Oculus Rift 600$$ Ridiculous.

$600 for a virtual interactive environment is still cheaper than building a smart/reactive environment. That's my VR/AR argument. Instead of building a smart house, have AR vision within the house. The difference in cost between those two ideas is... a lot.

Not that people are making smart houses right now, but there was talk about them while I was in college. I was surprised people would spend so many millions to have house with smart technology built into everything instead of an AR setup. And that was for things like... having a little display pop out of any surface of your house to control that room. It'd be way more cost effective if an AR device (like a combination of google glasses and a kinect) projected a screen to interact with based on whatever device you're interacting with.

 

Yeah, the lack of games is my major gripe. There's been an Oculus at work available for people to try for about a year. After the first 24h, I'm not aware of anything new and significant to do with it.

(I'm told Elite is amazing but needs a patch before it'll work again, and even then it's a super niche title in any case.)

Until there's games or apps that I can imagine myself spending hours with - you know, like other video games - there's little value to me, because hardware without software isn't very useful. Its a circular dependency: Few people will buy the device with no apps, and few people will make the apps for no audience.

I'm surprised at the lack of console-style exclusive titles, to be honest. It seems like a smart thing for FB to invest in, especially as the competition will have them on top of more accessible devices.

 

The UI is only a tiny part of a smart house. I have a phone that can nail that aspect for a trivial cost. Getting the UI to talk to my lights / AC / TV / fridge..? That's the challenge.

 

This is one thing for me. There seem to be no flag ship titles. When there is a game that everyone is talking about that I have to buy a rift to play, then I will buy. Before then it just seems like an expensive toy.

 

At risk of going off topic - please, no one follow me - it's not that such a thing can't be done, but appliance manufacturers are going about it in terms of, "Just open everything up to the Internet!" instead of, "Open everything up only to my in-house WiFi network," which would work better at the expense of requiring cooperation, adherence to standards, and a more complex setup for Casual Joe. The appliance makers need to agree on things and cede control for a setup like this to work. Similarly, your router needs a way to let your Smartphone securely talk to your home network. G'luck with that.

Back on topic, it's sort of a similar thing with VR right now. The same interface - the general concept of "VR" - has to deal with multiple interface devices and 'actuator' devices (PCs in all their configurations, game consoles, etc.) that don't share any standards, and while setup is simpler for VR than for a smart house, it's still just not easy enough to catch on, and the value proposition to the end user isn't yet strong enough.

TL;DR - One does not simply create Jarvis.

 

That's what the VR is for. It doesn't have to talk to your fridge. Just convince the guy wearing the headset that the fridge has been spoken too.

 

it needs to be untethered to stand any chance, There were so many wires coming from it on the DK2 then the wires needed for the IR camera, It was so much effort to wire up and then my desk had a mess of wires all over it. I don't think anyone but a hard core enthusiast will go to that effort. I wanted and still want to play Elite on it but I just don't have the energy to fight with it. Oh and being a Mac user sort of put the kibosh on it.

 

I don't think the standards issue is that big, though that could well be because many of these things in fact do already share plenty of standards.

HDMI is a great example. It's a shared standard that works between PCs, monitors, TVs, phones/tablets, DVD players, set top boxes, consoles, recording devices, audio devices, heck, even DRM systems! When there's a clear and widespread benefit to a standard, one emerges.

Which is another potential challenge for VR. We have many well established standards for how we do things with 2D screens. We're sorely lacking on them with 3D immersive environments. We've overcome them in the past, so I'm sure we can do it again. It might take a while, though, because our 2D "screen language" didn't have to compete with anything (aside from maybe radio?), where 3D screen language is going to have to deal with people reverting to 2D screens if/when they get frustrated.

I'm sure it can be done. I just don't expect it to be fast. And, again, it needs some strong app that's compelling or useful enough that people are willing to bear with it during the early stages.

 

The people that I have seen get the most enthused about VR is the sim racing audience. Admittedly that is pretty niche but it is also a group that doesn't bat an eye at dishing out $700 for car pedals or $2000 for a do it yourself force feedback wheel, or $1000 for a cockpit. Even with the DK2, sim racing was a pretty compelling experience. Things like judging braking points or detecting when you are starting to spin come much more naturally in VR than with a flat monitor (even triple screens). I don't play often these days and when I play with a monitor, I always find that it takes a while to get into things; I end up driving off the track every corner for a few laps but with the rift, I can almost start setting fast laps right away.

