@wiouds said:
After using the 3d goggles (I refuse to say they has anything to do with VR) for a bit I see it more as shoehorning into games. It offers so little to change to games, It offers less than motion control. Movement of the head is all it offer if you look thing not subjective like immersion. I can see makers force games to be first person because of the 3d goggles and few games truly benefits from being first person.
This is kind of like saying "I don't need to look at artwork because I already know what paint looks like". Sure, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because stereoscopic 3D is an element of the total number of effects that make up VR, but the difference between that VR does and what 3D does is night and day. Again, though, it's hard to describe because if you haven't tried it you have no frame of reference.
@seanh:
"I can see your point about the whole 'Matrix' thing, however they are really only just goggles with a screen on them - So from an immersion point of view, first person sim games (driving, flying etc) would be pretty good if done right, but it's still just going to be the same as what is on your TV screen only really close to your head so you can't see anything else, and with the added bonus (or annoyance, depending on how you look at it) of being able to move your head to look around."
Yeah, this is the part that's hard to explain.
My interest in VR was piqued when I saw all these Youtube videos of people using VR headsets and going through rollercoaster demos falling out of their chairs. I was curious to know if this was happened because VR is that cool or because the people in these videos are all spazzes. After trying it out myself, I'd say it's about 50/50. The effect -is- extremely convincing. It's really the head tracking that "sells" the effect to your brain. Without head tracking, the effect is very much as you say. You feel like you have a screen strapped to your face. It fills your vision and blocks out everything but the game image, but that's not really the whole story. With head/3d positional tracking added onto that, the effect changes from "screen on my face" to "I am somewhere else". The fact that every aspect of the perspective changes with the slightest movement of your head in any direction makes the whole thing feel very natural and real. Even before you put on the goggles, you can see a different place through the lenses that stays perfectly still on the other side of the glass while you move the headset around.
While playing Alien Isolation with the DK2, I heard a noise behind me. I jumped and spun around to see a Working Joe behind me sitting at a previously dark workstation (this was before they go all homicidal). I realized just after that happened that -I- heard a noise behind me and -I- turned around, not that I spun my character in the game. The level of immersion that you get from these things is insane. Even just these little cheesy horror tech demos that spring up on Steam Early Access and Oculus Share, games that would barely be a blip on the radar were they not VR, and be extremely unsettling.
"Your point about mobile gaming has some mileage to it, however you're missing a key point with that whole platform. The accessibility is insane."
I'm not saying that VR will reach anywhere near the level of market penetration that mobile gaming has, only that if it succeeds it'll be based on new experiences designed specifically with VR in mind from the ground up as opposed to just tacking VR onto something like Call of Duty. VR will still be a "hobbiest" toy much like HOTAS setups are for the sim crowd, but with more general appeal than what I just described.
"As regards to 'shoehorning' - I think we will see more of that than you think. It will most certainly be like the 3D implantation into games - half arsed. It was sort of only done as token gesture, (like on Killzone for PS4) because the devs knew that not enough people had a 3D TV so why put in millions into the technology when there wouldn't be the significant return on investment. Same for PS Move. Same for Kinect, same for the PS4 Camera and it'll be the same for VR to a degree."
I have all of the technologies you mentioned, and with just about all of them there are pretty obvious reasons why they didn't take off. 3D isn't bad but adding the illusion of depth doesn't really do much to add to the expreience relative to the inconvenience of the "wearable tech" it requires. Xbox Kinect gave you a significantly less precise control scheme in exchange for the novelty of being able to play without a controller, which was a terrible tradeoff. PS Move was far more precise, but it didn't really give you any significant advantage over playing with a controller and came at the cost of user fatigue. With VR, though, it's doing something pretty different from anything that was done before as opposed to replacing a perfectly good control scheme with a crappier one.
"These VR systems will be rather expensive. I read somewhere that Sony are classing their set almost like another console in terms of price, so immediately you have a huge barrier to adoption, which worries me, as developers do not like barriers to platforms which will lead to less choice, and perhaps, less quality. My concerns are also not helped at all by extremely underwhelming and ridiculous game announcements like Job Simulator confirmed for PS4 VR so already before the kit is even released, I feel a but ''meh'' about it."
There are certainly a lot of mediocre, thrown togehter VR tech demos out there but it's still pretty early. Oculus is literally shipping their 1.0 SDK only now and throughout the process they introduced at least one breaking change (in the 0.7 SDK) that required all previously developed games to have to be refactored. From this point forward, though, I expect we'll start seeing better and more interesting stuff. Eve Valkerie, Technolust, NewRetroArcade, and many others are either out now in some form or are coming out shortly. I have beta access to Technolust and that game is a blast even in its early form. It's like walking around in a William Gibson novel.
The big difference I see between VR and stuff like just normal 3D is that 3D was just never that impressive. You could show 3D to someone who is otherwise pretty much a Luddite and generally speaking people don't have much of a reaction to it. It's neat for a few minutes, but even with my passive 3D LG TV that uses polarized lenses like the movie theaters instead of the heavy active LCD 3D glasses I can barely get my wife to watch a movie with me in 3D. Sure, movies like Avatar or Gravity will blow people away in theaters but generally speaking most of the people I talk two prefer to watch even theaters movies in 2D because they don't want the hassle of the classes or think the effect warrants the additional ticket price.
With my experiences with VR, it has been exactly the opposite. Everyone I've shown my DK2 to has been absolutely blown away by it because it's so different from anything they have tried before. My father in law, who used to be into tech but now has retired to do woodwork and views computers as a necessary evil rather than a passtime, was very impressed. His wife, who is clausterphobic, gave it a shot and was amazed to find that it actually had the opposite effect on her because the "virtual" room was larger than the room she was actually in. I turn 40 this year, and -my- godmother was so blown away she didn't want to take it off. I have yet to show VR to anyone who has had a reaction like "meh, that's kinda neat". Everyone I know who has tried it (even people who aren't into computers -or- games) has had a reaction more like "wow, this is fucking crazy!" and I think that's telling.
-Byshop
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