I run my VR setup on an i7 with a 980GTX graphics card, which happens to be very doable, but still about the lower edge of what I'd consider playable. I'd probably have to find out what it must look like on your rig to know for sure, but I guess your experience must be a very unpleasant one.
The reason for this is that VR depends more than any other kind of game on a smooth simulation. When I turn my head in a normal computer game and get about 15 frames a second, it's annoying but doable. If you get that kind of feedback in a VR game it's a surefire way to get horrible motion sickness. Same for any other kind of movement.
Motion sickness happens when your balance system reports something fundamentally different than what your eyes are seeing. And a 15 year old rig sounds like trying VR on it is mostly a motion sickness simulator.
Have you played current VR titles? 9 out of 10 of them are basically copies of games that existed before, only now taken to "virtual reality". Hell, I recently saw a Zuma-Clone the distinct VR feature of which was just that the ball tube ran all around you. The best VR game I know is Raw Data, which is, essentially, not really new either because Zombie shooters have done the "be swarmed by ever growing hordes of mobs" routine before, too.
Is it a different experience? Definitely yes. But different enough to warrant the expense and the far more complex controls? Well, not really.
Very good example. Also, think of games that would require perfect depth perception to be playable. Or even better, games where you being able to manipulate objects in 3D space is key. I distinctly remember some early 3D games that tried this, where you were supposed to "reach" for objects. Didn't work so well, and the genre didn't go anywhere because of that problem. Now this problem is pretty much solved.
I could also see new and interesting ways of 3D scene generation. I also wonder why the likes of IKEA haven't yet adopted this technology to show off their crap to hopeful consumers.
Maybe it's a matter of simulation speed, I noticed that this happens mostly when the hardware isn't quite strong enough to run the program and what you see is a few fractions of a second behind of what you "should" see. When this happens to you when you turn your head, this sounds like this issue.
I think VR games simply have not found its place yet. What we get as VR games today are essentially the same games we had before, just with the screen replaced by a headset and the stick to turn the head replaced with the turning of the head.
As long as we see (and treat) VR as some sort of extension to what computers are doing now, this is probably going to remain true. Why bother with VR when you can get almost the same experience from a computer setup that's much cheaper and requires a lot less room?
The problem is not technology. The technology is more or less there. The problem is application.
That's exactly the problem, people simply don't know (yet) how to put the technology they have available to good use. It's similar to what happened when movies started a century ago. When you look at some works of early cinema, you'll notice that they feel a lot like glorified theater production. Much of it looks like there's a stage and you're sitting in front of it, with the big difference to a normal theater being that the changes of backgrounds happens "instantly" instead of enforcing a pause where the stagehands put the new props on.
Only slowly movies started exploring what we now take as granted in cinema. Point of view shots, taken from the viewing angle of a protagonist. Dialogues happening so camera shots show the one talking only, with the camera in or near the position of the person being spoken to. Dynamic shots where the camera actually moves about in the scene. These are fairly new concepts that had to be developed. Citizen Kane isn't really that good a movie IMO, but it premiered a LOT of movie tricks that are common today but were groundbreaking when it came out.
When you look at VR games of today, you'll notice that they are essentially the same kind of games you play on a normal screen just "VR-ified". What's needed is to find out what possibilities VR offers to makers of games and then explore them.
This of course will take time and we'll see a few horrible flops in the process, much like we did when 3D and first-person views became a thing for the gaming industry. But we learned and now we've arrived at something where the "formula" is developed. That's still ahead of us for VR gaming.
I'm not so sure about this. Certain physical limitations apply, of course, but that mostly means we have to look for ways around them. Like now that we're hitting the physical boundaries of how small and fast you can make processor cores, we start packing more of them into a processor.
I don't really think that we're already at the end. If everything fails, we just have to learn how to write optimized code again.
I don't know if that's really a problem if your goal is to provide a good gaming experience. You do not have those effects in "normal" games either, I doubt they're that important in VR to create an enjoyable experience.
That's an issue in surprisingly few games, actually. I found that (virtual) lateral acceleration does it to me mostly, while being moved in the direction I'm facing is fairly comfortable.
