Proton Pulse was a great suggestion! Very fun game
The Rift coaster was appreciably cool, but didn't do much for me. Probably because I have been on maybe seventy different coasters and I really love them. It just isn't the same without the g-forces.
Any other suggestions? Going to try First Law next.
I downloaded most of the ones you recommended, haven't installed and tried them all yet. I went looking to see if I could play Dead Space 1 or 2; there's an injector for 1 but it costs 40 bucks? I downloaded TriDef 3D Ignition and activated the 14 day free trial and I'm reinstalling DS2, we'll see how that goes.
I'm not getting much in the way of motion sickness, which is nice, but the screen door effect is really distracting to me. I still have First Law and Titans of Space to try.
Hey @TheSonicRetard - was your recommendation for SoundScape meant to SoundSelf or is there another sound related program I should try? Edit: Soundself has no demo?
Thanks - I found it late last night on some weird indie game site. The only issue was it wouldn't work with the microphone on my 360 headset and kept crashing, I'll have to dig out a real mic somewhere or maybe a webcam.
So John Carmack has officially left id for Oculus. Wow. Originally he was going to remain at id as a technology director, but he's explaining on twitter that it didn't work out and he's officially leaving the company. Talking about how id doesn't want him talking at quakecon. This is crazy stuff.
I downloaded most of the ones you recommended, haven't installed and tried them all yet. I went looking to see if I could play Dead Space 1 or 2; there's an injector for 1 but it costs 40 bucks? I downloaded TriDef 3D Ignition and activated the 14 day free trial and I'm reinstalling DS2, we'll see how that goes.
I'm not getting much in the way of motion sickness, which is nice, but the screen door effect is really distracting to me. I still have First Law and Titans of Space to try.
let me know how dead space 2 plays
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Apparently the Kentucky Route Zero guys' sort-of-intermission, "The Entertainment", is available in an Oculus Rift version. Check it out at http://kentuckyroutezero.com/the-entertainment/.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The guy has had an indiegogo donations page for a while now. I've been wanting to link to it, but PA has a policy about linking to indiegogo or kickstarter. I'm glad an actual publication has picked up the story, this is something worth exploring.
The guy has had an indiegogo donations page for a while now. I've been wanting to link to it, but PA has a policy about linking to indiegogo or kickstarter. I'm glad an actual publication has picked up the story, this is something worth exploring.
Definitely.
It's funny - as a gamer, I'm incredibly excited about the potential of the Rift and STEM. As a disabled gamer, I'm incredibly weary about it/them because motion controls are a barrier to entry by definition. So, I'm a bit torn on it all. It all looks incredibly awesome and like something I could never enjoy.
PSN/XBL/Nintendo/Origin/Steam: Nightslyr 3DS: 1607-1682-2948 Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
The guy has had an indiegogo donations page for a while now. I've been wanting to link to it, but PA has a policy about linking to indiegogo or kickstarter. I'm glad an actual publication has picked up the story, this is something worth exploring.
Definitely.
It's funny - as a gamer, I'm incredibly excited about the potential of the Rift and STEM. As a disabled gamer, I'm incredibly weary about it/them because motion controls are a barrier to entry by definition. So, I'm a bit torn on it all. It all looks incredibly awesome and like something I could never enjoy.
I would think that, as a disabled person, one would be even more excited about experiences the rift could bring them. The ability to do things that they might not be able to normally do. I've seen chatter in the dev forums about building a mountain climbing simulator for disabled people, for example, so that people who normally wouldn't be able to experience the sensation of looking out over the peak of a mountain might get to taste what it's like.
there's also the possibility that someone might not have the same dexterity in their hands or arms or fingers that they do in their neck, and thus where camera controls become cumbersome to someone when they're mapped to a pair of sticks, they become intuitive and manageable to someone who retains control of their neck.
That game proton pulse is basically breakout, for example. Except it's playable by people who are paralyzed below the neck - all the game requires is the ability to move ones head. Dumpy is a similar experience. I find that sort of game design fascinating. I've seen experiments where people bound to beds in complete paralysis were put into VR headsets (not necessarily the rift) and used electromagnetic impulses generated by thought to "walk" around a virtual environment, which moved these people to tears.
