Oculus Rift - Dev Kit Review | Hacker News Reader

Oculus Rift - Dev Kit Review

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32 pointsdsaber21 comments

> You cannot play first person games.

As an Oculus Rift owner I've been able to play HL2 for three hours straight with zero breaks. It was hands down the best gaming experience of my life and this is coming from someone who really doesn't appreciate single player games.

People don't believe it but you DO have to gain your 'vr legs' before diving into fast paced games like FPS.

You have to gradually work your way through games that are just at your limit until you find yourself able to handle something fast paced like FPS. For me it went roughly Blue Marble,Alone in the Dark,VR Helicopter,War Thunder (for 2 weeks), DoD:Source, HL2.

I think what may have been key to my transition was when I played DoD:Source, I just treated the Rift like a big screen in front of my face and used my mouse to look around the world rather than my head (DoD currently does not have separate head look/mouse look so where your head moves your cursor moves and vise versa). When I finally got around to playing HL2 (which has separate mouse look/head look so you can look up a flight of stairs, and than bring your cursor up to shoot) it was a small enough jump from DoD that I was able to play a half hour my first night, an hour my second and 3rd nights, and 3 straight hours on my last when I beat the game.

I think the greater issue Oculus Rift faces is that, even if you are careful to slowly acclimate yourself as I did, over time you will build a slight aversion to the Oculus Rift as your brain associates the odd glitch of nausea that are inevitable in any game with the Rift. So while I did say that HL2 was the best gaming experience of my life, I do admit that I haven't been back to it since. I don't know if thats a function of me beating the game or nausea, but I'd probably put it at 80/20 respectively.

I think that it will just be a matter of how compelling a game is to overcome the nausea/aversion. I suspect that if GTAV releases for the PC that I'll find myself logging multiple hour session in the Rift again.

My first time with Oculus demos I got very nauseated. The next day I tried playing HL2, I got a little queasy for sure. The next day it was totally fine. I'm sure that your mileage will vary, but it is entirely possible to feel sick the first couple times you use it and then get used to it over a couple days.

I cannot play Source Engine games even on my regular display because i get motion sickness, but other games are fine. None of the settings I tried helps (FOV, resolution, refresh rate, VSync). I wonder if trying Oculus would make it worse or better.

> I think the tech will shine if they ever manage to fit 4K resolution in there.

That's probably going to take a few generations, and they might do it faster and with better results if they used this technology instead, which apparently doesn't give eye-strain like LCD's do, too:

http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-virtual-retina...

By the way, check out this Redditor's crazy story about falling asleep with the Oculus Rift, and waking up feeling like he was actually in there for the first couple of minutes:

http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1oe33h/so_i_fell_asl...

Sounds like we'll be on one hell of a ride in the next 10 years, if Oculus Rift gets so immersive, and hundred of millions of people have them, all preferring to be in their high quality virtual realities over real life, most of the time, and feeling "disconnected" when they aren't there, just like we feel now without the Internet.

> if Oculus Rift gets so immersive, and hundred of millions of people have them, all preferring to be in their high quality virtual realities over real life, most of the time

Much as dislike this outlook, it might actually make a lot of currently somewhat "overpopulated" physical real places (with traffic jams etc.) a lot more pleasant, so yeah, let's see :D

Interesting. I had a very similar initial experience [1]. I got sick from Half Life 2 the first two times playing it, but the third time I managed to do a 40-minute session without feeling any serious nausea. It's definitely something you can train yourself to tolerate.

But srsly, 4K resolution is an absolute must.

[1] http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2013/10/02/oculus-rift-dev-...

I wonder if you can take some Dramamine and still get used to it without having to endure the initial nausea.

You cannot play first person games. As cool as they are for the first minute, beyond that motion sickness kicks in.

It's only one data point but I've not had any nausea with extensive playing of Minecraft and HL2. Indeed, the biggest problems by far are the lenses steaming up and the gigantic pixels/low resolution (I'm not even sure 1080 would improve this significantly since it's already 720, isn't it? It feels like it needs a doubling, at a minimum.) However, every other (adult) person I've tried it on has indeed felt quite nauseous very quickly.

Like others though, I think the big initial wins won't be in FPS games since they also encourage you to run around and interact with an environment that doesn't exist. Flight sims, space sims, underwater sims, racing sims.. this could be a huge deal.

It 100% will be a huge deal with flight sims. The Rift is ideal for that. In a few years, playing a sim without some kind of high immersion device like the Rift will be like playing a flight sim without a joystick today.

I wonder if, for those who experience it, the motion sickness would be as bad if running around on an omni-directional treadmill. While your body would be moving to match your avatar, your inner ear might still sense that you are stationary and cause you to feel nauseous.

My experience:

5 minutes with Occulus and a game pad resulted in about 10 minutes of mild nausea.

5 minutes with Occulus and Omni resulted in about 30 minutes of moderate but not debilitating nausea.

Complicating factors: tried the Omni test first, perhaps increasing my tolerance for the next test. Also used the lower resolution Occulus devkit with the Omni.

How does the omni control the game? Just curious.

It detects your forward walking motion and translates it to pressing forward on the keyboard (roughly).

How does turning work? I've been curious if I could build my own omni?

I never really felt much motion sickness from it, even in TF2. I didn't really enjoy playing that way, as I felt like I lost some of the control mouse+kb gives, but it's certainly immersive.

petercooper hit on the big problems: the lenses fog up quickly and the low resolution in the dev kit is distracting.

Also, in some games like surgeon simulator 2013, there is drift which means you're spinning slowly in a circle to keep looking at the same spot. It's horribly frustrating, and ruined the (already frustrating) experience for me.

Unreal works very well with it, however. I think any game which doesn't rely on fast transformations to the perspective will benefit greatly from the immersion the retail Rift brings.

I agree with the points about FPS games. I played a couple of the demos without any nausea and then tried HL2 and my stomach was almost instantly in my throat. On reflection, there was something about the first two demos that made the difference, I think. In one, you're underwater in a pod, which means even though you're in first-person, there remains the concept that it's not you moving, but the pod, and you therefore have a relatively static near-plane environment which moves subtly, whilst the 'outside world' moves more freely. In the second demo, a sky-diving simulator, you're free falling, so there's very little rotation involved.

I did not get sick at all.

I would definitely try the demos which were written with the Rift in mind, not general games. RiftCoaster for example is superb (be even better if I could get it to work under Wine ...).

So far the main problem I had with the demo system is that I can't set it up to my very myopic sight; none of the sets of lenses did it, and you can't wear glasses with it.

It depends on your frame. I can wear glasses with mine no problem.

If anyone in Adelaide, South Australia wants to check out the rift, I have a dev kit I'm willing to lend out.

When I played around with the Rift I got sick. But taking pills against travel sickness helped.

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