Again, a learning process. Game developers have to find out what they can do to people and what they better shouldn't.
The problem with being "cut off from reality" is that our input systems ARE still in reality. Finding your mouse is a true PITA when your VR helmet doesn't show it to you, and while the input devices you have are quite amazing already (seriously, it freaked me out when I saw my virtual hands for the first time holding those Vive controllers in the Raw Data game), the moment you have to use an input device that was made for you at least having a peripheral view of it (like mouse or keyboard) your immersion grinds to a halt because, well, it's just not there.
I think it's less the people that aren't there yet, it's more the input devices and the programs. Or rather, developers are simply not really aware of the problems VR throws at them yet.
Yes we do need to know this. Programmers not knowing assembly language and not understanding why sanitizing input is what made stack overflows so common.
And this is a security problem that is easy to find and to fix. With our current layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of APIs and frameworks, obscure security problems that someone with at least a halfway decent understanding of how computers work would never make will pop up. And they won't be easy to find and even harder to fix.
For reference, see the clusterfuck that node.js is.
Similar career here. Got a computer when I was 10 (that was before you were born) and spent the next couple years finding out how to make these things do what I want them to. Not exactly being rich meant that certain limitations had to be worked around, especially when wanting to be playing games on that computer, which led to me becoming quite good at figuring out how to get games to play even if the maker wasn't too fond of the way I wanted to play them.
Fast forward and modems and BBSs made it into my life. Still not the rich guy, I had to find a way to keep my bills, especially phone bills, low, and this led to learning a lot about hardware and signal modulation since, well, no internet and not exactly being the kind of information you can easily pick up from various official manuals.
And today I'm selling this, among other knowledge I picked up along the way, to customers that pay handsomely for it. I guess I never would have arrived here if it wasn't in the end that I wanted to play computer games...
But they could skin their knees! And in this time and age, an abuse accusation isn't far away if some teacher happens to find a bruise on your kid, if you don't keep your kids under the cheese cover 'til they're 18 you're asking for trouble!
Slashdot Mirror
Then I guess we'll have to continue relying on third party AV software, since WinDef sucks on 7.
We should make it a national mission to find out where the billions the telcos got to do this went.
I have no doubt that the games run. I only doubt that he's gonna keep his lunch in playing them.
I run my VR setup on an i7 with a 980GTX graphics card, which happens to be very doable, but still about the lower edge of what I'd consider playable. I'd probably have to find out what it must look like on your rig to know for sure, but I guess your experience must be a very unpleasant one.
The reason for this is that VR depends more than any other kind of game on a smooth simulation. When I turn my head in a normal computer game and get about 15 frames a second, it's annoying but doable. If you get that kind of feedback in a VR game it's a surefire way to get horrible motion sickness. Same for any other kind of movement.
Motion sickness happens when your balance system reports something fundamentally different than what your eyes are seeing. And a 15 year old rig sounds like trying VR on it is mostly a motion sickness simulator.
True. But introducing additional shortcomings doesn't exactly improve the situation either.
Have you played current VR titles? 9 out of 10 of them are basically copies of games that existed before, only now taken to "virtual reality". Hell, I recently saw a Zuma-Clone the distinct VR feature of which was just that the ball tube ran all around you. The best VR game I know is Raw Data, which is, essentially, not really new either because Zombie shooters have done the "be swarmed by ever growing hordes of mobs" routine before, too.
Is it a different experience? Definitely yes. But different enough to warrant the expense and the far more complex controls? Well, not really.
Very good example. Also, think of games that would require perfect depth perception to be playable. Or even better, games where you being able to manipulate objects in 3D space is key. I distinctly remember some early 3D games that tried this, where you were supposed to "reach" for objects. Didn't work so well, and the genre didn't go anywhere because of that problem. Now this problem is pretty much solved.
I could also see new and interesting ways of 3D scene generation. I also wonder why the likes of IKEA haven't yet adopted this technology to show off their crap to hopeful consumers.
Maybe it's a matter of simulation speed, I noticed that this happens mostly when the hardware isn't quite strong enough to run the program and what you see is a few fractions of a second behind of what you "should" see. When this happens to you when you turn your head, this sounds like this issue.
