Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

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I was able to get a demo of the Crescent Bay prototype (hand-built tech demo of the consumer version) at PAX East this year. I've also tried the DK1 and DK2.

If you've been playing with the DK1 or DK2, the consumer version is fundamentally better. Do not assume you know what the state of the art is until you've gotten your hands on a preview. I don't know exactly what the resolution differences are, and I don't care - it's not the relevant spec to compare. It's gotten to the point where resolution is "good enough" to trick the mind and anyone who says otherwise is bikeshedding. They've gotten the screen door effect under control. With head tracking implemented and drift solved as a side effect, two huge problems are gone. Their low-latency head tracking stops people from feeling nauseated like they did with DK1. I could barely stand without wanting to vomit after playing the Doom demo. The only game I could play for any length of time was a simple platform jumping game called Rift Rush.

I don't know what they consider their largest hurdles, but from my perspective the hardware/software problems are solved for now and they need excellent made-for-VR content. When done well, the effect is stunning - in one of that calmer, more exploration-oriented demos I just stared at the light glinting off a metal bowl as I moved around it for at least 30 seconds.

But the difference between "good" and "mind blowing" was often the result of things that nobody has thought about before. In the movie-like demos, sometimes I missed things because I had my back to the action. In VR movies, the user controls the camera and needs to be told where to look; that's a problem nobody making movies has ever faced before. Even Pixar's demo suffered from this - the action was too spread out for the screen's field of view.

I never got to use Crescent Bay, but I've got a DK2 at home. Resolution for me will be a non-issue once I can read smallish text on virtual signs/displays. I'm thinking mostly for games like Elite Dangerous and other simulators like that, where a cockpit display is part of the game. Do you think the crescent bay prototype is at that point? (this might be a naive question as it's been awhile since I've looked up anything on the newest prototypes)

Otherwise I'm with you. Positional tracking was the thing that really made it awesome for me. There are so many tiny head movements that you make when you're looking around; if positional tracking isn't pretty much 100%, then it just feels wrong.

I agree about the smaller text but at the same time, it's been more of an issue for me when the content wasn't created primarily with DK2-class hardware as the target. Elite is great and I feel like Frontier owes Oculus money because myself and just about everyone I know who got a DK2 also ended up buying Elite but it's still primarily designed for a monitor.

If you're targeting a game or other application for VR (and assuming generally similar hardware to DK2 or whatever), there are a lot of design decisions you can make to improve the experience. Something as simple as using larger text goes a long way. Color choices help, as does less focus on lists and menus in favor of gaze-based control.

Then there's the general stuff like "not trying to shoehorn that awesome first-person-shooter style that was so great on 2D screens into VR". Yeah, it's neat to look around in a FPS-style game but whereas seated or less frenetic experiences are gorgeous and immersive, asking someone to run around in first person while actually sitting in a chair is nauseating. I've seen all the omni-treadmills and other workarounds and I appreciate the way people are trying to engineer solutions but I feel like it misses the point. Some things just work well in VR while other things require a lot of tradeoffs or addons.

I think Minecraft is a good accidental example of what you're talking about, especially on the DK2.

It's natural pixel style makes you not notice the resolution at all, and all of the text is large, and easy to read. The cube nature also really makes me aware of the 3D, which is nice.

It doesn't do anything to deal with the FPS/nausea problem, though I don't react very poorly to playing an FPS in the rift as long as it uses a keyhole style control with the mouse (half-life 2 is a prime example of that).

One other thing I like about minecraft on the rift is that it really shows off the true blacks you can get with the OLED display. It smears a bit, but it's still really rad to look into a mine shaft and have it fade to actual darkness (not sure if the consumer version is planning for OLED off hand).

I definitely agree that it'll be cool when game shops start really thinking about building their games for VR, and that they can work around VR weaknesses.

Weird scaling is another issue, when something was scaled to look right from 2D on a screen, but drops the ball in VR. I played Skyrim using Vireo and the mountains ended up looking like glorified hills, heh.

Another funny issue I had was playing Alien Isolation. VR made it super obvious that looking out through a spaceship window into "space" was actually looking at a black wall about twenty ft away.

Looking forward to wherever VR goes, either way.

Elite Dangerous could do a bit to make their text easier to read even on the DK2 - I think they expect players to rely on other visual signals and so they shrink their text too much.

That said, I think Crescent Bay would help to solve the problem.

Changing the colours (have to manually edit some config files) in elite dangerous made the text easier to read. green text on black background is a lot easier to read then red on black (black being the space in the background for the most part)

Yes, it's due to the pentile subpixel layout. It has twice as many green subpixels as red and blue.

It's more related to the chromatic aberration, where the correction is not perfect (esp when not correctly configured) and using only one color avoid the issue. Of course the best choice is green, in resolution and brightness.

Crescent Bay was, for me, a revelation. I don't know if I'm a born again true believer now, but I will say that a lot of skepticism washed away with that demo. It really was a very startling this-is-no-gimmick-anymore kind of moment for me personally.

As I said in my other comment, I'm really surprised by this. When I tried a DK2 and a CB back to back, I couldn't tell a difference (and not in a good way, they were both extremely screendoor-y and pixel-y) other than the headphones.

Hmm, the CB is a huge improvement over the DK2. Did you notice the screen door effect in CB? It's much reduced. Also, CB has two screens.

Yes, both of them looked equally screendoor-y and pixel-y to me.

As an owner of a DK2, I still haven't really had that moment. I'm really hoping that they're able to consistently deliver that kind of experience with the CV1.

> I don't know what they consider their largest hurdle

It seems like there are still plenty of challenges to solve with VR devices. John Carmack recently spoke [1] at the University of Texas at Dallas and mentioned that designing for VR is all about tradeoffs--hardware just isn't powerful enough to reach the ideal combination of resolution, framerate, etc.

He also talked about how to design media to work well with the current generation of VR devices. For example he said to avoid accelerating the user, because this commonly causes users to feel sick (due to mismatch between what your eyes and inner ear are telling your brain). Moving at a constant velocity is fine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBtXMtUNpdE

I'm really surprised by your comments about Crescent Bay. I used a DK2 and a Crescent Bay back to back, and literally could not tell the difference aside from the headphones. Both were horribly screen-doory-y and pixel-y.

I own a DK2 and have demoed Crescent Bay several times this year and have a hard time believing this. Which demos were screen door-y to you on the CB? i.e. which specific scenes... please be specific.

I did both Crytek and Unreal's VR demos at GDC, the dinosaur island and the Hobbit scene respectively.

I'm confident that both the Rift and the Vive consumer versions will be good enough.

The DK2 is pretty close, but if you use it a lot the tracking isn't good enough as are the screen resolution and the refresh rate.

All these problems have been addressed so it should be great!

The problem with the Oculus is not the display, it's the controls. What are they going to use in order to take care of user input in the virtual world ? At least Valve has a clear answer for that.

i found the screen resolution to be a disappointment in DK2. Otherwise it was fine, nausea is still there, but i guess we 'll never be able to get rid of it.

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