With all the doom and gloom in indie game development, VR is a potential gold mine. It might turn out to be fool's gold but the people that figure it out and come out with compelling experiences in VR stand to make a bunch of money. Personally my main interest in VR is not directed at mainstream gaming and luckily is geared towards a market that is used to spending big money so I am still pretty excited over VR.

 

Problem: How does the device know you're talking to the fridge?

I know about image recognition approach, where you slap markers eveyrywhere. But that's sorta ugly.
You could try IR tracking, but that doesn't work against sun and obstacles.

Even if you put, say, 5 kinects to cover every angle of the room, they still need to be taught what is in that location.

That would require massive infrastructure, common wireless protocol for devices to talk to each other plus security for the protocol, so it won't be hacked jammed.
Right, you'll also need depth reconstruction for the glasses.

So, to solve problems that can be dealt with using something like raspberry pi, for the sake of it being "AR" we'd need to develop massive infrastructure and bunch of new protocols.

50 years from now, maybe it'll be viable. Right now it'll be probably cheaper to hard-wire your house for a single custom smart home solution.

 

I'm pretty sure that @BoredMormon was joking that as long as there's some pretty graphics that make it look like something accepted your command many people would be happy, because the AR/VR UI focus is about bling rather than functionality.

Otherwise we'd just take our phones out of our pockets, select "Fridge" from a menu, and get on with our lives.

 

Have people forgotten about voice control interface already?
The tech is getting better. And you won't need scene depth reconstruction + headset.

 

Unless you're planning on playing the "Guess which appliance I'm talking to game", I'd imagine it would start with something like "Fridge, what's the temperature on that soup I put in there earlier?".

 

It's hard to forget the hilarity that ensues whenever I try to use it with my Aussie accent.

Then there's issues like ambient noise and the environment I'm in. If I want to check how many eggs are left in the fridge I think I'd rather select it from a GUI than ask Siri (or equivalent) out loud, in public, and get a response, out loud, in public.

 

The point is valid, though. Voice command will probably be quite important for VR, especially when we start using our hands in the virtual world, because we need some way to pause it or apply other meta-control that doesn't also interact with it.

 

"command accepted. Door lock engaged. Commencing self-destruct sequence in 10 seconds, please vacate the blast zone. It has been a pleasure serving you, sir/ma'am! Beep, beep, beep, ....".
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On related note, do you really want to have a fridget that understands what is soup?

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IBM has watson computer, which sounded interesting - they're pumping medical data into it, AFAIK, and it processes queries in natural language. Not sure if it is spoken or written language, though.

 

Understanding the form my food is in would be handy for basic information. Anything more complex is likely unnecessary.

 

Have you seen the price of the Microsoft HoloLens? It's five times greater.

 

This is what I was getting out. And why stop at smart houses. Why not simply build the entire house in VR and feed people through tubes like in the matrix?

In serious practical terms you would simply put a physical device in the fridge that was capable of communicating its own location to the VR device. Then you can simply look in the direction of the fridge. The VR device does a raycast to see what you are looking at. Then it brings up a contextual menu for the fridge from the physical device in the fridge. Its identical in principle to how you interact with objects by looking at them in a traditional flat screen game.

Or for a more humorous approach you can use distance finders to project a menu directly onto the front of the fridge. Then you can use motion controllers to detect the location of the users fingers on that menu. Based on which virtual buttons they push you can feed the information back to the fridge.

 

Or alternatively memorize your general vicinity and the direction you are facing. Wouldn't be terribly useful for situations where you're busy preparing a dish and need to know how many peppers are in the fridge while facing away though.

 

This necessitates teh VR device having both a full model of the house and accurate positioning within it. If you have that, you don't need a device in the fridge, you just build the fridge's position into the model that's already there.

 

It would be pretty cool to have people design their maps for VR and play locally.

 

I figured if you needed some sort of control element in the fridge then you might as well take advantage of it. That way your VR device simply has to know its own location and rotation. It doesn't have to know about the fridge, it can get that data from the fridge when needed.

