Oculus Rift 600$$ Ridiculous.

If you have an NVIDIA GPU you could try Moonlight.

http://moonlight-stream.com/

 

Naw i have Radeon R9 290

 

What kind of attach rate would they need to make that work, though? And it's not even just an attach rate... they'd need to get people who buy the game for VR who wouldn't have otherwise purchased the game at all for it to be a VR-related profit.

 

My first foray into VR, after Cardboard, was the Freefly: https://www.freeflyvr.com/
I find it more comfortable than the OSVR HDK that I bought afterwards, and with the 1440p display of my LG G3, it has less screen door effect than the 1080p in the HDK.

There is an app on Google Play called Trinus VR that works really nice. Before I got the OSVR, it was what I was using to develop PC VR. It can get a little laggy, and is certainly doesn't produce as crisp an image as a dedicated device, but it works well.

Regarding the pricing of the Oculus, I'm a bit disappointed in the sense that I don't think that VR will become as big a market in 2016 as I had hoped. I also bought the OSVR because I wanted to develop for PC now but figured I'd wait for the consumer release of the OR before buying that. I probably would have bought a DK2 had I realized what the price would be.

Long term though, I think the smaller initial market will be good for VR. Early motion pictures were basically just people recording plays. It took a while for the medium to grow into its own with cuts, and special effects, and all of the stuff that we now know that differentiates the two. VR is in much the same state as early motion pictures. You can't just slap a VR camera onto a first person game and call it done. First person controls are still not figured out. Traditional FPS games have you move in the direction your head is facing. That is awkward in VR. But separating the movement makes it hard to figure out which direction you will go when you press the forward button. FPS walking in general is also the quickest way to induce nausea. Having a smaller market of enthusiasts who have proven themselves willing to spend money to serve as test bed for the new ideas that develop as VR goes from equivalent of recorded plays to the modern cinema experience will be beneficial when the second wave comes in and the market grows.

 

I didn't think that had really been the case since Half Life? Maybe even Quake 2, but I can't remember if it was the defaults or not. Certainly since twin-stick gamepads became standard the movement hasn't typically been constrained to the view direction. (It's relative to it, but that's not at all the same thing.)

 

Hmm. Yeah, I guess you are right. In non-VR FPS games, it's very second nature. You don't really consciously think about what is going on. Which needs to be able to happen in VR. But it doesn't really work out that way. I guess it's hard to explain why it doesn't work out unless you've tried it.

 

For Vive you require to have an EMPTY room, sans computer and desk of course. How many people have those?

 

Strafe controls has been available since... well... always?
The existed in Doom 1, they existed in Zero Tolerance (1994), they existed in Duke Nukem, Descent, etc. Not sure about Wolfenstein, though.

I think only RPG first person dungeon crawlers required you to walk in direction you're facing, and even those occasionally had sidestep button.

 

I wouldn't make that comparison as most modern games already support 4k gaming at no extra cost or effort from the developers, it's just a question of whether you want to spend the money to take advantage or not.

VR on the other hand needs a decent library of games that actually properly exploit the potential of VR, not retro-fitted as a novelty feature. For that to happen though, it will need to be popular enough for developers to justify making such games, otherwise it will go the way of Kinect, with a few dedicated developers trying valiantly to turn it into a mainstream gaming platform while the rest of the world shrugs and carries on.

 

@HemiMG - I'll check that out man, I do have the LG G3 which I think always performed pretty good.
But it gets extremely hot doing most basic of things. But I may stick to getting a 3D Monitor.

I have to wait on Asset Store money (next month). So I have time to research into what I am going to do.

 

What I think @HemiMG meant, in most fps games, the movement controls and camera are lock to body/weapon front. VR adds 6-axis input, which is a big learning curve from most fps games. Addition 6-axis create options, do you have them drive the head only or body turning or the weapon. You should support all the options, but there should be a default/standard between games to lower the learning curve, that has yet to be decided.

 

In that case you'll obviously need weapon controller and you'll have to aim it as a real thing. Head mounted weapons are not gonna cut it.

 

Strafing isn't the same thing as turning. It's also a wholly unnatural mechanic that was put in to overcome the limitations of old FPS. No human being has ever ran sideways like that. Put it in VR and you might as well call the strafe button the vomit button. And that's the ultimate point I was making, VR is radically different. The designs must be radically different. Developers have to forget everything they think they know. It's going to take a while for a proper new paradigm to come up and become the dominate control method.

