I finally got to spend a decent amount of time with my Rift. I'll try to summarize my impressions (new-ish computer with GTX 970):
Pros:
- The tracking is spot on. The camera provides a wide enough field of view that it never lost me no matter how fast I whipped my head around in Eve Valkyrie. The tracking is night and day compared to DK2 and it's at a point now that I think everyone will be happy with it for seated experiences (stood up in a few things I tried and that worked great as well, but I can't say how well it does a full room). The higher refresh rate (compared to DK2) and the improved tracking combine to make the experience as smooth as I could have hoped for.
- The screen is much improved from DK2 but there are shafts of light from bright objects like you guys have mentioned. I'm guessing the Fresnel lenses are to blame and that both Vive and Rift probably have the same issue, but it's distracting in some menu's and games. The resolution is improved from DK2 by a lot but you can still see the SDE if you look for it. Having said that, it really is at a point where you'd have to be focusing on it to notice it during gameplay at all. Hopefully devs will account for the light shafts going forward. Colors have a tendency to wash out at times but I'm almost certain it's the lenses/those light shafts and not the panels themselves.
- The comfort is much improved from DK2. Getting the proper fit was quick and I didn't notice any fatigue from a few hours of playing (other than my poor neck from the aforementioned head whipping in Eve Valkyrie). The cloth wrap is a nice touch and the placement of the headphones is spot on.
- The built in audio is greatly appreciated. Having to mess with a separate pair of headphones is a hassle and it's nice that they've incorporated it into the design. It's not going to match a pair of audiophile headphones in terms of sound quality but the convenience factor makes it worth it.
- The Oculus Home software itself seems well made and I like how it comes up when you put the headset on automatically. I know people are concerned about the services always running but man... compared to what you had to do to even get a game to run on DK2, this is such an improved experience. I'd still like to see them add a services toggle button but the user experience is greatly improved. What I didn't like was having to take the headset off to "finish installation on the desktop" in a few things. Need to figure out how to make that more seamless.
- I had been worried about the FOV because of differing opinions I had been hearing. Having said that, to my eye, the FOV is bigger than DK2 and also rounded with no hard edges on the side like DK2. Your mileage may vary if you have a wildly different IPD than me, but I enjoyed the return to a FOV that isn't square. Seeing that hard edge on the side in DK2 was a bummer.
- I'm writing this while Oculus Home takes an unfortunate amount of time to download more games. Eve Valkyrie (5gb download) took like half an hour on a gigabit connection so that definitely needs to get better. This isn't exactly peak usage time.
Eve Valkyrie is like a real version of what must have been going through my head as I played X-Wing vs Tie Fighter with a joystick as a kid. I don't know what kind of legs it has, how many modes, etc, but what I did get to play (finding players is hard right now since few people have Rifts) was fantastic. Tracking an opponent with your head while pulling your ship around to get a shot is intuitive and they've done a good job with the HUD design so that you know where enemies are at any given time. I look forward to playing a whole lot more of this when there are more players to be found.
The other game I tried (boy...I can't stress this enough, the download speeds have got to improve) is Lucky's Tale. I'd have liked the camera to be zoomed out a bit (Lucky was capable of going out of my FOV at the bottom at times) but other than that the 3D platforming is a lot of fun. I can see why they picked this as a launch pack-in for sure since it's probably very unlikely to make someone sick (I've never been nauseous in a VR headset so it's hard for me to give impressions of that).
The two real downsides to this headset for me right now are the lack of motion controls and the light shafts I mentioned. One will be fixed with the arrival of Oculus Touch but I don't know what they're going to do about the light shafts. It can be avoided by not putting bright objects against a darker background to some degree, but if it's a physical property of the lenses, that's unfortunate. Trade-offs had to be made for V1 I suppose.
My impressions are obviously colored by the fact that Oculus gave me a free Rift, but I'm pretty happy with what they've managed to build in such a short amount of time. I'm really looking forward to playing Adrift and Chronos shortly.
The quality of Lucky's Tale is probably the biggest surprise of the Oculus Launch for me personally (besides massive logistics problems I guess). It kinda looked like one of those games ported from an iPad and I guess it was always going to be okayish and when it was picked up as a pack in it sort of enforced that impression for me ('probably didn't cost much, will probably receive middling reviews'). I was wrong.
I definitely thought it was going to be a short little thing designed mainly for kids and I was pleasantly surprised.
