I'm sick of phones as the basis for VR. I tried Cardboard, it has real problems. The battery life is bad when you're doing 3D things, the phone gets very hot on your face, and the GPU is underpowered for pretty much every purpose including rendering a realistic enough scene for VR immersion.
In my mind, there's no other way for VR to go mainstream except for mobile. Average people will not buy a multi thousand dollar gaming rig, and the big software companies want to see how big of a whale this thing really is.
If VR is going to go beyond the high end gaming niche, people are going to have to be able to access it through the computer in their pocket.
I tried the Playstation VR. It was definitely cool and better than mobile VR solutions but motion sickness is a big problem. I played a really intense space fighter game, and I had a headache for a while after. I am not especially susceptible to motion sickness either. Perhaps after using the headsets for a while I will adapt but then again am I going to pay the $4-500 for the PS VR and take the chance I won't? If it was a sick feeling free experience I would 100% buy it.
Have you tried a HTC Vive with a decent (GTX 970 or better) graphics card and cpu? Apparently being motion sick is all about the framerate and resolution, and I don't think the Playstation has a graphics card that can handle a framerate that won't make you sick.
I'm not a VR enthusiast, but I've tried the Oculus with the basic demo app and got sick within 3 minutes. I spent a good 20 minutes playing games on the Vive and felt fine.
That's an interesting data-point because my understanding was that motion-sickness was purely a function of biology. It seems it's at least weakly coupled to something else, in your case. Could it be something other than frame rate?
The best demo/test I've come across for this is Minecraft in VR for the Occulus Rift. It has a "theater"-mode, in which you can play Minecraft on a "big screen" in a room in VR. This mode works great for running around and doing things. And it has a first-person mode, which works great -- for standing still and looking around. But I'm pretty sure the only people that can play and walk/run around in first-person mode, are the 0.5% of US fighter pilots that don't get motion sickness at all.
I think it's a great way to demo the limits that motion sickness places on experiences for the vast majority of people. It's more than just being in control, and there are other effects at work, just like hand-held video footage without image stabilization is painful to look at. But my pet theory is that the big one is working with your body - if your body sits in a chair, your avatar should too (ie: drive a car, fly a spaceship is ok, walking around an art gallery at a leisure pace, not so much).
Probably because of the full room position tracking and using teleportation for longer distances instead of a controller. If the viewport/camera moves but your body doesn't move you may experience motion sickness.
I suspect (speculate) that the issue is with normal vision being a sequence of saccades, wherein you don't actually see anything between point A and point B, vs most VR which is a smooth glissando between points.
I heard of one hack, for minecraft or something, that snapped view angle increments to 30degrees or something like that, and it was helpful. That would simulate saccading.
Expect a lower point of view frame rate (vs animations that don't change point of view) would be helpful. i.e. smoothly move whatever is in your hand, or that pig on the landscape, but turning your head triggers saccade emulation.
> I suspect (speculate) that the issue is with normal vision being a sequence of saccades, wherein you don't actually see anything between point A and point B, vs most VR which is a smooth glissando between points.
Why would your eyes not saccade when wearing a VR headset? The screen isn't the source of saccades. Your eyes are.
because your eyes are looking straight ahead for the most part. It's like seeing the world through a narrow view point like binoculars (sans magnification).
You can dart around within that narrow window, but mostly you are looking around by turning your head. You are subjected to more visual motion than you would in real life.
Your eyes still saccade when you turn your head. If your headset is causing your eyes to stop saccading properly, I'd expect that means it's not rendering fast enough. I also don't see how adding jitter to the turning would fix this. That seems like it would just cause major disorientation. Maybe I'm totally off though.
I was at the mall and had a chance to try out an occulus rift. It was a very pleasant surprise. My speculations were completely wrong, it felt very natural.
Yeah, hard to design FPS games where you can't move. Then again, mobile had a similar constraint - a touchscreen is a piss-poor substitute for keyboard and mouse or gamepads... And yet a massive number of games have found good approaches on this. Obviously the big difference is that phone gaming is "free" on that you already paid for the hardware. Not many people would buy a phone just for gaming.