Yeah, mine gets hot too. It once made me stop watching a show in a virtual movie theater because it got too hot. That show was over an hour though. I'm not sure how long it took to get to that point, but 30 minute shows are always fine, and I'm pretty sure I've sat through 45 minute ones as well.

One thing about the freefly though is that it form fits to your face perfectly, with really plush padding. So it is super comfortable. The downside is that the lenses fog up pretty bad. I was angry about that for a few days until I realized that the trick is just just pull it away from your face for a few seconds until the fog goes away when it happens. You don't even have to pull it far enough to break immersion, and eventually the temperatures balance out and it won't fog anymore for that session.

Yeah, the weapon is a problem. As @neginfinity said, I think a proper hand held weapon will be a must. But turning also isn't right. VR is incredibly immersive, even in it's current state. In the VR cinema I actually tried to lean against my chair even though my real body was sitting on the bed. I almost fell over. It does a great job tricking your brain. In real life, imaging you are standing North and look 45 degrees to your left. Which way is forward? The answer is both North, and North-West. Your brain makes a subconscious decision which way it wants to go. If you try and separate out the movements in VR, there's no way to make that decision happen at the subconscious level. If you look all the way to the left and press forward, your character will appear to strafe, when you might have wanted to turn and go left. At best you could have two forward buttons, one for direction of head and one for direction of body. I haven't tried that, but I suspect that it too would have unforeseen problems.

 

Check youtube.

And the real problem is that people will get tired holding it.

 

My main concern with HMDs is that I'm very near-sighted. Everything becomes blurred at about six inches. Do you think that would affect my ability to use the Freefly?

 

How do you have an empty room without a computer and still use the Vive? That does not make sense. Show me your reference.

 

If I have to check Youtube to see if something is natural, then it isn't natural.

I'm nearsighted too, though I don't think I'm as bad as you. I can't read the forum headers on my monitor without using glasses or straining though. I originally got a Powis as my Google cardboard because it allows the lenses to be adjusted, so I was worried about the Freefly not being adjustable. It turned out to not be a problem. The OSVR claims to have adjustable lenses, but if I place them anywhere other than as far back as they can go, they touch my eyes. Luckily for me pushing them back is what makes things clearer. I'd try a non-adjustable Cardboard before spending the $75 or whatever on the Freefly. Of course, then you end up spending $100 so I guess it just depends on how you choose to try and save money.

One thing I didn't mention about the Freefly is that it is not a Cardboard. I don't mean that it isn't made of cardboard, it isn't of course. I mean that it doesn't have that button that cardboard has, so some apps require you to flip up the screen and touch the screen. That can get annoying at times, but the Freefly is one of the few higher end headsets that let you do that. Others slide the phone in.

 

Longer cables?

 

I may still just get a 3D Monitor.
But surprisingly though - the Anaglyphic 3D I set up I have it near perfectly setup.
Of course I'm not a big fan on the Colors. But hey - that's how it was done back in the day, and my game looks like an old VCR movie - so I guess it mixes pretty well to keep the old feel lol.

 

I thereby declare 90% of the globe unnatural. Because I'll need to see youtube to check it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

 

You are just arguing for the sake of being argumentative. I've never ran sideways once in my life. I'm betting that no one here has ever ran sideways once in their life. VR is about replicating the experience common to most people. I don't have to check Youtube to see that people walk, that they turn their heads while they walk, etc. We aren't talking about obscure skill sets here. We are talking about the very basics of human locomotion.

 

Not quite true, in certain sports it is common. When I played basketball we often practiced sideways strafing.

 

No. Are you having a bad day or something?

No, it is the opposite. It is providing them with experience they can't get in real life.
Oculus rift is bundled with a spacesim of all things. And spacesims are as far from "real life experience" you can get (misinterpretation of space are common).
There's no point replicating real life in a game when you just can experience real life instead.

Speaking of which, one of the demos I played was this one:
https://share.oculus.com/app/windlands

It involves running, jumping and you can shoot grapple gun. Oh, and you can turn around too.

