Over the holidays, my brother-in-law brought over a set of the current Oculus. The 720p ones.
The experience reminded me a lot of the early days of 3D, i.e. the difficulty alone of setting up a 3D daughter card properly. You needed the right version of this driver, the right version of that app. The Oculus took about 45 minutes to set up properly - and I am a gamer with a gamer PC. We needed a particular game from Steam that had a development feature that you could turn on, etc. We had to fool around with the Windows video settings. You name it. This will obviously get better when they release a real version, but it was pretty bad.
Then I actually tried them. All of Jeff's observations are spot on. The current resolution sucks. The problem is that your eyes are so, so close to the screen. I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. I have no idea why, but I didn't need them, so that was good.
The other big issue is maybe health related. These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. Of course, the game we were playing, which was some sort of flight simulator, didn't help. I did not try another game. I didn't feel like I was going to be able to walk after 10 minutes of VR.
One other thing. These goggles invite new gameplay experiences that probably haven't been invented yet. And by that, I mean that just strapping these things on does not suddenly make current mediocre games great. Mediocre games still suck. In fact, they are worse, because you can see every flaw, due to the closeness of the screen. So there will need to be games that are made just for this device. Which, I guess means that you should not buy these hoping that your current set of games will now become "walk thru" or whatever.
It is going to take a compelling combination of hardware and software in order to make this device really shine.
I wish them the best. I am really on the fence as to whether or not this is a revolution at all. Time will tell. I hope it is and that they can overcome all of the hurdles, many of which seem kinda big.
Hmm, on Mac, my dev kit is plug and play. While DK1 has very low pixel density, these numbers increase fast as resolution scales. CV1 will be at least 1080p, and more likely 1440p, which increases PPI from ~14 w/ DK1 to 19 or 26, respectively. Samsung is scheduled to release 4K mobile panels in 2015 (and hence directly portable to the Oculus devices), which will gets you to regular monitor PPI. At that point, you can basically have infinite virtual screens, which is very interesting for developers.
Farsightedness is fine - the Rift focuses at infinity. It's probably a lot healthier than staring at close screens in terms of eye stress/focusing.
Simulator sickness is mostly caused by excess latency and confusion of the vestibular system. The latest word is that these are taken care of with 1) accurate positional tracking (DK1 only has rotational tracking), 2) sub-20ms motion-to-photon display, and 3) low persistence.
Jeff links to Abrash's talks, which are well worth the time to go through if you have an interest.
I think to some degree, the most interesting thing about DK1 isn't how "rough" it is, but more as a data point showing just how far things will have come in such a short period of time.
Yes, compare the absolute stagnation of HMD development over the past 20 years to the leaps and bounds from the Carmack demo at E3 2012, DK1 in Q1 2013, Crystal Cove at CES 2014 and DK2/CV1 in Q4 2014. IMO, we're in for a wild ride.
> These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad.
It's primarily a matching failure between what you see and what your inner ear, proprioception, and sense of pressure are telling you is happening, as well as any other visual input if it's a mixed-vision system. Mostly inner ear, and vision if present.
Also it's mostly rotational motion that triggers it - but you'll easily hit that with just the small motions of your head and the looseness of the headset.
Which is ridiculously hard to compensate for since you have to get extremely precise, low-noise motion & environmental pose tracking, with extremely tight time limits - and then it has to be fed into the rendering engine, which has to react in time to fool the operator.
But the evolutionary rationale is also right. Your brain evolved to freak out in the event of persistent sensory mis-match because it's a pro-survival feature. The naturally occurring causes are things like severe food poisoning.
> I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem.
IIRC, the reason is that VR stimuli are "focused at infinity." It also helps that you're trying to take in the image, not the pixels or other fine details.
Trying to read small text at a distance of ~ 20 cm requires relatively precise focus. A picture of a cat that's taking up your entire field of view does not.
