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Comment by xroche | Hacker News Reader

I have an Oculus (DK2, development version though, so please take my opinion with a grain of salt), and while it is great, there are some show-stoppers:

• Games needs to be reinvented for VR, which basically makes adoption much harder - playing a FPS in VR will get you dizzy very quickly, even for people that are not very motion-sickness sensitive

• Quality is still not good enough, you can feel the pixels, and it breaks immersion - 4K screens, or even 8K screens, are probably the minimum, which means that we need also graphic cards that can deliver two 3D scenes combined at 4K or 8K, and these cards aren't there yet

• Plugging/handling all the messy cables is a pain

• And of course the price, but I don't think this is the biggest issue here

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I actually disagree in several areas.

1. It's surprising how well flat screen games work in VR with minimal changes. 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games. I personally would love to see more "low-effort" ports to VR of existing content as just adding stereoscopy, 6DOF and 360 to a game can make it visually stunning.

2. I wouldn't turn my nose up at more resolution but even first gen Vive and Rift and more than enough to make me happy. You see past the pixels fairly quickly. I've demoed VR to over a hundred people and very few comment on the resolution (I'd prefer more FOV than more pixels personally)

3. Cable management varies from the annoying (Rift with 3 cameras) to a non-problem (plugging in a Windows MR headset is basically just 1 USB and a HDMI)

4. You can grab an Acer WMR for close to $200. The GPU cost is still a burden but we're on the 3rd gen of VR capable cards now so a 1060 or a 970 is now entry level for PC gamers.

> 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games

What does that get us then? Just a worse version of the games we already have?

I don't understand how your comment relates to what I was saying. Could you please elaborate?

Honestly, I'd envisage buying a VR device if I could play games like XCOM or Supreme Commander. I'm not really interested in the games currently offered

Have you seen Brass Tactics? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95rgdaN25t0

There's no such thing as "low-effort ports to VR" as you are describing. When you model a 3D object for flat screens, scale is really not that much of a concern whereas in VR the player's immersion might be completely ruined if something feels just slightly off. Here's a nice blog post I found on the topic which goes much more in depth: https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/size-matters-scale-relationsh...

The argument in that post is extremely overblown. I've messed around with dozens of Unity assets that were not intended for VR and they usually work perfectly well.

"Completely ruined" is hyperbole in any case.

Whilst I haven't produced any commercial VR games I have spent two years working with VR in Unity and there are many shortcuts to moving traditional content into VR.

Note that I'm not talking about turning FPS games into room scale experiences. I'm talking about using VR as a stereoscopic 360 view into the game world but maintaining existing control schemes. First person games might be more problematic.

I had a DK2, I now have a Vive. I highly recommend the upgrade, it's like night and day. It's still not perfect and suffers from the same issues you mentioned, but being able to wander around my living room in a VR world, and at a much higher resolution/framerate is fantastic.

" which means that we need also graphic cards that can deliver two 3D scenes combined at 4K or 8K, and these cards aren't there yet"

Hopefully we will have quality eye tracking and foveated rendering in a few years, so we will not need to render the whole screen in high resolution ever.

From my direct experience it's a quality thing. Once we're at 4K per eye @ 120FPS or something approaching this - and able to maintain it steadily without dropping frames, it's going to be a pretty mind blowing experience. The problem is right now the resolution and framerates just aren't there to make it feel visceral enough. I think even with just a sitting still model of a headset that has ultra high resolution and frame rate will be an iteration where things start to take off. I'd love to see things take this direction over trying to solve the problem of physically moving in a 3 dimensional space while engaging with VR.

Immersion is the killer feature of VR, not standalone graphical fidelity. FOV, 6DOF tracking are far more important today than 4K per-eye resolution and 120 FPS. Moreover, foveated rendering will give us drastic graphical fidelity improvements, in the very near future.

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