Feels nearly identical to your average FPS game. Absolutely no difficulty controlling it, got used to controls in... half a minute?

So, I think that your control problem does not exist. Most of the standard controls should transfer nicely to oculus rift, mostly because we don't have VR suits. People will surely want a gun, but they won't have an issues running forward/backward/sideways... and most of them wont't be even using real life body motions to begin with. That's because compared to game protagonists most people are way too slow.

 

That's an agility drill. Now, how many NBA games have you watched where people are running around sideways?

 

You strafe all the time in basketball while facing forward so every one?

 

Point taken. But there is a fundamental difference between the type of side-step shuffle used in a basketball game, and the actively walking/running sideways that is used as a form of locomotion in a FPS.

 

That I agree with, sprint side strafing is unrealistic. But circling an opponent while facing them is realistic.

 

Run forwards. Turn your head sideways. You can also pivot your arms around somewhat freely. Your eyes can also pivot within your head, which is what gives us a significant part of our visual mobility. Our bodies aren't particularly rigid.

I've never considered the view direction in a first person game to represent the body's orientation. Just the eyes, and maybe by association the head follows a bit. The rest of a body can do whatever I wants under that. See many modern third person games for example. (Though I'll admit that many third person games opt for more realistic movement speeds as well.)

 

Strafing and other FPS movements in VR:

It works, it's fun, it's cheap, light weight and small. I am pretty sure we will see more polished versions of this idea in the future.

Who cares if strafing is realistic? So much of what people want to do in VR is so completely unrealistic it's a better use of resources to find ways to do those fun, unrealistic things and not make people sick.

 

Sigh. I never said that all VR experiences have to be realistic. I said that all VR movements need to be realistic in order to reduce motion sickness. At least that's what I meant, and I thought it was pretty obvious given the context in which it was said. And my aversion to strafing in VR isn't just coming from my own experiences. It is also coming from the direct recommendations of Oculus themselves: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/intro-vr/latest/concepts/bp_app_motion/

Yes, there are instances where you have to ignore that advice and allow for side-stepping in order to provide the proper level of immersion, or realistic behavior. As Tiggus mentioned, a basketball player will shuffle from side to side while defending. But traditional FPS controls are the fastest way to motion sickness in VR. The way to "not make people sick." is to tailor the experience to the new medium instead of trying to shoe horn a new medium into an old control scheme.

The Wii board may very well help reduce motion sickness by tying the in game motion in with an actual real life body motion. Using Wii boards for strafing is not a conventional FPS control however, so my point still stands.

 

Ah, now I see where you got that unusual idea.

I do not think the advice is good - it eliminates most of the scenarios where people would want to use VR in the first place.

"It is only recommended to use our $600 device for still scenes where you can't move and only look around".

I also remember impression of people playing Half Life 2 on DK1. For some reason people didn't mention getting sick from strafing, although one guy said that his brain concluded that everybody in the world is a pint-sized or something like that.

It is better to put refund policy for the people that can't take it.

 

Oculus best practices are written from a PoV which assumes seated play. Remove the seating restriction and best practices get more forgiving.

No, the Wii board is not a conventional input, but it allows for the conventional, established and expected movements in VR that are otherwise nauseating.

What do you mean by "traditional fps controls"? Are you talking about input devices, or the movement of the player in virtual space? If you are talking input devices I agree, mouse look and keyboard movement in VR are a recipe for simulator sickness. However high speed character movement including all forms of strafing are indeed possible and enjoyable, not nauseating if we let go of traditional input technologies.

 

We call that the "We don't want to be sued when someone inevitably hurts themselves" clause.

 

They underestimate people. They'll always find a way.

 

Nope, I meant empty room with only desk and computer. You've just made a fool of yourself.

 

No. I think you just failed to explain it properly. Kinda like that guy who asked if he could learn programming in a month only to later state he meant something else.

 

I find that strange, the universal reaction that my friends and I all had to HL 2 on DK2 was "hey thats really cool" followed by 2 minutes later "I'm going to be sick". That was just from walking around and looking at stuff.