Thanks for the information (and also to the other replies). I do not totally understand the "focused at infinity" thing, but it does make sense. I am just grateful that older eyes will not be excluded from trying this new tech out in a reasonable way.
I just read the Abrash PDFs and they are very honest and insightful. It's nice to know that someone (many someones!) is actually doing the science that's needed to get this stuff right.
Honestly, given the challenges, it seems reasonable that this will all start the way that the 3D game revolution did. Slowly, on the PC first. One step at a time.
I'm in as soon as there is a compelling game to play!
The "sick as a dog" problem rapidly diminishes with practice. I can cheerfully spend an hour in a high-movement VR environment now with no ill effects, and I don't use my Rift all that often.
Also, even a bit of positional tracking helps a whole lot. MineCrift (Minecraft in the Rift) becomes a lot easier to play once you've got a Razer Hydra enabled with positional tracking.
The trick is to use it frequently for short periods when you're first getting used to it.
> The "sick as a dog" problem rapidly diminishes with practice. I can cheerfully spend an hour in a high-movement VR environment now with no ill effects, and I don't use my Rift all that often.
For some people, it takes strong guts to be willing to put through that practice that it requires. 10 minutes of Oculus Rift (dev prototype) will make me ill for hours. In addition to feeling like I'll to throw up, my eyes cant focus properly and I can't read text on a monitor afterwards. I'm not particularly motion sensitive.
I'm sure practice would help but I'm not willing to go through several days of nausea in order to be able to play 3d games.
I think that this is also the reason why Oculus isn't putting out their product quite yet. They need to get to a point where only a very small fraction get any kind of motion sickness. Otherwise they will be devastated by press reviews in mainstream consumer electronics reviews. Gamers might be less harsh about it. But if they get a "vomit helmet" reputation, that will be the end of it.
That being said, I'm very eager to get to try the Crystal Cove prototype with translation motion tracking (the IR LED + camera thing) and improved resolution. I think that better matching the head movements with the virtual reality will reduce motion sickness.
I very much hope that they will be able to roll out a better product but I will not touch the devkit again.
Last weekend I installed on an Ubuntu machine with no trouble at all. Just downloaded the dev kit, followed instructions, plugged in the device and it worked. Haven't tried any actual games yet though.
It's definitely a prototype, and you're right that it'll take new gameplay. People are saying that typical first-person shooters don't work at all.
Forbes had an interesting experience with the latest prototype. Especially regarding the motion sickness aspect as the latest tech supposedly addresses the problems with the first dev kit in substantial ways.
Over the holidays, my brother-in-law brought over a set of the current Oculus. The 720p ones.
The experience reminded me a lot of the early days of 3D, i.e. the difficulty alone of setting up a 3D daughter card properly. You needed the right version of this driver, the right version of that app. The Oculus took about 45 minutes to set up properly - and I am a gamer with a gamer PC. We needed a particular game from Steam that had a development feature that you could turn on, etc. We had to fool around with the Windows video settings. You name it. This will obviously get better when they release a real version, but it was pretty bad.
Then I actually tried them. All of Jeff's observations are spot on. The current resolution sucks. The problem is that your eyes are so, so close to the screen. I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. I have no idea why, but I didn't need them, so that was good.
The other big issue is maybe health related. These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. Of course, the game we were playing, which was some sort of flight simulator, didn't help. I did not try another game. I didn't feel like I was going to be able to walk after 10 minutes of VR.
One other thing. These goggles invite new gameplay experiences that probably haven't been invented yet. And by that, I mean that just strapping these things on does not suddenly make current mediocre games great. Mediocre games still suck. In fact, they are worse, because you can see every flaw, due to the closeness of the screen. So there will need to be games that are made just for this device. Which, I guess means that you should not buy these hoping that your current set of games will now become "walk thru" or whatever.
It is going to take a compelling combination of hardware and software in order to make this device really shine.
I wish them the best. I am really on the fence as to whether or not this is a revolution at all. Time will tell. I hope it is and that they can overcome all of the hurdles, many of which seem kinda big.