Our bodies are frail and disposable, as far as I'm concerned. The true essence of what we are is in our heads. I look at technologies like rift as being able to free us from our mortal bodies. 50 years down the road, the life experiences of people totally paralyzed might be drastically different as they can live out their days in a virtual world, able to recreate the functionality they might not have in the real world. Anybody ever see that cartoon The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest several years ago? I used to watch it growing up, and there was a reoccurring plot point about this very idea. one of the main villains was completely paralyzed save for use of his mouth, and the Quest family had a widely publicized VR environment called Quest World, which they gave to the villain to try and better his life. And, several times, entire plots would take place in this virtual world where he was unhindered by his paralysis and would live a lavish lifestyle in VR.
It's pretty exciting. I think this tech could legitimately better the lives of disabled people.
+1
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
But then you have people bitching about things like "basic human rights" and "oh the humanity" and "it's not cool to slaughter millions even to safeguard the gene pool from the inevitable flesh-eating mutants."
Hey if any of you are colorblind and left-handed and are sick of all this tyranny of the majority bullshit feel free to join me on Mars when that happens 30 years from now :P
Left hand/right hand dominance? The vr future laughs at these silly quibbles. No matter which side you prefer, vr will direct your input into the correct mechanical vagina output seamlessly and invisibly to the end user.
That's interesting. I didn't realize it'd be able to track head movement. Whenever I think of motion controls, I think of things like the Wii, or Kinect, or the PlayStation dildo/light thing, where things tend to be tuned for exaggerated movements. I have a Wii, and while I can use the Wiimote somewhat, it eventually boils down to an exercise in frustration because my arms can't do the fine motor control that my fingers can, so I just use the not-Dual Shock most of the time.
And, yeah, Real Adventures of Johnny Quest was great.
PSN/XBL/Nintendo/Origin/Steam: Nightslyr 3DS: 1607-1682-2948 Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
That's all the Rift tracks at the moment - head pitch, rotation, and yaw. It doesn't really track movement, not yet. The consumer version will track head positioning in X, Y, and Z, and you can currently simulate this with a razer hydra.
At this point, I think there needs to be a distinction among types of tracking, though. The term "motion controls" is so misleading and limited. Motion controls really refers to gesture input - a system reading a motion and trying to interpret that into an activator for an action. The most obvious type of motion input is waggle - moving a controller up and down so that the system reads that gesture and maps it to a virtual button press. You waggle in Mario Galaxy to punch, for example. Your motion to punch in mario galaxy isn't even close to what is represented on screen.
People sometimes say 1:1 motion controls, which is closer to what this type of tracking is. The better, more accurate, and emerging term for this type of tracking is positional tracking. What this means is that instead of trying to create a gesture and having the computer map that gesture into a pre-canned action, the computer instead reads where and to what orientation your extremity is at and maps it to a virtual object. It's important to clarify between orientation and position - orientation is pitch, yaw, and rotation among a vector. Think back to trig - a vector differs from a vertex in that a vector contains direction. You display orientation in vectors. Position, by contrast, is displayed as vertex, a single point in X, Y, Z space.
Positional tracking takes both of these into account. By nature, things which are positionally tracked don't need gesture tracking. If the computer can figure out which way you're holding a virtual sword, what the sword's vector is (pitch, yaw, rotation) among a vertex (the handle being held by your hand at X, Y, and Z) and can refresh its position 60 times a second, as accurate to your real world position, then it doesn't need to cross a threshhold before the computer recognizes the gesture and begins an attack animation. Simply swinging the sword IRL will be enough to attack.
