Sony announces Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset coming to PS4
polygon.com
polygon.com
http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/03/18/oculus-on-sonys-rumored...
My question, is the PS4 going to be able to handle rendering its existing games x2? Michael Abrash's presentation was pretty clear that the Oculus and its competitors would really be pushing the PC's requirements and laid out exactly why.
And no, I think most VR PS4 games will be made at 720p@60fps. You might see some indie ones at 1080p. PS4's hardware is barely enough for VR, but should be sufficient for a decent experience. The worst part about it is that Sony won't be able to upgrade it until PS5, while Oculus will move on to 4k displays in a few years, 120Hz, better optics, and so on.
I can only assume that if the SDK is being made soon then devs may well have had time with it. I am really looking forward to hearing about their experiences.
Well, yeah, at 10fps. Currently if the PS4 outputs 1080p it drops the framerate to 30.
For reference, metal gear solid 5 renders at 60 fps in 1080p on the PS4, and that is "with room to spare" according to the dev team (the weaker xbox one only delivers it in 720p).
http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/02/MGS-...
"On launch games"
Go look at a launch PS2 or launch PS3 game then come back
-Consoles make inferior version of something that can be done so much better on PC. -People buy up the inferior version one cause they apparently have no problem with being stuck for a decade on hardware/games that will never change. -Developers make so much money from that bargain basement segment that they only care about the console version and if they feel like it, port it over to PC as is. Without any refinement whatsoever.
When did that ever happen before you ask? With games in general, of course.
Most recent example: DICE developed a shield as DLC for Battlefield 4. Should have been shield in one hand, pistol in the other. But!, since that would take ONE MEGABYTE OF ADDITIONAL RAM it was scrapped cause the dumb kiddie consoles can't handle that "enormous" additional load. Instead you only get the shield which is now held "in both hands"!
No problem right? Just gimp the console version and do it right on PC. Wrong. DICE is hell bend on keeping the tradition of giving the PC gamers the finger alive and just shells out this crutch on all systems.
Yeah, if these console people really have to enter the VR business, I already know how that will turn out for the one system that is best equipped to do gaming. And that is very very badly. Unless Oculous also enters the game development in a big way and more developers with the correct focus like Bohemia Interactive come forth, PC will get hosed again.
Prime Examples for developers with the wrong focus would be again, DICE and of course Rockstar who have nor problem putting GTAIV on sale on Steam now, even though who knows what will happen once the gfwl servers are shut down. And of course, nobody needs to talk about GTAV on PC. They made enough money with the cheap console version. Why should they even do a poor port to PC? Let alone maybe take some pride in their work and do things right and make the PC version really push the envelope.
I hear that a lot from bitter PC gamers. It's just as valid to say "People buy up consoles because they want to just be able to play some damn games without worrying about hardware upgrades and framerates and heat dissipation."
(I have a 360 and a high-end gaming PC. I am platform-agnostic. I just like games.)
Except that it is not. HW upgrades have not been an issue for a loooong time. Example, I still run a non i3/5/7 intel CPU and a mid range nvidia and have no problem getting a gaming experience that is at the very least on par with consoles. And if we look at the FPS I get, it is far superior.
If you check now just how many generation of iX CPUs there are and I am still running something from before that, you know that upgrades are not that vital anymore. And I just mention the CPU as it is still the biggest cost factor in a PC. Along with the GPU which I also stated is years old and was mid range when I bought it to begin with.
And I could just enjoy games with that PC if the games I get wouldn't be horribly ported messes of what often looks like copy/paste from the console codebase.
If only the developers would finally employ two separate teams for their games. One camp can focus on the consoles all they want. I don't give a damn. As long as there is one separate team solely focusing on the PC version. This whole thing would go away. No more PC/Console wars. No more animosity or the repeated question "why can't we all just get along?". We could get along if one platform would finally stop getting the short end of the stick. And in the past, that platform was always the PC. Which, incidentally should answer just why PC gamers have such a low opinion of console gamers. It is the direct result of console gamers flooding the market and shoving so much money down the developers throats that they can't help but go where the money is. And just go there period.
Just look at the "new" consoles. Spec based a mid range PC from a couple of years ago. But in comparison so much "advanced" when looking at the old consoles. And now what? Suddenly 60fps is "soo awesome". 1080p FTW etc pp. Before? Couldn't care less when PC gamers were telling them how great it is. And the fact this was possible for the last decade. "Not needed", you'd hear. "I don't care", you'd hear. But throw them this past decade tech in console form and they cheer. Not realizing that this is it for them for the next ten years.
