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Valve and HTC Reveal "Vive" SteamVR Headset
An anonymous reader writes Today Valve and HTC revealed the "Vive" SteamVR headset which is designed to compete with Oculus and others, which aim for a high-end VR experience on PC. The Vive headset uses dual 1200x1080 displays at 90Hz and a "laser position sensor" to provide positional tracking (head movement through 3D space), and also includes a pair of motion input controllers. The companies say that the Vive headset will be available to developers in Spring and receive a proper consumer launch holiday 2015, though no price has been announced.
Please take my money now Steam!!! I Want!!!
Hopefully, they won't crap it up with all kinds of fancy 3D or stereoscopic viewpoints, or at least have an option to turn it off. Some of us who are blind in one eye really have a hard time dealing with some of this technology.
But remembering interviews with Occulus developers there is more to VR than a good resolution and tracking. Things like ridiculous low latency needed to prevent motion sickness and screen artifacts caused by rapid panning. Has Valve solved these things in record time in secret or will this be a better specs on paper but worse in practice product ? Or maybe I'm just falling for Oculus marketing: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
Whats up with that full hype marketing video? It is a announcement of a developer edition, it doesn't even have built in audio yet. Give me technical details, how does that headtracking work? Does it need a external camera like oculus? It is "really light" and allows you to "walk around in the room" so will it be (eventually) wireless? How are they managing wireless, latency and batterylife? Or is it not wireless at all?
So a company desperate to grab a toehold in an up-and-coming industry rushes a barely developed product to market, people buy it, become massively disappointed so when the other companies try and release a better and more polished device everyone brings up 'we've seen this before' and kills the market dead..
I was already thinking about my VR room straight after reading TFA. I have considerable space in my loft for just such a venture. Bye bye extra bedroom plan - hello VR room!
I hope it's not another valve vaporware
This is dead in the water unless they quickly find a way to add the glove-free hands tracking that Oculus is presently adding to the Rift. Oculus just bought a company that was about to make an add-on for the Rift that sits on the front of the Rift and tracks your hand/finger movements (very precisely) and mirrors them in the VR world so that you can interact with VR without any controllers or gloves.
This is a "Game Changer" that HTC/Valve are dead in the water without.
Really? Like the dedicated "computer room" everyone had? Where have the space in the big-box office supplies was devoted to "computer furniture"? And now all they sell is office chairs?
I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years that most people have dedicated VR rooms.
And I wouldn't be surprised if all the junk is sitting by the curb in 20 years, same as those big-screen projection TVs and computer desks.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
don't always agree with ya , but yep. this is the exception =/
Hype is, and always will be, hype. People have not changed -- gadgets come and go.
Most people don't have desktop computers any more. They have laptops, tablets, phones, but desktops? Nope.
I know of one exception - one of my neighbors. She has a computer desk and desktop - but they're piled under a ton of junk because nobody uses them. She has 3 tablets, a smartphone, and 2 laptops. When the grand-kids come over, they use the kitchen table for homework, same as we did when we were kids.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Thank you! It's amazing how quickly that's happening. Who needs a "computer desk" for a laptop, tablet, or smartphone? And when you don't need a computer desk, that frees up that space (in many times an entire small room) for something else.
The other advantage today is that you don't take turns sitting at the computer desk. Laptops work fine at the kitchen table, and handhelds work on the couch, in bed, or wherever.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is like a week after they agreed to significantly help Occulus after Facebook, their #1 gaming platform competitor, bought them. I don't think they understand the concept of crush your competitors' products that compete with yours. I didn't see MS making the Zune work with itunes.
For whatever reason, the games industry has decided that these things are amazin' and everyone has to do it. Of course nobody is doing it, I mean Occulus has a prototype out that has some pretty major issues and no release date for final hardware but that's it. Everyone else doesn't even have any hardware at all.
So of course what companies lack in deliverables they make up in hype. Talk about how damn cool their shit will be, how the world will be changed, etc, etc. Particularly since it doesn't seem any of them have a solution to any of the issues. Most of the things aren't solved by magic, but by better technology which is being developed by other companies. Things like latency/refresh are largely going to be a combination of higher speed displays and faster GPUs to drive them. Well, those will get developed I'm sure, but by Samsung or LG, not by Occulus or Valve.
Valve has also been having some problems in this area as of late. They seem to wish to become more than just "the guys who run Steam" which makes sense, because Steam is super profitable but also unstable, people could migrate to a different store en masse for various reasons. However their "no bosses" organization means that a lot of playing happens and not as much delivering. So you see hype and noise, but not necessarily final products.
