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Comment by jc4p | Hacker News Reader

I have an Oculus CV1, I had the DK2, and I've been making VR side-projects using their SDK for a couple years now. I'm really disillusioned about Oculus as a platform, though. I didn't even consider buying the HTC Vive because I've been riding the Oculus train for a while and had faith in them as the future of VR, but come on.

I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this.

Sidenote: for what it's worth, I haven't used my Oculus since the first week I received it. It was supposed to work with glasses (the DK2 does) by shipping with different foam faceplates that can change how far off my face it is (my glasses fit in the Oculus, it's just that the lenses are so close to my eyes that my glasses scratch them) but they silently took that off the "What's in the box" months before shipping.

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> I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this.

My impression is that Carmack is working on GearVR-related stuff in isolation from the rest of the Oculus/Facebook bureaucracy from the comfort of Dallas, TX.

Hard to tell, but I'm not convinced he's even aware (or cares) about what's going on with Oculus in general: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/733761224098242560

I'm pretty sure there is a Chinese firewall in place for legal reasons due to the Zenimax lawsuits and him likely having a non-compete that only applied to desktop games and left mobile free.

Carmack is the CTO of Oculus. I'm sure he's involved in a lot more than just a side project like the GearVR.

He was cofounder of id, and had high ranking office until he left in 2013, but still was spending a lot of the 00s building Armadillo Aerospace instead.

Carmack tends to not particularly care what the business side are up to. He wants to focus on pushing the tech forward and not get bogged down with the office politics or PR spinning beyond what he's forced to do.

Hence John Romero...

Carmack is more of a Woz type character, hence why there is great respect for him in the industry. Many a developer merely dreams of being let loose on the tech and not have to deal with any of the "bullshit".

Ditto, I was one of the DK1 backers so got the CV1 for free.

I haven't used it much past the first week - only to demo to friends and such, really. I have some disillusionment about it also - it seems like Valve VR/Vive is getting a lot more dev support.

Having tried the Vive also, I think delaying the Oculus motion controllers was a critical error. It turns out the motion controllers really open up a lot of use cases, whereas a "simple" HMD-only feels particularly limiting in comparison.

The Rift is substantially more comfortable than the Vive - the Vive I felt was extremely front-heavy to an extent it actively distracted from the experience. That said, the idea that Oculus Rift "works with glasses" is a statement that's at most 30% true. My glasses are pretty small but while the HMD is on it crams my glasses literally up against my eyeballs - my eyelashes literally brush against the lenses of my glasses while blinking. After using the Rift my glasses are covered with eyelash/eyelid/eyeball(?) smudge marks. It's tremendously annoying.

The backing off of the "switchable glasses faceplate" promise is disappointing.

And honestly, there just isn't much content. Most of the content are tech demos.

Lucky's Tale is a really interesting vindication of the idea that platformers can work in VR - but it's also just not very compelling by itself.

Ditto Eve Valkyrie - the technology is tremendous and you can't help but get that "Battlestar Galactica come to life" glee when you first launch in your fighter... But the gameplay is just not varied or deep enough to hold you for longer than a couple of hours.

Between the discomfort of the HMD and the lack of content, there just isn't much motivation to dive back in.

I don't think I could've put this any better myself; I'm also a DK1 backer that got CV1 for free.

Most of my friends who did the same sold their CV1 when the hype was high for a profit and went on to purchase the Vive. I live in an NYC apartment, so I don't really have the room to spare for the Vive, but prior to the free CV1 announcement, I planned to purchase a Vive.

After experiencing DK1, you really got a good idea of what VR at that price point was capable of. Sure, the resolution and comfort will improve slightly, but it was a good calibration of expectations for the market. I just hope there comes more and more interesting software to actually drive the industry, because currently it's looking like another 90s VR cycle.

I think Eve Valkyrie might actually have a lot more depth, but it's hidden behind a progression system. You can pay cash money to bypass at least some of the pain of the progression system which is kind of insane considering it's a for pay game, but this has been the accepted standard in COD and Battlefield for years. At least those don't mock you by offering a pay to win (or more charitably pay to progress) option.

Certainly they could have done a lot more and given you more systems to interact with both inside and outside your ship.

I agree the software situation is dire. I tried VorpX with Aliens Isolation and there is just no comparison with other VR titles I have tried. I admit that doesn't include Chronos or The Climb which I have trouble spending the coin on for fear they are overrated tech demos instead of true AAA experiences.

I also got CV1 for free from being a Kickstarter. Having a Vive, the Oculus CV1 is just a paperweight right now.

Even when Touch finally comes out, it has been under so much secrecy and so many NDAs that I'm thinking it might have significant issues.

Not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but I've been working with both controllers for a while and honestly really prefer Touch over Vive's controllers. They have way more expressiveness, which means we're often running into things we want to do with Touch that don't easily translate to Vive's trigger/squeeze/thumb combo. A basic example, you can do rock paper scissors with Touch. Not perfectly since you still have a controller in your hand, but it totally works.

It's a huge plus for Vive that it has motion controllers on launch, but if Touch comes out by end of 2016, half a year's difference isn't much time in the grand scheme of VR and I bet most of the Vive exclusives will be cross-platform then too.

Vive doesn't have any real exclusives. You can already play most of the stuff on Rift with an MIT licensed Razer Hydra driver adapter that Valve released for free. Valve are treating headsets more like monitors, Oculus is treating them like a gaming console.

