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Facebook's Phone-Free, Wireless 'Oculus Go' VR Headset Is Released Today
UnknownSoldier writes: The Oculus Go is finally available for purchase. Amazon is selling the 32GB model for $199, while the 64GB model is selling for $249. As a standalone virtual reality unit, it doesn't require a computer or phone to use. Ironically, you must use a phone for the initial setup. Reviews are out on The Verge and Ars Technica. The TL;DR -- Pros: Inexpensive; Cons: LCD, fixed 72 Hz rate, limited motion tracking. Will 2018 finally will be the year of cheap VR?
given the specs of that gadget, 2018 will mostly be the year of the cheap headache.
I have an almost-decade-old VR headset with specs better than that.
(the slow LCD causing motion blur combined with the limited motion tracking are going to be kill*ing* features).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's what they'll use this for: feed ads directly into your optic nerve, complete with subliminals. Why the actual fuck does Facebook need goddamned VR headsets?
It's 2018 we want better VR HMDs not lame smartphone apps tied to one of the most egregious cyber stalking companies ever to exist.
Your own people said 90hz or bust and went on and on about people being turned off by low quality now you settle for 72hz and still dicking around with vomit inducing 3DoF?
Here is what I want:
At least 16k per eye foveaed display hardware. /w at least 5 meter square range
At least 140 degree FOV
Wired connectivity to PC
Proper drivers without data collection malware or walled garden power plays.
6DoF
Better optics than Rift
RGB LCD displays running at least 90hz. I'm tired of OLED. The dirty OLED burnin/degradation sheen gets worse and worse, god rays and tearing / red smear are annoying.
If someone builds it I'll buy it. If not I'll spend my money on something else.
Is a Facebook employee.
LOL!!!
> Will 2018 finally will be the year of cheap VR?
It's Facebook: The Zuck and his squad of privacy ass rapists. Your "cheap" VR is being subsidised by Zuck going through your private affairs and selling your info to the highest bidder. When you're what is for sale it's not really "cheap" now is it?
This sort of VR is barely any better than Google Cardboard (which is awesome)....super cool technology without decent software. What I'm waiting for is better VR content and an ecosysytem that makes it really easy to browse/share/deal with 360 degree photos and videos.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Realism isn't everything.
The obvious solution is to make less detailed games for it. The original Wii was extremely popular despite positively crude graphics, in large part due to novelty, physicality, and generally excellent use of available potential. As long as you can push enough pixels to keep the edges smooth(ish) and see into the distance a ways,fast enough to avoid nausea, it might not matter so much if the graphics reminds you a little of the VR from an 80's movie.
Heck, I'd fully expect quite a few experiences to embrace that aesthetic - there's a lot people out there who would probably enjoy the nostalgia-become-reality.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You cant set it up at all, or access many functions, like bluetooth pairing without an iOS or Android device and the Oculus mobile app.
Good-bye
the thing that occurs to me most strongly is "Soothing beige cries out for skins - needs giant googly eyes in front."
It's like a big iPhone attached to your face. Does it have built-in motion tracking? It says nothing else is required to use it.
This is essentially an upgraded Samsung Gear VR, and it can only run the Gear compatible apps.
So if you've got a Google Cardboard, Google Daydream or a Samsung Gear already, well, you're not missing much here.
You missed something.
Cons: LCD, fixed 72 Hz rate, limited motion tracking, Facebook infection.
Really? You have one with a > 538ppi screen that's almost a decade old?
By some random chance it happens that, yeah, about three time this resolution. But it's not relevant actually.
PPI (points-per-inches) are (nearly) irrelevant in headset for the resolution. :
What's relevant and of key important
- the field of view (the total angle that the screen cover in front of view).
- the angular resolution (number of pixels per degree of angle).
Yes, on modern headsets, the display is achieved usually by using a smartphone screen, so you can take a short cut and compare the screen resolution and basically have a comparison.
That wasn't the necessarily the case a decade ago.
So my headset happens to use display that completely beat the crap out of anything on the market now, with somewhere around 1600DPI.
But that's that because they are tiny screens to begin with : each eye has a micro OLED display that's about a square milimeter, and offers a 852x600 resolution which the optics make cover ~40 degree of FOV. That was very impressive 10 years ago, but probably pales in comparison in what smartphone-screen-based headsets are doing now (or what the same company is doing now with 2k x 2k micro-OLED displays).
But resolution isn't what I was talking about.
What headset is that?...and how much did it cost?
eMagine z800 3D Visor, I managed to grab one during the short launch promotion where it sold for 600-700$ (normal price was twice that).
I suspect you're not talking about an even remotely comparable device here.
The device is based around a much older and much more expensive approach to headsets (using expensive custom made micro OLED. But they were mainly making devices for military use so it was worth for them. The z800 was just them making their port-folio diverse by adding some civilian products. They also use high quality complex optics to make the screen appear flat) than what is used today (use cheap off-the-shelves display like those mass-produced for smartphone, use a simple lens and compensate the distorsion in (GPU shader) software).
But it's comparable for 2 specific points.
- display refresh rate and persistence
- tracking
- my old gear used on purpose OLEDs, because they can go up to 85Hz (that was incredibly impressive back then) and can keep display for very short time (as soon as you cut the power, the pixel goes immediately dark).
- most modern headsets (Occulus Right, HTC Vive, etc.) use OLEDs. They can go even higher max display rate, and again can "blink" their display for very short time.
- this thing uses LCD. It's max refresh rate is a pale 72Hz which is *very* low for a VR headset. and LCD are slow to transition between one state and another (compared to OLED or even old tech like CRT. Of course if you compare them to even older pre-TFT LCD, they are a lot less blurry nowadays).
