GDC is for Palmer to convince gamers and developers that they have a good product.
Bigtime, i seriously hope they have a new kit on show, its probably too early for any demo of Nimble VR or 13th Lab, hopefully though.
CV1 is supposed to be higher than 1080p. Let's hope for at least 2kIf Kreijlooc is right about it being decades before we even get to the fidelity of my 1080p monitor, I really don't see VR movies and whatnot taking off at all. It might be cool at first, but I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed by how bad the fidelity is and if you cant tell them that it will improve drastically in the near future, then that's a lot of wind out of the sails if you ask me. People might put up with it in the beginning, but when 4k TV's are more popular and affordable, I think its a really hard sell to ask people to put on goggles to watch movies in SD-like fidelity instead.
I'm still interested in VR, particularly for sim racing, but I kind of agree with the doubters that its not going to be big now. I'm also super bummed because of it....
Well yea, 1440p/2.5k will obviously be minimum resolution for CV1, I expect.
Ikr. They just have to announce something big or it would be pointless
You need a big booth to show the Crescent Bay-style demos. At Oculus Connect they were encouraging people to walk around a fairly large square area. They probably have several set up to reduce waiting times, so that requires a huge space. I wouldn't interpret a large booth to mean they have anything to announce. (However, they always have something interesting to say, so I look forward to the various interviews.)
It's already begun:
Oculus CES booth
Let me be hopeful
If Kreijlooc is right about it being decades before we even get to the fidelity of my 1080p monitor, I really don't see VR movies and whatnot taking off at all. It might be cool at first, but I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed by how bad the fidelity is and if you cant tell them that it will improve drastically in the near future, then that's a lot of wind out of the sails if you ask me. People might put up with it in the beginning, but when 4k TV's are more popular and affordable, I think its a really hard sell to ask people to put on goggles to watch movies in SD-like fidelity instead.
I'm still interested in VR, particularly for sim racing, but I kind of agree with the doubters that its not going to be big now. I'm also super bummed because of it....
The key difference there is a low resolution Wii game on a TV doesn't give you motion sickness or vision discomfort (at least, not to a significant extent for most people). A low resolution (and for VR, 1080p is low resolution) VR game can cause motion sickness and vision discomfort for many people. It isn't the sole cause of these things, but it contributes. As metareferential says, with the right content, 1080p can be made to work, but it is borderline. One more step up in resolution is what it needs, even for Average Joe. The enthusiast will still want more, but that should be the baseline to aim for.
And in 5 years when 4k TV sets are commonplace? Is SD-like fidelity still going to be acceptable?
Yea, I've tried a DK2. But I think you are misunderstanding what I'm bummed about. Its not about not having the fidelity of a 1080p monitor now. Its about not being able to have that within the next 20 years! I can fully accept 1440p or whatever right now and have it look subpar(compared to what I'm used to), but if that's not gonna rapidly improve, I wouldn't say the future is very bright for VR in terms of global appeal and casual usage. I was always under the impression that things were going to improve quite quickly, so I'd been very bullish on VR's chances, because even if the first 2-3 years only sees VR as a niche device, I could always respond to the complaints about how it looks with, "It'll look a lot better really soon, don't worry." If I cant say that, I can do nothing but admit, "Yea, VR doesn't look very good, sorry...".
Nor will a low resolution VR system. Resolution makes absolutely no difference whatsoever on VR sickness or discomfort. All low resolution does is make it hard to see details (same as doing any activity, VR or not, in low res).
Agreed - in November Oculus said it would be "many months". May is not "many months" from November.
They were also in the previous CES with the dev kit so...
I want to be sceptical too, but Kreijlooc typically knows what he's talking about when it comes to VR.
I know VR will be awesome. You're preaching to the choir here. I'm in Day 1. But getting that across to the entire world? I think VR will absolutely blow people away when they try it, but if I don't have a good response to, "Why does this look so bad?", I feel that's a major hurdle to overcome, especially when people's standards are about to go up even further with affordable 4K TV's on the horizon. Again, I'm thinking more how VR is going to come across to people in 3-5 years than it will now. Will people really want to watch a movie or a sports event in the equivalent of 480p when they have a 4K television in the living room?
I completely disagree. Resolution is one of many contributing factors that affect motion sickness, and it is quite clearly related to vision discomfort. A lower resolution causes you to strain your eyes more to resolve distant detail, and it means that there is only a strong sense of stereo depth at shorter distances. This is one of the reasons why VR demos with cockpit views tend to reduce nausea - there is a lot of close detail that is less affected by the low resolution and provide a greater sense of depth. A low res also means that you can see individual pixels, and in the case of DK2, the subpixels too - meaning that there are times where immersion can break down, and you stop seeing the display as your world and start seeing it as a display panel, potentially upsetting your spatial awareness. A low resolution also produces more severe aliasing, which is a bigger, more distracting problem with stereoscopic 3D.
If Kreijlooc is right about it being decades before we even get to the fidelity of my 1080p monitor, I really don't see VR movies and whatnot taking off at all. It might be cool at first, but I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed by how bad the fidelity is and if you cant tell them that it will improve drastically in the near future, then that's a lot of wind out of the sails if you ask me. People might put up with it in the beginning, but when 4k TV's are more popular and affordable, I think its a really hard sell to ask people to put on goggles to watch movies in SD-like fidelity instead.
I'm still interested in VR, particularly for sim racing, but I kind of agree with the doubters that its not going to be big now. I'm also super bummed because of it....
Where's this happening?It's already begun:
Oculus CES booth
Oculus was so full of shit when they said they had no motion control solution. This is awesome.
I wouldn't expect this as their solution for gaming motion controls, though. This seems far more useful for menu/UI navigation and whatnot. Which should still be really cool, but it doesn't solve the issue that gamers are interested in.
Well basically, I don't see VR being 'mainstream' for general media use before it gets moderately high fidelity and we get something like foveated rendering for dealing with the 'power issue' for gaming. Until then, I think its something that will still be damn cool, but not necessarily something everybody wants to have or use regularly. I don't necessarily expect VR to explode in the 1-2 years following its commercial release, so I'm worried about it being a case of big name content creation and potential R&D seeing the 'not huge' market for it yet and knowing that the major advances are still far off and simply not investing to produce this accelerated timeline.
Well its not lasers, but Magic Leap is basically all about projecting the image directly onto your retina. We haven't seen it yet, but it is exciting if it works.
