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[Virtual Reality] is like normal reality, but butter
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Yeah, that sounds like the second thing I mentioned. There are a lot of bad custom tracks that are difficult for totally bullshit reasons. It's partly power creep and partly a warped idea of what elements are required for "difficulty".
This video talks about the weirdness of difficulty in Beat Saber and gives a few examples of good creators:
That's roughly my experience.
When psvr first debuted, a lot of people got this swimmy, forward and backward motion on the tracking, even when completely still.
I haven't always been 100% comfortable in VR, but that was the only time I felt straight up nauseous.
Dammit I want to love the way I move once more.
I would start without locomotion. Maybe a VR movie like Henry, stationary games like Beat Saber or Super Hot.
Did it come with anything?
Yeah. I don't think it came with anything. Picking it up after work.
A lot of the headset bundles come with printed coupons for a free game or a trial subscription or something like that.
Other stuff that I liked starting out but is maybe old hat (and possibly cheaper?) by now:
I still love The Blu as a demo game and experience, but the three experiences combined last less than 30 minutes. It's great if you want to start with more passive experiences before getting into more interactive stuff, and doubly so when introducing someone to VR and wanting to show them the range of experiences it offers, but not a great $/hr investment if it's just you. It's definitely quality over quantity.
If you're completely fresh to VR, I'm sure Oculus has some 360 degree 3D photos and videos for free on their storefront and that stuff is a lot of fun for a bit.
Space Pirate Trainer is great, Super Hot is great, Gorn is great, Blade & Sorcery is also great.
If you're into weird VR psychadelia stuff, My Lil Donut is also free on steam and is easily the best LSD donut simulator on the market.
Job simulator is a wonderful and simple example of the power of VR. I wouldn't suggest paying full price for it but if its on sale (which it often is) it's well worth a play.
It's one of the titles I use to show VR off to people.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Nah you'll be fine. There are certain scenarios and use cases where the tracking differences may come into play, but you shouldn't have any real issues. It's mostly just occluding the controllers by holding them in spots where they can't be seen by the trackers you have, but apparently they've done a lot to help with that on the Rift S and it's going to only affect certain pretty specific stuff.
The demo with Cirque du Soleil is probably this one: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/1006887936048510
It's a bit grainy, but the scene with the elephants and then the one with the Mongolian family really took my breath away as it really made me feel like I was there.
There was actually a little bit of jank in The Lab when I tried it for the first time about two months ago. Movement and/or object interactions weren't working right in Secret Shop and Robot Repair, and Longbow isn't intuitive since just touching the trigger counts as a pull - you want to take your finger completely off the trigger to release.
But I think that was pretty soon after the Index update. Valve might have fixed these problems since then.
The Oculus Introduction to Virtual Reality and Oculus Dreamdeck are good first experiences. The museum in Dreamdeck still makes me pretty happy. Google Earth VR on SteamVr.
I'd get Aircar from either the Oculus Store or Steam and try that pretty early on. There's not a lot to it, but it's very pretty and intuitive.
Some Steam titles have free VR ports, so if you already have any of those, they usually feature good content but sometimes wonky VR implementation. Subnautica, No Man's Sky, Rise of the Tomb Raider (if you have a certain DLC), Zone of the Enders, Hellblade, Obduction, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (not a single player game), Dirt Rally, Distance, Elite: Dangerous, DCS, Everspace, Overload, Payday 2, Project Cars, Prey (if you have the DLC), Sublevel Zero, Tabletop Simulator (this wasn't great in VR when I tried it).
The box seems light.
Anywho, I bring this up because of talk about Oculus having asynchronous time warp; what wound up happening with that technology?
It turned into asynchronous space warp, which extended the tech to depth movement as well as rotational movement, and is, as far as I can tell, magic.
Good summary of where we stand with it today.
https://uploadvr.com/reprojection-explained/
Like at the end of the game will some guy come to my house and say the code phrase which will send me into some gun fu assassin mode that dilates time and I'll wake up in like eighteen hours covered in blood?
The experience is so interesting on so many levels, like how even though it looks like it does it gives a sense of urgency, or realness. I think it's because it is so intuitive, yes you can hide behind the desk and fire around it. Or the way it rewards mastery. Hey, there's a gun hiding over here, and then when you use it it's like cheat codes. It's almost like being in a real time training montage, by the third or fourth attempts through a sequence you're just acting out of instinct, your optimal moves already planned in the early going.
Throwing is really unintuitive though.
Not quite, but you'll know what to do.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Palmer Lucky's still a fascist, though. That hasn't changed. He got fired a couple years ago.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
ATW and ASW are still in all the new headsets. They're good things, not bad things.
And by VR, I don't mean Big Screen. I'm talking full 360-degree looking around.
That may not help a ton with what you're talking about, but it may help a wee bit?
Yeah. Getting up to speed on this was....incredibly confusing because even dedicated VR websites can't seem to consistently use timewarp/spacewarp and they're all very futuristic crazy tech names, but this article has a good summary if you're feeling adventurous.
Shortish version: ASW and ATW are super cool and can kind of magically make your low framerate games feel higher framerate and it's sweet. Valve was being a bit silly upon launch of SteamVR/Vive and their feature was noticeably less good because something something not wanting developers to get lazy and rely on it. They have since changed their position and did a few updates, and as of the Motion Smoothing update they achieved parity with ASW and ATW at the time in SteamVR -- non oculus headsets or oculus headsets running games through steamVR get the benefits. Then earlier this year, Oculus came out with a 2.0 update that makes the image better when...spacetimereprojectwarping....(pictures in the article), so they're currently ahead of the curve on that again.
It would probably make it playable to me because tracking the ball and driving never worked for my primitive brain.
Also yeah I've had the same fantasy.. I wish the VR userbase was much bigger, so many games would be unbelievable with VR mods.
If I wasn't then I knew where I was going but no idea on the ball.
I know the trick is to switch back and forth as needed but it never clicked for me as I would get too wrapped into one or the other.
In VR they got the scale perfect and it feels like racing around micro machines.
probably hard to find a MP game these days but for the $5-10 they're probably asking it's a great SP experience too.
I'm not sure what most people do, but I pretty much always leave it on ball tracking. It's a lot easier to maintain the shape of the field in your mind than a moving ball. And until you get better, you're pretty much just trying to make contact in vaguely the right direction anyway.
Oh cool, I didn't know Blaze Rush had a VR mode. I'll have to check that out.
And since it seems like a lot of people are newly getting into VR these days, once you have your legs and want to check out a more movement-intense game (seriously, make sure you can handle movement, have at least a good few hours under your belt in stuff like Skyrim or Fallout) check out Jet Island: