MS sold millions of Kinects early on too…ok maybe that’s a little too harsh.
Arizona State had an event yesterday called Night of the Open Doors, which is basically an open house for all the departments that the public can attend with lots of demos and activities for kids. They had a couple different spots where there were activities using Oculus rigs. It didn’t appear that they were wiping them down between users though, which I thought was a thing.
Hey, we’ve managed to rig up a Kinect as a really cheap mocap setup for animation generation.
There’s a ton of cool hacker stuff going on in the Kinect world. Do you use the Kinect 2 for Windows? Doesn’t it automatically recognize and generate skeletons for up to 6 people at a time? Is that what you use for animation mocap?
I think it actually can do multiple people, but we haven’t used it for that yet. We’ve got some immersive training simulations, and for various simulations we have a need for fairly specific custom animations. We could make them by hand, but it’d be much more time consuming. The Kinect offers a pretty slick solution for quickly creating at least the basis for the animations, for a total cost of a few hundred bucks. Not too shabby.
This is really good to hear. Making VR (somewhat) affordable seems to have paid off. Having a couple of really cool apps seems to have helped too. Supposedly Resident Evil 7 VR actually works pretty well.
Glad to hear that it’s overselling Sony’s expectations - this year seems really important to determine momentum, and there need to be more “real games” like Resident Evil 7 (which I’ll never play, because horror in VR is freaky terrifying). But I’d love if Elite for PS4 supported it, or Fallout 4 VR actually turned out really well, but I mainly just want cool new games in VR that don’t feel like little demos. I might have bought something like Battlezone, but $85 for an arcade game of dubious longevity seems silly.
$500 is getting much closer to buy range for me. I think I’d rather get a Vive though.
Why? The current generation of Rift hardware’s more comfortable than the Vive stuff. The only real advantages of Vive are that it’s easier to use with glasses and it doesn’t have the Facebook/Luckey associations.
Facebook is a big reason for me. I don’t have a Facebook account and there’s a lot I dislike about the company. I also have more faith in Valve as a game company than I do Facebook, and games are what I’m interested in with VR right now. There’s also the fact that the Rift is lagging behind in sales.
It’s not a religious thing for me, though. A $500 Rift has me tempted, but at the same time I’m waiting to see if the Vive has a similar price cut.
At this stage, though, I may be better off waiting for a 1.5 or second generation unit. That was the way I’ve been leaning, but the Rift price cut has me reevaluating.
Glad that VR is doing well for Sony. I want it to succeed, I just don’t want to be an early adopter.
I’m even cooler on it than that, but I’m definitely interested in seeing where this goes. Love hearing impressions from those of you who do want to early adopt though.
Honestly, if it weren’t for flight and space sims, I’d probably say wait.
But if you enjoy either of those, boy are you going to get your money’s worth…
I’m so antsy here on the sidelines of VR, but this I just can’t pull the trigger. The rift seems like a no brainer at this point in time, but I want to ride with Gabe. How close is the Vive 1.5? Someone tell me what to do. Am I somehow locked out of Steam and into The Facebook if I get a rift?
The number of exhibitors in the expo hall at GDC showing off VR technology is incredible. There is a ton of haptic technology on the horizon, everything moving to wireless, beyond-room-scale setups, etc… If anything, I would say the level of enthusiasm points to VR succeeding greatly in coming years, but also to the fact that the Rift and Vive, in their current forms, represent basically alpha versions of VR equipment. If you’re on the fence about VR and can wait a year or two, I would wait. Many players have gotten on the bandwagon, but only just recently. It’s going to mature pretty quickly, I think.
Well, see for yourself.
I think we will see some iterative improvements in comfort and weight, but higher resolution is really needed to take it to the next level – and that is dependent on some big advances in GPU capabilities over the next couple of years. Simple experiences can probably benefit from a higher resolution display, but there isn’t much headroom for anything of moderate complexity (much less a robust game like Elite or the coming Fallout 4).
I think we’re maybe eighteen months minimum, maybe 2 years out from really seeing a Vive 1.5.
In terms of current tech, Vive vs Rift is a no-brainer at this point. I guess if you’re not concerned with room scale (the SteamVR sensors are fricking magic compared to the Rift stuff), then the price break on the Rift is nice. However, keep an eye out for sales at the Microsoft Store. I bought my Vive for $100 off, plus another $100 in gift cards. THat’s pretty competitive to the new Rift pricing.
As far as I’m concerned, the Steam ecosystem plus the sensor technology (not to mention fit for glasses which was important for me), make Vive the clear PC winner of this generation.
I love my Vive. No regrets with jumping in relatively early. It’s amazing. It’s revitalized gaming for this particular old guy. Will gladly upgrade to next gen when it’s here, despite the $$$. If I could get a bit of a resolution bump in Elite I’d probably never leave VR.
There are other advances that will mitigate that requirement somewhat though, such as proper eye-tracking to allow foveated rendering.
Software tech like Async Spacewarp already reduced the min spec considerably, now combine that with a checkerboard rendering technique and you’re well on your way! :)
Oh? I thought the consensus was that the rift + touch controllers was superior for the time being? But please do convince me to buy a Vive.