You could build everything into an internal model. Especially if you drop the requirement to give commands to the fridge. Similar technology is already in use today to help vision impaired people.

 

It's also a computer, not just glasses.

 

It still needs some way to check how many eggs I've got, though. A purely internal model can't do that. So you're right, if you need some controller anyway then it it could potentially self-configure its location.

 

Yes, but the hardware is what you would expect from a tablet. It's simply Intel's Cherry Trail Atom hardware. Adding the equivalent of a mid-ranged tablet (Surface 3) and a battery to the device should not massively increase the cost.

 

Making any sort of new device is expensive, even if the internal hardware looks like plain off the shelf chips.

 

They'll just have to hope they can make those costs of development back. At least the HoloLens has no real competition.

 

Agreed. For me it's not so much that the price alone is the problem - people did buy PS3s which ran for roughly the same price back in the day, even if they grumbled about it a lot. The cost of the hardware is more or less unavoidable, at least at present.

What the end user is getting seems completely lacking, and totally not justifiable of a $700 purchase. I think when most people say, "The Oculus Rift costs too much!" that the reaction is at least in part due to what they see themselves getting out of it - people have bought super-expensive stuff even if they had quite a bit of buyer's guilt after the fact. If there were a couple of dozen titles lined up for launch using the OR, with a few eagerly-anticipated killer apps among them, there would still be griping, but it wouldn't be quite as bad as what we're seeing.*

*: Still, the Internet is acting as a multiplying factor for the griping, though. So it's still best to be conservative as far as evaluating the criticism.

 

Don't know about the price.. but what surprises me the most is that the title of this thread did not yield a pun.. Rift, Oculus, come on, it's right there!

 

The difference though is that a GPU will power all of your gaming needs on a PC in a market where it is firmly established as an essential piece of kit.

The Oculus Rift and VR in general are not mature technologies yet, and it will be a while before we see a proper library of games being produced to maximise it's potential. Imagine if the early GPUs like the Voodoo 1 had cost that much 20 years ago, it would have been much longer before games ditched software rendering and embraced hardware completely because fewer people would have one.

It really needs the price to be low to aid proliferation and help kick start the VR sector, and a price tag like that will put people off and potentially keep it consigned as a novelty for a while longer.

 

I'm not too surprised at the price. It's a product for early adopters (with $1k+ gaming rigs already), in a market without much competition, and without much software yet. Vive is sure to be similarly priced for very similar specs - neither company will want a price war while there's just the two of them in such a new market.

As a DK2 owner, I'd want to actually try one before spending £500+ on the retail version. The resolution hasn't increased by that much, although the 90Hz OLED screen could potentially make a big difference.

(I never managed to use the DK2 for more than maybe 5-10mins at a time without feeling a bit ill - but perhaps I just didn't use it enough to build up a real tolerance...)

 

I'd really like to know. The other day I checked somewhere about compatibility.
And it said I was all good to go with my rig.
However, I don't see how randomly now one of the most powerful cpu's made by AMD (8 Core 4.6Ghz) isn't fast enough according to their Compatibility tool. But just the other day it was on the recommended list.

 

I'm talking specifically about a project that talked about having smart surfaces all over your home. There is certainly a cost involved in having your devices talk to each other. There's another tier of costs entirely having the surface area of your home have a smart surface.

And yes, a phone would work as an even more cost effective option for controlling things. I mention AR because it gives you the same experience of having a house made out of smart surfaces - if the other technology is available. I don't know why, but I hope that the first iteration of AR => computer => other devices in home operates via bluetooth.

So before it was less expensive with less resolution and lower system requirements. Maybe they're trying to make sure it delivers the biggest experience when their competitors launch. Or maybe they're going the way of apple and planning to start a premium brand.

 

The price reveal blew up on reddit and there was numerous front page posts about the Rift. You can find them all on r/oculus:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus

There's also the ask me anything with Palmer Lucky, founder of Oculus, here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3zt7ul/i_am_palmer_luckey_founder_of_oculus_and_designer

Personally I feel VR will remain a gimmick for a long time to come, but the experience I had when I first tried the Rift devkit 1 I was mind blowing, even from simple games and tech demos like Half-life 2. But I could only play for minutes at a time without getting really nauseous even though I'm the type of person who doesn't get nauseous from anything.