Bohemia gets it. No console version of Arma3. Could focus solely on their PC version and it is great. No tradeoffs. No cutting corners by just taking the dumbed down assets instead of working on PC specific ones that highlight its capabilities.
Plus I probably spent $2500 on this setup. Started out as a miner. Went through three cases (NZXT -> Corsair 300R -> Bitfenix Prodigy), three motherboards (Asus MA97-2 -> Asrock Fatal1ty Killer -> Asrock Z87E-ITX), three CPUs (Sempron 145 -> FX-4130 -> Intel 4670), replaced the 2x2GB of RAM with 2x4GB, added a 1TB SSHD, sold reference R290's, got an XFX R290-DD, several USB WiFi adapters (all junk, bought an Airport Express and extended the ethernet reach instead), Keyboard, Mouse, Gamepad, Corsair fans (loud, low flow), NZXT fans (ok-ish, high flow), Phantek fans (high flow, really loud), Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO...
The list goes on. It's a hobby. And I like some things about it. But it's not a cheap one, and while you might have more sense than me in knowing what you ultimately want, more PC gamers than not have the upgrade bug IME. A valid Windows license alone is 25% of the price of a PS4. Just my current CPU is over half the price. All together I could've bought a PS4 for what I've spent on CPUs.
Yeah, shitty PC ports of console games are a problem, I'll totally agree with that. Of course, they're also a tiny percentage of all PC games. It's not like there's not other stuff for you to play. And whose fault is it that there are shitty PC ports? Well, the publishers looking for a quick buck--oh no, silly me, it's the console gamers! Their gamepad-clutching fingers are pulling the strings of a Machiavellian global network designed expressly to ruin your fun!
Jesus Christ. The Xbox fans hate the Sony fans, and the Windows fans hate the Apple fans, and the PC fans hate the console fans, oh, the black folks hate the white folks, and the white folks hate the black folks, all of my folks hate all of your folks, it's American as apple pie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgASBVMyVFI&t=0m44s There's gotta be someone I can blame for my burnt toast and my broken shoelace.
Get your shit together and get worked up about something that matters.
And in the mean time, play some games, have fun, and stop stressing so much!
Still, the PS4/XB1, like previous consoles, were designed with heat dissipation in mind. If you build your own PC once you go off the beaten path you're going to have to be careful.
That's a bit of a blanket statement, no?
The PC controller market has been rife with crap. 3rd-party console controllers were equally sucky. Even Microsoft's PC controllers weren't that great.
These days, you could get by with a Logitech controller. But by and large if you want to game with a controller on a a PC you're going to use a wired 360 controller.
There's nothing a controller can do, that a simple mouse and keyboard can't do better.
Now you'll say you are kick-butt with a controller and terrible with a PC. But that's because of the 10000 hours you've spent on a console.
The user-bandwidth available thru a mouse and keyboard is like an order of magnitude higher than a controller with bang-bang 'joysticks'. There's a reason online gaming separates PC clients from console clients. Just watch the console users trudging around a virtual landscape like a tank, turning jerkily and aiming erratically. Then watch a mouse virtuoso leap about like a ninja and literally run circles around the console folks.
Analog control for a flight sim or racing game. Mouse and keyboard is absolute shit for those.
Platformers also really aren't great.
> muh gaben
But I guess there is not much lock-in effect - except for the current Oculus SDK, so hopefully games will start using a platform neutral one soon - and the market is potentially huge, so competition can also have a lot of pros.
Sony's VR will be PS4-only for a long time, perhaps forever.
The Oculus will be disallowed from the PS4 by Sony, probably forever.
The hardware doesn't matter; some people just cannot stand certain forms of stimulation-without-movement that occurs with virtual reality. I can't play FPS or watch videos containing lots of movement on large screens for this reason, and I doubt the experience would be any different for VR; if anything, making the graphics more realistic would exacerbate the situation.
Who's making such a claim about VR? People who think Michael Abrash made this claim simply didn't read his white paper closely enough. Here's what he said:
> …VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.
Longer quote and more discussion in my earlier comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249118
It's definitely less likely to cause sickness than some of the other genres, but not guaranteed safe.
Hence why hardware does matter
While it won't help every case, for the vast majority the motion sickness is alleviated when the head tracking is better (accurate positional tracking and low latency).
You can make pretty much anyone feel sick if you add enough lag to the display.
that is to say, you can probably not eliminate motion sickness entirely in all cases, but without care it's probably not hard to catalyze either.
