Speaking of Beat Saber, Oculus is having a free weekend for BoxVR, which is a similar hit-things-coming-at-you-to-music game, and despite being Early Access, it’s really well done. It’s more of a workout program than (I’m assuming) Beat Saber, but it’s still pretty fun. And the developers seem pretty active in making improvements and adding suggestions.
THANK YOU, TIMEX! Great advice. I hadn’t noticed the Manual Override setting. Just jacked it up from 75% to 125% and ran around Skyrim with my jaw on the forest floor. I’ll have to experiment to find the sweet-spot between frame rate and resolution but you just made my week.
I sold my old Vive headset (plus deluxe audio strap and VR Cover foam pad) on Ebay today for about $175. I was hoping to get over $200 but there must be a glut of these hitting the used market.
Lastly, Beat Saber is terrific. Intuitive, energetic, gorgeous, and a pretty good soundtrack too. This would be killer if it had user-made levels with real songs like Soundboxing offers.
Ive played a fair bit of BOXVR. I REALLY like the fact that it gives me a calorie count, as I’m doing this mostly for exercise, but frankly its nowwhere near as ‘cool’ a game as beat saber. If beat saber had more song variety and a calorie counter I’d likely stop playing BOXVR entirely.
Beat Saber is really damn good guys. Best rhythm game I’ve played since Elite Beat Agents. And it’s going to be amazing with more songs and official custom song support.
So, I played the Clockwork mod on Skyrim VR over the weekend. I seem to remember hearing about it pre-SE edition, but never bothered with it since I was just about done with that playthrough. I installed it after getting Skyrim VR mostly because the player home you get with it looks really cool, and I’m glad I held out, because it’s so well made, and an absolute blast in VR. Especially the first mission, which is so creepy and so well designed, I thought it was a stock Skyrim mission I had missed the last time around, or maybe one that had been added with the SE until I finished it (you don’t get to the house until you complete it).
Highly recommended if no one’s tried it, though be aware - there are four missions in total to complete before you can return to the main Skyrim map, and you don’t get to take followers with you (you get a warning before embarking). The other three take place in an impressive Blackreach-ish Dwemer ruin, and unless you’re skilled in Dwemer smithing, (I wasn’t) the second requires a fair amount of tedious backtracking, which is the only complaint I can level against the mod. But between that first mission, the dwemer ruins, and the lovely castle itself, I’m pretty flabbergasted this was designed by one person.
They made it so:
There’s a lot of sound reasoning in this post.
So let me ask this question, for a study we’re setting up for work: what’s the killer app look like? What is it – a game (and then what genre), some other kind of media, a business application or education application?
Does the killer app change at price points? So is there a killer app for the high-tier VR sets and a different killer app for Oculus Go/GearVR/Google?
Oh, definitely. I mean, there’s a whole category of games that don’t work at all on GearVR/Go, because of the lack of positional tracking and fully tracked controllers.
Just playing Artikel. Suprised how much effort they’ve put into the assets, and the scripting. It really is like a single player fps from yesteryear. Their limited-positions-teleport movement system seems like it would be a real limitation in a game that is just move and shoot, but there’s enough going on that it does feel like a bit of a Sci-Fi adventure. Surprisingly enjoyable!
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Nobody knows.
VR porn could be a killer app at the right pricepoint and functionality level. If you sell the equivalent of a Rift for $200, seated positional (not roomscale), wireless, at half the weight, make it interactive, and include the equivalent of deepfakes so you can interact with that hot person at work in POV based on his/her facebook photos, a lot of people would pay for that.
But games… I dunno. VR is great for driving games and flight simulators, it enhances those games, but doesn’t really transform the experience.
If VR improves to the point where you can go full motion without puking, it could work for first and third-person games. That level of immersion would be transformative in first-person.
Augmented Reality is a great fit for strategy, adventure, and puzzle games. Imagine playing a MMO wearing a pair of sunglasses, projecting a 30" monitor in front of your eyes, and if you glance to the right you see the minimap, against that wouldn’t transform the experience, but it would improve it.
But where’s its Wii Fit, its Halo? I dunno. Good question.
Skyrim VR down to $34 at GMG. Nice that the $60 stage didn’t last too long.
I am interested in VR, but I am not going to spend any money on it for a good while.
My fundamental problem is that there are very few games that I would want to play that support it. Why spend money on hardware you will barely use, when perhaps in a few years, a lot more games will support it, and the hardware will be better and cheaper.
Also, bullshit like Fallout 4 / Skyrim VR modes at $60 doesn’t help either. I think, at most, it should be a $5 or $10 DLC option. It can’t be that hard to add VR to a game.
I was ok with paying for Skyrim VR, and $34 is a great price for the experience.
I’m pretty sure it can, I’m not a VR developer though:
I picked up a S6 and GVR in 2016; including the phone and apps I’m conservatively $500 in, and consider it money well spent.
Agreed - I tried this out for the first time last night and really liked it. Normal moving around didn’t make me dizzy w/ the options that make it a gentler experience. I have a ton of mods now to add on that I’ll try out tonight to jazz up the graphics, etc.
It’s not all doom and gloom in VR dev land:
I bought it, had fun trying it out, then returned it when I saw how limited the song selection was. Then the next day they announced they were working on an official add-on that would let you make your own maps, etc. So I’ll pick it up again when that’s ready to go. Really fun implementation of similar games like Soundboxing.
I wonder if the ‘killer app’ question is misleading. It’s not a gaming console, it’s a new form of display tech. Did film or television or computers have a killer app? These are just new forms of information and entertainment evolving with technology over time. To me, the killer app debate is a question of how fast it gets adopted as opposed to ‘whether or not’.
Once it gets lightweight, wireless, and sharp as hell, I’d think something like immersive skype/facetime or ‘baby’s first steps’ home movies bringing people together would be a good answer.
Right. The killer app label will be applied to whatever sells most perhaps :) As well as the necessary developments you mentioned, there’s performance and cost, plus field of view. But all of those areas have seen steady improvement in recent decades… Seems to me like something unexpected would have to happen to derail VR.
It’s Arktika.1 not Artikel. Doubt the awkward name is helping it but this was really pretty good. It is just like being inside an FPS from the golden age. They have exactly the same platform/crane/fuse/breakable wall puzzles that came into single player FPSs after about Half Life. Mixed in with what’s basically a light gun shooter, with the ability to flip between pre-chosen teleport spots. That sounded like a serious limitation to me but in practice the interesting movements in this shooter are more about leaning and ducking, which are well supported, and made me wish I had more room here. Otherwise you’re able to slip to a flanking position often enough to capture some feel of moving round the battlefield. Along with Robo Recall this has been one of my favourite VR experiences so far. Its biggest shortcoming was its insistence on having you obtain new weapons, sights etc by manipulating terminals and a 3d printer, which was more unwieldy than it had to be. I went through with more or less my starting weapons.
I think I might try Everspace now, also positively regarded I think, and $12 at Fanatical right now.