VR SUCKS... or does it???

King of Posters
628

had one of the most compelling VR adventures so far in this VRChat world with three friends

I don’t want to spoil things unwarranted, if anyone wants to get a group together and try it, but it’s a really interesting moody action-puzzle-adventure world which includes some really quirky mechanics, including making use of VRChat’s own systems and structure as part of the narrative, requiring you to start a new instance of the world (moving to an alternate universe, in-narrative) in order to progress by taking a code given to you at a soft-lock state in the original instance into the second to continue the story - we left off there yesterday and plan to continue from there once we can regroup, and I’m really curious to see where it goes from here!

it also has a really satisfying item-summoning mechanic, because carrying objects for long periods in VRChat can be kind of fatiguing, so you can hold your palm out to summon key items to your hand from wherever they were left last

I also enjoy that the mechanics aren’t handed to you immediately, it takes a bit of looking and considering to pick up on what’s going on, and you could fairly easily mistake it initially for a generic, if well-put-together world to hang out in, rather than host to a compelling narrative

it claims to work for desktop users, but the couple of desktop players we had had trouble with some of the platforming and climbing, so we resorted to using avatars with seats (thanks, pool toy furries) to get them through the troublesome areas, haha

semi-relatedly, I’ve realised that a thing I would like my avatar to have is some sort of measuring tool I can spawn, I wonder how complicated that would be to create. even just a basic tape measure or laser measure would be great

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629

visited what must be a place of honour where many esteemed deeds are commemorated

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There’s a cool sounding documentary showing on Sundance online tomorrow all about VR chat as a method of expression Program Guide | Sundance Film Festival

Guy’s also done some short docs about a dance club and as a meeting ground that are pretty neat.

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631

I finally bit the bullet and tried out Virtual Desktop for my PC VR stuff and wow, the difference between it and the stock Oculus Link gear is night and day

Oculus’ software just constantly feels invasive - it takes a while to start, it’s always trying to sell you stuff, and it’s just all-round sluggish and irritating, whereas Virtual Desktop is fairly lightweight, gets you straight to the desktop or into SteamVR, and, the big game changer, lets you interact with the desktop without launching PC-side VR first - it makes it so you can start your VR session without even touching the PC’s primary display

it does it all over Wi-Fi and performs better at that than Oculus Link does for me over USB - the biggest negative is the weird additional voice input latency, which is most noticeable in VRChat, but mostly okay

raw graphics performance between the two on my CPU-constrained system is about a wash, but the combination of Virtual Desktop using slightly nicer HEVC compression if your GPU supports it, and that it somehow does all this over Wi-Fi while dropping fewer frames in transit than Oculus Link does over USB make it a bit of a no brainer - I still use the USB cable to keep the headset powered, though, because otherwise it’s capable of somewhere shy of two hours of play, but obviously with no data going by you don’t need one of the fancy optical cables to make this work, presumably so long as you have a high-quality 5GHz access point fairly close-by

unlike some of the other third-party tools like ALVR it doesn’t furnish SteamVR with battery information, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, but unlike Oculus Link, keeps it in easy access anyway by being a native Quest app, and therefore showing the Quest’s usual notifications, and allowing access to the Quest’s own quick menu

ALVR is alright, but it takes a lot more fiddling to get stable performance than I’d want out of this, I don’t feel like sending video to my VR headset should require Linux levels of configuration tweaking

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120hz over wifi with gnarly compression is an interesting aesthetic tradeoff, blocky artifacts with super-smooth motion resolution

I want to test latency between wired/wireless options because the rhythm games are our favorites but tether-free Alyx seems great

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633

yeah I definitely feel it in things like beat saber maps with red/black block colours, given video codecs fucking despise the colour red lol

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635

hi can I revisit this

they have three of them for 150 bucks

are we still a big red no

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636

do you not already have a PC VR setup? it’s basically as good as any other at that price

637

I have nothing because I am violently cheap

cheap enough to wait out these open box goggles getting even cheaper

(also I just bought a Deck)

638

I would jump for $150! there’s plenty of stuff worth playing

639

unfortunately you’re stuck with their controllers which are about a generation behind, and you’ll have to do some workarounds to get it to work with Steam; certainly less attractive than a Rift 2, maybe on par with an original Vive. Tracking is inside-out but poor inside-out.

Original Vive kits look like they’re going for $170-$250…at $150 this is probably a good idea. Probably

640

the evidence I’ve seen that first-generation inside-out tracking has been meaningfully obsoleted for anyone who isn’t actually in the industry and faced with having to work on these damn games is still very weak imo

641

probably, but I wouldn’t put one under the shambling remains of HTC’s product division circa 2019

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642

The Cosmos can also be upgraded to use external tracking;

So for $150 it’s probably not a bad starting off point for deciding if you’re into it and then upgrading to that and the Index knuckles & Steam lighthouses if that takes your fancy

643

The recent SB VRchat meetup convinced me to get a PC headset, and I’m likely about to come into a little money, so I’m considering getting an Index. I have the PC to power a nice headset, and I’d want to get one that’s basically top-of-the-line but not too much of a pain in the ass to set up and use. The Index seems to fit that, but the one thing that’s holding me back is… it seems like we’re between VR generations right now. The Index is 3 years old at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was about to be surpassed. Maybe I should wait and see. What do y’all think? Is there gonna be a worthy successor to the Index any time soon?

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as much as i loathe facebook, the inside-out tracking and price on the quest 2 are hard to beat and i was shocked at how well virtual desktop worked for wireless streaming (under 30ms of latency in a PC VR game at 50 Mbps on an older 802.11ac router)

they recently patched out the requirement to link a facebook account, though i’m sure they’re tying the profiles together on the backend

the question is whether you want to avoid them at more cost and hassle — steamVR setups use base stations that need their own power and mounting, and an index in particular is twice the cost. i don’t know of good alternative wireless setups but they probably exist. i’d wait for an index 2 or other new headset involving valve while the index is $999.

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Yeah, those base stations might be pretty ineffective in my small Boston apartment. And it is bogus that the Index is still $999 this late in the game. You’re right, I think I’ll keep waiting. Thanks for the thoughts!

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646

i imagine valve want to do something about this

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besides fire the person who picked the legend colors, i mean

whether they will? hard to say, valve time

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Does anyone have experience with Slime VR trackers?

Their precision is not that great compared to more expensive solutions from big brand companies. But it’s not entirely clear to me if that means it will constantly be up to 10 cm off (which is kind of a lot) or if it will just gradually lose precision over time since it has no base station to auto calibrate against. If the latter and it’s just a matter of recalibrating every few hours, that doesn’t seem too big a deal in comparison to the savings in cost (and supporting a small supplier offering an open source and open hardware solution).