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

So the Touch controllers showed up tonight and while I didn’t have time to do more than setup and the quick demo I can say…holy shit these are worth the money! This is what VR can be like! I was grinning like an idiot the whole time and all I want to do is get back in and try out some games. I really want to see if Google Earth VR will work and I’ll think I’ll pick up Superhot VR tomorrow. I got the wizarding fireball throwing simulator for free so I’ll try that out too. Anyway these things are awesome that is all.

All right! Ordering!

I’d appreciate it if you let us know which previously Vive only games you find work with them and are worth checking out

Vive apps I’ve heard work well with touches that I’ve enjoyed on Vive:

  1. Tilt Brush - Seems like just an art tool from the outside but drawing neon in 3D space is way cooler then you’d think.
  2. Space Pirate Trainer - It’s a simple arcade shooter with slow-mo, but it’s a really smart design. It’ll have you feeling like Neo dodging bullets and picking off enemies. It has lots of body contorting and badass guns.
  3. Budget Cuts Demo - This is short, but worth checking out what a lo-fi Deus Ex experience might be like in VR.
  4. Audio Shield - It’s by the team that did Audio Surf. Instead of locomotion, it turns music into a series of balls that fly towards you with you trying to punch all of them before they reach you. It’s great for chilling out.
  5. Vanishing Realms - I don’t love this. It’s sort of like Zelda VR and I think works against some of the strong points of the platform, but it’s interesting.

I believe Google Earth VR is not supporting Oculus + Touch at the moment. Even if you use the hardware through SteamVR it detects it’s not a Vive and crashes. However, there’s apparently a hack to get it to work. If it does work, that gets my heaviest recommendation. It’s really neat! I’d recommend checking out Lisbon, Portugal if you get in. It’s not a featured city, but a very cool looking place to fly over.

Yeah, this week’s GiantBomb mentioned Google Earth doesn’t work “yet”.

The Star Wars VR mission for Battlefront was ok. Would love to see a full game implementation like the old X-wing games. It made me feel queasy near the end though, fighting a ton of tie fighters around a star destroyer.

https://github.com/Shockfire/FakeVive/

This will let Google Earth work with Touch. The controls are not quite as intuitive as they are on the Vive but it’s not hard to figure out the mappings. Just walking through the tutorial I guessed correctly the first time for most and 2nd or 3rd for a couple.

Google Earth is just off the wall nuts. I kept hearing it was cool but I didn’t realize just how cool. They turned the entire world into a 3d diorama. 3d is really the selling point, it gives you a sense of scale and depth that normal monitors never could. Flying over some beaches, finding my home, checking out Legoland - I had to force myself to stop.

Ncie scene created in Quill with Oculus Touch.

Surprised there’s not an uproar and anti-Google backlash over this, since they’re querying the hardware and locking the Rift out.

It certainly was the case when Oculus did it a while back… :)

Ha, this reminds me of when the WWW was first becoming a thing and someone was told by his boss “Monitor the internet and inform me of changes.” It’s a license to goof off at work! :p

Certainly could be, though the number of faculty who are actually interested–or, really, even aware of–VR seems pretty low where I am. Another thing, too, is that for faculty, virtually nothing is just “goofing off.” You can ALWAYS justify ANYTHING as research. :)

Dean “Rocket” Hall (formerly of DayZ) says VR software development depends on manufacturer’s subsidies.

[quote]
There is no money in it. I don’t mean “money to go buy a Ferrari”. I mean “money to make payroll”. People talk about developers who have taken Oculus/Facebook/Intel money like they’ve sold out and gone off to buy an island somewhere. The reality is these developers made these deals because it is the only way their games could come out.[/quote]

Interesting, but neither surprising nor, really, concerning. New tech often requires assistance before it becomes mainstream. Developers aren’t going to commit to something that is nearly guaranteed to cost them money without subsidies of some sort.

I think its concerning in the sense that their investment in games hasn’t been that great so far. It seems like the strategy is get as many titles as possible rather than make sure they have that killer title.

I spent a couple of days trying to get the Rift setup in my office for room scale but the odd shape and furniture layout is pretty much preventing it. So I moved it out to the garage alongside the Vive and it was up and running well in a couple of minutes. Been playing quite a bit of Arizona Sunshine and having a grand ol time. Outside of VR this would be a middling game but inside VR with touch controllers it’s something completely different.

I like the aiming quite a bit. I am constantly missing headshots, but it never feels unfair. I can always see the barrel of my gun came up slightly or was off to the side a fraction. Dust flying off the surface behind the zombie helps show you why you missed and I found it invaluable when starting. Gives you a new appreciation why film & TV can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn.

