A game that released in 2004 that I literally never heard of is going to save VR? C’mon.
Just because Minecraft works in VR, and Minecraft is super popular, that doesn’t mean Minecraft in VR is super popular. The properties don’t transfer that way.
GearVR and Daydream do require compatible phones, but Samsung phones are top sellers globally. You can buy a GearVR as cheaply as fifty dollars.
I also feel that the “VR movie theater” is subpar to just watching it on a nice TV. I am however, excited for my remote friends to get VR after trying multiplayer VR movie watching via Bigscreen and other social VR apps. For the type of person who enjoys a Synchtube session, the difference between that and actually seeing your friends emote and have a physical presence with you is quite drastic
Edit: I just looked it up and Bigscreen does support Oculus Go! I might have to badger some friends to buy this.
I can see that. It’s not something I would ever do though. I fundamentally don’t like watching movies with other people. Talking about it afterward, sure. And TV, sometimes, sure. But during a movie? I want to be alone in my head.
So what exactly IS the primary use case for the Oculus Go? My son mentioned he wanted one for his birthday (we currently don’t own a VR headset ) I’m assuming his reason behind wanting this is that a) he likes true VR games and b) he saw an add for it in a magazine. He’s 10.
I do have a GTX 970 so I could hook up a true VR headset to my PC - So I’m not really sure why I would want to buy a Oculus Go. Kadath — what did you think of it? What are you going to use it for?
DOES NOT COMPUTE
Bear in mind it’s not really “True VR”. It only has rotational tracking. It’s still pretty neat (I had a GearVR before my Rift and enjoyed it), but if you have a PC that can handle it, I would definitely go full Rift (or wait for the next gen).
DCS. It’s niche but that is it for me. A 500$ HOTAS, a 150$ set of pedals and a 500$ headset make for a utterly sweet flight sim experience. Flight simming always has been an expensive hobby.
“Boys Life” ---- Cub Scout publication that is pushed upon the boys regardless on if they want to read it or not… (they do… and they like it — so who am I to laugh at some of the old school methods. it’s good to have the youth of today unplug a bit… now lets continue the discussion of wiring up people all the more!!!)
VR for movies seems like a weird use. The illusion of a larger screen is nice, but the tradeoff is you wear googles for two hours. I don’t really see that a virtual avatar of a friend would add much, but I guess I’d have to experience that. It might be fun to voice chat during some movies, I suppose.
One of the things that could really sell me on the Go would be the Google Earth experience. We’re going to Paris and Grenoble next month, and I’d love to be able to virtually walk the streets ahead of our trip to become more familiar with these places. Anyone have experience with that kind of thing? Does it seem helpful for orienting yourself to an unknown area?
It literally drove me to adopt Android in 2011 as a Mac user since 1984. Stranger than fiction, yo. ;-)
Yeah, I was talking about Wii Sports and Halo, so really looking for the exact polar opposite of niche. Of course there are niche applications.
What VR needs to take off is a runaway hit like Fortnite, and it needs to be exclusive to VR because it wouldn’t work without VR.
I don’t know if Go will have Google Earth, but there already is an app available for Gear VR which is very, very compelling for virtual telepresence: Viso Places. I used it to “walk” around a town of my upbringing in Japan I had not been to in over 15 years. It was uncanny.
I may look into that. I have a Samsung phone but it has a battery case on it so I think that means it won’t work with the Gear unless I remove the case, which I don’t really want to do.
Yeah, I don’t know if there is a Go version, but Google Earth on Rift/Vive is amazing. It may not be quite what you’re hoping for. It’s best for sort of zooming around across landscapes and gets jankier the lower you get.
The way I know I’m boring is that whenever I load up Google Earth VR I always look at my house and my work.
I’ve used it extensively to figure out what the stuff I can see from my balcony is. I’ve got a pretty decent view of south east London, but only having lived here for a few years a lot of the landmarks are new to me.
With Google Earth VR, I can more or less replicate my view, then zoom over to whatever it is I’m not sure about. Doesn’t work for brand new construction, obviously.
I tried out street view in VR in NYC, but because the images are static it felt like that scene from The Matrix where Morpheus froze time on a crowded street. I was surrounded by New Yorkers frozen in time. Quite surreal.
I picked up the vive pro (its lovely) and also got this today. I recommend it :D
The Vive Pro is a very nice piece of hardware, albeit pricey.
One thing to check is to make sure that steam VR is using it’s resolution… On one old machine, we noticed that steam vr was being overly conservative in the rendering resolution, and not fully leveraging the improved resolution of the new headset.
Also, when setting the resolution, the actual listed resolution in stream vr didn’t seem to match what i know the headset to be… It was weird.
Images need to be rendered higher than the actual HMD screen res to take into account the postprocessing that gets applied to counteract the lens distortion, to provide “1:1” pixel sizes near the center of the view.