I believe the Vive is similar and the Rift is about half that (last I heard). But anything under 20 is good (the sweet spot according to Carmack).
They’re kind of related but different. Latency is how long it takes for a controller input to be updated to the screen - you can have a great frame rate but poor latency (like lag in an online game).
In VR the latency refers to the time it takes for your head movement to update your view, the so-called ‘motion-to-photon’. If it takes too long, it feels like you’re moving a controller with your head rather than looking around, reducing presence and making you nauseous.
Oculus is using software tricks to get superior latency, by querying the head sensors just before each frame is drawn and re-projecting the view based on that updated data. Valve is not yet implementing anything similar, I’m not sure they think it’s necessary.
Being able to play all games in cinematic view is what I want!
Do they have a launch title for this, or are they hoping people will shell out $499 for Playstation Home 2.0?
Cool technology doesn’t sell hardware, games sell hardware. VR needs a killer game. Otherwise, why bother?
I was under the impression that VR was just a new way to play your games, not a specific game type. I realize there will be games designed to take full advantage of VR, but I thought you could play other games using the VR headset as well? Games not designed explicitly for VR?
You can, but in the PlayStation VR’s case, those games will just be “projected” onto a virtual theater screen in the VR game space.
I have no idea why people would want to take advantage of the virtual theater screen for games or movies, outside of privacy reasons I guess.
Pretty much the wrong impression, especially on the PS4. Games need at least some love from the developers to make a decent VR game. On the PC you can make or find a hack to convert some games to VR but these tend to be pretty bad - nausea and frustration inducing experiences outside of a brief initial wow factor.
How much effort it takes is up to the game. Sometimes you don’t need many changes, like Elite, to make a great VR game. Also like Elite the developer can spend quite a bit of time adding neat features like HUD pop ups based on glance direction and other VR specific enhancements.
No excuses for framerate on PSVR games.
Norden seemed especially passionate about warning PSVR developers against letting their framerates drop below 60, even for a moment. Low or varying frame rates are bad news for VR game players, said Norden, and therefore it’s bad news for PSVR.
“Frame rate is really important; you cannot drop below 60 frames per second, ever,” said Norden. "If you submit a game to us and it drops to 55, or 51…we’re probably going to reject it.”
“I know I’m going to get flak for this, but there’s no excuse for not hitting frame rate,” said Norden. "It’s really hard, and I’m not going to lie to and say it’s extremely easy…it’s really difficult,” said Norden. Still:
"60hz is the minimum acceptable framerate. Everybody drill that into your heads.”
It doesn’t matter if the technology works without a killer game to drive sales.
VR needs its Wii Sports-- a game that clearly benefits from the tech, a new experience that wasn’t possible before. All it takes is that one game. There were no other great motion control games; Wii Sports alone was sufficient to drive Wii sales for that entire generation.
That’s fascinating, but the VR headset only knows where you’re looking-- it has no way to capture all those subtle non-verbal cues. They showed those guys playing with gamepads. Was there a kinect also? But if so, how did it work sitting so close to a computer?
If they pull this off, with a kinect or whatever, and it’s just as engrossing of an experience as the trailer says it is— is a little social tabletop game enough to drive VR sales? Probably not, on its own. But if they extend it to monopoly, and D&D, and whatnot… maybe. Maybe it could be their Halo, their Super Mario Bros. Tough to predict where lightning will hit. But I’m doubtful.
Oh, Werewolves Within will be terrible. I think the initial wave of VR games will be like many of the early 3rd-party Wii games that really won’t play to the strengths (and weaknesses) of the tech.
Sure, but there needs to be something awesome or nobody other than enthusiasts will ever buy one. VR needs its Wii Sports.
Or were you agreeing the whole time in a sarcastic way? If so, whoosh right over my head.
Edit: The late 3rd party motion-control games sucked too. Other than Just Dance, I can’t think of one that was successful and worth a damn. I’m sure there were a couple, but not many.
The late Wii stuff sucked too, but I think that was because as the sales started to go down, budgets were cut on a lot of projects. There was a mid-point where I’d say the 3rd-party Wii games were decent. (We can debate whether or not they ever hit “good” but I think that’s outside the scope of this discussion.)
And yeah, sorry. I was agreeing with you. There’s nothing must-have compelling about any of the stuff shown so far, other than the curiosity factor of putting goggles on your face and getting motion-sick in MinecraftVR.
Yeah, we’ve known VR tech was real and coming for years now and nobody has a compelling VR game or product announced in the works. I’m bearish on VR for now.
Minecraft will be HoloLens, which is an entirely different and altogether fascinating product. I can see immediate applications for augmented reality. Very exciting stuff!
A few more bits on the small processing unit that comes with the PSVR.
It provides no extra GPU or CPU power. It's not any form of PS4 expansion or upgrade. It's not directly accessible by the developer in any way - code cannot be written to it.
It carries out object-based 3D audio processing ("really good and important to VR"). it displays the social screen - undistorting the VR output for display on TV. Quality is lost in this process, so it scales the image up and crops it so you don't see edges. "Separate mode" - a completely separate audio and video stream you can send over to TV, as opposed to the mirrored social screen. It's sent compressed to the PU and then uncompressed by the device and sent to the screen. We're told that this was "an innovation that came quite late" in the development of the system. It displays PS4's system software interface in cinematic mode, handling the display of traditional 2D content.
No reason to think there isn’t one or more Wii Sports already there in the launch lineups. Monitoring the VR Reddit, there’s no shortage of people there who ran off to make a preorder based on demos of The Climb, or Fantastic Contraption, or TiltBrush (which is basically a paint program) or just the various roller coaster demos. There’s a lot of reported “Wow!” factor with VR, even (especially?) among non-gamers.
None of these launch titles are necessarily long or deep games, mind you, and none of them necessarily look like system sellers from watching a video of them … but then neither did Wii Sports.
Edit: Hololens is on indefinite hold as a consumer product, by the way. Microsoft is selling dev kits for $3000 but refuses to commit to any kind of a time frame for general release. This is unlikely to affect the release of Minecraft for VR in any way, as MS’s policy is to release it on every platform known to man. (What’s probably keeping Minecraft from being a launch title is coming up with a locomotion solution that doesn’t make people sick.)
On the flipside, the price of entry for the “gee whiz” factor is substantially higher than it was for the Wii back in the day–particularly for non-core audiences who’d need to buy the PS4 and camera alongside the VR device after hearing how neato it was.
I don’t know about that, Wii Sports had immediately obvious crossover appeal as a social activity for non-gamers-- if it was executed well, and it was. VR is inherently isolating. And yeah, the price of entry is extremely high for this first generation.
But remember-- there essentially was no second generation of motion-control games. It never got past Wii Sports. Will there be a second generation of VR games that truly exploit the possibilities of VR, resulting in a superior gaming experience… if nobody buys the first generation?
If you discount immersion I still haven’t seen any games that I would describe as a must play I guess.
What you don’t want to forget is that sense of presence that VR delivers. This can’t be described or shown, it has to be experienced. Everybody got the Wii because it was obvious from a video but that doesn’t work with VR. You have to put the headset on yourself or it’s all just so much babbling about how cool it is.
Account from somebody who was fully immersed in an experience (not much of a game, but no reason this doesn’t translate to games):
The guys from Tested try to put their head through the floor because they forgot VR isn’t real (this is just a gif like video, no sound so you miss the clunk):
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ParallelLinearBlackfly-mobile.mp4
You can watch the long video of them trying out different games on the Vive but skip to Budget cuts at 30:30 in if you want to see an actual game.