3093

So the preorders are now up for the Vive Cosmos with their inside out tracking and updated screens. I was excited, it seems like the wireless adaptor will also work with it?

However, what is up with the controllers? I assumed after the Valve Index Controllers, HTC would realize they need to do some real work and instead it looks like an older Oculus controller.

3094

Ars Technica talk about a pretty underwhelming hands-on experience they had.

3095

Do devices such as these support a 2D mode too? I.e. simply display the game screen without simulating depth? I am curious to know whether this is even possible.

3096

Yeah, Virtual Desktop is an app that streams your computer desktop as a flat screen in the virtual space. You can definitely play games that way. All of the video streaming services offer a similar feature. Often you can select whether you want the flat screen floating in space or in a virtual movie theater or whatever and have some control over its size, tilt, and curvature.

3097

I wonder if this could work with a smartphone too, coupled with a MOGA gamepad maybe. You would no longer be limited to such a tiny screen.

Regardless, I could never afford an Oculus at current prices.

3098

The Quest is an Android platform and you can absolutely play mobile games on a flat screen in it. You have to hack it a little bit, but it’s not hard. The Go (which costs $200) is kind of made to do that.

3099

I have to confess I bought this, played through it in 30 minutes, and then refunded it. It’s the only game I’ve ever done that with, but I couldn’t believe it was over.

3100

I watched one of the promotional videos on the Oculus site. They showed a couple of guys watching a Lakers game from virtual court-side position. Presumably the view is 360 degree panoramic so they could rotate their heads in any direction.

However, is it possible to do a 360 degree panoramic view and 3D depth view at the same time? To me it seems the geometry involved simply would not allow this. Maybe some sort of software could be devised to interpolate between dozens of cameras and create a convincing fake, but I am skeptical. I wonder if there is any research along these lines.

3101

Yes, they use multiple cameras to create two 360 degree panoramic videos, one for each eye.

This kind of thing

3102

Neat!

3103

The best VR videos are 180 degrees. There just isn’t enough resolution for good 360 degree stuff. For instance 4k 360 might sound good, but it looks like ass when blown up to VR size. 8k 360 looks sortof passable.

5k or 6k 180 videos gives you enough field of view that you can łook left or right a bit, yet the upside is there’s enough pixels that it can convince your brain that you’re actually there. The 3d depth is also much easier to do in that case.

3104

Does anyone know if the new Vive’s external cameras have a resolution that’s good enough to use for AR purposes?

The prior version (the Pro version… essentially v.2) added in stereoscopic cameras, but for some inexplicable reason they chose to save 5 cents per camera and install webcams from 1994, with like 640x480 resolution. It had some AR capabilities in the SDK but they were clearly half baked, and the cameras’ lack of resolution made it largely garbage if you tried to do any AR stuff with them.

3105

Aren’t the new and first Vives designed/made by HTC and the 2nd and 3rd Vives were designed/made by Valve with an undisclosed hardware partner? Or am I mistaken?

3106

I don’t think so. The cameras are meant for tracking and not AR so they’ll be like the Rift S.

3107

Hello QT3 hive Mind! Looking to use my new rift S for something other than DCS and Elite. Appreciate any suggestions. I see Fallout 4 VR and Skyrim VR are heavily discounted at green man gaming. Any thoughts on those? I did enjoy Fallout 4 when it launched - but is VR enough to go back?

3108

I thought yes for Skyrim. Everspace is another cockpit shooter I thought was very good, and Robo Recall was a lot of fun. I’ve heard good things about Lone Echo which I bought on sale myself but have still to try.

3109

No Man’s Sky. :)

This, when it releases this year:

3110

In Death only 9 bucks this week. Highly recommended if you want a challenging rogue-like archery sim!

3111

Yeah that’s a good game.

3112

See… to me, that seems dumb.
Given the overall cost of the hardware in its entirety, it seems like they could have made the two primary stereoscopic cameras into ones with reasonable resolution, without changing the price of the overall headset much at all. And doing so would give tinkerers a lot more stuff they could potentially do with it.