VR Could Be More About Film Than Games, Oculus Says

I only got to play around with one for a few minutes, but it doesn't take long to see how shoddy the image quality is in these VR headsets.

Imho, it will end up just being a gimmick. It takes the nerdiest of nerds to sit there slack jawed, with one of these strapped on. My wife has al ready told me that it would be hard to watch me play that way.

These guys annoy me with every statement they make. It's like they don't give a sh*t about games anymore. What pr*cks

I am very surprised that people are not mentioning that the VR is like strapping a 70 inch (or bigger) TV screen to your head. How much does a high def 70 inch TV go for? For a fraction of that cost you can have that in your living room. On a cost per unit basis it is even cheaper to buy one for every member of your family than to buy just one TV of that size. Factor in the fact that there will be undoubtedly advancements that will allow you to view DVD's blluetoothed directly to the unit and you have a portable entertainment system for each member of the family.

It's quite possible, in the short term. The reason is simple - VR game where a player feels realistic demands hardware beyond what is available on the market today, but VR movies doesn't have such a steep requirement.

In order for controlling a character in first-person mode in a 3D environment to feel "realistic", I'm not just talking about fancy graphics. In fact, I think modern graphics are already good enough. However, unlike a plain 2D monitor where even 1080p may feel clear enough and 60fps smooth enough, your eyes will be a lot more sensitive to the uncanny valley. VR will need VASTLY higher resolution and fps to feel realistic, 4K resolution would have to be the borderline, and fps above 200 or higher may be needed before VR games feels realistic.

Poorer 3D graphics on the other hand is not as great an issue as resolution and fps when it comes to VR. The human brain would trick itself into perceiving less-detailed 3D objects as real, but regretfully it can't do anything about low resolution and poor framerate.

Why not sporting events? I mean, people pay a lot of money for a good seat at a football game. Why not just place some crazy multi-directional camera in several seats at a stadium? Then charge people access to those seats and ability to switch between them on the fly, so they can watch the game with a VR headset as if they were right there in the stadium.

VR is going to be a very slow process I think. Lots of trial and error in how the tech will work.

Bit hard to get excited about VR when there aren't even any actual games planned for it yet.

Not to mention movies on this thing will feel like being 3D in a 4D world. By including head movement in the headset you are giving it more flexibility for immersion. Only to then remove that flexibility when you watch a movie. Since 3D movies aren't actual 3D, they are 2D images with depth added to them. Your point of view while watching a video will always be fixed.

3D would be if I could walk around in the movie just like in a video game. Which will never happen. Most of the reasons for VR are lost when watching movies on it.

Honestly the more they speak about it and the more I think about it as a device the less confident I am that it will be a success. Once the wow factor of these has gone and it will go eventually I don't think there will be much incentive to even use one any more outside of a few very niche genres, such as simulations.

I hope I'm wrong but I just can't shake the scepticism no matter how much I want to.

While I really doubt VR will be good for movies, I have no doubt VR will be great, and quite popular in the gaming community.

I would like to say why I think people are unfairly comparing VR to Kinect or 3D.

While Kinect might have had hype behind it, it never lived up to the potential we were told it had, most peoples first experience with Kinect made them doubt it would ever be a popular device, and none of the early demos shown except the extremely scripted Milo demo showed the Kinect wasn't capable of much that would be useful in a meaningful way in gaming. The Oculus Rift on the other hand makes believers out of the people who try it, they go in with low expectations and leave as full converts, people who remember the experience as something refreshingly new and immersive, it's really the opposite of the "Kinect Effect" where you go in with high expectations and realize they will never come to fruition, VR has you go in with low expectations and come out realizing it does actually deliver, and it's vision has already come to fruition.

3D is also something that was hyped as the next big thing, but most peoples first experience showed it was a novelty at most, and one that would leave your eyes hurting after a couple hours, gaming in 3D also wasn't great, I hear people talk about VR like it's 3D and it just shocks me that they don't realize the difference between being fully immersed in a world that is around you, compared to one that simply pops out giving a feeling of depth.

Games with native VR support are putting you in the characters eyes, you aren't simply viewing it from the perspective of the character though, you are viewing it from your own perspective as you now control the characters head movement with your own, and the world is all around you, for all intensive purposes, you are the character, and anyone who has experienced VR will get that moment when you're so convinced it's you, you put your hands out to see them, even though it doesn't work in game, you expect it to, simply because the experience is so real your brain interprets it as reality.

I think VR will be huge, especially now that Oculus bought the team that is working on full hand tracking called NimbleVR - << LINK REMOVED >>

"We don't know what the killer app is."

And you never will, unless you get around to actually releasing the consumer version...

I'm mostly excited for exploring places I never will in real life. Like the moon, Mars, the Sun, deep oceans and Mt Everest. Wingsuit flying in the alps!

If someone could make a really cool "simulatuion", in VR, of the the 1969 moonlanding (including take-off, landing, exploring the moon and the return journey) I would be all over that!

p0rn

I doubt it will be movies. People socialise with films far more than they do gaming, also films would require studios to spend a small, and unecessary, fortunes on it. Games won't as the worlds are generated in 3D already.

still have yet to see a reason to get excited for vr and now oculus admits they don't have a killer app

It's already pretty apparent that one of the emerging genres is not a traditional game. I hesitate to call these things VR Games as they're more like VR Trips. By the word "trip" I do mean both "visiting another location" and "tripping out". They're limited in interactivity but deep in immersion so these VR trips are more related to movies than games.

I blame this on lack of decent input devices more than anything else. Despite the surge in motion gaming we had, it still feels like that technology is already lagging behind what VR technology needs for gaming. It needs to catch up.

And facebooks evil hooks set in..oh well...some other company will pick it up