The GPU in the PS4 pro will be the RX480 desktop-equivalent graphics card. This has a slight lower passmark than the Nvidia GTX 970, which is the minimum spec for the HTC Vive.
Of course, it's not like and like - you can't just compare cards like that, and Playstation have the advantage of controlling the hardware and software configurations (which has always been an advantage for consoles), but saying it easily has the resolution and framerate sounds suspect - I expect it will just about have the resolution and framerate.
I'll find out in a week - I'm going to the Playstation Future of Gaming Tour, and I'll be able to compare it to the Vive with a 970.
I thought the resolution was also tied to motion sickness, but I could be wrong.
I've noticed on benchmarks that the relationship between resolution and framerate is exponential - so a lower resolution will go a long way to a higher framerate.
You're still talking about an audience that's predominantly gamers. The mobile phone market by default has a much larger market. My parents have phones that can do VR, they don't have a Playstation.
The gamer audience is pretty damn big. It's not an obscure hobby. A huge number of households have gaming consoles.
It's way way way bigger than the number that have custom built ultra-high end PCs.
Phones that will be powerful enough to provide a good experience for more than a short amount of time (due to battery, etc.) and with the abilities of other VR systems (hand controllers, positional tracking, etc) are going to be a fair ways off.
A vast swathe of "the gamer audience" is on mobile though. The bulk of the numbers are people playing the likes of Candy Crush and Temple run, not COD or Halo. Just the ones who flesh out the most money for gaming.
Does that really detract from my point that the PS VR is probably the most mainstream way of introducing VR we'll have for a while that isn't heavily constrained and doesn't require thousands of dollars of hardware?
Yes all gamers (including phones) is a bigger group than console gamers, but there are still a TON of console gaming households who have proven willing to throw down real money to buy hardware to play specific games.
> who have proven willing to throw down real money to buy hardware to play specific games
It remains to be seen how many of these will buy a VR headset. Peripherals have always been a very marginal aspect even on dedicated gaming hardware. If there's an actual killer application (i.e. a must have game) I could see myself buying into it, but as long as the VR "games" are either glorified demos or badly converted regular games that are worse than their non-VR counterpart, I won't spend a cent on it.
With some exceptions like Game of War, Candy crush and Pokemon Go the average mobile user doesn't play that much. They just need a quick 5 minute distraction. That's the wrong mindset for VR.
PS VR is $400 without a move controller or $500 with a couple. In addition to buying a PS4 if you don't already have one. Yes, 40m people around the world have a PS4, but a lot of people that would play with VR don't.
The Daydream is likely going to work with most top tier Android phones in the coming year or two and will likely start working with mid tier phones soon after. You'll be able to use it anywhere you want and bring it with you to friends and family. And it's only $79 with the included controller.
While I have no doubt the PS VR will have similar success to the HTC Vive and Occulus, I think VR with a phone as a base will likely have a wider market due to economics and market penetration.
I have a Vive and have tried VR porn. There's not a lot of say. You get some pretty bad uncanny valley issues and having a first person view of porn is weird and unatural and frankly unsexy. Porn that 'happens to you' doesn't really work.
I don't think porn VR is the killer app people think it is. Perhaps in a few generations especially in conjunction with tele-dildos or robot sex dolls or somesuch, but that's a lot to ask when ordinary 2D photos and videos get the blood flowing with much less hassle.
VR photographs can be both be captured and viewed on a smartphone.
Big screen playback of YouTube and Netflix through a smartphone would offer a much better experience than watching a limited selection of titles on a postcard sized screen on the back of an aircraft seat.
Given that you're going to own a smartphone anyway, an accessory that's an order of magnitude cheaper than high end VR seems like it has a place.
Actually, I think that using VR to watch movies in constrained spaces (i.e. airplane seat) would be a fantastic idea. Having just been on a long and boring flight, I would have given quite a bit to watch a movie on a "big screen", even if it was virtual.
