Oculus GoBlack – How to Make Your Oculus Go Better | Hacker News Reader

Oculus GoBlack – How to Make Your Oculus Go Better

palmerluckey.com

145 pointsDanAndersen94 comments

> wait just a little bit longer for the vestibular fix I have been talking about.

If this is what I think it is, it is going to be huge. The buzz is that someone has discovered a cure for motion sickness, and it's incredibly simple: just wear a small vibrating device on the back of your head, sending a continuous vibration signal to your inner ear. For reasons unknown this seems to deactivate whatever part of the vestibular system is responsible for motion sickness. It is supposedly effective in >99% of people and does not disrupt balance.

Read the inventor's description here: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/9ywify/inventor_may... Of course a cure for motion sickness will be great for VR but the applications in everyday life will be much, much bigger.

Motion sickness is only normally an issue in these 3DoF headsets.

You don't tend to get it with room-scale setups.

I'm hopeful that decent inside-out tracking will be a thing in 2019 - then it's off to the races.

Perfect inside-out tracking with hand tracking, mixed VR and AR - that's when consumer VR gets big.

Motion sickness is a problem for _all_ VR headsets.

Even if the headset tracks in 6-DoF most games still need some form of artificial locomotion. Rarely is it acceptable for the entire game to take place in the same 5ft x 5ft space, and introducing artificial movement causes motion sickness for some people. Just letting users teleport doesn't always cut it.

Yep, just fire up any free-walking VR game and try to move around. I never get motion sick but it still feels very strange to move without walking.

The sensation is somewhere between having my soul sucked out of my body and having a terrible ear infection that impacts balance.

Yeah, that's a 3DoF - your location in the room is not being tracked.

The HTC Vive rarely gives you this feeling as you are free to walk about and there is a 1:1 relationship between the VR and real world.

That only works for games with a very limited player space, or games with a teleporting mechanic. Other games, like Onward allow you to both walk within your room with your location tracked, as well as free-walk using the joystick like a normal first person game, that's what I was talking about.

As I understand it, if motion sickness were not a thing then it would enable a lot more compromises on the performance of VR headsets and the games that play on them. Dropping framerate and stuttering in these games is 100% unacceptable at the moment because it instantly induces intense motion sickness (unlike when the same thing happens on a conventional screen and it's merely irksome).

I don't think anything is going to resolve the "i'm having a stroke" feeling when a VR game freezes or crashes.

Imagine your vision froze in real-life, you would rightly freak out.

So I bought all those stocks in dramamine manufacturing companies for nothing :-(

Yes! Ménière's disease [0] and other vestibular diseases are (thankfully) rare, but truly horrible. Diseases like Ménière's are sometimes clustered into the list of 'suicide' diseases, due to their severity. Vestibular science, in general, is very poorly funded and therefore poorly understood.

Hopefully, things like VR and the need for a better understanding of vestibular disorders will drive funding and understanding[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ni%C3%A8re%27s_disease

[1] https://hearinghealthfoundation.org/donate/

My grandfather had Ménière's disease, and I have had vertigo on a couple of occasions myself. It is debilitating. Unfortunately this device wouldn't restore balance, but at least it could relieve nausea.

The really fascinating part is that somehow this works without any measurable impairment of other reflexive responses.

Hopefully doesn't also cause cancer or alzhaimer by some convoluted mechanism.

Stochastic resonance strikes again.

I was feeling like a lazy hacker when I saw all the work this person put into the headset, then I realized who wrote the article and relaxed.

This person = Palmer Luckey = Oculus VR founder

And he literally didn't like and hacked his own product as a consumer?

He left the company last year.

Or rather was kicked out for links with the Alt-Right.

By which we mean he made a single $10,000 donation to an organization that at the time of his donation had put up one single anti-Hillary billboard.

I think context is important for understanding the response. From what I recall at the time, the article that first broke this news and defined the narrative was this article from the Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-nea...

Describing it as a $10K donation for a single anti-Hillary billboard misses the parts of the story that caused controversy at the time. The controversial aspects included his connection to Milo Yiannopoulos and moderators of r/The_Donald, and their connections to abusive online behavior and white supremacist rhetoric.

Wasn't it more than that?

@wronghorse, If I'm reading that FEC page you linked to correctly, the only donations listed before his firing were to Ted Cruz and Dana Rohrabacher, neither of whom is even vaguely alt-right.

Palmer's big donating spree happened after his firing, and those later donations still didn't go to alt-right causes/candidates, just Republican ones.

[edit: The post I was side replying to has been deleted. Sorry if this post now makes less sense.]

"Dana Rohrabacher, neither of whom is even vaguely alt-right"

Uhhh what now?

I thought the donation was to some other group making political memes and not a candidate....?

Wasn't he funding a group that was posting fake news and memes online?

Removing the EMI shielding is just dumb.

