Oculus Rift: Bulky Thing You Put On Your Head or Gateway to Paradise?

I need one of these. What's the best plastic one?

acc to r/GoogleCardboard the de facto plastic one at the moment seems to be the ViewMaster VR: http://www.amazon.com/View-Master-Virtual-Reality-Starter-Pack/dp/B011EG5HJ2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447430811&sr=8-1&keywords=viewmaster+vr

$30 (only $10 more than most ofthe cardboard kits!) and super sturdy. The only drawback is that there's no headphone port or anything so yr stuck w/ Bluetooth headphones (though I have no idea how easy it is to use corded headphones w/ the cardboard Cardboards)

But the way that it clamps in is really clever and secure (w/ no risk of it falling out, like a lot of the cardboard ones) and it's compatible with a ton of diff phones

Happy to find out that The cardboard app is also avail for iPhone

i finally played a game with the oculus rift and the way i was able to look down and see my virtual body was the most :0 moment i've had in videogames since i played the mario 64 demo at target and realized that i could lightly push the control stick to make mario tiptoe around.

i dreamed of mario 64 for weeks.

uh so quake 1 on this.

please kill me

wow, is there a better use case?

You can use this to ... simulate going to the arcade? for some reason?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odnUK_n1Thg

not the same without the smell

or the chance to get beaten up and have your 10 pence pieces nicked by bigger kids hopped up on glue

uh so quake 1 on this.

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, December 29, 2015 10:39 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh so elite dangerous on this

and now uh morrowind. can't really recommend it to anyone unless like me putting your head inside morrowind is something you have Always Wanted.

so far the oculus is really only "immersive" in games about sitting in chairs -- elite, euro truck simulator, that kind of thing. (elite really is something -- probably best in show so far, rly plays to the thing's strengths. if only it were a slightly funner, less numbingly repetitive game in general. tentative excitement for no man's sky.) quake is a terrific novelty and i bet if i had a second dk2 that deathmatch would approach the sublime, but having multiple the matrix wires coming out of your head doesn't really go well with a lot of frantic, bodily turning in place. (i am very interested in the vive, which is whispering to me about some kind of platonic, full-body, true-cyberspace deathmatch experience, though i'm not sure how you fix the problem where the limits of your irl space are not the same as the limits of your imaginary space.)

2016 is being hyped as vr's Year but i don't actually see these popping up in every home until the video hardware necessary to run something besides tech demos is a lot cheaper. (so, 2017.) also there will need to be a lot more software that uses vr's quirks/limitations natively; for the oculus that means a lot of games about sitting in chairs and/or a lot of more abstract stuff where the primary interface is your gaze itself. (one thing the oculus is an ideal medium for is something like russian ark.) for the vive (or for "augmented reality" stuff like magic leap) that means something entirely different, which is gonna make for a pretty fractured and slow market i think.

i don't know what zuckerberg thinks we're gonna do with these btw. reading people's horrible political opinions is not going to be more fun with a bag on your head.

reading people's horrible political opinions is not going to be more fun with a bag on your head.

actually

yeah i didn't think that through really

the horrible political opinions are coming from inside the bag, is the thing, obv -- like, how do you look at people using their phones at lunch, in the bathroom, on the subway, at funerals, while DRIVING, and think, what these people really want is to completely enclose their head in plastic? this time, let go your conscious self, and act on instinct.

feel like we're still 5-10 years off from these being an actual mindblowing experience and not just the equivalent of a 3d movie for games

fewer than that i think, but yeah it's not really ready. play 15 minutes of elite dangerous any way you can, tho.

really it's a software question tho and vr won't be totally hampered on that front the way 3d was. (people liked avatar! then they never really got more.) 3d movies are such a lumbering corporate investment that they never managed to be anything except "normal movies, but in 3D". on the other hand it's really easy to download unity and make something.

there'll be plenty of "call of duty, but in 3d" and "skyrim, but in 3d" but really the thing needs, and will get, whole new genres.

yeah space sim is the #1 thing i think of for VR-friendly existing genres. #2 probably racing/driving games. beyond that there's not a lot

space sim is the only one so far where when you play it you think "how did i play these before? how did i fly the ship?"

launch: march 28

i've been paying little attention to the entire thing but i hope a friend picks one up so i can mess around with it for a while. i've never really tried VR (at least not since the Virtual Boy), not even the Google Cardboard thing.

tbh i am really interested in VR as a way to create really weird virtual spaces. i would be really into software geared for beginners that lets you make your own simple rooms, walls, lighting, sounds, etc, save them and share them with others. i have a pile of really terrible installation ideas saved in a really terrible google doc from way back when that i would love to try to replicate in VR and send to unsuspecting soon-to-be-former friends and acquaintances

i think that kind of thing is the major reason to get one of these

and the main way to create such a thing would be...to get a developer's kit somehow and do it in Unity?