> Frankly, [high end gaming] seems to be the main use case.
That's the case now, that and porn will be the early adopter uses.
But I'm pretty sure the Killer App is going to be feeling like you are in the same space as someone you're not actually in the same space with. Which doesn't require much technologically.
You could probably get social presence with a pair of microlasers pointed at pair of lenses, plus spatial audio.
(I definitely am not trying to be sarcastic, your statement is pretty much what I think, but somehow whenever I try to think of these practical opportunities, I fail to grasp anything with even remotely the potential user base of gaming.)
Training. There are already training sims for surgical assistants using consumer hardware. Extend that to any job that involves highly skilled work away from a keyboard and mouse. Nursing, mechanics, maintenance, construction machinery, etc...
Design and simulation. The auto and oil industry have paid millions for whole-wall, multi-user, 3D display systems because they want slightly better visualization tools for people doing car design and oil exploration. Spending on that saves them 10X on avoiding wasted effort. Commoditize that to fashion, gadgets, furniture...
Real estate. In the near future, you would be considered an idiot to pay for a building to be built without walking through it first. Very soon when shopping for a house, you will walk through 50 prospective houses in VR before bothering to visit 5 in meatspace. Architects already call VR visualization "cheating" because it is so much more effective --even for professionals-- than drafting and CAD on flat media.
Education. Firing full-scale catapults is a much more engaging way to teach physics than staring at diagrams of catapults.
Tourism. VR won't replace going there. VR will replace not going there. To say that most people don't go to most places is a comic understatement. For people who can't travel because of personal/financial/health constraints, being able to get out of the house/hospital bed/nursing home for just a while would be quite a boon.
Socialization. The telephone is basically lightweight social VR. Social VR is like the telephone but more intense. The phone will not be replaced by VR. VR opens up more intense options for being with other people you couldn't be with otherwise. Instead of just sitting in the same room having a chat, you can hike through Minecraft mountains, play D&D, paint a sculpture, or shoot catapults together.
Education for one. A properly scanned museum would be interesting to walk through.
Able to walk around construction projects before they start. Able to walk around construction projects as they are built.
Main deal I could expect out of a cheap version of VR technology with decent enough data connection is telepresence. One could attend any event, large or small, around the world as if you were there.
I imagine videoconferencing / telepresence type things have a lot of potential? There's all kinds of interesting ways you can imagine a VR meeting could be more effective than your typical group Hangout/Skype video call.
360 videos, especially of exotic locations (the great Pyramids, temples in India, etc.). I really enjoy these now (using cardboard), but better resolution and smoother panning would be even better.
I used Autodesk Homestyler to take floor plans of a preconstruction condo and visualize what it looks like in 3D. But ideally, it would be much cooler to walk around with a VR headset on to really get an idea of the space (given you don't bump into walls or fall in a lake). I'm not a VR expert so I'm not even sure if Daydream supports this or if the user must be stationary.
Autodesk previously demoed their app working with project tango so you can walk around holding a tablet as a viewport.
> In what situation would you watch netflix on this as opposed to your 60 inch TV?
I don't have a 60 inch TV, I do have a phone (and tend to keep a pretty recent one), so the marginal cost of Daydream over what I would have anyway vs. the marginal cost of a 60-inch TV over what I would have anyway is a pretty clear win for Daydream.
The Kinect is truly giant in computer vision/hobbyist circles. Your metaphor may be good, but not for the reasons you mean - I think gaming won't be impacted, but industries will be.
Like I said before, I imagine the large platform companies want to see how much a revenue generator it can become if it reaches mass appeal. This can only really happen on mobile.
Give it a few years and affordable PCs will be able to power VR just fine. A device like the Rift will also become much cheaper over the next few years. Given how easy the Rift is to set up (pretty much just plug it in along with a single webcam that sits on your desk), I don't see any other major impediments to it going mainstream once the prices fall.