Gesture tracking is imprecise and laggy by nature. Old motion controllers for last gen systems were slow and had limitations. The Wiimote could do positional tracking, but only in a very narrow field of view, and only when the orientation of the controller was such so that the camera on the controller could see the sensors in front of it. When you held the wiimote and pointed it at the screen, it had pretty accurate positional tracking - using the 2 IR LEDs it could map the rotation of the wiimote accurately, the distance (Z) from the TV accurately, the height from the TV (Y) accurately, and the horizontal distance of the TV (X) accurately. It couldn't map pitch and yaw very accurately - those were gleamed from a relatively starting position via accelerometers. Accelerometers work by counting the degree of change without regard to the point of origin. So an accelerometer reports back stuff like "from last poll, we moved +5 in pitch and -7 in yaw" without giving a frame of reference. The problem is, with this old motion control tech, these accelerometers were subject to drift, so that movement one way might report back +5 pitch, and the exact opposite movement backwards might incorrectly report back -4 pitch (instead of -5), meaning the tracking would very slowly, over time, get off.
When the wiimote wasn't pointing at the screen, it had to rely entirely on these accelerometers for both positioning and orientation, and that's where things got inaccurate. Without line of sight at the TV, the wiimote was very inaccurate and that's why devs would resort to gesture monitoring. If all they can read from the remote is rate of change, then the most complex motions they can read are stuff like waggles or waving motions.
These new VR devices work differently. They all rely on gyros instead of accelerometers. Gyroscopes take into account a frame of reference, usually a magnetic source like the earth's poles. Using those as a frame of reference, you can get an accurate reading of the absolute positioning and orientation. The razer hydras and sixense stem are built off of this technology. They include a base which sends out magnetic pulses that acts as a central spot to orient these devices within a 6 cubic foot area (9 cubic foot on the STEM). That means that you can conceptualize a cube 9 foot by 9 foot by 9 foot big surrounding the base, and these trackers, within that cube, can get 1:1 directly tracked for position and direction, without any line of sight. That means no limitations, which means you don't have to rely on gesture monitoring. Everything is accurately tracked.
Getting back to the rift, it currently tracks orientation, but not position. But it will track position going forward. But even when it does, it won't have to rely on motion to be read. It's not you swinging your head, and the rift measuring the swing, and updating the camera in-game accurately. that's slow and laggy. Instead, it's the rift updating it's orientation 60 times a second, and the computer aligning the camera in-game to the orientation the rift reads. That's why latency is such a big deal.
To think of it a bit differently, think of the way the wiimote and previous gen motion trackers read motion as them reading acceleration, while the new motion trackers read position. That's glossing over a bunch of details, but it will help you conceptualize how these are different.
That said, the stigma about motion controls needs to go away. For all the good it did getting this tech into the limelight, the wii seems to have given people a terrible conception about what motion controls are. Less gesture, more absolute positioning. Next-gen motion controls (by which I mean the STEMS and not, like, Kinect, which is built off the same limitations as the original kinect in a lot of ways) will be a lot more accurate and work the way people imagined they would.
And, to go a step further regarding the above, this difference in tracking is exactly why 60 FPS is so important to VR. unlike other games and tracking technologies, your refresh rate is tied to the polling of your devices in VR. 30 FPS means that you're reading orientation and positioning half as much as normal, and since VR games don't try to predict or measure motion, but accurate positioning, that amounts to you sending half the inputs as normal. At 30 FPS, you literally react half as fast in VR. In truth, 60 FPS might not even be enough going forward, we're probably going to start looking at the emergence of light weight 120hz and 240 hz screens soon enough. The problem of motion blur and VR sickness is directly related to the number of inputs the machine can receive a second. At 240 hz, a lot of the problems of motion blur and VR sickness would vanish.
words can't express how much I love this. I would pay $infinity for a remake of Moonwalker done using this tech. Being able to dance through the smooth criminal set in VR? Jesus christ...
Hard to believe that a product that's so hyped is so far away from commercial release. I want it in my hands and on my eyes already
1st ever "Penny-Arcade Hero Academy Tournament" Toilet Bowl Champion!
"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."
1. Put on a full motion tracking suit (preferably with finger tracking (this is important, stay with me)
2. Put on the Rift
3. Find a room with only a bed in it (safety reasons)
4. Scan that room into VR
5. Have sex with your partner but use HD avatars in VR (choose whatever avatar you wish).
I'm kinda terrified with how... feasible this looks.
1. Put on a full motion tracking suit (preferably with finger tracking (this is important, stay with me)
2. Put on the Rift
3. Find a room with only a bed in it (safety reasons)
4. Scan that room into VR
5. Have sex with your partner but use HD avatars in VR (choose whatever avatar you wish).
I'm kinda terrified with how... feasible this looks.
