1627

You say that as if its a bad thing but i think its great. VR goggles are a peripheral and to treat them otherwise is bullshit that hampers their development and marketing.

For certain genres of games they enable an earthshakingly transformational experience. This gives hope for both that genre and VR to be tailored for eachother. (speaking of flight and space sims here)

Other genres do not fit VR very well imo, such as the first person shooter games that killed flight back in the 90s.

As a peripheral, VR goggles enable awesome stuff, if and when they fit as a tool, think of the sculpting software, or google earth. Trying to see them as a platform means trying to shoehorn things into them that do not fit very well, such as fallout 4 VR.

1628

I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the users at all.

For Facebook and VR hardware companies it’s different, though. Peripherals don’t have the growth potential of platforms.

1629

Just discovered Soundboxing yesterday and am going to try that out as a regular workout. Great stuff on the Rift.

Also ran through a quick dungeon of VR Dungeon Knight and it’s really well done, especially for a one man team.

1630

By the way, just saw that The Climb for the Rift is just $10 right now (80% off). Not sure that it’s ever been this cheap.

1631

I’ve had The Climb in my wishlist for months now, waiting for a decent sale. $10 is definitely the cheapest it’s been.

1632

Thanks for the Soundboxing recommendation, a hour of sweating and looking like a goof. Already got my $3.51 worth. Now to figure out how to make my own playlists.

1633

The interface took me a little bit to figure out. Just need to hit ‘new’ on the playlist thing on the left, then the plus symbol on any videos you find. Will have to experiment on making my own beat maps, or whatever they’re called. I haven’t tried to figure out how to save multiple playlists though. I did notice that you can accidentally add 2-3 songs at the same time accidentally if your pointer goes through multiple pluses at once.

1634

Argh, apparently From Other Suns and Lone Echo were on sale the past two days. Missed it. Nabbed The Climb at least.

Hopefully they follow Steam of yore and repeat daily sales on the last day.

1635

Seriously? Darn. They’re both titles I’m waiting to drop. I picked up The Climb, and Superhot is the current daily deal at 9.99. This actually seems like a good sale, given how costly good VR titles usually are.

1636

Chronos is the other daily sale. I’ve heard some pretty good things about it too.

1637

I made my 1st two “beat maps” today, Porcupine Tree’s “Trains” and Post Modern Jukebox " All About the Bass". It was quite easy and for two takes on PT and one on PMJ it worked OK. Try it, it is fun and now my playlist is growing. Thanks for the plus symbol note, don’t know if I would have found that myself.

1638

Finally got around to playing Blade Runner 2049 Memory Lab, which is free on the oculus store. It’s very short (20 mins or so) and reminds me of those 90’s adventure games that use full-motion video. Worth checking out if you’re a Blade Runner fan. The beginning of the game where you fly around the city in a cop car is worth experiencing.

1639

Anyone using this? Just wondering if it breaks any games…

1640

Not me, the whole experience is beta enough IMO :)

1641

There’s a free thing called aircar, which is basically a Blade Runner vehicle tech demo. No real content but surprisingly good I thought. Denser than say Elite, which is the only other flight game I’ve played and with probably more forgiving controls than flight sims. Worth a quick look.

1642

Just noticed Lone Echo is $10 off in the Oculus Store. And Superhot VR is down to $10 total.

1643

Tried out Aircar and it’s very cool, thanks for sharing. This is the sort of stuff I love in VR.

1644

Okay, so I decided to try the new beta Rift Touch UI after noting there’s an easy way to revert if tragedy strikes. And wow! Oculus have certainly put a lot of work into this. It’s really cool to play with and well worth the install!

It’s basically 3 main features, controlled with Touch from a new floating dash system that is called up with the Oculus button:

Home
You can wander around inside your Home, which is now a customisable space supporting up to 500 hand-placed objects. There’s a bunch of big-picture stuff like wallpaper, roof, and floor textures, three different ‘outside’ environments, lots of decorative items likes chairs, tables, plants, and paintings, as well as a bunch of familiar toys like the bottle rocket, blaster, targets, ping pong bats/balls etc. There’s also a nice bow and arrow which seems like it may have a bunch of future variants…

What’s also neat is you get game boxes and cartridges for all the titles in your library, to arrange on your virtual bookshelves. There’s also a console for the cartridges but it didn’t seem to do anything, even though it responded to having a cartridge in it. Perhaps it’s planned as a game launcher? If so, I couldn’t see myself using it over the Library overlay - but it did make me smile.

The UI they’ve done for the item inventory is really cute. Seems you earn extra stuff for Home by spending time in VR. You can visit other people’s Homes and see what they have - atm there are three demo ones you can visit that show off some sweet little items that I’m already feeling like I need to have! So mission accomplished there… :)

Shop
The Shop is redesigned, and exists in a different space seperate to Home. It’s still missing the main thing I’d like from the shop, which is full 360 degree 3D screenshots of the games rather than those dinky little thumbnails. You can still browse it quickly from the dash, but to buy stuff you need to load into the full shop space.

Desktop
Oculus Desktop is the other big new feature and it works really well. It allows you to use your PC from within VR at any time, using the Touch controllers. You can left/right click, drag-scroll with the trigger, also drag left/right in Chrome works to navigate browsing history. It has a virtual keyboard you can call up. It also plays well with ‘Hey Cortana’ using the Rift microphone (I’ve not yet tried it with Speech Recognition to fully control windows etc).

You can pull windows off the virtual desktop and pin them open seperately, so they stay visible within a game (non-interactive, you press the Oculus button to pause the game and make them ‘live’ inside Home). So yes, you can now have Youtube videos playing inside your games! Apparently the game needs code to support this, but I read it’s trivial to add. I only tried it in Google Earth which worked well.

Overall it’s an amazing update and I think a great step towards encouraging people to spend more time with the headset on. Quite the polished experience too.

The only buginess I noticed was with Oculus Desktop - occasional draw order/layering when trying to move the windows around. It also didn’t much like the UAC popups you get when installing some software, I had to take the headset off to click on that. The desktop framerate seems a little low too, possibly because it has to support being on-screen inside games. But naturally the biggest barrier to all this being truly functional is still text legibility - you need to make the screen quite big, and then move your head around to read stuff more easily.

But yeah, highly recommend anyone with a Rift check it out (‘Settings/Beta/Public Test Channel’, then ‘Restart Oculus’)!

1645

I’ll wait and see if you still love it in a few days :) I’m glad they’re still investing in it!

1646

I’ll be sure to report back when it all collapses! :)