You have to dig in a menu and click a "scare toggle" to even run third party software on Oculus. On GearVR they don't even have the toggle. It will only run Oculus store apps.

and apps that you have signed to your individual device, making them impossible to distribute broadly

I'm aware and don't mean exclusive in that sense, just in the sense of being officially released on the platform. Many of the same games be released on the Rift once the touch controllers are out, negating the controller availability difference.

That said, Vive's tracking will still be the better of the two, as well as their cord length. I do wish the controllers were slightly more evolved though... :P

How is Touch a secret? They had stations with it at PAX East. They're different than Vive's wands but seemed equally good.

I have both. The Vive gets way more use, for one simple reason. Room scale is the future of VR. Some of the Oculus games are fantastic uses of the technology. Lucky's Tale has the camera on a rail based on where your character is, and EVE: Valkyrie has great mechanics for seated VR. But both of them feel like you're playing a game, albeit an immersive one, whereas room-scale vive games feel like I'm interacting with a world. Water Bears VR is adorable, but most importantly, the puzzles make use of the physicality of the experience. Moving objects in 3d space is hard with a gamepad, and intuitive with a motion controller. Sitting down isn't the way to use those controllers, either; It's fine to work with your hands sitting down if you're doing detail work, but the resolution isn't there yet for detail work, so you want to focus on sweeping gestures. That means standing up. That means shifting around, wiggling side to side, taking a step. There's theoretically a standing in place mode, but I've not seen it used, everything makes use of the 2Mx2M play area, and for the better.

I am sceptical about this. People like to sit down for their entertainment, that is unlikely to change. Turning, swerving, swiveling, sure, but I bet most would quickly get fed up with having to get on their feet and move around in order to play their games.

I thought that about the Wii, but me and my lads still stand to play that. The games are a bit crap, so we only play for an hour or so, but standing to play isn't an issue for us (much to my surprise)

The Wii may actually be a case in point, since it never really got that much consumer uptake, and no other platform has picked up the mantle with physically active games.

As with the Vive, it seemed like the future at the time, the concept games were a lot of fun, and it scared competing platforms to rush out imitating products (Xbox Kinect, PS Move). But neither have ultimately had much adoption.

The Wii was Nintendo's most successful console, selling over 100 million units.

Like you said, Microsoft and Sony both introduced motion controllers for their consoles. The Kinect was the fastest selling consumer electronics device.

Source: http://nintendoenthusiast.com/article/the-false-success-of-t...

The kinect was crap. It was almost good, but it just wasn't there, it would miss things, get confused, it wouldn't pick up one of my lads (he was too small?) and the games were really boring.

I feel like the happiest Kinect customers were research groups and some artists, because it was the first really cheap depth camera system you could buy readymade.

So far, you're wrong. I have a Vive and four kids. The Vive sees at least two hours of play time a day, with kids often sneaking time at weird hours. They were even getting up before 6 am, dressing and doing chores in order to play before school until my wife halted the practice.

When friends come over, it's the most offered activity; it's a very compelling experience. Not a ton of long form content yet, but seriously, it's compelling.

Does it fit a child properly? I have been planning on getting one for the kids, but I read several complaints that it takes some work to to get a good fit on an adult, let alone a child, plus the fact that it seems very front-heavy.

I don't doubt that it will get a lot of play from the novelty factor alone, but I remain sceptical that it will make sedentary gamers change their habits in the long term.

It does fit my kids. The experience gets less sharp if your interpupillary distance is too far out of spec, but down to about 7, kids function with it fine. Even little kids immediately 'get it' when they are using it; it is the least mediated computer experience I've seen.

You can put on a headset with a 75 year old man and hold out the controllers to him, he will reach out and take them.

Inre: weight, the kids don't like to play more than 30 minutes at a time or so, but that's partly because they want to talk about what they're seeing with someone there.

Probably the most frustrating part right now is that you want to engage with other people, ("oh wow!!" "can you believe that just happened?") and it can be hard to do so when you're isolated visually and auditorily. I think it's got a ton of potential as a party game technology though, with a little bit of work at the integration back and forth with friends sitting on the couch.

Inre: sedentary gamers, probably not, but it does encourage movement. In the first few minutes I tried out hover junkers I was literally crouching on the floor, popping up out to shoot at an opponent and then back down as quickly as I could. One of my daughters at her first try was down on the ground crawling around to look at something in under a minute or so.

So, it's at least a lot more movement than we currently have. :)

I remember people having nearly-identical debates about the motion controlled "party games" of the Wii.

My kids still like to play those with their friends as well! But they've mostly moved on to the vive.

I'm gonna have to back vessenes on this. It's really a very compelling experience. I'm sure there will be many games/experiences that you play seated, we do still sit in cars/planes/giant robots in real life after all.

However I very much doubt that such experiences will be the overwhelming majority. Dodging bullets and moving around to see things from different perspectives is WAY too fun.

Sitting down is great for passive entertainment, of which Vive has a lot of. But also, VR is for immersive interaction... and for that, standing up with tracked controllers is not only compelling, it's essential.

> I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this.

That's a really good point - has he spoken at all about the direction of Oculus & HMD VR in general since the Rift was released?

The champion of mods. The champion of being as open as you can (while making money.) He lectures, he helps, he's open and honest.

I'm sure he is disappointed in where facebook+rift is heading.

I have the DK2, doesn't work with my glasses :(. Admittedly i didn't try with a CV unit I got to check out, but my brother did and it worked for him. Might just vary depending on frames.

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