- my old gear used the best accelerometers they could get access to a decade ago-
- most modern headests have even better tracking than that, mostly relying on IR+camera-based tracking.
- this thing has dialed back the tracking a lot.
To roll back to the main subject of my comment :
kinetosis (sea sickness, VR-induced nausea, etc.) are caused by discrepencies between the motion you see with your eyes and the motion you feel with your inner ear (balance).
You want your headset to display a picture as close as possible at what the user would be seeing given the current head position as possible, to minimize the risk of getting headache and motion sickness.
That's why you want OLEDs :
- you want a frame rate as fast as possible to update as best as possible what the eyes should be seeing. This requires a high frame rate. This cheap
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Realism isn't everything.
But headaches and motion sickness are everything, at least if you want a product with wide mass appeal among the general public.
You want the headset to display something that is as close as possible as the motion sensed by the user while moving the head around.
That means the best head tracking you can get. This has been studied for as long as VR headsets exist.
The expensive headsets use IR+camera tracking to be extremely fast and reactive and precise as possible.
That also means a very fast display: as high FPS rate as possible, and individual frames that blink for the shortest time possible (think CRT phosphor blink vs. LCD's crystals slowly changing configuration).
Occulus has done a lot of research themselves about that.
The expensive headsets use OLED because of that. It can have very high framrates, and each frame can "blink" for a very short delay.
This devices cuts back on the motion tracking, and uses cheaper LCD with slower frame rate and longer frame remanescence.
That will worsen the exact kind of problems that VR has that prevents wide public adoption and that normal users are complaining about (headache and motion sickness).
Regular users aren't aware of all the small details going behind a good VR implementation. They'll see the cheap headset, pick it up, try it, get headache/motion sickness and think that "yeah, VR definitely doesn't work" and VR will again lose general interest and marketability because of that.
Cheap headsets as this (and cardboard solutions, depending on the screen of the smartphone you drop in and the software running on it) are best used only for 3D stereo cinema movie (where there is no tracking involved).
(DISCLAIMER: I happen to be lucky and *not* affected by motion sickness that much. So it's not a personal attack against VR. But if you want to reach a wide audience, you need to address the problems that most users are complaining about, and this product is a step backward compared to other facebook/occulus product).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The reviews so far have been favorable:
"The headset manages to feel more high quality than the Rift in a lot of ways. Comfort-wise, I would say the Oculus Go bests even the first-gen Google Daydream View headset." https://techcrunch.com/2018/03...
"The visuals far exceed those on a phone powered headset. This is due in part to the new LCD display which boasts a 2560 x 1440 resolution and some very well designed lenses. Content looked crystal clear and pin sharp, instantly impressing." https://www.vrfocus.com/2018/0...
For a list of decent games for Oculus Go / Gear VR check this wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculu...
Many people find it attractive as a portable video player (both 2D and 3D).
And then there is also an intriguing gimmick that is Oculus Home, which might gradually grow into a richer social VR, as envisioned in sci-fi classics like "Snow Crash" and "Ready Player One". https://www.oculus.com/blog/we...
That's the price from the official store. Amazon.de does not offer it yet, and Amazon.com quotes a $83 shipping&duties surcharge. I guess I should wait for Amazon.de to figure out the logistics, or buy a used set.
I'm not criticizing the picture quality.
I'm just pointing out that the thing they cut back on (refresh rate/transition speed of LCD, lower quality tracking) are the exact cause of motion sickness and headache in VR.
To take the matephore of Ars Technica : Yes, like the author mentions, it's like back at the beginning of MP3 player (back when they were expensive due to the HD drive inside), there were a few Asian no-name who thought about slapping a cheap MP3-decoding chip on a cheap portable CD-player.
Result: a device that can play MP3s, but is cheap and you can store a ~10h long playlist by burning a cheap CD.
But there's metaphorically a risk that users confuse the short coming of the MP3CD player (CD skpis, a scratch killing a whole MP3 song, etc) and think that MP3 in general sucks as a technology.
Here, there's a risk that simple consumer pick-up the Go, get motion sickness and decide that Virtual Reality isn't for them or isn't even a promising technology.
With the design of the Go, Occulus/Rift wants to reach a much wider audience than with their flagship Rift.
But the wide public is very often put off by the headache/motion sickness (see most frequent / most vocal complain anytime stereo 3D is brought up as a technology).
And the Go, by cutting the specific corner it cut to reach a 200USD price point will exacerbate these problem.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I did want an Oculus Rift once I had the system for it, until they were bought by Facebook.
That pretty much killed VR for me.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
I wont.
My reasons is :
You have to connect it to your cellphone with WIFI and GPS turned on. NOT Bluetooth.
You have to have a Facebook, or an Oculus account.
No SD card.
Only 3 degrees of freedom, as in only sitting or standing without walking in either direction, only tilt, pan and rotate head.
The price. 219 Euro, instead of $199.
So to buy two will be to costly, and then I end up with buying none.
I'll wait for their Santa Cruz headset, maybe it will be better.
And the intent I was having with my common :
"We know for an extremely long time that fast displays and high precision tracking are absolutely key points so people don't suffer from nausea.
10 years ago we were already been achieving better on that front that this cheap VR headset"
Yes, my old equipment did cost a lot a decade ago. Because they tried to achieve this spec with tech that was available to them in 2005.
But a decade later, if we absolutely try to stick to at least this level of nausea-prevention, we could possibly come down to something that cost a tiny bit better (say 300$) but is vastly better.
(Also, Occulus GO needs to be configured using a smartphone connected to it (so add it to the price) and works over wifi (so add the price of the router too, while you're at it), just pointing out~~ ;-) )
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]