NewbSaibot United States. Sep 12 2013 23:47. Posts 4946
A kickstarter campaign was launched not too long ago to fund the worlds first high-end consumer friendly virtual reality headset. This was basically supposed to be the VR headset that finally does virtual reality right. VR is nothing new, I've tried it before back at various arcades in the early nineties. It was clunky, had horrible head tracking, and very low quality graphics. Everyone wrote it off and rightfully so. Till some guy came up and said "we have the technology". Of course VR has such a bad rep from previous attempts no company was willing to back it, hence the kickstarter campaign. Anyway, the campaign was a huge success and they got all the money they needed to begin development.
Out comes this developers kit which is really meant for game designers, but so many people bought it and began sharing their own stuff that there are actually quite a few nifty demos out there to give you a taste of what VR was always meant to be. I finally grabbed one, and I must say I am impressed. There are still issues with your field of view, and until they come out with a lens that wraps around the side of your temple, or flat out project images on to your retina, you will still feel like you are looking through a pair of binoculars INTO the world, rather than actually feeling like you are IN the world. But it's still incredibly fascinating to look at, and as I write this my head is still spinning and my stomach nauseous from having just played around in the thing.
So far the most impressive worldly feel, and by that I mean a game that actually pulls you into the universe is Half Life 2. This is basically the only commercial game with official support for VR from the developer, so obviously it shines as a well polished example. Plus the world of HL2 is perfect for VR since it's so exploratory. It's also the quickest to make you dizzy since there's so much interaction to proceed. You see, the more you have to move around, the more you get sick.
The easiest games to stomach are the pure demos. You just sorta sit back in a pod or something, or mindlessly walk empty corridors just kind of staring at stuff as you go. These are natural movements, and your brain is willing to accept the disconnect from physical motion and visual motion since you can kind of pretend you are sitting in an electric wheelchair and just gliding everywhere. It's the games like HL2 where you are supposed to be walking and climbing and going around corners that make your stomach churn, since now it feels like the world is just spinning around you. It's perfect to just stand still and look around, but as soon as you have to start moving and going around the corner of some building, your stomach turns into knots, or at least mine does.
What really makes this whole thing work though is the latency factor. Old VR systems used infra-red scanners and magentic resonance detectors and stuff that were just horribly slow and inaccurate, plus the computational horsepower available at the time was pathetic, so when you turned your head left, it could take a full second for the screen to turn left. You basically just felt like you strapped a cellphone to your face and were looking at a little box. With advancements in gyroscopes and accelerometers thanks in large part to the mobile phone boom, incredibly accurate and fast devices are now available and allow the headtracking to be 100% SPOT ON. You move your head the equivalent of 1 pixel width of visual density, and the screen updates PERFECTLY. There is absolutely no delay whatsoever between your eyes and what you see. You can literally turn your head in any direction, upside down, sideways, at an angle, left, right, over your shoulder, you can even spin in your chair and do a 180 and look directly behind you. The camera follows with absolute perfect precision. The only thing left to do with this device is simply widen that field of view so you dont feel like you're looking through a tube.
thinking of ordering myself too, looks pretty neat, and obviously something i wanna support even if its not complete etc since its what every gamer dreamed about while being a kid and now its here
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Canada. Sep 13 2013 01:47. Posts 10085