Even though I suspect I will still see the Rift consumer version as something I rarely play with having experiences like those I had with Half-life 2 again (without the nauseousness) would be completely amazing. And I mean there's numerous other things I spend just as much money on that are not exactly great investments, but I'm still glad I experienced them.

For most people trying the Rift somewhere or even loaning one is probably more than enough, but I also have some cool ideas for some game prototypes I want to try with the Rift. I haven't bothered with them with my current devkit just because of how nauseating it is and because it doesn't have position tracking.

I see people say they'll wait for the Vive. I don't really have any knowledge about competing VR headsets, but I guess I'll wait some time before I order a Rift (or an alternative). At least until I have a machine capable of running VR in more demanding games.

 

Smart eggtray, with pressure plate for each egg slot.

 

VR induces a slower reaction time than a 2D image, this is not appropriate for hard core team gaming.

People will have to wait two years before actual VR devices becomes cheap but you will also find new improved VR headsets that will still cost a high price and you'll still have to pay a lot if you want the last and best of the best.

 

Well its kind of a catch 22, make a cheap product will less quality and no one catches on but make an expensive product with the best quality you can squeeze into it and it pushes people away with the price. It seems like they made that choice a long time ago and decided to go for the higher quality to try and prove that this can be viable tech that people want. Considering all of the clones that already exist I would say that the tech is already getting well established and they have the opportunity to raise the bar with a more expensive, high quality product.

I guess we'll see how their decision plays out but personally I don't think they did anything off the wall here. Ideally yeah we want it at $99 but imo it's fair to do what they have when you consider the vr space as a whole right now.

 

What kind of device?

Now, how, exactly, are you going to perform a raycast in real world?

 

For $600, I'd expect to buy full-dive, Matrix/SAO-like VR system. That actually would be well worth $600 or even $1000+. But not thing that basically glues a screen to your head (figuratively speaking). I'd be hard-pressed to even pay $350 for that (though something between $200 and $300 would be acceptable in my book).

 

I don't understand that. Are those expectations based in reality? I understand OP's frustration if Oculus originally said it would be around $350 and then launched it for nearly twice that, but for anyone else why are you expecting it to be so cheap? It's pretty stacked with technology, and from someone who's tried the much, much crappier initial dev kit I can safely say that it is a pretty mind blowing experience.

From Palmer's AMA:

I'm looking at buying myself a new gaming monitor and the models I'm looking at cost about the same as the Rift, and even though I will use the monitor a lot more than I will ever use the Rift I don't feel like I'm getting more bang for my buck.

Sure the Rift is just a fun toy, at least for the foreseeable future, but I at least have spent equal amounts on fun toys in the past and not regretted it.

I feel the same way about the iPad pro to be honest. It's extremely expensive and I probably wouldn't use it much at all, but it would be really cool to make some games for a 13 inch tablet.

 

Right now buying a Rift is like buying a 4k monitor. You have to be willing to spend a little more, or wait until it gets cheaper in a couple of years.

 

But then if you decide to wait, the market will be so flooded with already popular stuff that it will be like anything else - better get lucky lol.

 

That's unreasonable. Fulldive would be priced around at least $600 000, not $600.

 

Developers that have been sold the idea of an affordable vr platform for years have been fooled. In two weeks, Oculus became hi end VR. I still believe in the product, but will now look also for the others competitors. The problem is not the hardware, it is the communication/marketing strategy.

 

Yeah, not sure if it was the right call to make a $600 consumer version. It scares people away. In the meantime cheaper VR options will thrive. By the time the tech is cheaper, Oculus Rift will be empty pockets to further improve the tech. But other VR brands will own the market.

I think they wanted to make the best VR headset, best tracking, best refresh rate, etc. But the best is not usually what people prioritize, sometimes people prioritize affordability.

 

Yup yup I agree!

 

Radar?

 

I swear if I understood the concept of Software Interacting with Hardware I'd invent something, I just plainly don't understand it. I mean in theory it makes sense. But obviously it's not or everyone would be doing it lol.

Like I have all kinds of ideas in my head that if I just knew how hardware worked I could get it done.

 

"New fridge, now with anti-radar stealth technology!"

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The point was that RL devices do not return references to object. There are few distance sensors, but they generally can tell if something is in the way, not what that "something" is.