Hey, Oculus pre-orders went live today for its March launch date.
600 bucks, plus shipping and taxes, ignoring the power requirements (about some 6-800 dollars in PC)
Well, it’ll be cool when it’s more affordable and bless those with more money for working out the kinks in the meantime
Well, I was already even more skeptical of oculus than I was of valve or sony’s thing, so we’ll see.
Yeah, this is the price point for rich folk and suckers to hammer out the problems for everyone else.
death to megathreads!
ok real reply, i would probably pre-order this as i am super effectively excited about VR but the graphics cards required to run it are also expensive and it seems like maybe an even newer generation of graphics cards are about to come out …
does anyone have a better idea about what gfx cards are due to appear soon?
I think people might actually choose to die wearing them… I can imagine preferring to be looking at VR clouds than the ceiling tiles of a hospital ward.
AMD has confirmed their next generation of cards for mid-2016 and I’d imagine Nvidia will be getting Pascal out in around the same timeframe. If you’re going for VR, wait, if you just want to ride out the console generation, you can probably get a card now and just wait things out. Personally, I’m tempted by the wave of high-end AMD cards popping on for cheap on ebay, which probably means they were in mining rigs and are about to die but that’s a gamble I’m willing to take.
One of my former coworkers was this Renaissance Fair cosplay lady who was real into WOW and one of her guild buddies was bedridden in a hospital forever and lived in the game. I don’t think this is a sad story.
Was and still am cautiously excited for 2016 Year of VR but even though I am not a poor person I don’t think I can justify a $1500 game rig to play stuff that doesn’t quite really exist yet. Hopefully there are enough Bay Area millionaires out there to make this stuff viable for long enough to get real cheap.
I wonder what Sony’s gameplan is? That seems like the most compelling intersection of affordability, convenience, and potential userbase - but it seems like they’ve not been exactly banging their chests about their device.
I’m still skeptical of an upcoming GPU free for all (as I posted in the ITX/skylake thread) given how much nvidia has been defending the $300 price range lately
this time last gen you could get a 9800 GT for $150 and the PS3 was still $400
buy a PS4 instead. Bonus: Doesn’t run Windows
seeing genuine enthusiasm for vr here makes me think i might have missed something & been hasty in writing it off as the latest ‘massively hyped technology for technology’s sake’
getting major kinect/google goggles deja vu otherwise
This time last gen, there was a fairly even split in GPU marketshare unlike what we’re seeing today, where it’s almost 85/15 in favor of Nvidia and people wanting that power as monitor tech pushes 1440p/144hz and 4k. AMD is so far down in the hole that I doubt we’ll see that level of price competitiveness anytime soon, provided AMD is still in business at that point.
So far I haven’t really been on board the VR train. Like, I’m glad it’s a thing that is finally happening because it’s cool and all but it isn’t something I’m really, really excited about. I think it’s cool that Facebook and Valve and John Carmack and everyone else are all finally making Real True VR a thing that actually exists in the real world and not just in science fiction stories.
I will say though that I saw a video of the VR game Adrift, where you’re an astronaut in space in a spacesuit and your space station is all tore up and stuff, looked really cool and I would definitely play that (I might even end up playing the non-VR version if it’s still fun with a controller).
I heard that one of the reasons No Man’s Sky keeps getting delayed is because they’re putting it on PlayStation VR. I don’t really know how all that will pan out but it would be cool if true and if I were Sony I would be doing everything I could to make that happen.
It looks like the VR endgame is arriving sooner than anticipated: Verge Fiction: The Empathy Machine
PathoGlyph is showing off a prototype that won’t be displayed on the show floor: a recording of a Syrian bombing from the perspective of a bystander, paired with separately recorded 360-degree video.
Syria, as the piece is simply called, is not the product of an editor’s deliberate construction. It’s drawn from the real response of a local volunteer, an artist who agreed to be wired into biometric readers 24 hours a day. Using a baseline profile developed beforehand, her brain activity is translated into a series of signals that the Wavelength processes through its sensory palette. Unhurt by the blast, she downloaded her raw emotional data and sent it to PathoGlyph — and, by extension, straight into my head.
I can’t wait to watch this stream archive. I love their launch coverage for hardware because it’s usually a showcase of why to not buy it where other outlets are sycophantic.
I watched a bit of it. There were too many games were the VR thing was “your head is the second analog stick”. The non-interactive stuff was kinda neat and a couple of neat uses (I liked how AirMech VR looked, essentially making the playfield a tabletop) were in games, but, yeah.
I saw three people play Rez Infinite and only one of the three looked close to vomiting. VR has come so far!
Apparently Rez Infinite includes an additional level that has more elaborate visuals and is not on rails. I will be getting the game just for the basic levels, but it will be fun to see what the new content is like. And maybe someone I know will get the VR setup so that I can try it on that as well.
Also, this shirt is tempting:
My interest and excitement for VR is muffled not yet having any real experience with a setup. Aside from the ground floor lobby of Google Cardboard.
I could use another excuse to play Rez again, definitely getting Infinite and yeah, seems like a perfect match for stepping into VR.
I first tried VR in the 90’s and it was terrible.
The possibility of not making it completely terrible didn’t exist, I think that possibility exists now, and if people really push for and support VR it will reach NOT TERRIBLE after a couple of iterations.
The focus and sell is on immersion, but that seems to blind most tech developers from the fact that for many people the detachment of real world sensory inputs is unpleasant and nauseating. If it completely blocks your vision (which helps achieve total immersion) it needs to compensate by giving imperceptable lag video of the real world in certian situations OR have some other means of providing people with immediate access to perception of their environment. Some people seem to have fewer problems with lessened sensory input, and those are naturally the people who are going to end up working at VR companies. It doesn’t help that many VR setups including Rez infinite have people standing up; it is kind of suprising how much input your brain receives that confirm uhh yeah, ‘still standing up and ok’ and how weird it feels to be standing up and have a not insignificant amount of that feedback cutoff.
I don’t want VR. I think it’s goals are misguided. Immersion is not what is lacking in the medium of videogames.
I think VR is feasible, and if the market goes for it the kinks will be worked out, but I will never want it or buy into it.