flipswitch
Member
The cable management in that video is damn good.
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HTC Vive Launch Thread -- Computer, activate holodeck
- Thread starter taco543
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Man, as much as I've enjoyed the Rift, I've always imagined VR being a room scale thing, or at least, 360 with tracked controllers. I am kinda bummed that oculus hasn't put much emphasis on this, but I get it. When touch arrives I hope their tracking system will allow for something like this... Seeing people teleport around with even a small play area is so cool and holds so much potential. That's how VR should be... it completely circumnavigates the nausea issue by eliminating artificial locomotion. The whole seated with a gamepad thing looks less and less interesting in light of this, and I wonder what the VR landscape will look like in a year from now, and what kind of set-up consumers are going to prefer. I know plenty of games will require sitting (racing sims, platformers, etc), but I wouldn't want to play a game sitting down when I could be standing.
I was watching some of my friends play Warhammer, over a dinner table recently... and I was just thinking to myself. Man, how cool would this be if you could input the dimensions of your physical table, and play a tabletop game like that in VR in the same physical space, leaning over the table to get a better view, or reposition a piece.
I was watching some of my friends play Warhammer, over a dinner table recently... and I was just thinking to myself. Man, how cool would this be if you could input the dimensions of your physical table, and play a tabletop game like that in VR in the same physical space, leaning over the table to get a better view, or reposition a piece.
Pops Maellard
Member
Roomscale, tabletop Warhammer would take over my life. Also, buying a VR setup and necessary PC would probably cost slightly less than physical Warhammer.
A few months ago I was certain the Rift was the go-to VR experience. Fast forward today I feel like Oculus dropped the ball on just about everything possible.
What really bothers me is I still have the Rift preordered and they have had zero communication with their supporters as of late. Just a shroud of secrecy beyond that Oculus launch event. We have no updates at all on Touch, no idea if they are ever going to work on Room Scale tech or anything. I am very close to canceling my Rift and preordering a Vive because of the facebook secrecy they go going on.
I look over at all the Vive stuff and I feel like I'm missing the party. Though my problem is that I have maybe a 6x6 space for room scale max and in the middle of that spot, a ceiling fan. I mean I could move some stuff around and possibly get a 6x7 space or something but in conclusion, I'm not sure how well Room Scale would really work for me, if at all which is kind of depressing as it looks absolutely ground breaking and awesome. Actually I would have jumped on a Vive already if it wasn't for that.
What really bothers me is I still have the Rift preordered and they have had zero communication with their supporters as of late. Just a shroud of secrecy beyond that Oculus launch event. We have no updates at all on Touch, no idea if they are ever going to work on Room Scale tech or anything. I am very close to canceling my Rift and preordering a Vive because of the facebook secrecy they go going on.
I look over at all the Vive stuff and I feel like I'm missing the party. Though my problem is that I have maybe a 6x6 space for room scale max and in the middle of that spot, a ceiling fan. I mean I could move some stuff around and possibly get a 6x7 space or something but in conclusion, I'm not sure how well Room Scale would really work for me, if at all which is kind of depressing as it looks absolutely ground breaking and awesome. Actually I would have jumped on a Vive already if it wasn't for that.
Dreams-Visions
Member
FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
*breathes*
My Vive is out for delivery and I spend some time yesterday on preparing my launch library:
Now to do some work before it comes here.
I've been looking for a reason to buy universe sandbox all day. Is it actually awesome? The videos I've seen make it seem like it's something you'd see everything it had to offer within a few hours. Is there anything deeper? Some mesmerizing visuals I'm missing or something?
Here's a really dumb question, how do you see the edge enhanced camera chaperon? I only see the grid.
By the way, Budget Cuts and The Gallery and stuff like that is fantastic and shows what deeper VR experiences can be like but Space Pirate Trainer is just ridiculously addictive in its simplicity.
By the way, Budget Cuts and The Gallery and stuff like that is fantastic and shows what deeper VR experiences can be like but Space Pirate Trainer is just ridiculously addictive in its simplicity.
Super Rookie
Member
Any UK CC orders been shipped yet?
My payment is still in holding state.
Between this and my Rift my VR hype is slowly turning to rage....
My payment is still in holding state.
