VR - Is it really going to be a success? Or, thanks Time for starting a discussion!

My VR headset is the best gaming peripheral I have bought in my life.

My only annoyance with the Rift is clearing space for it. The initial setup with Steam VR was a pain in the ass but no real issues since then.

I use mine whenever I want to play a driving or flight sim.

It’s such a game-changer that I won’t buy anything in those genres that lacks VR support.

Same.

Mine has been a real headache this weekend so far, and I’m not yet sure if it is the oculus or my rtx 2080. It is odd. Things in the oculus store like Brass Tactics, Superhot VR, and Onward run without issue. IL-2 Sturmovik in the Steam store also seems to run fine, but two of my biggest games for vr, Elite Dangerous and DCS World are having issues, and it has been accompanied with the oculus complaining about no hdmi connection and/or poor tracking. My next step is to stick the gtx 1070 back in the system and see if the issues go away with the 2080 leaving the system.

Sounds like you need to tell windows again not to turn off power to seemingly unused USB devices.

Thanks, that reminds me of something else to look at. Recently installed Razer cortex software and that has its own power plan, and does other shit like remove things from memory when a game starts up.

Yeah I love my Vive, but keeping it running smoothly is a pain & you can tell it’s the BLEEDING edge.

Have had it for 2 years now and every week or so the Vive linkbox Bluetooth drivers fuck up and blow up the system on board Bluetooth drivers, causing them both to stop working and need reloading. I’ve also had the gyros in one of the lighthouses start going & i’m going to need to replace that unit. Out of warrant cost is something like $150. Suspect that having semi broken Bluetooth could shorten the life of the lighthouse gyros since they won’t go to sleep without that driver and are likely to reach MTBF sooner if on all the time.

Diego

Thanks again for the hint @schurem. Disabling razer cortex and setting ultimate performance has fixed Elite, and I’m guessing the same will be true for DCS World, but need to get the little one to bed before I can test it. Then it will be time for some Eagle driving. I didn’t realize how simple the start up procedure is on that plane.

Interesting. So Nintendo introduced motion control and sold the heck out of the Wii, and now with the Switch they moved away from it. MS doesn’t do anything with Kinect anymore. Whatever Sony did also seems abandoned. Is VR going to go like this too, at least with gaming?

For some reason that article compares Steam survey numbers with previously estimated sales figures and concludes usage must be declining because the Steam numbers are lower. Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare the survery results with previous Steam survey results? I mean, they do one every month and it should be easy to see any trends.

I believe it also only counts users who actually have their headset attached at the time they’re asked to participate in the survey. Some people disconnect their headsets when not using them.

I don’t think this is true. But even if it is, Steam survey percentages have been flat(ish) for a while and we can assume a similar percentage of people have their headset attached at any given point. So while the overall numbers might not make sense, the trend is there.

However, Steam gains users, and it does so in territories with lower per capita income (China). A survey result showing no grow or even slight decrease has to be compared to estimated user numbers at the time of each poll. There’s probably higher growth that shown (if still low).

That said overall Steam numbers point towards perhaps inflated sale numbers by the hardware vendors (most likely counting press and developer sales, a not-insignificant amount at this overall number of headsets).

If it’s detecting headsets that are disconnected, then is it still counting people that have had their device on a shelf for the past year? Or does Steam keep a record of when a device was last connected and then send that to Valve when the user participates in a survey? As you say, I guess it doesn’t really matter though.

Anyway, I looked at the survey results for previous months because I’m bored. Percentage of Steam users with VR:

Jan 2017: 0.37%
Jan 2018: 0.41%
Mar 2018: 0.40%
May 2018: 0.72%
Jul 2018: 0.65%
Sep 2018: 0.72%

So yeah, it seems to largely stay the same each month with some small variance up and down. The exception being April and May, which both saw large growth. Not sure what happened those months to see such a jump.

Of course Steam has also gone from 67 million monthly users in August 2017, to 90 million at present. So using the same method to calculate number of users, we get:

Aug 2017: 295,000
Sep 2018: 647,000

It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here. I don’t really see there being much future growth until costs come down unfortunately.

This is where something like a better Occulus Go comes in. It’s cheap at $200, all-in-one, and you’re not tethered to a PC. They need to make that experience better and then the hardware won’t be the issue it is today.

So maybe the technology isn’t here yet, but in 5-10 years maybe it will be.

That’s basically what the Quest is for. All-in-one, but with lateral tracking. Probably still not going to be cheap enough for the mass market this gen, but that’s clearly where they’re aiming.

For my money:

Vendetta Online
Darknet
Dead Secret
Dreadhalls
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
End Space

This is coming from a GVR owner. I would have said Minecraft, but apparently it can only be side loaded for OGo. There are some really cool non game things to do as well like AltspaceVR, that street view app formerly known as Viso Places, and 360 photos or video.

Sounds like a good list to me, though KTANE is just as good outside of VR. I really liked Land’s End at the time too, though it may not hold up.

Not sure I like the Quest. I get the cable annoyance factor, but for cockpit games, it’s pretty much a non issue. Lower processing power really hinders the “reality” part of VR.

What I’d really like to see is a significant bump in resolution. Surely they are working on that and it is around the corner? For the enthusiast cockpit crowd where VR has been blessed and adopted?

For that we need a true new generation of processing power. Our current boxes can hardly keep up with current low res.