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it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you.

That's only a problem if your FOV is too small. With a large enough FOV and a light display there's no reason why eye and head movements shouldn't work exactly as they do in real life. The Oculus Rift has twice the angular field of view of the SU2000 in both dimensions, for 4x the subtended angular area.

Edit: Oh I see, your complaint is about using the head tracking to control a game, e.g. by pointing a gun. Yes, I think that's a bad idea. Head tracking should only control the camera. All game interaction should happen through a controller. A motion controller like the Razer Hydra would probably work well for this.

if you move your head for any reason you can't maintain focus on objects

Again, only true for crappy hardware. With a good enough display, 120 FPS, and low latency, there's no reason why tracking moving objects shouldn't work just fine.

I think a lot of people got disillusioned with VR because there's a lot of crappy hardware out there. Even the expensive stuff is crap. I tried Canon's augmented reality system at SIGGRAPH last year and the latency and FOV were awful, despite the $120,000 cost. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the Oculus Rift is the proof.

We seem to be so close to agreement here that I'll just have to vote you up and take you at your word regarding the Rift. It's entirely possible my experiences have all been unfortunate ones. I've not tried the Rift yet, though by all means I will. :)

Well, my word about the Oculus Rift is secondhand, since I haven't received mine yet. And I haven't tried the Sensics device you mentioned below; that hardware looks quite nice, so it would be quite disappointing if that level of device still wasn't good enough for a great VR experience. My opinion may change after using the Rift for a while, but given what people are saying about it I'm still optimistic :)

Modeless, can you please answer this "trick" question? If a flat piece of cardboard that is 10 inches wide occupies 10 degrees of my horizontal FOV, how many degrees of my horizontal FOV will 20 inches wide flat piece of cardboard occupy? Both cardboards are positioned at the same distance from my eyes, of course.

Thanks.

> The chief problem is that without eye tracking, it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you. Mind you when the HMDs were much heavier back then it sucked a lot more, but it's still pretty shitty not being able to glance aside.

Isn't that more of a problem of field of view? With a wide enough field of view, you could just look at whatever you wanted to. Basically make it like real life, where what you look at is the combination of where your head is pointed, which the computer needs to use to update the screen, and where your eye is looking, which the computer doesn't need to care about. Or are you thinking of using eye tracking to something else, like determining what you're pointing at like a mouse? Yet another option you have in VR is what you're targeting, like how Dactyl Nightmare uses the gun you're holding to map directly into the virtual world's gun. Using the head position to AIM rather than just LOOK seems like a bad way of doing things.

Yes, you're absolutely right that a lot of what I'm complaining about would be solved with sufficient FOV and things certainly have improved since the SU2000 system in that regard. But we're not at 'sufficient' at the moment, at least in my experience based upon trying more recent examples, like an obscenely expensive Sensics kit. It's possible that it will be sufficient long before eye-tracking winds up in consumer HMDs.

But yes, the other part of my previous remark regarding 'dumb joystick' was more directly related to using the head for aiming/pointer duties, which also unfortunately has cropped up before and I quickly conflated the two issues together.

>This lead to policy that the 3D effect could not be used for anything related to actual gameplay mechanics, reducing it entirely to an optional gimmick.

Citation? I had not heard this about the 3DS.