Between this and my Rift my VR hype is slowly turning to rage....
The moment they announced they weren't shipping with touch is the moment they lost the message IMO. I've been reflecting these last few days and what they told us at Steam Dev Days wound up being true - the demo we tried (the "Valve Room") indeed was something we'd have in our homes within 3 years. They did it in 2. Oculus didn't stick to the vision and launched something well behind the vision valve sold me on that day.
The success of the vive is the success of lighthouse. None of this happens if it's not for lighthouse, IMO. They engineered a brilliant solution to what had been a constant problem since the 1980's with incredible elegance and they don't get nearly enough credit for it. Lighthouse, what it is and does conceptually, is an enormous leap forward for technology. They shamed a whole bunch of dedicated research teams IMO.
What's exciting is hearing Alan Yates talk about the other systems they have in R&D, some of which he says are viable. He won't go into detail about how they work, but he leaks their codenames, which are similar to lighthouse (foghorn, for example).
Alan Yates said that, when Oculus sold Mark Zuckerberg on VR, they didn't show him an oculus demo. Rather, they actually demoed for him the Valve Room, and after he purchased Oculus they tried to poach Valve's VR team. Alan Yates said they failed, and that the great majority of the VR team stayed behind at Valve. I suspect that's why valve was able to deliver the system they promised at Dev Days while Oculus was not.
artsi
Member
Yeah they've really fucked up with some countries, I've heard other people in my country (Finland) paying 90 and getting the cheapest possible 7-day shipping.
Better ask for a refound on that
Indeed.
When I heard details about lighthouse is when I jumped on the Vive hype train.
VlaudTheImpaler
tl;dr
I'm not kidding when I say that I can't wait for the movie.
If people like me are right and this all really is the beginning of a transformation for human-machine interaction, and VR/AR becomes a tightly integrated, dominant medium, there will undoubtedly be movies (or at least books) about what's going down at the moment. This is a classic silicon valley soap opera.
This is the video that made me get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTpL1A2tkYg
I'm a fool for cosmos-related things and this sandbox seems to have good physics so I thought this would be a fun thing to mess around in VR.
Dreams-Visions
Member
For windlands, it seems you will get access to those options if you hold Alt during launch. At least that was the case before the final release.
Not sure about the lab. Thought it runs adaptive quality that scales to your hardware?
The HTC Vive lightouse tech definitely seems lightyears beyond what Oculus has shown so far. I read somewhere that Carmack also made a comment about Touch being delayed because they were having problems with tracking or something though I have not verified this myself.
I think my greatest concern is that I'll go with a Vive and Oculus will some how quickly beat HTC (HTC company health is relatively poor) with their facebook bucks. I mean realistically I feel like facebook could buy HTC with some of their couch cushion change.
I don't have a lot of money so I can't afford both or I would go with both so I am really trying to support the VR set that has the biggest potential to succeed as a product and while nobody obviously knows for sure, I'm really trying to make an educated guess here as again I don't really have enough money to fully support both.
It's funny because choosing between the two has been one of the hardest decisions I have faces in a long time. lol
kittoo
Cretinously credulous
Wait, what? Is this real? How is Zuckerberg not super furious at this? This is lying and certainly disingenuous, if not illegal.
I think another very obvious one is reducing teleport cooldown.
DOT DASH DOT
Member
Wouldn't bet on it, but we live in hope..
The way things are going in these early days of VR, interoperability trumps exclusivity. The past few days have been filled with news of Oculus 'exclusives' getting Vive ports. And in less than 24 hours since the Vive Launched, there is already a working Rift->Vive translation layer software out there that already runs a demo and one game.
It doesn't make sense to sell software to only a small chunk of VR gamers, because VR sales are going to be naturally small for a while. Just like how it's not viable for AAA games to skip platforms, the same will happen with VR. I'm glad a PS4k is coming because it means PSVR can keep up with advancing standards and devs will be able to target that headset going forward as well. If you're making VR software, especially VR games, you need all the headset consumers to be your potential customers.
Thus far, SteamVR looks like a very viable platform, and OpenVR is gaining steam as well. Soon enough OSVR will be a real option for PC gamers as well, and before you know it, it really won't matter which particular headset you have. So don't worry about HTC's health - their headset is more concerned with the viability of SteamVR and OpenVR at the moment. If HTC dies, your headset doesn't become useless (and besides, when foveated rendering comes in the next couple of years, you'll want to upgrade anyways).