Without IBM, Lisa with its 10k price tag might have actually won out over Mac. That is, Apple would have made Lisa their business computer and not even bothered pushing Mac. (see folklore.org et al)
At the time, Apple II was not considered business level hardware (although people used it for business, ie VisiCalc).
Without IBM entering PC market, the micro revolution would have taken a few years longer.
If you look at the market now, Apple is the most profitable "PC" maker.
From the presentation (see: http://live.theverge.com/live-sony-playstation-future-of-inn... ) it looks like 1) they've been working seriously on this for over 3 years and 2) they have taken the ideas of immersion/presence to heart and are focused on VR as a medium, not as a gimmick.
Personally, I think it'll be good for Oculus and VR in general to have a strong competitor w/ Sony. If it weren't PS4 only, I'd seriously consider grabbing one. Of course, we'll have to see what Oculus has up their sleeves w/ DK2 tomorrow...
For comparison, the HMZs OP references are a HFOV of about 45°.
In any case, the field of view on that hardware is generally lens limited and the lenses are round, so the monocular field of view for most users is circular. The diagonal field of view is then equal to the vertical and horizontal field of view.
The diagonal is a bigger FOV than the horizontal FOV simply for that reason.
Most people can't see the edges of the screen when looking directly at them in the rift (but they can when looking indirectly, it is something to do with the eyeball moving around leaving the sweet spot).
Also is there technical documentation on the prewarp shader and pixel density/perceived resolution? I'm interested particularly in text rendering, so really looking forward to the low persistence displays!
There are technical details on distortion correction in the SDK guide: http://static.oculusvr.com/sdk-downloads/documents/Oculus_SD...
Much of this is in flux as we improve on both the methods and the specific implementations, but the guides will be updated as we get there.
I'm also looking forward to this tech being used for concert demos. I'd love to strap this on and listen to AC/DC's Live At River Plate, all the sound and the atmosphere of being there!
Shame that "no PC support has been announced" [1]. But some enterprising hacker'll get it going, no doubt.
[1] http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/03/18/sonys-ps4-virtual-rea...
It requires a bit of tweaking to get configured properly though, which led to a lot of negative reviews or people leaving reviews saying they weren't impressed.
Experiencing actual 7.1 surround sound headphones (rather than simulated surround) is kind of like a mini version of experiencing the Oculus Rift for the first time, in terms of the "wow" factor when you finally get it working properly. What Rift is to eyes, the Tiamat is to ears.
The reason headphones have had just two speakers till now is because people have two ears, so we've incorrectly assumed that that's all that's needed. But human ears are designed to capture 3D positional audio. Two speakers means there are only two positions that audio can come from. 7.1 headphones simply blow everything else out of the water. It's a very visceral experience that's hard to articulate.
The takeaway is that having a headset which is capable of physically producing soundwaves from 7 different directions at once is one of the coolest experiences that any gamer can have. For casual gamers, it enhances the experience and immersion of any game. For competitive gamers, you can hear people sneaking up behind you, so you gain a competitive advantage.
All of this means that real (not simulated) 7.1 surround sound is a valuable idea which till now has seemingly been overlooked by the gaming industry. The first industry player that delivers a true positional surround sound experience to the masses stands to profit handsomely, whether it's Oculus or Sony or someone else. So build it!
(That said, I have no idea what 60 virtual speakers means, but I wanted to share my experience with true positional surround sound. Also, the surround sound headset works fine in tandem with the Rift. So until the Oculus guys realize how important 3D positional audio is and ship their next product with a pair of surround sound headphones, you can get the same effect right now from the Tiamat.)
I'm pretty skeptical as to whether this really requires special headphones. Amazing-sounding recordings made with a binaural head can be played back on normal headphones, after all. It seems more like a signal processing problem.
Sort of analogous to the way Creative used to sell overwrought, overpriced hardware for creating sound effects with EAX when the CPU and signal-processing libraries could have been used to serve the same purposes.
As someone who is stereoblind, I really wish opening both eyes leading to depth perception were true for all of us...
Interestingly, some people with faulty depth perception have had that experience with Oculus Rift. I look forward to trying it out myself.
I bet they have just regular stereo and software. Here, take a pair of good stereo headphones and try this 3d demo. And don't forget to close your eyes.
