicinity, say up to three meters, it is pretty much clear, and some titles put more techncial emphasis on making graphcis in close vicinty sharper, than others. You always wear a ski mask: the outer rims of your viewing field are blocked, but not much, at top and bottom one finger wide, at the sides two finger wide. Does all this limit the joy? For me, not at all. The mask effect I am not aware of anymore since minute two of my VR exploration. The blurriness is somethign one gets used to, in some games it is more apparent, on others less. The Oculus introduction and then the first demo with the small flying robot, were moments of pure magic like I have not felt for many, many years. I probably grinned all the time like an idiot, babbling stupid words like "Das is' nicht wahr!" and "Verdammte Scheiße!" and repeating them endlessly, for more variation in prose my brain had no reserves left to produce, it was too occupied with processing what the headset fed in signals via the eyes. I then, ten minutes later, tried Google Earth in VR. And it was then when the first contact with the virtual world really became overwhelming. I was speechless, and felt that my emotional control was starting to get shaken. I could not belie it, the visual impression was absolutel overwhelming and - well, yes, overwhelming, there is no better word for it. I was floating in space, and this big orb that Earth is was floating before my eyes and I was levitating in empty space and stars and the milky way around me - then zooming in to Florence and seeing it laid out under my eyes like the 3D landscape of a model railway landscape of unlimited proportions, and this little god that I suddenly had turned into, flying and moving and handling it all like he wanted - it started to become too much. Not due to nausea, and still have not suffered a single minute from it, but my emotional reaction became more and more intense. All this beauty around me! Unbelievable! I then zoomed to Neuschwanstein Castle, and here used the function of Streetview, suddenly standing in the inner yard of the castle that surrounded me as a true 360° panorama, and all the people stood around me, and I turned and it was as if I were there. I had to stop here and give it a break, my emotioins went on a rollercoaster ride. System overload, my inner system shut down and took a break. *Guys, this is madness.* Since then, I only made as intense and overwhelming new experiences with VR, no matter what I tried. The tracks in Assetto Corsa and now sitting inside the car and watchigng my alter ego behind the wheel, it is a completely new ball game, the tracks have nothing to do with those I remember from screen. That cars in a distance are hazy and blurry, it just does not matter that much, when they get closer, all the stunning detail in stereoscopic 3D becomes apparent, you race in the middle of the pack, you see and think you feel the car shakign and rollign around you, you scratch off paint from others and look scared out of the window, you naturall turn your head towards turn apex or to watch the mirrors - its super-hot stuff, the devil pales in envy. With the even more detailed tracks in Raceroom, it became even better. Yesterday i did the Nordschleife, trying to kill my new rig and push it into maximum fans acitivity (a fail, btw. ) by driving with almost 100 cars. The noise! the sights! The experience! You see, all external cameras, TV cameras, car body cameras, they are still there - just in 3D. You want to reach out and touch it. Its unbelievable. What also impresses me, is how they solved latency. There is none you can note. I love to play Eleven Table Tennis, and you depend on the game releasing your movements and reactions in zero time. And as far as human perception is concerned - it does. The movements I do are natural, and like in reality, the game - to me, while I play - is like the real thing, they physics are excellent and absolutely convincing. After 30 minutes of excercising , I am wet with sweat, breathing a bit heavier than before. Its unbelievable how good this game is in catching the real thing. I also saw Racket Fury, which is better in presentation, but a bit lighter in AI and physics, still: also a very good table tennis game. Just that Eleven is as hardcore as it can get, gameplay- and physics-wise. This morning I installed Battle for Stalingrad. I have not set up the controls and did not tune the game, I just went into a quick mission and let the autopilot fly and fight. Holy cow, once again I was kicked out of reality. They did an excellent job, a most excellent job in recreating the cockpits in 3D, and making all the instruments readable, and easily so, and the blurriness of distant planes also got toned down, but I recommend to play with labels on in VR. I expected the experience to be unusable, due to the open space and huge distance and the blurriness this implies. Somehow they managed to significantly tone it down. Like with racing before, flying now is a completely new ballgame. Point is, the scaling of objects in stereoscopic 3D gives you the impression to be different, bigger, than you are used to know things from 2D screen. a screen does not transport the informaton for the eye that gives you a correct idea of how big and massive objects actually are. It was like this in my race sims, and it was like this in Sturmovik Stalingrad as well. The tracks in race sims appear to be flat and even, even the laserscanned bumby and steep ones. on a screen, you just do not become aware of it. with the Vr headset on, you deal with a new world and are stunned of how steep it goes up and down on the N ordschlweife, and how uneven the track is. There are many free programs to be tried, demos and small games, I tried Robo recall, like somebody recommended, and indeed it is good fun and shows some really nasty humour, and it is a nice pistols and rifles shooter in the streets of Robo City. A good demonstrator. I already own Dirt Rally, like the other racing sims, so I get VR for it free, I just need to tune the options and settings a bit. The experience of driving rally I had already. It was the most intense driving of them all! And the world looks fantastic. My rig is a monster, and no matter what I throw at it, it happily digests it, and the Rift gives me 90 frames all the time. You can get away with less frames and then some software solution to extrapolate additional frames, but this comes at the cost of a.) being less precise, and more important: b.) increasing