The Steam box is a good example. Heard lots about that for a long time, some hype videos about their controller, and yet nothing is on the market, and there is no date when anything might happen.
"All that junk"? I'd imagine a "dedicated VR room" would mostly be an empty room free of junk you could bang in to while flailing around blindly. Maybe featuring an undersized rug/mat that gives your feet some warning when you're wandering too far from the "sweet spot" and risk punching the wall. The sort of room which would double nicely as a meditation/yoga/aerobics/etc space. (and yes, I'm sure there's a "padded room" joke in there somewhere...)
Unless you're going the omnidirectional treadmill route, but in that case you're kind of locked in place anyway, so you really only need one corner of a room that could otherwise be dedicated to less virtual pursuits (maybe a use for some of that horribly wasteful "master bedroom" space?)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, let's see, there's Christmas, Hanukkah, and Pancha Ganapati, among the more popular religions. And dozens more. Or we could go back to the core reason for most institutional celebrations about that time, and the only one with actual physical relevane: the winter solstice. The longest night of the year, and beginning of the return of the sun. Traditional time for all manner of celebrations of rebirth and new beginnings.
Most of what has become "the traditional Christmas celebration": santa, decorated trees, lots of lights, gifts, big meals, etc. have their roots in various pagan soltice celebrations in lands conquered by Christianity: the conquered aren't going to give up their soltice celebrations, so you'd best offer them an alternative so that they can party around your icons instead of their own. Only requires adjusting your calender a little bit...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"All that junk" could include crap like treadmills so that you can virtually exceed 15x15, fancy "jet seat" chairs with vibration, tilt, etc. And of course the vr gear.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is dead in the water unless they quickly find a way to add the glove-free hands tracking that Oculus is presently adding to the Rift. Oculus just bought a company that was about to make an add-on for the Rift that sits on the front of the Rift and tracks your hand/finger movements (very precisely) and mirrors them in the VR world so that you can interact with VR without any controllers or gloves.
This is a "Game Changer" that HTC/Valve are dead in the water without.
This was my post, I didn't have my password at work. The company Oculus bought was Nimble VR. Here are links including a video of the tech in action, it just works and has a larger FOV than the Rift:
Original Kickstarter (With VIDEO): https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
CNET Article about the Aquisition: http://www.cnet.com/news/oculu...
Oculus Blog announcement : https://www.oculus.com/blog/ni...
the bye bye wife!
To me that headline just says "Valve announces that they're still not working on Half-Life 3".
So when is this amazing new innovation which is absolutely definitely not just me-too-ism coming? I'd appreciate if somebody would clarify the anticipated release order for SteamVR/SteamController/SteamMachine/SteamOS/SteamTrain/HL3/armageddon.
There's also that little Illegal business practices matter. Not to mention the abysmal quality of their "technical support".
So I guess my real question is "why should I care?"
Fuck Valve. I'd rather burn my money.
Current 2d treadmills are just slippery surfaces and socks.
Think about making a treadmill that lets you move in two directions. It would have to be a 3 story 'mouse ball' with only a small relatively flat part exposed on top, Mass of the ball would make the whole thing impossible, not just uneconomic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So just put them on the inside of a human-sized hamster ball on gimbals. And a virtual bag of Cheetos that seems to be just outside the ball to exercise your human :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Inside the ball or outside doesn't really change the problem. The ball will be too massive to move when you move your feet. You'd need to put strain gauges on the surface or in your shoes and motorize the ball to move with your feet.
You'd be better off with 'roller ball' skates or just sticking to slippery floor and socks.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It doesn't need to be transparent, so we have a multitude of materials we can make it out of that are light. It'll feel like they're walking uphill, but the purpose of a hamster ball is to allow the little rat to get exercise while being safe from the family dog and cat. It could be marketed as a panic ball in case of an attack by zombies.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It is a truism of engineering: Nothing scales linearly. Not even hamster balls.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It is a truism of engineering: Nothing scales linearly. Not even hamster balls.
Never said it did. However, hamsters also don't scale linearly to the size of humans - if they did, they wouldn't be able to move.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Name a material that you think you could make a useable human sized hamster ball out of?
One that will run on gimbals. No inflatables.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A 2 meter diameter sphere has a surface area of 12-1/2 meters. 6 layers of 125g fiberglass requires 10 kg of fiberglass matting and 14 kg. of resin. If it's good enough for boat hulls ... probably less effort than pushing an empty shopping cart because most carts have crappy wheels.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.