Mobile VR still has an important unsolved problem too (absolute positional tracking throughout a room). Google and Oculus's John Carmack are working on this problem (independently of one another), and hopefully we'll see some of their work make it into commercial products in the next few years. But for now it's a real limitation of mobile VR devices.
I've tried the Samsung Gear VR. It doesn't feel immersive at all, it just feels like I'm looking at a phone strapped on my head.
I agree that the multi-thousand machines to power an Oculus is too expensive to go mainstream, but phone-based VR suck too much to go mainstream. The resolution is too low, headtracking is not good enough...
At best people will get those phone VR headset for free, play a little bit with it, show it off to their friends and as soon as the novelty wears off it will collect dust.
VR needs a much, much better experience to become a thing. Either PC-based VR becomes cheaper or phone-based VR becomes better I don't know, but that's not for 2017.
Surrendering your phone to your VR device is a hassle. It's a lot of work to make sure your battery is adequately charged, remove it from its case, sync all of your peripherals, and insert it in the headset.
I think that ideally VR should be a standalone device that connects to nothing but power, WiFi, 4G/5G, and bluetooth. (And yes, it can have a 3.5 mm jack too.) The basis for this technology would naturally be a built-in mobile device, so mobile VR is in this sense the path forward.
> Surrendering your phone to your VR device is a hassle.
Yes, but it is cheaper than duplicating the hardware of a flagship phone in a VR device, which is basically the atlernative, given that the phone-based VR devices are using the sensors, display, and basic compute functionality (CPU/GPU/RAM, etc.) of the phone.
Eventually, the necessary hardware for acceptable VR will be cheap enough that its not worth the hassle of surrendering a phone for it, and it will be viable for the mass market as a standalone device, but right now I think -- outside of very narrow niches -- the phone-as-core VR display design makes a lot of sense.
This is the right answer. Putting your phone into a visor is an awkward stop-gap but ultimately it needs to be something that can interface with your phone, wirelessly, so you can simply pop it on whenever you want to play around with some VR.
This meme is blatantly incorrect. You don't require a multi-thousand dollar rig for VR, let alone gaming at maximum settings. A multi-thousand dollar rig is strictly enthusiast-grade - that is when you put components into the PC for no practical purpose whatsoever and in some cases to the detriment of performance (e.g. 4-way SLI/Crossfire). Even $1000 is pushing the boundary of enthusiast.
Getting into PC-based VR can cost less if you go with entry-level VR components. This $850 PC[1], for example, will crush nearly all VR titles with little-to-no compromise.
Valid and educated criticism levied against PC VR would be the price of the devices themselves, the annoying cables and the immaturity of the optics (both the Vive and the Oculus are different imperfect trade-offs).
Completely valid criticism. That being said, the Gigabyte Aero 14 is a fantastically priced and built gaming laptop that might be able to pull off VR (if not, you can get GPU enclosures now).
Personally I find that roomscale is a bit of gimmick, but I'm more interested in seated VR titles because I'm one of the lucky few that don't get VR sickness (another valid concern).
I have more like a $600 gaming rig (i5 6500, 8b ram, ssd, gtx 1060 6gb). I don't have a Vive yet but I have no worries that my GTX 1060 should handle VR just fine.
The theory is that most VR games target the 970, as soon as you find yourself in the 10X bracket you should be all set. I was using my DK2 on a 660Ti+2600k just fine. I demoed the setup at work with a few games (mostly DiRT and NoLimits 2). Out of the 30 or so people that tried it, only one person felt uneasy.
One thing I'd definitely recommend you do before purchasing a VR setup is demoing it for a decent amount of time. If you're susceptible to VR sickness, that's $800 down the drain.
That's not that big a deal. Today's high end gaming is tomorrow's mainstream gaming and the day after tomorrow's budget gaming. If the market wants it, the market will get it.
I think there is a market for both. I think that you will see systems bifurcate (like you see right now with games -- high end rigs and consoles vs mobile) to high end systems and low end systems.
