Is VR dead?

[Deleted member 197115]

To my knowledge Anti SDE screen is Samsung proprietary technology that they were not planning to share, at least initially, may be that changed. So even with the same resolution it might not provide the same IQ, not sure how much lenses can help in that respect, as it's mostly sweet spot and god rays that they affect.
And this screen helps a lot with SDE, I owned both original and Plus, the difference is significant.
Agree on comfort, lucky for Odyssey owners VRCover has solution for both Odyssey and Odyssey+ now.
And it really improves wearing comfort, many folds in fact. Not like that shouldn't be coming from manufacturer, not trying to defend Samsung oversight here, but at least there is a solution.
Head tracking on WMR is superb at the moment, the problem only happens with controllers when they go into cameras blind spot. So yeah, if you do a lot of archery, extra cameras will help. For sitting experience, racing, flying, it doesn't matter really.
It may appeal to brand loyal fans, if such exist, otherwise I don't see how it can succeed with exactly same spec as current gen WMR esp. as Oculus bigger competitor HTC is coming out with better specced HMD.
I personally looking forward to that one than Rift S. Unless of course rumored Rift S spec is inaccurate and they will try if not beat at least match Cosmos.

 

[RCHeliguy]

The anti-SDE looks blurry to me. It seems like it helps sometimes and hurts other times. I don't hate it, but I also don't consider it a feature that I care about.

Vive Cosmos may be a good product. Time will tell. Their new controllers lot a LOT better than what the Vive had, so maybe they will be good. Historically the Vive has heavier headsets and the COSMOS looks like it could be heavy as well. That article said something, I'm not sure what to make of,

"While HTC also announced an eye-tracking headset at the show - the HTC Vive Pro Eye - the Cosmos won’t have the ability to know where you’re looking and therefore won’t support foveated rendering - one of Oculus’ biggest advantages in the headset war."

If the Rift S actually supported foveated rendering ( I seriously doubt it does ) than 4K per eye could work well. Without it... we need a rabbit pulled from a hat

 

[Deleted member 197115]

The whole "blurry" thing was due to WMR OpenVR driver using wrong renderTargetScale causing unnecessary resampling. It has been fixed since, and Plus to me looks sharper than the original one, plus no SDE grid.
Really not looking forward going back, unless it's higher resolution screen with RGB matrix.
Do we know anything about screens in Rift S, is it pentile OLED like original?

 

[RCHeliguy]

For now I think we will all have to wait for details. It appears Oculus is depleting the supply chain, so they probably won't release any official information until they are about to drop a new product. They have no reason to amp people up. They cancelled their Rift 2.0 or at least pushed it way back on the stack. This is considered a 1.5 iteration, so it will likely be an incremental improvement.

Odds are that I'll end up getting one.

In my eyes HTC hasn't produced anything yet worth considering. So I'll be surprised if the Cosmos is something that interests me. I'd love a good surprise though! The only thing best of class for the Vive is the tracking system that uses base stations. I didn't like their controllers and the Vive headsets have been bulky The Oculus was always a clean integrated well thought out product. Nothing clunky about it. It came with headsets from the beginning. Oculus did lag on getting their Touch controllers to market, but they were worth the wait and are absolute best in class.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Yeah, Oculus it tight lipped about spec and everything else.
At least what was demoed on CES is most likely Cosmos prototype in disguise.
https://www.roadtovr.com/qualcomm-reference-headset-2x-pixels-vive-pro-ces-2018/
Facebook Oculus is not innovative startup Oculus we used to know, they have lost their main VR guys already, the only one left is Carmack, not sure for how long.

 

[RCHeliguy]

And HTC has been split up, had assets purchased and is a shadow of it's former self. What's your point?

The products will stand or fail depending on how good they are. Oculus is still in MUCH better financial shape with better resources at its disposal than the HTC remant working on VR.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Besides money you need brains, and Oculus losing them one by one.
On related note, guess no more Valve HMD
https://uploadvr.com/valve-employees-vr-2019/

 

[Bjarne Hansen]

Besides money you need brains, and Oculus losing them one by one.
On related note, guess no more Valve HMD
https://uploadvr.com/valve-employees-vr-2019/

It could just as well mean the development phase is over and it is in beta testing or even starting production.

By canceling Rift 2 it was clear that the headsets from Facebook / Oculus is not trying to be a leader in VR, which is a shame.
If Facebook's visions of VR are that people meet on social networks as avatars I hope VR is dead as that is just way to stupid.
Samsung is maybe a company that can more VR forward due to display tech.
Otherwise we will see if newcomer companies can come up with innovations.

