The VR thread

[Bacon McShig]

Wipeout's fine if you focus straight ahead on the track. I made the mistake of looking directly sideways out the cockpit while going through an antigrav segment of the track, seeing a ship pass by a few stories down on the water, upside down, while the near scenery whizzed by at 400mph in the foreground. VR hadn't given me motion sickness before, but I got the sweats pretty bad on that one.

I didn't know Polybius had a VR mode! I'll be on the lookout for a sale on it.

[Frogacuda]

Oculus revealed a prototype of what is almost definitely CV2 called Half Dome. The marquee features here are a 140 degree FOV, eye-tracking, and a varifocal display to allow for natural eye focus on near and far planes. Unlike some of the more future-tech oriented prototypes they've shown, this one seems to be consumer-focused and is already of a similar size, weight, and form-factor to rift.

The varifocal display is an interesting solution to an old problem. Unlike lightfield displays, which offer true multiple focal planes (but which are expensive and not yet ready for mass production), this actually uses a mechanism that physically moves the display forward or back based on input from the eye-tracking, so that the focus matches whatever you're looking at at the moment. The flipside to this is that the FOV would also change dynamically, and it's not clear if 140 is the max when the screen is closest or an average. Even still this looks like a pretty big fundamental leap, unlike the Vive Pro, and it would be enough to get me to upgrade for sure.

[kingoffighters]

Is it wireless?

[Frogacuda]

Is it wireless?

This prototype isn't, but the current Rift has a wireless kit available and I imagine this will at least have that as an optional upgrade. The upgrade scenario seems the most likely in order to keep the prices mass-market friendly.

[kingoffighters]

Interest piqued.

[James]

Broke down and picked up Beat Saber today. 10 songs is too few songs but seeing as the game took off and there's a level editor coming out I'm not too worried about that being a problem for long. It's really simple but a lot of fun, and other than standard VR setup time (move chair, put on headset, get situated) there's maybe 10 seconds between firing up the game and actually playing, if you're moving slow.

[Frogacuda]

Broke down and picked up Beat Saber today. 10 songs is too few songs but seeing as the game took off and there's a level editor coming out I'm not too worried about that being a problem for long. It's really simple but a lot of fun, and other than standard VR setup time (move chair, put on headset, get situated) there's maybe 10 seconds between firing up the game and actually playing, if you're moving slow.

Yeah when I heard they're supporting custom levels and algorithmically generated stages, I caved and got it, but I haven't actually played it yet.

[Changeling]

I didn't know Polybius had a VR mode! I'll be on the lookout for a sale on it.

Don't wait for a sale. Get it NOW. Ingest the sin of your choice and play it NOW.

[Tain]

Beat Saber and Airtone are, like, the best music games in a really long time. I'm really glad I picked up Beat Saber.

And all the Oculus CV2 stuff sounds great.

Anybody hear about the Lenovo Mirage Solo? It just released and it's another standalone headset, only with 6DOF tracking in a limited (artificially so, I guess) range. Powered by Daydream.

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Sounds way more appealing to me than Oculus Go (which doesn't really hit the bar for "worthwhile VR" for me, being 3DOF), but I have to imagine it isn't on the same level as the Vive Focus or Santa Cruz.

[Frogacuda]

Right now the number of Daydream apps that support 6DOF is extremely limited. Google has made it easy to enable 6DOF, but few devs have and even among those, it's very "tacked on," meaning movement is not really factored into gameplay. The controller is also only 3DOF, so there's no hand presence. While it might be a better experience than Go, it's probably better to wait for Santa Cruz if you're really in the market for a self-contained unit that can deliver a real VR experience.