The Oculus image they output now is usually a 16:9 image. Not sure exactly what they are doing. The Vive has a mirror mode toggle to output the two eyes at the same time, only the left, or only the right. Most games that i've played do their own output as well which is a 16:9 image. Fantastic Contraption is rendering the game again actually where you can see the level from different angles or from the players eyes.
Interesting, thanks. <3 I like the spectator mode.
"Rift and Vive," sorry.
supposedly more comfortable to wear and with clearer optics - less screen door and larger sweet spot. i've seen a couple of vive videos where the user has red marks on the forehead and under the eyes, which could suggest it puts pressure on the front of the face or is front heavy
i think if it was a headset only comparison, you'd have a lot fewer people on the fence and considering both. its the vive lighthouse and motion controllers that are the big difference
Interesting. I'd have guessed HTC would beat Facebook on stuff like ergonomics and general design. Not that HTC is necessarily hot shit, but they do have more experience, at least. HTC seemed to do comparatively well on price though. /shrug
But yeah, I was actually sorta wondering why so many were still considering Rift.
The reason PS uses big colored trackers is because PS camera is a normal camera, i.e. standard sensor with IR block filter, because they wanted those sorts of mixed reality games with PS camera. You cant use infrared LEDs because the camera can't pick them up well, so they have to use light in the visible spectrum which the camera is obviously sensitive to. The reason they are big is because tracking visible light is harder than tracking relatively moderate brightness IR LEDs because in most situations there will be a lot more issues with competing visible light in your room than infrared. Making it bigger let's them identify the markers easier. The Rift doesn't need to sense visible light so they use a sensor with a visible light filter but let's IR pass through. If anything I would say the Rift tracking systen a bit more robust, though both should be adequate. Vive has the best solution.
As mentioned by TTP, the variable-visible light is actually easier for the camera to pick up than infrared light, so you need more IR sources to get a good lock. They're smaller because you need more of them, and if they're spaced too closely, they won't appear as distinct to the camera. Finally, because the IR targets are smaller,
they tend to shrink to nothingness at range:
"The Rift DK2 camera has a resolution of 752×480. The headset of a user sitting just a few feet away can only be seen by a small portion of those pixels (as the view of the headset only takes up a portion of the total pixels that comprise the scene). As you get further away, the headset is represented on fewer and fewer pixels which means the computer has much less data to work with, McCauley says.
You can think of it like this: if at 8 feet from the camera the headset only takes up 94×60 of the 752×480 sensor, its essentially like trying to track the headset with a 94×60 pixel camera up close with the headset filling its entire field of view. The further away you move the headset, the lower resolution your camera becomes (in a sense); theres no effective means of zooming the camera in when the headset is at range so that it can use more of its image sensor.
Several tricks have been devised to counter this reduction in available pixels at range, like dynamically boosting the LED brightness to create a larger light source for the camera to spot, using the flashing of LEDs to glean additional information about the tracked object, and utilizing dynamic exposure of the camera. At a certain point however, the resolution of the camera-based tracking becomes the fundamental range-limiting factor."
Well, but there are more of them. A lot more.
Right, not only do they need more hardware to maintain a lock, they need to get sorta fancy with it as described above. That's why I say the color(s) PSVR uses makes for more robust tracking.
I don't really see any reason to suspect that PSVR tracking is any better than Oculus tracking.
By the time Oculus add the extra hardware and implementation tweaks dictated by their color choice, it may not be.
I'd especially not use the word "robust" given that visible-spectrum tracking is inherently affected by outside conditions.
It's actually
less affected than IR, which is precisely what causes all of the issues described above. So as I said, PSVR is more robust because of the color. Sure, the lasers in Vive are even more resistant to interference making it more robust than Rift or even PSVR but I wasn't talking about Vive, and it's not immune to interference either.
while we are talking about tracking - why do they need to figure out orientation via the lighthouse/camera? isnt it only the accelerometers that drift, not the gyros? so they would only need to see where in space the headset was, yet they have these constellation arrangements to allow them to calculate orientation too.
You can get a fairly good lock with just the IMU that's how the Move wands work but yes, the gyros do drift, and I think it's hard to really get a "definitive" orientation lock when you only have G to use as a reference point. The Move wands actually add a three-axis magnetometer to measure orientation against the Earth's magnetic field, but I think it's fairly prone to interference in the real world, so I don't think it got used much, and I dunno if it's being included in any of the headsets. In any case, the cameras/beacons just make for an easy way to get a solid orientation lock.
RGB subpixel for every pixel is hardly "custom".
It's atypical for OLED, as is 120 Hz and low persistence. Sony's panels are just as "custom" as the others.
I'm in two minds about the roadmap comment though. Yes, I think HTC and valve in particular have overdosed on controlled tech demos to showcase room scale, but is it their responsibility to produce a roadmap of games coming out? Should HTC and Oculus be considered platform holders like Sony/MS, or are they peripheral makers and it is up to individual developers and publishers to communicate plans and for the gaming press to collate that information to build a picture of what is coming?
I see what you're saying, but there's still a bit of a Chicken & Egg going on here. Without some sort of concerted effort to push both hardware and software, there won't be a lot of consumer interest, which makes it hard to push hardware and software
Yes, this is just another PC peripheral, but it's not simply a higher res monitor. There's no reason to buy one without content created specifically for it, and there's no reason to create content specifically for it if nobody has one.
Hype from all three parties hardware, software, and enthusiasts will help, to be sure, but whether that alone is enough to achieve critical mass is a valid concern, at least. On the flip side, Sony will be helping to increase adoption and mindshare of the technology in general, because they
are making a concerted effort to push it. (More so than PCVR, at least; I'm not saying those guying aren't trying/bothering/whatever.) So that will help the PCVR guys just by stirring up more interest among the general population, and starting to sell high-end VR software, justifying its continued development.