IMACOMPUTA
Member
I was thinking about the teleporting in multiplayer situations. It's probably not ideal, but it'd help if there was a running animation tween put in place that only other players can see.
So Zuck bought Oculus based off a Vive demo? Crazy.
Isn't this really Valve tech though and HTC is just the first to have hardware? We will probably see more hardware vendors in the future.
Isn't this really Valve tech though and HTC is just the first to have hardware? We will probably see more hardware vendors in the future.
Very select. Only one in LA, one in NY (in their respective areas. There's a single demo in Chicago as well.)
I was watching someone play Vanishing Realms and I liked how the guy used repeated teleportation to basically mimic walking. You can't teleport very far per teleport, and there is no cooldown but rather a very quick fadeout that prevents you from just holding down the button.
I'll have to play with teleportation time and cooldown, because getting teleportation working well is likely figuring out the right combination of both.
Not true. There seems to be one 10 miles away from me in Chicago.
I would be pretty angry (if I wasn't a queue jumping paypaller).
Incidentally I was told yesterday by the online chat people that my order had shipped. Under normal circumstances I'd be excited, but I just didn't believe them. It's bizarre how poorly their stock/tracking database works.
artsi
Member
It's not like Oculus smuggled him to Valve offices blindfolded, he knew what he saw and what he bought.
They're just trying to do the same with Touch now.
If we get shipments this week then I think people have a right to be furious (to HTC) as they would be lying that they're double checking order timestamps.
Yeah, I updated my post before you mentioned it
Looks to be one in Gulfport, Mississippi as well. They're probably gonna add more stores as the date gets closer.
I hope so.
It wasn't the vive then, it was Valve's custom demo. They had a custom made headset with 2 720p screens running vertically and a mounted camera. The camera watched the room, which was covered in what looked like giant QR codes. Thanks to the stickers on the wall, the demo could track in 1:1 space and it was fucking mindblowing. The demo they had us try was super basic, like one demo was us standing in a box that was textured with newspaper clippings and walking to a hole in the middle that revealed we were very high up, to demonstrate vertigo.
This was all back before the DK2 even existed. This was my first taste of positional tracking, and going from the DK1 to the valve room demo was like a religious experience. I'm not lying when I say it was one of the most impressive leaps in technology I had ever seen and it instantly ruined my DK1 for me.
Here is mark zuckerberg trying the demo that made him buy oculus:
The big problem with the valve room demo was that nobody could figure out how to make it work in a home environment. Valve steadfastly defended inside out positional tracking - it was superior for occlusion and overall tracking - but the setup of several anchors to track was something nobody had figured out since the 1980's. Valve obviously solved the problem with lighthouse, but this was after they and oculus had stopped talking.
Oculus, meanwhile, experimented with other ways to doing markerless inside-out positional tracking. One system they worked on used a prism to scatter IR dots around the room for an IR camera on the rift to track:
That's a picture Palmer Luckey took of prototyping. Obviously they never got their inside out tracking system working. I think that's why Touch isn't ready - they spent so much time trying to solve inside-out tracking, then ultimately gave up and settled for outside-in tracking and worked to try and solve the inherent occlusion issues it has.
Right, I assume they will have other headsets out soon enough. Maybe Sanyo or one of those companies.
moniker
Member
The Vive didn't exist back then. What they demoed was basically the future of VR. Then Valve invented Lighthouse, the future became the present and here we are.
This is something that you keep bringing up. What does the economic health of HTC have to do with anything!? The tech is all Valve, who cares about HTC!?
That's a future I can believe in.
When it was revelead at E3 last year that Oculus was shipping with a non-custom/non-3D gamepad (without a chance to buy wands on day one) it seriously blew my mind at the ineptitude being displayed. It was crystal clear that it was a major shortcoming and damaging to the launch. Now we are seeing this play out with Vive reaping the rewards.
Good summary of the events.
HTC is producing, shipping, and providing support for all of the hardware.
That's why you should care.
And if they go bankrupt Valve will just get LG or someone to do the same
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