 

lol i just meant for me myself, to dev with Unity for oculus, and test it..
theres tons of DIY oculus info on the web
and yeah its totally jank, like i said, its just "make-do"


anyway, i bet they could sell it for $300 and be fine, they just wanna make bank cause they assume people will buy it nomatter the cost, and like i said, they gotta make it comparable to the gearVR, since gearVR is crappier (and if u go for just gearVR and the phone it requires, its like $700)

 

Was that remark really necessary? You can't make your point so you insult me instead. You are the one that wrote "sans desk and computer," which means without desk and computer. If you meant something different, you should have written something different.

There is nothing about the tech that suggest to me that you have to have an empty room. I thought one of the advantages of using the laser scanners in lighthouse was that it could scan the obstacles in the room. If you know differently, please give me a reference.

 

Unfortunately, I did not have opportunity to play HL2 on Rift. I had access to the device for relatively small amount of time, and could only check few demos, one of which was very badly done and featured "Amazing Ultra Detailed Brick Lying on the Floor At Every Corner".

Basically, the demo was about walking through dark dungeon (slowly), occasionally wade through pool of blood (knee deep), with chains from the ceiling and occasionally trying to scare you with girl ghost (whom I almost missed because I was looking in another direction when she spawned). Oh, and there was that goddamn brick. Same brick at every corner, with a little chip on the side.

I was bored to tears, and the demo was complete garbage. If you ever make VR game, don't create this kind of junk.

Speaking of motion sickness....
I knew a guy who couldn't play Half Life 1 (on monitor) because the game caused motion sickness for him.

 

@Aabel my specific first comment in the thread was that you cannot simply place a VR controller in an existing game and call it a day. I don't think you disagree with me there, since you are talking about extra peripherals. As far as how well the Wii board would work, I cannot comment on that because I have not tried one. Despite claims to the contrary, my opinion on strafing does not come from what Oculus says. It comes from owning two VR headsets. It comes from real-world experience, and real-world experimentation over a couple of months. I can give you a few insights though.

As @tiggus hinted at, FPS style movement is the absolute quickest way to cause motion sickness in VR. The sickness occurs when two difference senses don't agree with one another. Keep in mind, I am NOT talking about fictional scenarios. I'm not talking about space shooters, or flying pigs, or whatever else you may want to put in. I am talking specifically about when two senses send contradictory information to the brain that confuses it.

I can sit in a virtual movie theater for two hours and look around with no problem. Because there is no contradictory information. If, however, I lean forward in real life, in a device without positional tracking, then it will be disorienting. My inner ear and abdominal muscles are saying that I am leaning forward, and my eyes are saying that I am not. Unless you rock back and forth constantly, this isn't a huge problem.

I can go quite a bit longer in a racing game than I could in a FPS style game. The car model provides an important frame of reference, which helps reconcile the motion. My inner ear is telling me that I am not moving, and my eyes are, but that is the only disconnect. My body motion matches close enough to that of the avatar (we are both still, the car is moving), the controls allow me to look around naturally independent of the prime mover. The extremely fast speed is reconciled in my brain by the fact that I am in a race car.

FPS controls remove almost all of those. If it is an actual shooter, you may have a gun to provide a frame of reference. If not, then you not only don't have that visual aid in reducing motion sickness, but you don't have the aid in determining which direction your prime mover is facing. In real life, the car does not rotate underneath you like your body does. If I look left and turn the car left, my head is still in the right position. If I look left and then turn my body left, my head will naturally move to face forward. This is not easily duplicated in VR without external input systems. If the controls force you to turn in the direction you are facing, then you cannot look around naturally. This is another disconnect. When we turn our heads, our bodies do not turn in real life.

I can minimize the sickness of FPS by standing up and actually turning my body with the avatar. I still have to keep my head straight. But having the motion match helps. It also helps if I walk in place while doing it. That helps prevent the brain from saying, "Hey, my legs aren't moving but I am walking forward. What's up with that?" For these reasons, from this actual real world experience, I don't think that quick FPS style movements of 50-100 MPH will set well with the majority of users. I'm not saying that it can't be made to. If your avatar is on a hoverboard, and you are on a Wii board, then some of that disconnect goes away. Or maybe your character is a super hero, which explains why they are moving fast. Maybe they have some kind of exoskeleton on. But the brain needs an explanation as to why what it is seeing does not match up with what it is expecting, or the body is feeling. That's why walking in place helps. Again, this is personal experience. Not theory.