I think VR can only become mainstream/ubiquitous once it has an "iPhone moment" that fundamentally changes what VR even is in the first place. Right now everyone is thinking about how to make the VR we heard about 30 years ago. Sure, we have faster processors and everything is smaller and lighter now but if you look at VR demos from the 80s it's really all of the same stuff taking the same approach with all the same issues and all the same empty promises. VR's problem right now is it's just the same boring novelty it's always been.
1) A dark box on your head with a screen (or a projector) inside
2) Direct connection to the brain
We're not even close to solving #2, and even if we were, I'm not sure many people would agree so a surgical procedure.
We could create a light weight version of #1 without the box - something like glasses with screens or low-power laser projectors, but then you'd need to be in a relatively dark place for the true immersion. Dlodlo V1 VR is doing that, I think. And ODG R-7 Smartglasses, kind-of.
I'm not even necessarily talking about just the hardware specifically - the whole experience stinks. Nobody's really figured out what to do with it yet. I think mainstream VR as a whole will have to be something way different from what's being made now, and I don't know what that even looks like.
To counter: VR on the smartphone is great for visualizing preprocessed data. I love being able to view 3D research data on a comparatively cheap device and that I can share the visualization with everybody that has a phone, not only labs that have decided that it is worth it to buy a dedicated headset. Moreover, setup of the Cardboard is trivial compared to other headsets (no matter how easy it might be, you can not beat "just launch this youtube video").
Out of curiosity what sort of data and data visualization strategies would VR be particularly well suited for over more traditional visualization methods?
A good pitch would be: Medical diagnostics/pathology professionals are really exited about VR as (according to those I have spoken to) the 2D presentation of 3D data impedes making precise diagnosis (which VR solves).
>We are working with a number of smartphone manufacturers to create a specification for Daydream-ready phones. These smartphones enable VR experiences with high-performance sensors for smooth, accurate head tracking, fast response displays to minimize blur, and powerful mobile processors. [1]
Given Google's track record of being able to deliver hardware they actually had available for a demo at their product and service announcements I don't hold out much hope for this ever happening.
Here's betting that the first killer app for phone VR will be viewing fpv videos made with those silly snapchat glasses. I mean, aside from porn. And watching movies in bed without disturbing your SO.
I've actually played around with this (used to make 'immersive' 2D videos for fitness equipment; [1] is a former startup of mine). We tested existing footage in VR: completely nauseating.
That is, it's nauseating if you're trying to imagine that you're running or biking through an area, because the movement doesn't match your movements. There are a few exceptions.
Our content was live action video, but massively stabilized (it almost looked like CG; many partners assumed it was). So I'm not optimistic that standard video would work for this, at all. Just my two cents, though it's a pretty well-informed couple of pennies.
>if you're trying to imagine that you're running or biking through an area
I mean videos in the general sense. I watch 2d videos (while using fitness equipment) on a VR headset and find it enjoyable. The best part is blocking out all of the visual distraction from my environment. I look forward to getting a higher resolution headset.
I know nothing about the hardware behind VR so a quick question: if the GPU had enough power, could the experience be the same as HTC Vive/Oculus or is there something hardware wise on those that simply doesn't work on a phone? For example I thought there was some kind of special screen in real VR headsets, different from phones.
- Positional tracking, being able to move around in your environment rather than just move your head (will be solved eventually on mobile, see inside-out positional tracking)
- Custom made screens for VR, Rift/Vive have 90hz refresh rates, I believe Daydream phones will be 60hz (same as GearVR)
Eh, phone VR is fine, though cardboard kind of sucks. No low persistence, no full usage of the phone's resources, no additional IMUs to help with tracking. GearVR is a lot better in that regard, though the missing positional tracking is really what is missing. I wish Google would productize Project Tango properly already.
I'm sure Daydream VR is still like that, just like Gear VR was at first. I'm finding the 2016 GearVR much improved, however. It has a separate power jack for the headset, for example, so you can prevent the phone from having to do everything and burning up.
