Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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I'm waiting for the Vive, or at least a bunch of a reviews of both platforms. I trust Valve a lot more than Facebook to deliver a gaming device that won't be caught up in strange legal requirements, social media promotion, lock-in, platform exclusives, and potential privacy exploitation.

I also feel that the Valve team has been working on the non-sexy issues like controls, motion sickness, advanced eye tracking (rumor?), and head tracking as opposed to the narrative that comes out of the Rift which seems to be centered on "OMG RESOLUTION AND FPS!" Obviously, gamers will lean towards the latter but I suspect work on the former will be more important.

I'm also concerned that this stuff will look great, but will require a $2,500 gaming machine to make it all work right. I just upgraded to a Nvidia 950 and from what I've read that's really too weak to do 1080p per eye at 60fps on anything coming close to AAA graphics. I really don't want to be forced to deal with PS3-like polygons and textures for the 3D effect to work correctly.

I guess I'll wait and see. I'm certainly not doing any preorders. I'll let the early adopter crowd figure this stuff out. I'm also waiting for magic leap to produce an AR product, but don't expect that to happen anytime soon. I am somewhat concerned that AR could strangle VR in the cradle.

FYI, it doesn't require a $2,500 gaming machine. The recommended specifications require a PC that costs roughly $1,000. "Oculus Ready" certified PCs start at $950.

Not sure where you'd get the idea that Oculus isn't working on non-sexy problems, considering how many people Oculus has working on controls (Oculus Touch), motion sickness, and yes eye tracking too. Obviously Oculus is working on "head tracking" - that's been around since 2012.

Either way, you are correct: waiting to hear about the Vive is a good idea. VR in general (Vive, Rift, etc.) is very much an early adopter technology for the next couple years.

Minor note: AR is far from maturity. The FoV and resolution pales in comparison to VR. 30-degrees (like looking through a pinhole) versus 110-degrees is a massive difference that's hard to explain. AR and VR are like sister technologies that will one day converge.

AR approaching VR by improving FoV and resolution over the next decade, and VR approaching AR by improving real-world capture & scene reconstruction.

>The recommended specifications require a PC that costs roughly $1,000.

The recommended card for this is a 970 which chimes in at around $350 today. Another $450 (more?) for the Rift, well, you're pushing $1,000 with tax and shipping right there without a PC, CPU, OS, etc. This stuff is fairly pricey and downplaying the cost is being a little disingenuous. I think if you want to remotely future-proof your rig, yes, you are much closer to the $2,500 mark than $1,000. My point stands; this stuff is really, really expensive. Especially when the real competitors in the PC VR gaming space are going to be consoles. I suspect Sony's offering with come in at a cheaper cost and work with the existing PS4. That's going to be a value proposition that's going to be tough to beat.

>motion sickness

This is unsolved in the VR space. Oculus struggles with it and HTC/Valve claim their "lighthouse" technology can greatly limit it, but there's been no public demonstration or study here proving any of these claims. Hand wavey readings of PR bullet points from vendors isn't convincing.

Fwiw, I read an article the other day that stated that dual-GPU cards are likely going to be ideal for this.

I'm not a graphics hacker, but the gist was that a lot of modern rendering techniques had broken the ability to split workload via alternate frame rendering.

However, since each VR eye can essentially be independently run as its own pipeline, they'd see a much more ideal speedup in "same scene, two eyes" workloads.

Some of those arguments would have held more water before the complete security clusterfuck that Valve visited upon the users of Steam over the holidays.

from how i understood it, valve was not the one at fault for the caching bug, it was whoever they use for hosting :^)

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