But I'd like to know why you would want to put strafing in? Strafing is a mechanic that was built around limitations that will soon no longer exist. It is literally the equivalent of changing scenes in a movie by closing and opening curtains in front of the set. A real soldier is not going to stand parallel to the enemy, creating a wider target and exposing vital organs, then shuffle sideways in an awkward motion that reducing aiming accuracy. Real life "strafing" involves turning perpendicular to the target, then turning your head and weapon to face them and walking forward like human beings do 99.9999% of the time. If the technology allows for that, why not get rid of the silly lateral sliding motion unless the story gives a reason for it? Motion sickness wasn't invented with VR. It has been around for at least as long as the automobile. I used to get motion sick riding in a car. Anyone who has, can tell you that looking out the window and seeing that fast moving lateral motion will make it worse. So even using the proper perpendicular facing method that I described will likely cause problems for some people if the motion is unrealistically fast. But if you really want to make someone with car sickness vomit, then have them face the direction of the window. If your head is facing sideways, the brain at least expects lateral motion, if it doesn't expect such fast lateral motion. If you are facing forward, it does not expect lateral motion. When you are facing forward in a car, or are on an airplane looking out the window, the objects are further away and not whizzing by so fast. So motion sickness isn't as bad. This isn't something that I am making up. It isn't a case of Oculus wanting to reduce the fun of an experience that it has a vested interest in seeing succeed. It's well established fact, and has been for longer than any of us have been alive. So again, why keep the traditional FPS strafe? Keep in mind that positional tracking will still allow for leaning sideways without running sideways. Controls could even allow for stepping sideways with far less negative effect than running sideways.

 

What are you basing that on? It's possible that designing and manufacturing two custom high res, high refresh rate OLED displays (among hundreds of other custom components) is really inexpensive and that Palmer Luckey is lying through his teeth when he says they are selling the unit at cost, but that's a pretty big assumption.

 

Yeah, me too. I've played iRacing with a DK1 and it was very comfortable. I've also played my own space game with a cockpit and it was comfortable too. But Half-Life 2 and Alien: Isolation both made me sick.

So yeah, I agree that just plugging traditional FPS controls and mechanics into a VR experience doesn't always work too well. It may even turn out that FPS games (as we know them today anyway) are not a great fit for VR, which I wouldn't have predicted, since I would have thought they'd be a natural fit.

 

My opinion comes from experience as well, not just theory. It comes from hacking the Wii board to work in first person VR over 3 years ago.

Why would I try to preserve strafing? simple, it's expected by gamers and it works, so why not? If someone wants to move that way and has the coordination to do it, why not allow them? With my Wii board setup you can move in any way you wish, including forward and reverse circle strafing. It may turn out that strafing is no longer a tactic that works, but let the gamers find that out for themselves. If you take it away from them preemptively they will likely never give your experience a chance.

If someone is prone to motion sickness well that's just something that person will have to keep in mind and stick to experiences that work within what the can tolerate. However if they aren't, the thrill of accelerating to 50-70 mph sprint in VR is pretty damn awesome. It is something you have to be careful with as a designer, accelerating or decelerating too fast can result in loss of balance.

Just to be clear everything I am talking about is in context of using a Wii board for movement input, not a mouse, a controller or anything else. I have no interest in the mouse, keyboard and controller when it comes to first person VR. However using our actual balance as an input for movement is really freaking cool in VR. Having vestibular response line up with what happens in VR is awesome. It doesn't take much to fool our brains.

First person experiences in VR are going to have to either be extremely limited in what kind of movement is allowed, or ditch the legacy input devices from the previous generation.

 

I think that FPS is really the genre that excited most people about VR, which is why there is a lot of pushback from people without a lot of VR experience to the news that maybe it doesn't work as well as we would have hoped.

Having not tried it, I cannot comment beyond my original response that tying in game movement to actual body movement such as leaning on the Wii board will help. I still think it would help further if the speed and leaning controls were explained in the game. But that is just theory on my part, and if you say otherwise I'd have to trust your judgement in that regard until I've tried it for myself.