That's a lot of effort just so I can bang the Crypt Keeper
Hard to believe that a product that's so hyped is so far away from commercial release. I want it in my hands and on my eyes already
In roughly 1 year, you'll see a big push on the oculus front. Likely alongside a relatively big push by virtuix and sixense. This technology is right around the corner.
1. Put on a full motion tracking suit (preferably with finger tracking (this is important, stay with me)
2. Put on the Rift
3. Find a room with only a bed in it (safety reasons)
4. Scan that room into VR
5. Have sex with your partner but use HD avatars in VR (choose whatever avatar you wish).
I'm kinda terrified with how... feasible this looks.
That's a lot of effort just so I can bang the Crypt Keeper
the effects VR will have on sex are practically inconceivable at the moment. What I love about VR is that it, to me at least, feels like a divorcing of our minds from the world, and, as a result, our own bodies. We're hijacking our senses to transport us to another reality, one we completely construct to our own whims. That means everything we interact with is built to our own liking, and even our own bodies are built as we see fit.
Thinking about gender identity and time shifting and all that jazz, VR will provide the ultimate playground for anybody wanting to explore themselves, or others, sexually. Not only can you change your partner, you can also change yourself. I've talked about this a lot in this topic, but it really is pretty mind blowing.
And yes, what you describe is extremely close to reality. Like, it'll be here within the next 5 years, if not sooner.
I showed my mother VR cinema when she came to visit me a few weeks back, and she spent the entire time acting like a little kid, looking at seats and "running" down the VR aisles instead of watching the movie lol.
1. Put on a full motion tracking suit (preferably with finger tracking (this is important, stay with me)
2. Put on the Rift
3. Find a room with only a bed in it (safety reasons)
4. Scan that room into VR
5. Have sex with your partner but use HD avatars in VR (choose whatever avatar you wish).
I'm kinda terrified with how... feasible this looks.
That's a lot of effort just so I can bang the Crypt Keeper
I could have just introduced you to my mother-in-law.
If you haven't tried Doom in VR yet you really really should. I don't mean Doom 3, I mean Doom1. It's one to try after you've got your Rift legs but it actually induces less sickness in people thus far than Tuscany has done.
The scale is weird though, all the soldiers look like giants, and I think Doom Guy's eyes are in his chest. Seriously though, I played through a couple of levels, it's awesome.
I think once I've finished up Beyond on the PS3 the next game I play through is going to be entirely in the Rift. I'll have to decide what. Maybe Half-Life 2, never played it before.
This virtualizer stuff continues to look impressive. The way it can allow for a seated position is particularly interesting. The above video is a mod of GTA that uses the virtualizer to move.
The guy has had an indiegogo donations page for a while now. I've been wanting to link to it, but PA has a policy about linking to indiegogo or kickstarter. I'm glad an actual publication has picked up the story, this is something worth exploring.
Definitely.
It's funny - as a gamer, I'm incredibly excited about the potential of the Rift and STEM. As a disabled gamer, I'm incredibly weary about it/them because motion controls are a barrier to entry by definition. So, I'm a bit torn on it all. It all looks incredibly awesome and like something I could never enjoy.
I would think that, as a disabled person, one would be even more excited about experiences the rift could bring them. The ability to do things that they might not be able to normally do. I've seen chatter in the dev forums about building a mountain climbing simulator for disabled people, for example, so that people who normally wouldn't be able to experience the sensation of looking out over the peak of a mountain might get to taste what it's like.
there's also the possibility that someone might not have the same dexterity in their hands or arms or fingers that they do in their neck, and thus where camera controls become cumbersome to someone when they're mapped to a pair of sticks, they become intuitive and manageable to someone who retains control of their neck.
That game proton pulse is basically breakout, for example. Except it's playable by people who are paralyzed below the neck - all the game requires is the ability to move ones head. Dumpy is a similar experience. I find that sort of game design fascinating. I've seen experiments where people bound to beds in complete paralysis were put into VR headsets (not necessarily the rift) and used electromagnetic impulses generated by thought to "walk" around a virtual environment, which moved these people to tears.
