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

http://mimeacademy.net/

Double Dare Simulator: VR Slime Edition

imagine getting slimed in VR, that would be pretty rad

i all of a sudden realized what game this soon-forgotten stopgap hardware was built to have remade on it: a mind forever voyaging

i feel like people are still kinda acting like vr is gonna be a thing in a somewhat even more farfetched way than apple watch becoming a thing
if we can get through the holiday i kinda hope that will calm this down

Does anyone here have one of those google cardboard phone holders? I have an iPhone 6, which I might upgrade at some point in the near term, and was wondering if anyone had a recommendation. I watched a few VR movies on the Within app and am sold enough on the concept that I'd shell out a few bucks to get the dual-image effect

Definitely worth picking one up, in terms of recommendations though I can only recommend you don't get the one I got, which was pretty flimsy and badly put together.

I think google talked about hard plastic ones earlier this year though? Not sure whether anyone's actually making/selling those yet.

http://www.view-master.com/

oh ffs no it turns out that was their april fool shit this year. Man, if your only idea for an april fool gag is to announce an actual improvement which people actually want to an actual product you already promote, maybe best not to bother eh?

(xp to me)

That one definitely looks cool (although after tilting my phone around, I'm wondering if a head strap isn't the worst idea) but are you recommending that as one you've tried? xp

i am not tbh but it's very cheap and likely a good test of the tech.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/08/the-new-view-master-deluxe-vr-is-the-best-cheap-vr-headset-available/
My hands on VR experience has been limited to the NYT cardboard giveaway (interesting but not anything I could use for more than ten minutes) and an hour with an oculus rift which felt more or less as novel and as disposable as the 3D element of the 3DS

mh the best one to get is the viewmaster for sure but you'll need wireless speakers as it doesn't have a hole for the headphone port

I have a viewmaster and it's great (I haven't tried the cardboard ones but the VM is only like $10-15 more so why not get something way more durable, eh?)

steve, the new one will have a headphone jack; check that gizmodo link

ooh

ugh now i have to upgrade!!!

i feel like people are still kinda acting like vr is gonna be a thing in a somewhat even more farfetched way than apple watch becoming a thing]

Is this a general consensus, that mainstream interest in VR has peaked? I don't nec agree. Obviously the high cost of Oculus/Vive, and gimmicky low-quality nature of Google Cardboard is holding things back but it still seems like early days. Interested to know what people think.

a lot of art/creativity festival things I follow were really into augmented reality four or five years ago, and while google glass seemed like a misfire, the stuff that people were using for projects -- geotagging, images and animation overlaid on live pictures on cell phones, are big now even if gimmicky. the pokemon go and snapchat stuff is cheesy but widespread

all the same festivals have had VR art tracks over the last year or two

i tried Google Tilt Brush. That shit fuckin rules

xp: clearly the business side doesn't think it's peaked and zuckerberg's long game interest suggests everyone genuinely believe this is a whole new form of media. i remain deeply deeply doubtful.

it's interesting because it's the convergence of several pieces of technology that have been independently developed but work in concert for the consumer devices. you have the use of goggles or screens to provide an immersive perspective rather than a single screen with a fixed view. then there's the human interface devices -- motion and orientation detection in phones makes things like google cardboard and its peers possible and has driven the device accuracy while driving the price point down. there's also the acceptance of things like the Nintendo Wii's remote, which isn't used for VR in its original incarnation, but has made people familiar with motion control.

when I was in college, way back around the turn of the century, a few universities had immersive virtual reality but it was mostly a room you stood in with relatively low-resolution projectors illuminating the surrounding walls and pretty rudimentary control schemes. even then, a handful of companies were very interested and would provide funding in return for time using the equipment for specific purposes. I think one of the big ones was a manufacturer of large machines who would take advantage of the tech to walk around and look at a 3d model of proposed new projects

VR is obviously going to be a thing ~eventually~ but i wouldn't count on anything too incredible coming out of the first couple generations, esp with the barrier to entry being so high - the audience is tiny for now

I'd qualify that to say direct-to-consumer, motion-sensing VR headsets? Even with consumer VR we're already a bunch of generations in, it just depends if you define "VR" as what oculus rift is capable of. If we exclude some of the prior art, we might as well exclude oculus in a few years when we talk about "real VR"

i don't want to put on a VR headset until i don't have to ever take it off

http://zeissvrone.tumblr.com

hmm!

dude in that video has terrible roommates

Just passed up an opportunity to have a go on one of these in a large "win a holiday to Dubai" booth in the middle of waterloo station. No matter how amazing the experience it couldn't be worth having to deal with what would certainly have been a highly invasive specimen of salespersonicus arseholicus.

My PSVR arrived yesterday, only managed an hour with it last night and my original plan was just to flip it for an ebay profit given how short stock seems to be but damnit I flipping love it and I'm going to end up keeping it LIKE AN IDIOT.

Only thing I tried so far was The Playroom VR and there's a little platformer in there where you control your dude like any other 3d platformer but the camera is your own big head (pretty much a Luckey's Tale clone I'm guessing, though I haven't played that) and it's really lovely. Hardware feels nicer and is more practical than Vive or Rift (though it still has too many wires), I actually prefer the lenses too (they're not fresnel like the rift and vive, which means they're smearing less on high contrast peripheral vision imagery, that improvement more than makes up for the slightly softer resolution imo). Seeing complaints about tracking accuracy but mine's been fine, probably does hurt that my current gaming room has no natural light so I'm not having to deal with rogue IR bouncing around.

Will hopefully get to try Driveclub and the Batman thing tonight.

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