Gamers also used to expect a joystick and a single button, but Nintendo changed that. It took some getting used to, but it was for the best. Goldeneye, the greatest FPS of it's time had a single stick. Twin sticks controllers changed that control style up. Play goers used to expect curtain calls, motion pictures changed that. When technology and mediums evolve, I disagree with you that the greatest success will come from clinging to old ways. I think the greatest success will come from those who most fully embrace the new medium and the new technology that comes with it. If the Wii board embraces that, and becomes a standard input device, then maybe you are right. I think that VR will achieve its greatest success with omnidirectional treadmills or some other form of full body tracking. In which case, strafing will be fighting the medium rather than embracing it. Of course, only time will tell what the majority of people embrace. And that is precisely why I said a limited VR audience to sort these things out will probably benefit VR better than appealing to a larger audience before it is all sorted out.

 

I don't experience any motion sickness from monitors, inside car or at sea etc. and no problem in real roller coasters or similar stuff but any FPS type game or demo I tried with DK1/DK2 was so horrible experience that I just couldn't or did not even want to think about improving my tolerance to that type VR cause of nausea it caused. Played 1-5 minutes and felt sick for an hour or two every time. Even the Toscana demo where you just walk around made feel bad after talking few steps for the reasons HemiMG mentioned, senses receive conflicting info that I'm moving but I don't feel it.

It's said in some places next with with motion sickness or sea sickness that this is behavior where brains think that you are hallucinating or etc and have eaten something poisonous and its natural defense to try to throw up. I just didn't really believe in such strong effect since I never had a problem anywhere else but oh boy it struck me for the first time so bad that I felt I was dying

Car games, roller coasters, space simulators or etc where the player is stationary were great and do not cause any nausea for me.

I will be getting the CV version and try some FPS once without any gear and possibly once with Perception Neuron I got from Kickstarter but if It feels even slightly similar in terms of nausea I will just skip FPS genre and wait for year 2020-2050 or solutions like HoloLens for FPS

 

Doesn't really apply to your argument. If you want to remove strafe in VR from FPS games, then instead of 1 stick and 1 button, you're giving people 2 sticks, but no buttons to press. It is not a step forward.

I think people will just need to tough it out and get used to VR to the point where they stop feeling nauseous. Human brain is quite flexible, so I wouldn't be surprised if this will work.

 

Do we really know that? All we really know is that shoehorning existing FPS designs into VR doesn't work. We don't clearly know why, and we don't know what changes we might be able to make to get it to work.

"First person" doesn't have to mean "exactly like Quake". Taking Quake et. al. and trying to make incremental changes probably isn't the way to solve first person in VR, because Quake et. al. were designed for keyboard/mouse and later twin-stick controls attached to a little, flat, squareish viewport, all of which are super abstract as far as actually doing anything is concerned. Why on earth would we want to inherit any design decisions from that?

I think that debating whether or not "strafing" works is missing the point. Do you consider that you're "strafing" when you're walking towards the fridge but looking towards your TV? Walking down the street and glance into a shop window? There is a viewpoint which, for certain use cases, should obviously be able to rotate about with some degree of freedom because it simulates our head, and that's how we use our heads to look at the world. If we can reliably allow people to move without inducing nausea then is there any reason to constrain the direction of movement to where their head is pointed? The answer to that can only come from research.

 

No we don't. Which is why I said "maybe." We do know that racing games work, for example. We know that, in order for FPS to work, we'll need to work out some new form of control.

Maybe we don't. Which is why I said that maybe the Wii board would become dominate. I suspect that the most natural motion, if one is using their own body, would be to do what real person would do in the situation. Namely, turn their body and head as I stated and walk forward. That scenario is dependent on body trackers becoming the dominant form of control. At no point have I claimed to have a 100% claim on what the future holds. I only know what the present holds, and that VR is such a radically different medium that we will have to rethink current designs.

 

It's not worth toughing it out if you experience what Ostwind describes, the technology(either the game or the HMD) either needs to evolve or it is just a skip. I put at least 200 hours into my DK2 because I was excited by VR and wanted to make a VR game. Eventually I just got tired of feeling nauseous and have permanently shelved it, it never got better for me.

I also have never been seasick or had any other motion sickness issues in the real world so I agree with Ostwind it is a different type of motion sickness from what you normally experience. I do agree cockpit type stuff was fine, but anything that involved walking and looking around at the same time I knew I would be curled up in a fetal ball in 5-10 minutes.