 

[RCHeliguy]

VR is still young. The early entries into any new market are vulnerable. They "could" come to dominate the market or be knocked out early.

Oculus's decision to cancel/backburner half dome made sense to me. I think they were going down the wrong path. From the very beginning I didn't like the concept of having multiple focal points with motorized moving lenses. It seemed like a lot of moving parts that would fail just to provide depth of field. In most games I would prefer to have infinite focus. It isn't realistic, but it is what I like. As an example for car racing it means that if you looked down at your dash, your dash would come into focus and the imagery in the distance would become blurred and then when you looked back out, your dash would become blurred. Considering how often you might scan and then check your tach or something else on the dash that just seems like a lot of wasted effort, at least to me. People WANT resolution and field of view. The group on the half dome project decided this would add realism, but it is a lot of expense for features that are not top priorities yet. Maybe once we get resolution and field of view and foveated rendering so we can support more resolution THAN work on depth of field.

They did lose people when they pushed that project back which may have been a good thing if those people where pushing them in the wrong direction for now. As talented as they were, I think the feature set was wrong for this point in time. Just one point of view, but sometimes talented people feel passionate about things at the wrong time for the market.

 

[Jordan Dion]

Conclusion...
VR is at early stage in development of the best concept

People don't want to read a book and forum to understand how it works and to get good performance

They need to upgrade image quality

High end VR are way to expensive. Not the VR himself but the PC it takes

 

[Deleted member 197115]

I don't think it has anything to do with motorized lenses, it was just another prototype, companies go through a lot of them before settling for an acceptable, working solution.
It was the whole idea of high end PC HMD that was essentially killed and made Brendan Iribe leave Facebook.
But as it made PC enthusiasts quite angry, as a damage control Oculus threw us Rift S bone, with no spec or any data of what it is. Where did it come from I wonder, never heard of Oculus working on that half gen solution before.
Sounds like the only innovation is an attempt to improve on WMR tracking with extra onboard cameras.

 

[RCHeliguy]

The motorized lenses and adjusting depth of field was the key concept of the half dome concept that was canceled. https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/facebook-oculus-half-dome-teaser/

Like I said, I didn't think the half dome would have been a good move.

The Rift S is just an incremental update. Oculus stated that they would update products on a 3 year cycle so they are just keeping with that. I'm sure the update was scaled back. Originally the idea was for 140 degrees FOV which would have been an improvement as well.

You can paint the Rift S however you want, but it will likely deliver on the promises that the betish WMR headsets made. Most of the WMR headsets were pretty bad. The best of the bunch Odyssey was pretty good, but still lacked polish. They've cleaned it up some with their update to it, but it still lacks the comfort, is 50% heavier, has hand tracking that is lacking.

So if the Rift S is still lighter, more comfortable, with better tracking and keep all the other nice features. For example the little things like the magnetic battery compartment on the hand controls. The way the hand controls sip power from a single AA cell and are also very light. There is a LOT of polish to their products that is still missing from the WMR headsets.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Andrew, it does look like you may have called the end of base stations and all VR going to inside out tracking correctly. The fat lady hasn't quite sung, but it sounds like she is ready to go on stage.

If HTC and Oculus have abandoned base stations for future HMD's and if Valve is pulling back from VR space, base stations are effectively dead. StarVR also had an inside out tracking headset assuming their IP ends up somewhere useful (fingers crossed)

The HUGE issue here are the hand controllers ( until they aren't )

Oculus has the current state of the marketplace controllers, period. Comfortable and ergonomic, etc.

The SteamVR 2.0 base stations were a standard. Any hand controller that followed that standard would work with any SteamVR 2.0 headset. This meant that Vive, Pimax, SteamVR, or Valve headsets could all use the new knuckles controllers if they were ever released.

What I'm seeing a LOT more of now are demos of inside out tracking cameras tracking hands without any controller. So the question becomes whether hand controllers are required or not.

In flight games like XPlanes they have tried to move away from all hardware controls so a player could reach out and interact with the virtual controls of that plane. Personally I think that works great for things instruments which are very different for different planes. However I will always think that the stick, throttle and pedals should be hardware controls.

Likewise some of the tactile systems under development included FFB. Like a haptic gloves that offer resistance when picking up an object and allowed squeezing etc..

So it's really hard to predict where this is going, but for the average consumer a hands only interface without out controllers of any kind would be the most convenient and that is likely what will have the highest market penetration.

 

[sjb266]

Good discussion...