Virtual barber shop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
I would imagine that they're just processing audio in a way to create a logical spherical arrangement, and sounds that fit into that sphere at certain points have equalisation applied to them to give the psychological effect of being far away or close; in effect, most things can be done with equalisation! For example, guitar effects boxes these day commonly "simulate" cabinets. Each speaker cabinet has its own resonant frequency, and the speakers in it also have certain frequency responses (they are not flat responses), hence the reason 4x12" Marshall cabs sound a certain way. The speakers also have sharp treble roll-offs, so these cabinet simulators are just putting an equaliser on the output signal that sounds like the frequency response of a particular cabinet. This is also the reason that signals taken from an amplifier's "direct out" that doesn't have this EQ applied sound fizzy - the sound doesn't have the same response as the speaker (which happens to be really ineffective at converting the input signal to the output sound), and so the guitarist will compare the speaker sound to the "direct out" sound and think the "direct out" sounds rubbish! In reality, the sound they are expecting to hear is the massively coloured sound of the speaker but they are hearing the true-sounding DI tone.
(Your ears are far more responsive to middle/treble frequencies and not bass, but bass gives the feeling of power and treble the perception of loudness, hence the reason most "rock" equalisers on hifis or MP3 players boost those two, so you think "Wow, this is really powerful and LOUD!")
BTW, that's a great demo. Haven't heard that in ages.
With old fashioned two-speaker headphones and binaural recording, you can already achieve a surprising level of audio spatialization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IXm6SuUigI
I'm not sure how the "60 virtual speakers" would work (it sounds like marketing terminology), but currently, the state-of-the-art in immersive in-game audio involves constructing an acoustically realistic head model, and harnessing the raytracing abilities of game engines and graphics cards to apply a material-based frequency attenuation curve at each bounce.
However I seem to recall Creative acquiring some audio company that had products with superior audio positioning technology, & basically axed the other product in favour of EAX or whatever its called..? Could be wrong
I have Diamond Sonic Impact 90 (Vertex AU8820) next to me on the wall :/ That was and is my best sound card to date.
oh, so you mean its a stereo headset?
I can also see a glove, similar to the early Nintendo efforts, with a keyboard that slides down over (or under) the hand, pivots 90 degrees and locks out between both hands. Speech recognition is of course great and all, but slightly humiliating to use (from experience), getting progressively moreso on a sliding scale of how many people can hear you talking to a computer. What we really need is either the sensor, as you mention, for 'air keyboard', or a brainwave reader that can intercept and interpret thought. Obviously one of those is more workable than the other, but no harm in planning ahead.
they are essentially a full screen Google Glass with "touch" based UI. i am excited for the opportunity to use something like this as an IDE.
Hopefully the product will be good. But I can't see myself using one and sat there waving my arms around like a lunatic. Instead of typing on a virtual keyboard, why not just use a laptop or netbook or something? It seems to be built to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
it could be good collaboration tool, many people touching/moving parts of the same application (or presentation, etc).
and as the video suggests, this interface makes more sense for something like 3d modeling (on paper).
Oculus is likely to announce DK2 at a session tomorrow:
Wednesday, March 19 | 11:00am-12:00pm (PDT)
Working with the Latest Oculus Rift Hardware and Software (Presented by Oculus VR) Speakers: Michael Antonov (Oculus VR), Nate Mitchell (Oculus VR) Format: Sponsored Panel Track: Programming
Summary: Since the debut of the original Oculus Rift development kit at GDC 2013, we've shown off a set of critical improvements including a high-definition display, positional tracking, and low-persistence support. Likewise, behind the scenes we've also been making critical improvements to the core Oculus SDK like new feature support, optimizations (particularly around latency), and overall simplicity.In this talk, we'll discuss everything you need to know to get started integrating the latest Oculus Rift hardware with your VR game or experience. The talk will be split into an overview of the latest hardware, a technical breakdown for engineers, an a game design discussion relevant to the new features. We'll also talk about our vision for future development hardware leading to the consumer Rift and what that path might look like.
But the name "Project Morpheus" just sounded like they were trying too hard. Of course this will probably get a much sexier name for release like "Playstation Virtual Reality Headset Environment".
Occulus Rift is a pretty cool name.
It's not trivial translating all the sensor data quickly and precisely into game camera movements.
That's an understatement. It's a totally awesome name.
Has anyone without stereoscopic vision tried any of these devices? What was your experience?
IIRC the big differentiator of Occulus Rift was lag - i.e.: to be truly immersive and "real" the system has to process and respond incredibly quickly. No mention of that anywhere from Sony.
http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014/map/6...