the risk of nausea. Whe you consider to try VR, keep this in mind. You can get away with a less beefy system and lower specs than I have, but you may be faced with a price. Also, nausea risk increases in games that have the player moving at high speeds, and then looking to the side instead of ahead. For your first test, you may want to chose a more slow, gentle animation experience, or something where you can stay steady. I just got Alien Isolation in steam sales today. Somewhere out there, there is a - working! - 3D patch for it, indeed it has her basic 3D interface build in, but the producer never officially pushed it to release in development, since they did not sell enough units of the game and thus development was considered uneconomical. Not much must be said about the game and its survival mode, its truly creepy. Now that I have a first hand impression of what 3D does regarding me teleporting INTO as game world, I am not eager to check out the manual installation needed for this patch. As I said already in the Subnautica thread, this is another marvel in 3D VR. The beauty to be seen is incredible ,you must not play the game, just go into god mode and then dive away as far as your heart lets you - and as deep. The feel of pressure in the wide open blue, is intense as well. I feel very intense excitement when diving in this game. At night, it looks breathtaking. Its a SciFi game after akll, and the flora and fauna is an alien one. A word on the manufacturing quality of the Rift. The visuals are said to be the best amongst all currently available headsets. And I do not complain about visuals and electronics, but about the face rim with foam that they provided, it is cheap, shabby, and did not fit my face at all, my nose's breath streamed back into the mask and the result was not just fogging, but it simply became really wet inside. Very bad. For this price, even at reduced price, the manufcaturing quality is shabby. The foam also started to unpick at the sleeves, where skin might be a bit rough due to shaving having left some stopples of hair. I replaced the face frame with an external product which again is not too good in manufacturing quality considering its too high price, but it has at least a plastic leather skin on the foam, and a piece of cloth to be put on top of that, and important: the fit is suiting my face much better. Hygienics can become problematic, since you tend to sweat when wearing this masks, they become warm, and if you play something like table tennis, you sweat due to the "sports". My glasses were not a problem to be worn in the mask, but be aware they say here is a limit how wide glasses cna be, not every frame may fit into the mask. Anyway, I ordered lens-lab lenses that get attached to the mask, so that I do no need to wear the glasses at all. On the cables, they again saved money ion the wrong plac, they are the very lowest minimum only. At the same time, be advised that if you extent them, you enter dangerous terrain already if extensions are longer than 2m, also, not all brands of cakbveols may work with the Oculus Rift. The Rift needs longer cables by default, and a stronger signal amplifier would be appreciated as well. The runnign software is too obstzrusive, for my taste, coming to life whenever oyu just touch or move the Rift on the table. There is no switch to turn the hardware off, it is always on - stupid, and they said they designed it intentionally so, which is even more stupid. Its no bad kit, I do not say he image quality ois bad, it isn't. What I say is that they save dmoneys in the wroing places, and that the cable length is too short, and the face frame is too bad - on these things the Rift is overpriced. However, the Vive currrently costs twice as much, more or less. Virtual Desktop is a must have tool, it projects the PC desktop before your eyes and let you handle it without needing to take off the mask. Its like sitting before a huge movie screen in the cinema. There are severla programs doing this, but VD is said to have the best player for 360° videos, which are another highly fascinating thing. You sit in an open bus and drive through the streets of Havannah, a fluid, smooth movie that is projected on the inner side of a sphere surrounding you from all sides, and yourself hanging in the centre of the sphere. Dolphin diving, parachute jumping, and many touristic introduction videos - very nice! Programmign games for 3D, is costly, and the first heavy weight in business, CCD who did Eve Valkyrie for 3D on Playstation, already has withdrawn completely again. With games like Skyrim and Fallout coming to 3D, the ultimate fate of VR is still open nevertheless, but I do not take it for granted that it will be a success story - in gaming. Some games' content are nice for VR implementation, some other content does not go well together with VR. However, one must see the other fields where VR can be used, and I gave some example, while not having mentioned others. The possibilities are immense, and fascinating, and technology will improve. Just increasing the pixel in displays will not do the trick, since you need more calculation power in your PC s well. I think, all in all, this time VR has come to stay. But it will not necessarily be the game genre that pushes it forward. Could be - but must not be. There are tradeoffs in visual quality that you currently have to live with, but I found myself getting overwhelmed and flattened by the compensation. I love VR, and I love it with big passion - just took me one minute. One minute. P.S. The nausea problem is a brain training thing. You can train yourself to form greater tolerance for it. If you are faced by this problem, due to lacking monitor time, do not give it up immediately, but come back next day, but have a calmer and shorter session, and then slowly extend length and intensity of your sessions, from day to day. Most, amost all people seem to agree that this way you can train your brain to adapt to VR. Me, playing a lot and doing a lot of things on PC, has not had a single nausea attack so far. However, if yiur hardware is lacking, no brain trian can compensate for that. And if somebody knows how to get Stellarium for VR (named Starsight, I think) without needing to file in a Google+ account, please let me know. Elite can be had for Steam sale price currently, think I go after it. I'm on a frenzy currently. __________________ If you feel nuts, consult an expert. Last edited by Skybird; 11-24-17 at 10:46 AM.