Our bodies are frail and disposable, as far as I'm concerned. The true essence of what we are is in our heads. I look at technologies like rift as being able to free us from our mortal bodies. 50 years down the road, the life experiences of people totally paralyzed might be drastically different as they can live out their days in a virtual world, able to recreate the functionality they might not have in the real world. Anybody ever see that cartoon The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest several years ago? I used to watch it growing up, and there was a reoccurring plot point about this very idea. one of the main villains was completely paralyzed save for use of his mouth, and the Quest family had a widely publicized VR environment called Quest World, which they gave to the villain to try and better his life. And, several times, entire plots would take place in this virtual world where he was unhindered by his paralysis and would live a lavish lifestyle in VR.
It's pretty exciting. I think this tech could legitimately better the lives of disabled people.
I'm excited about the potential, but not excited enough to throw $300 (or potentially more) at something I don't know is going to work for me. You know those magic eyes and "3D" movies? An inability to see those 'working' just makes me doubt the usefulness or viability of a system fundamentally based on the principle of stereoscopic vision. If only one of my eyes is actually, properly looking at one of the screens, then I've kind of lost a majority of what the hardware is for in the first place.
It's kind of like if I don't have full range of motion in my arm and can't go bowling, why would I expect that using a Wii-mote is going to work any better (obviously a lack of a 4-15 pound ball is one factor, but it's a legitimate worry). I wouldn't really qualify it as a good reason not to try (if given the opportunity), but it is a good reason not to buy straightaway.
The rift isn't anything like magic eye; you can't use that as a baseline. As long as you can focus close up and have normal vision otherwise you should be fine. Totally worth trying someone else's first, I admit!
0
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
The Rift emulates normal vision. You see in the Rift exactly as you see in real life, no exceptions, no tricks.
Posts
it just bleeds in through the sides and bottom, ruining the immersion.
No sir, when I play VR, I do it in pitch black darkness.
The Rift coaster was appreciably cool, but didn't do much for me. Probably because I have been on maybe seventy different coasters and I really love them. It just isn't the same without the g-forces.
Any other suggestions? Going to try First Law next.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
I'm not getting much in the way of motion sickness, which is nice, but the screen door effect is really distracting to me. I still have First Law and Titans of Space to try.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
Works as advertised, with the new tracking technology instead of using modified Razer Hydra parts. Pretty neat.
let me know how dead space 2 plays
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Similarly, Nissan has teamed up with Oculus to use VR to promote themselves at the Tokyo Motor Show using HD prototypes:
Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
The guy has had an indiegogo donations page for a while now. I've been wanting to link to it, but PA has a policy about linking to indiegogo or kickstarter. I'm glad an actual publication has picked up the story, this is something worth exploring.
Definitely.
It's funny - as a gamer, I'm incredibly excited about the potential of the Rift and STEM. As a disabled gamer, I'm incredibly weary about it/them because motion controls are a barrier to entry by definition. So, I'm a bit torn on it all. It all looks incredibly awesome and like something I could never enjoy.
Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
I would think that, as a disabled person, one would be even more excited about experiences the rift could bring them. The ability to do things that they might not be able to normally do. I've seen chatter in the dev forums about building a mountain climbing simulator for disabled people, for example, so that people who normally wouldn't be able to experience the sensation of looking out over the peak of a mountain might get to taste what it's like.
there's also the possibility that someone might not have the same dexterity in their hands or arms or fingers that they do in their neck, and thus where camera controls become cumbersome to someone when they're mapped to a pair of sticks, they become intuitive and manageable to someone who retains control of their neck.
That game proton pulse is basically breakout, for example. Except it's playable by people who are paralyzed below the neck - all the game requires is the ability to move ones head. Dumpy is a similar experience. I find that sort of game design fascinating. I've seen experiments where people bound to beds in complete paralysis were put into VR headsets (not necessarily the rift) and used electromagnetic impulses generated by thought to "walk" around a virtual environment, which moved these people to tears.