For those that are thinking of doing this, you should realize that EMI shielding serves two proposes.

One is indeed reducing emissions from the device.

The other is reducing the emissions from the environment which might affect high speed or otherwise sensitive circuits.

The shields themselves weigh very little, and there is a risk that you'll damage the board trying to remove them too.

The virtual desktop thing looks cool. Has anyone been able to use it as an external monitor for coding ? I have neck problems and this seems like a great replacement

Have you tried VR headsets for extended periods of time? My experience with both the Rift and Vive have been that they aren't easy on the neck and upper back muscles because the headsets are front-heavy. You could try to use it lying down though.

The other poster is also right about resolution issues. To get any decent amount of text on the screen, you'll cause a lot of eye strain.

I do it sometimes with my samsung odyssey. I usually use VR Toolgox: 360 Desktop although I also have Virtual Desktop and Multiscreens. You have to blow the screens way up to keep things readable but if you're having a bit of writers block it can be a nice change of pace to get your creativity flowing on a whatever problems you're hacking away at.

Waiting for my Piimax 8K-X to see what the greater and field of view and nominally better pixel density does for it.

Haven't tried them but an idea that just popped in my mind would be to add some counterweight at the back of the head. Increased weight but decreases the torque you have to fight. It is what the military uses when wearing NVGs IIRC

I've been wondering why more companies don't do this. Simply re-locating the battery to the back would go a long ways towards this.

I remember this came up in an Oculus keynote that John Carmack gave. I believe the reason given was because a significant portion of users use the headset while lying down and so nothing can really be on the back of the head?

Modern smartphones almost weigh nothing, so I'm wondering why is a VR headset so heavy?

Glass for the lenses, for one thing.

Another is that the force exerted on you head is roughly weight times the distance that weight is from the centerline of your neck. This multiplier makes stuff hanging out in front of your face much heavier than it would be if were just sitting on top of your head.

I had silly idea of gaming using DJI headset while lying down. Not sure how good would it be and how would it compare to monitor hanged above the bed.

The Oculus Go is not heavy at all.

If you're having strength issues you should consider exercising more. They aren't heavy and are well balanced.

I was trying to think about why your comment irritated me. It's because it sounds like you commented about balance without actually trying to find the center of gravity on either headset. (It's near where your nose would be.)

I researched it for a VR application primarily for older people, so the ergonomics mattered, and the ergonomics were a real issue.

You raise a great point that I overlooked. There are many reasons why someone would have impaired neck movement or strength, making it hard to use. I apologize.

Tasks that require reading text from screen can't be done using VR yet, because of the resolution and chromatic aberration. You'll end up with eye related problems. It's good for pictures, videos.

That (and watching video) requires significantly higher resolutions than the Rift provides, even 4k isn't enough.

Resolution needs to be quadrupled at least to make this feasible :(

Having tested Visual Studio and IntelliJ IDEA in 1080p (HD), 1440p (QHD) and 2160p (4K) desktops with a Vive Pro, I would it say it really depends on your monitor and HMD resolution. With the new Vive Pro, 1080p is totally acceptable, albeit strenuous (for my eyes/brain), then again I am easily fatigued by anything in VR lasting more than 30 minutes. It also assumes you don't mind coding in HD, which I do, so I have only tried a couple times before giving up.

Is the 4K resolution less strenuous for you than HD? I tried looking at text in VR a while ago on an older Vive and the text was too blurry for me to easily read.

Yes and no. I just tested again... 4K is considerably crisper than HD, even when resizing down ~25% and up to ~60% of original size. The main problem is actually the size... 4K is just too large of a screen area to be viewed without having to pick up the controllers to move the virtual screen around. Anything past the bottom or right half is more or less off-limits, meaning you have to move those windows (e.g. builds)... or just resize the editor to the upper-left corner.

The best setup I could manage was to put the bottom of the virtual screen a bit in the floor, then you are looking straight on so that you can see the upper-left corner and still get to the menus and see at least the first ~25 lines of code (Consolas size 10).

I should note I'm using the built-in Desktop which you can insert via Steam VR Home. I just dropped it into the default home and moved it around/resized until I found it workable. There may be better tools for running virtual desktops in VR, I haven't explored this space at all since reading anything in any VR app for more than a few minutes makes me dizzy... speaking of which, no more VR for today! ;)

The Mobile Computing Keyboard is fascinating ! I'm curious of people's reactions in public transport.

I feel like at least one reaction would be to try to steal your shit while you're blinded.

I wonder what kinds of fumes the dye lets off when heated.

It's probably just Rit dye or a similar brand. It's a pretty stable dye.

What is the field of view?

(Note that humans have 210 degrees FOV, and from the looks of those goggles, it seems to be a lot less, but I could be wrong)

I wonder why the original headset wasn’t just made in black?

He mentions in the article. Cost and time.

Is going black that much more costly?

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