My opinion is that it will never go mainstream.. ever... but will always have it's niche.. Like Vinyl records!

I bought an Oculus a year or so ago.. loved it.. couldn't race without it.. then I started to tire of it... bought a Samsung 49" widescreen.. and now never use the Rift.. I've tried a few times to go back to capture the magic but the cons outweigh the pros for me now and confirmation bias has faded away!!

 

[RCHeliguy]

Good discussion...

My opinion is that it will never go mainstream.. ever... but will always have it's niche.. Like Vinyl records!

I bought an Oculus a year or so ago.. loved it.. couldn't race without it.. then I started to tire of it... bought a Samsung 49" widescreen.. and now never use the Rift.. I've tried a few times to go back to capture the magic but the cons outweigh the pros for me now and confirmation bias has faded away!!

I'm not sure that's a very good analogy.

Vinyl is old tech and dramatically inferior for storing music to digital media.
Vinyl degrades easily, requires maintenance, is cumbersome to deal with, takes up lots of storage space and doesn't have the instant selection from a music server which can offer seemingly limitless selection, playlist grouping and randomized play.

VR is high tech and adds to the experience.
Head tracking means you never have to press a key to look left, or look right and can naturally look into corners. 3D depth perception means your eye work as they are supposed to and have more information to use to gauge when to turn in and other timing. VR is small footprint vs. a triple screen monitor setup to try to get a similar experience.

By comparison a bunch of monitors are bulky, are inefficient in terms of power and heat generated and don't convey the same immersion.

This isn't confirmation bias and is a difference in priorities. I started out in front of a low latency 65" UHD monitor at a perfect height. It was OK, but in VR I felt like I was there in the car. For me that was a huge difference.

That doesn't mean everyone likes driving in VR and I respect that. But there is a big difference between having different preferences and having confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a real issue and it is obvious that I favor Oculus right now and Andrew favors Samsung. I'm sure we both think we are being less biased than the other

 

[sjb266]

It was more the point that there will always be enthusiasts... I was not being literal

 

[RCHeliguy]

It was more the point that there will always be enthusiasts... I was not being literal

Well, I'm a bit of an audiophile, not in the crazy believe in magic way some people are. As an electrical engineer I occasionally get into discussions about things like why a $1,000 USB cable doesn't make music sound any better and how 1's and 0's have no gray areas. They are either in spec and latch the right way or they are out of spec and get re transmitted if the checksum fails than buffered by the DAC.

So you may have hit a trigger

Was your point more that some people are about the immersion factor and others are about track times?

If so, I am definitely in the immersion camp. This is why I have a seat mover, 4 transducers and play in VR.

I want to feel like I am in the car. So call me an immersion enthusiast if you like. I never expect to be truly competitive on a race track, but I still want the experience to be visceral.

 

[Miguel Batista]

Well, I'm a bit of an audiophile, not in the crazy believe in magic way some people are. As an electrical engineer I occasionally get into discussions about things like why a $1,000 USB cable doesn't make music sound any better and how 1's and 0's have no gray areas. They are either in spec and latch the right way or they are out of spec and get re transmitted if the checksum fails than buffered by the DAC.

So you may have hit a trigger

Was your point more that some people are about the immersion factor and others are about track times?

If so, I am definitely in the immersion camp. This is why I have a seat mover, 4 transducers and play in VR.

I want to feel like I am in the car. So call me an immersion enthusiast if you like. I never expect to be truly competitive on a race track, but I still want the experience to be visceral.

I am with ypu on the immersion vs competitive thing. Even to a fault. Like before VR I never considered a DD wheel. Now, I would actually like to replicate the forces a group C driver or an F1 driver in the 60s or 70s would feel when they were driving those cars. And a but kicker system... for me, driving in VR is a necessity to properly enjoy a racing sim.

 

[scottiedawg66]

seems like foveated rendering GPU support might be on the horizon? Also sounds like nvidia has a similar strategy already in place. So what is the missing piece of the puzzle? A headset with eye tracking?

https://wccftech.com/amd-next-gen-r...-launch-with-upcoming-rx-navi-graphics-cards/

 

[Miguel Batista]

seems like foveated rendering GPU support might be on the horizon? Also sounds like nvidia has a similar strategy already in place. So what is the missing piece of the puzzle? A headset with eye tracking?

https://wccftech.com/amd-next-gen-r...-launch-with-upcoming-rx-navi-graphics-cards/

As long as latency is good, eye tracking could be a plus. But even a bit of latency could ruin the experience.