Our bodies are frail and disposable, as far as I'm concerned. The true essence of what we are is in our heads. I look at technologies like rift as being able to free us from our mortal bodies. 50 years down the road, the life experiences of people totally paralyzed might be drastically different as they can live out their days in a virtual world, able to recreate the functionality they might not have in the real world. Anybody ever see that cartoon The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest several years ago? I used to watch it growing up, and there was a reoccurring plot point about this very idea. one of the main villains was completely paralyzed save for use of his mouth, and the Quest family had a widely publicized VR environment called Quest World, which they gave to the villain to try and better his life. And, several times, entire plots would take place in this virtual world where he was unhindered by his paralysis and would live a lavish lifestyle in VR.
It's pretty exciting. I think this tech could legitimately better the lives of disabled people.
There's already a cure.
But then you have people bitching about things like "basic human rights" and "oh the humanity" and "it's not cool to slaughter millions even to safeguard the gene pool from the inevitable flesh-eating mutants."
Babies.
And, yeah, Real Adventures of Johnny Quest was great.
Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
At this point, I think there needs to be a distinction among types of tracking, though. The term "motion controls" is so misleading and limited. Motion controls really refers to gesture input - a system reading a motion and trying to interpret that into an activator for an action. The most obvious type of motion input is waggle - moving a controller up and down so that the system reads that gesture and maps it to a virtual button press. You waggle in Mario Galaxy to punch, for example. Your motion to punch in mario galaxy isn't even close to what is represented on screen.
People sometimes say 1:1 motion controls, which is closer to what this type of tracking is. The better, more accurate, and emerging term for this type of tracking is positional tracking. What this means is that instead of trying to create a gesture and having the computer map that gesture into a pre-canned action, the computer instead reads where and to what orientation your extremity is at and maps it to a virtual object. It's important to clarify between orientation and position - orientation is pitch, yaw, and rotation among a vector. Think back to trig - a vector differs from a vertex in that a vector contains direction. You display orientation in vectors. Position, by contrast, is displayed as vertex, a single point in X, Y, Z space.
Positional tracking takes both of these into account. By nature, things which are positionally tracked don't need gesture tracking. If the computer can figure out which way you're holding a virtual sword, what the sword's vector is (pitch, yaw, rotation) among a vertex (the handle being held by your hand at X, Y, and Z) and can refresh its position 60 times a second, as accurate to your real world position, then it doesn't need to cross a threshhold before the computer recognizes the gesture and begins an attack animation. Simply swinging the sword IRL will be enough to attack.
Gesture tracking is imprecise and laggy by nature. Old motion controllers for last gen systems were slow and had limitations. The Wiimote could do positional tracking, but only in a very narrow field of view, and only when the orientation of the controller was such so that the camera on the controller could see the sensors in front of it. When you held the wiimote and pointed it at the screen, it had pretty accurate positional tracking - using the 2 IR LEDs it could map the rotation of the wiimote accurately, the distance (Z) from the TV accurately, the height from the TV (Y) accurately, and the horizontal distance of the TV (X) accurately. It couldn't map pitch and yaw very accurately - those were gleamed from a relatively starting position via accelerometers. Accelerometers work by counting the degree of change without regard to the point of origin. So an accelerometer reports back stuff like "from last poll, we moved +5 in pitch and -7 in yaw" without giving a frame of reference. The problem is, with this old motion control tech, these accelerometers were subject to drift, so that movement one way might report back +5 pitch, and the exact opposite movement backwards might incorrectly report back -4 pitch (instead of -5), meaning the tracking would very slowly, over time, get off.
When the wiimote wasn't pointing at the screen, it had to rely entirely on these accelerometers for both positioning and orientation, and that's where things got inaccurate. Without line of sight at the TV, the wiimote was very inaccurate and that's why devs would resort to gesture monitoring. If all they can read from the remote is rate of change, then the most complex motions they can read are stuff like waggles or waving motions.