i want to get one of these just so i can make it flash strobe lights with different colors and frequencies in each eye

it would be fun to send my dad (if we ever communicated) a room with only Trump mouths as doors, and every time you step through the door it adds another looping Trump audio clip to the soundtrack. while you're dealing with this in VR someone gorilla glues the headset to your face and steals your wallet, for example

i want to get one of these just so i can make it flash strobe lights with different colors and frequencies in each eye

exactly

friend of mine is working on some sort of VR music video project, seems like there's some space for non-interactive things like that specifically developed for the format

that's really neat. i'll have to look into that. if anyone knows of any good starting points for VR rookies trying to make shit feel free to post them here, i'd be very appreciative!

yeah Unity is really easy to learn and there are tons of tutorials online. here's one on the oculus developer site for a simple VR game. works in mobile/Gear VR as well:

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/game-engines/latest/concepts/unity-tutorial-rollaball-intro/

unity isn't the only platform and i believe requires a licensing fee that for instance UE4 doesn't -- i'm out of my depth here tho, there is plenty of argument online. also don't think there's any reason to get a developer's kit when the consumer model's coming out so soon, unless of course you can borrow somebody's cast-off, which btw is why i've been itt.

would def subject myself to yr nightmarescapes, km.

if i found out km was making vr experiences i would buy a vr

you can tell oculus or whoever i said that. see if they send you a kit

i tried the strobe in different eyes thing w anaglyph 3d video and it didn't really work. this new technology has a lot of promise and undiscovered territory especially irt abstract/experimental experiences.

making a wholly immersive psychotropic Dream Machine would be perfect for VR. but personally i think it's all still a bit young and whatever you develop is going to require at least some kind of traditional reference point.

i have my own inchoate history-teacher fantasies about its applications plus some even more inchoate notions about observers and gazes and little heisenberg parables but i haven't actually done any work yet

xpost

Dear Oculus or whoever, send me a nightmare generation machine. also, Will M sends his regards. xoxo PS see you in hell!

you accidentally posted it on ilx and didn't send it to me൫oculus.biz or wherever

i yelled it out the window too, i'm sure someone out there will understand!

This still needs like three more evolutions before i will buy it and i speak for all mankind

I've preordered the PlayStation one, but I already kind of know I'll use it about as much as I used the old eye toy camera.

someone get Karl one of these so we can have some stereoscopic animated gifs

oooh, that'd be kinda cool. i wonder if you can just do that with google cardboard, though? i really need to get off my butt and order one. or stay on my butt and order one, either way

i thought of a game where you have to maintain eye contact with faces contorted into expressions of grotesque agony and pain, thus causing them, gradually, to grow peaceful and content, and as you successfully progress the game keeps adding more and more faces in greater and greater excruciation until they are appearing too fast for you to look at any single one of them for long before your line of sight is obscured by a cluster of new, screaming faces, and you either a) quit or b) stop trying to process/heal every face and instead swerve your neck around trying for no particular reason to hold onto one or two specific ones until the game abruptly ends with no score or "achievements"

second idea: mario in the boo house

ooof, reminds me of high school, not sure i could relive that

faces contorted into expressions of grotesque agony and pain

reminds me of "Inland Empire".

the applications for horror style games is thick and tbh kind of scary. my heart is already racing when i'm in a particularly tense game of hide and seek in a Metal Gear Solid and I get spotted. with the added immersion of VR and inability to just look away it's likely there will be people having heart attacks while in VR. at that point the traditional self-regulation that video games have worked with for 20-or-so years would no longer be enough. we will have to invent a new kind of criteria that doesn't apply to movies, which can get an R for simply having curse words or nudity. in VR you could make a G-rated jump scare game that is by all appearances cute and harmless in still images yet is actually a public hazard due to immersion and intensity. figuring out how to test and judge these games as they get more and more sophisticated is going to be a doozy.

I'm interested in Rez VR!

Oh me too, except it's £25 and this will be the fourth time I've bought that game so...we'll see.

https://twitter.com/BigSportGB/status/789164293870661633

lol

the applications for horror style games is thick and tbh kind of scary. my heart is already racing when i'm in a particularly tense game of hide and seek in a Metal Gear Solid and I get spotted. with the added immersion of VR and inability to just look away it's likely there will be people having heart attacks while in VR. at that point the traditional self-regulation that video games have worked with for 20-or-so years would no longer be enough. we will have to invent a new kind of criteria that doesn't apply to movies, which can get an R for simply having curse words or nudity. in VR you could make a G-rated jump scare game that is by all appearances cute and harmless in still images yet is actually a public hazard due to immersion and intensity. figuring out how to test and judge these games as they get more and more sophisticated is going to be a doozy.

just tried one of these things for the first time and these were pretty much my thoughts exactly. one of the games was this alien planet thing where these two-legged mutant giraffes would walk all around, I think they were meant to be cute but I felt such weird feelings of anxiety as they approached me, especially since the controls were garbage (you couldn't walk, just warp to certain points). when the graphics for these things get better and less hologrammy then a dedicated horror game could inspire the sort of panic that could make someone run through a wall. these things do fuck with your head, a bit. anyway that's my 2 cents!

seems like the hardware is finally getting there and the cost is becoming more reasonable. now they just need the killer app?

https://kotaku.com/the-oculus-quest-is-how-virtual-reality-should-work-1835246896