There we go
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I saw a PSVR for 130 at bookoff yesterday. The thing that excites me most actually about VR is just going to real places and looking around.
Google Earth VR is still very cool yeah
As is tilt brush
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VR is a barren wasteland of derivative ideas and terribly unfunny but meant to be funny games.
I say this having not played a VR thing since the Virtual Boy, but as someone who looks at the Steam new release list daily and has to behold so many VR games that are just so… lazy.
Also the sex games seem underwhelming, but to be fair most of the non-VR sex games on Steam are as well.
whats better
- playing VR
- watching others play VR
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B&H has this headset for even cheaper with free shipping:
I’m really torn on getting this I wanna play the new half life but idk if I’m ever gonna care about other VR games, I feel like my space isn’t really ideal for VR games, but I guess a lot of VR games now you can play while sitting stationary??
i’m curious about vr as someone who’s pretty opposed to naturalized immersion-based embodiment/disembodiment in general; i feel like there’s a lot to productively push back against and misuse. i really want to try deracine soon, but i don’t really think there is enough out there that i’m really interested in atm to justify buying a headset…
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im glad i got to play deracine and superhot and polybius, but yeah my headset cost me £25. im not sure there’s anything worth the normal cost.
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well then i’ll have to come over next month and play deracine on yours
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best way to try is to come to next year’s meetup
mention you want to try the “moon blanket” and I’ll set you up
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This can be useful to argue around but I think you absolutely need to try VR before forming these opinions; the reality of what it does to your sense of self and relation to game avatar is very different from traditional video games.
For example, even the choice in Half-Life Alyx to embody the player not as the speechless Freeman but as the personified Alyx is strange and difficult to anticipate; VR tends to embody the player as themselves, literally or through a surface transformation a la VR Chat, or as an ego-less robot.
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after playing a bunch of VR I have to say that the promise of “immersion” hardly delivers, and thankfully so. if anything the experience is way more plinky and videogamey, like early 3D stuff, than any modern AAA game with a “story”. and I like it that way!
astro bot literally gave me a similar feeling to when I first played mario 64, which I thought could never happen again
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however much i like some of the things i’ve played on psvr. i think deracine is the only game i’ve played to completion.
i have tried a little bit of vr, though not a wide enough range of games to have a complete picture of how it feels in varying circumstances. as a rule i’m wary of both literal embodiment and egoless disembodiment, though maybe i’m just being uptight? i agree that the superimposition/negotiation of embodiments is interesting in that particular situation for what might otherwise be a relatively straightforward design principle outside of vr. i just worry about doing away with that friction in the name of either the oceanic feeling of surrender to egoless immersion or literalistic you’re the hero-type first person, which are the two ways i’ve generally seen vr marketed by silicon valley creeps (though obviously i don’t take them at their word about it).
based on that, i feel like astrobot might be a nice balance for you
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All of my favorite VR concepts are the ones that don’t involve any kind of physical human embodiment and instead expand on game spaces in ways that can only be done with the extra dimension of visual control afforded by a headset.
Like literally just the VR integration for dolphin that let’s you play Thousand Year Door as if it were a diorama sitting on your table is already better to me than any of the shooty slashys that take up most of the existing VR catalog
I think we’ll see much more of that kind of game going forth, even astrobot feels to me more like a techdemo than a fully explored idea, I’m glad the proof of concept exists though
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I tried the Quest Link beta, and was getting very choppy framerates for some reason. The problem, of course, is that there are multiple layers to this, and a failure at any layer could be causing the problem. Here’s what I think they are in most to least likely order.
- The USB cable is cheap, might need a better one
- I hadn’t restarted my computer in a few days
- It’s Beta software, so could be having problems
- I’ve had problems with my USB ports that SAY they are USB3.0 not actually being that, or randomly failing, so could be the port itself.
- Technically my graphics card is unsupported, so maybe it just doesn’t work.
- The Oculus software sucks
- My graphics card isn’t powerful enough to handle this (even though it can handle running the exact same VR games over a network to the exact same headset)
The problem of course is that troubleshooting all of this is hours of work, plus buying at least a new USB cable. So yeah, I’m just not sure about this yet!!
When I wasn’t getting choppy framerates, it was certainly better than the networked thing I was running before. Specifically, the resolution was better and without the compression artifacts, and the delay between moving my hands and seeing it on the screen was very low. If I can get the framerate to be Less Shit then it might actually be viable! Also I need a longer USB cable. :-/
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My understanding is that they’ll release a specific fiber-optic cable for this in a few months that should work better.
I bet it’s gonna be real expensive
So like, you might know this. The framerate of what I was seeing did not match the framerate of actually turning my head, the latter being much higher. Does this still potentially point to the USB cable having, like, not enough throughput or whatever? It just seems odd, if the video is essentially being piped to the headset, that the framerates might not match. But on the other hand, maybe it’s not just, like, “Computer gets motion tracking data, Quest gets raw frickin video.”
They use a technique called frame reprojection to cheaply skew the scene as you move your head at a faster framerate than it’s rendering. I think it might be set up to use 60fps but update the display at 90fps; I remember reading that Oculus’ version of the technique (everyone does it now) is good enough to even make 30fps content usable.
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