These new VR devices work differently. They all rely on gyros instead of accelerometers. Gyroscopes take into account a frame of reference, usually a magnetic source like the earth's poles. Using those as a frame of reference, you can get an accurate reading of the absolute positioning and orientation. The razer hydras and sixense stem are built off of this technology. They include a base which sends out magnetic pulses that acts as a central spot to orient these devices within a 6 cubic foot area (9 cubic foot on the STEM). That means that you can conceptualize a cube 9 foot by 9 foot by 9 foot big surrounding the base, and these trackers, within that cube, can get 1:1 directly tracked for position and direction, without any line of sight. That means no limitations, which means you don't have to rely on gesture monitoring. Everything is accurately tracked.
Getting back to the rift, it currently tracks orientation, but not position. But it will track position going forward. But even when it does, it won't have to rely on motion to be read. It's not you swinging your head, and the rift measuring the swing, and updating the camera in-game accurately. that's slow and laggy. Instead, it's the rift updating it's orientation 60 times a second, and the computer aligning the camera in-game to the orientation the rift reads. That's why latency is such a big deal.
To think of it a bit differently, think of the way the wiimote and previous gen motion trackers read motion as them reading acceleration, while the new motion trackers read position. That's glossing over a bunch of details, but it will help you conceptualize how these are different.
That said, the stigma about motion controls needs to go away. For all the good it did getting this tech into the limelight, the wii seems to have given people a terrible conception about what motion controls are. Less gesture, more absolute positioning. Next-gen motion controls (by which I mean the STEMS and not, like, Kinect, which is built off the same limitations as the original kinect in a lot of ways) will be a lot more accurate and work the way people imagined they would.
words can't express how much I love this. I would pay $infinity for a remake of Moonwalker done using this tech. Being able to dance through the smooth criminal set in VR? Jesus christ...
So cool watching this technology slowly spread to mainstream outlets.
Hard to believe that a product that's so hyped is so far away from commercial release. I want it in my hands and on my eyes already
"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."
1. Put on a full motion tracking suit (preferably with finger tracking (this is important, stay with me)
2. Put on the Rift
3. Find a room with only a bed in it (safety reasons)
4. Scan that room into VR
5. Have sex with your partner but use HD avatars in VR (choose whatever avatar you wish).
I'm kinda terrified with how... feasible this looks.
That's a lot of effort just so I can bang the Crypt Keeper
In roughly 1 year, you'll see a big push on the oculus front. Likely alongside a relatively big push by virtuix and sixense. This technology is right around the corner.
the effects VR will have on sex are practically inconceivable at the moment. What I love about VR is that it, to me at least, feels like a divorcing of our minds from the world, and, as a result, our own bodies. We're hijacking our senses to transport us to another reality, one we completely construct to our own whims. That means everything we interact with is built to our own liking, and even our own bodies are built as we see fit.
Thinking about gender identity and time shifting and all that jazz, VR will provide the ultimate playground for anybody wanting to explore themselves, or others, sexually. Not only can you change your partner, you can also change yourself. I've talked about this a lot in this topic, but it really is pretty mind blowing.
And yes, what you describe is extremely close to reality. Like, it'll be here within the next 5 years, if not sooner.
I could have just introduced you to my mother-in-law.
BOOM!
The scale is weird though, all the soldiers look like giants, and I think Doom Guy's eyes are in his chest. Seriously though, I played through a couple of levels, it's awesome.
I think once I've finished up Beyond on the PS3 the next game I play through is going to be entirely in the Rift. I'll have to decide what. Maybe Half-Life 2, never played it before.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
This virtualizer stuff continues to look impressive. The way it can allow for a seated position is particularly interesting. The above video is a mod of GTA that uses the virtualizer to move.
I'm excited about the potential, but not excited enough to throw $300 (or potentially more) at something I don't know is going to work for me. You know those magic eyes and "3D" movies? An inability to see those 'working' just makes me doubt the usefulness or viability of a system fundamentally based on the principle of stereoscopic vision. If only one of my eyes is actually, properly looking at one of the screens, then I've kind of lost a majority of what the hardware is for in the first place.
It's kind of like if I don't have full range of motion in my arm and can't go bowling, why would I expect that using a Wii-mote is going to work any better (obviously a lack of a 4-15 pound ball is one factor, but it's a legitimate worry). I wouldn't really qualify it as a good reason not to try (if given the opportunity), but it is a good reason not to buy straightaway.