Arizona Sunshine is not the best game for the Rift unless you order a third camera though. I am constantly spinning around facing away from the cameras and eventually losing tracking just when things get hectic. The cameras do a great job but if you are facing 180 away they can’t see the touch controllers sometimes. I might try and set up an oppositional camera config instead of the 2 facing forward but that would be hard to do permanently in my location. It’s fairly amazing how little they do lose tracking but it happens enough to be annoying.

So I think I will stick with the vive for room scale - which is clearly the most entertaining style of VR games. I was imagining that actual room scale games might not be that different than just standing and facing forward but my favorite movement mechanic in VR is just straight up teleportation. I never get sick and it really allows for a sense of immersion while exploring. I do however spin around like a top and completely lose touch with which way the cameras are facing. That doesn’t really work with just forward facing cameras.

In my ideal world I could use the Vive light house tracking system with the Rift headset and the touch controllers. I think the Rift is clearly better than the Vive headset but the touch controllers, while better in almost every way, are not enough of a difference that I really care which I am using. That may change later when/if more games use the finger sensing on the touch, but for now it makes little difference to me.

Unfortunately for me one of my Vive light houses just died. Getting an RMA number wasn’t a giant hassle, though I did have to take some pictures of the LED layout and send them through their chat client. Whole process took ~30 minutes. Reports from others seem to say it takes 1-2 weeks to get it back. The amusing part is I can still use my Vive and it performs about as well as the Rift for roomscale using their recommended setup.

Ah this is the one with that exclusive locked Intel i7 content backfire fiasco. ;)

Thanks for the review! I’m going to pick it up for when my Touch arrives next week. The Oculus store says the game supports standing and front-facing:

For any other Rift owners looking to buy, Humble is the same price as Steam for the next two days, and gives you both Oculus Home and Steam keys - though possibly you can only redeem one of them? Not sure how that works…

Okay, it’s a choice between the two:

I think I’ll go Oculus as it integrates more nicely and supports the advanced SDK featues like ASW, which I’m pretty sure SteamVR doesn’t. Plus I don’t have a Vive anyway. :)

I went with Steam and having been playing it exclusively with Oculus, but I do have a Vive. I had an issue with being only 3 feet tall and had to use an advanced settings mod for steamvr to fix it. The Oculus version would probably not have that issue.

The game is a little crashy and it is basically just zombies. Lots of zombies. For me though the simple mechanic of pistol head shots plus a small amount of exploration and new environments never gets old. Plus you do have other weapons, but eh, I like the pistol challenge.

Heh, well, the market should sort that out pretty fast if the games really suck.

It’s not so much as the games really sucking as there not being a big enough install base to support profitable quality games. It’s a catch 22. Normally what you do is you invest heavily in killer-apps to try to gain sales traction and make second round development profitable. But investment has been too far and broad, for quick to release titles instead of high quality games in general, and I don’t know how you recover from this (unless a new, heavier round of investment happens).

Basically, I think it’s a warning that home VR adoption might be failing hard.

I think right now we are at the range of half a million VR headsets in the PC space, total (going by Steam survey and projected user base, could be really off both ways, but I think it’s more or less accurate). And this is factoring early adoption and the number includes press and development units (estimated at around 200k, think about that, because it means 40% of VR headsets are not owned by consumers). Most projections early this year went from 2 million to 6 million headset sold. There were a couple of projections in the right ballpark, but those were the outliers (or the ones people didn’t like listening to). Because game development for VR is more expensive, we are looking at the equivalent of, say a traditional platform with a 300k install base. The kind of games you can develop for that are very limited in scope, specially if the market saturates with games making it much hard to reach users.

This would all be OK (you can grow a technology from a small user base, by releasing curated content and maximizing sales of each game) if it hadn’t been for the crazy gold rush that made all the industry jump into the bandwagon. Industry expectations was for VR to be a mobile-like or tablet-like boom, and because of that the market is in danger of being saturated before it even becomes profitable for a while.

I know many studios developing for VR. All of them develop subsidized, either by manufacturers or publishers getting in the hype bandwagon. Most of them I spoke to don’t even have a monetization plan, or the plan is unrealistic (expecting to sell 20 minutes narrative experiences at $5 and getting enough revenue to sustain that -there are not enough buyers-). I suspect very few of those projects will be completed if sales stay as they are.

I do hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see the viability of VR game development yet, unless you do quick 2-4 months development cycle products. The future of VR seems to be the GearVR and mobile like experiences, at least so far.