Don't worry, the chance of the US to ever get a left-wing administration is pretty much zero.
Not to mention that then, for the first time, working in an open-floor-plan office wouldn't suck.
I think VR games simply have not found its place yet. What we get as VR games today are essentially the same games we had before, just with the screen replaced by a headset and the stick to turn the head replaced with the turning of the head.
Answer: Save the pedestrian, kill the passengers.
Reason: I don't own one, hence the chance of being the pedestrian in the scenario is higher.
It's quite possible to run VR programs on last-gen graphics cards (nVidia 970 and 980 series are absolutely good enough). I know because I use them.
As long as we see (and treat) VR as some sort of extension to what computers are doing now, this is probably going to remain true. Why bother with VR when you can get almost the same experience from a computer setup that's much cheaper and requires a lot less room?
The problem is not technology. The technology is more or less there. The problem is application.
Finally someone gets it.
That's exactly the problem, people simply don't know (yet) how to put the technology they have available to good use. It's similar to what happened when movies started a century ago. When you look at some works of early cinema, you'll notice that they feel a lot like glorified theater production. Much of it looks like there's a stage and you're sitting in front of it, with the big difference to a normal theater being that the changes of backgrounds happens "instantly" instead of enforcing a pause where the stagehands put the new props on.
Only slowly movies started exploring what we now take as granted in cinema. Point of view shots, taken from the viewing angle of a protagonist. Dialogues happening so camera shots show the one talking only, with the camera in or near the position of the person being spoken to. Dynamic shots where the camera actually moves about in the scene. These are fairly new concepts that had to be developed. Citizen Kane isn't really that good a movie IMO, but it premiered a LOT of movie tricks that are common today but were groundbreaking when it came out.
When you look at VR games of today, you'll notice that they are essentially the same kind of games you play on a normal screen just "VR-ified". What's needed is to find out what possibilities VR offers to makers of games and then explore them.
This of course will take time and we'll see a few horrible flops in the process, much like we did when 3D and first-person views became a thing for the gaming industry. But we learned and now we've arrived at something where the "formula" is developed. That's still ahead of us for VR gaming.
I'm not so sure about this. Certain physical limitations apply, of course, but that mostly means we have to look for ways around them. Like now that we're hitting the physical boundaries of how small and fast you can make processor cores, we start packing more of them into a processor.
I don't really think that we're already at the end. If everything fails, we just have to learn how to write optimized code again.
I don't know if that's really a problem if your goal is to provide a good gaming experience. You do not have those effects in "normal" games either, I doubt they're that important in VR to create an enjoyable experience.
That's an issue in surprisingly few games, actually. I found that (virtual) lateral acceleration does it to me mostly, while being moved in the direction I'm facing is fairly comfortable.
Again, a learning process. Game developers have to find out what they can do to people and what they better shouldn't.
The problem with being "cut off from reality" is that our input systems ARE still in reality. Finding your mouse is a true PITA when your VR helmet doesn't show it to you, and while the input devices you have are quite amazing already (seriously, it freaked me out when I saw my virtual hands for the first time holding those Vive controllers in the Raw Data game), the moment you have to use an input device that was made for you at least having a peripheral view of it (like mouse or keyboard) your immersion grinds to a halt because, well, it's just not there.
I think it's less the people that aren't there yet, it's more the input devices and the programs. Or rather, developers are simply not really aware of the problems VR throws at them yet.
And that's different from TV commercials in what way now?
Yes we do need to know this. Programmers not knowing assembly language and not understanding why sanitizing input is what made stack overflows so common.
And this is a security problem that is easy to find and to fix. With our current layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of APIs and frameworks, obscure security problems that someone with at least a halfway decent understanding of how computers work would never make will pop up. And they won't be easy to find and even harder to fix.
For reference, see the clusterfuck that node.js is.
If they're religious they're already used to "do as I say not as I do", so it should be ok.
In the eternal words of the grand master George Carlin: And they switched cocaine for Rogaine.
Similar career here. Got a computer when I was 10 (that was before you were born) and spent the next couple years finding out how to make these things do what I want them to. Not exactly being rich meant that certain limitations had to be worked around, especially when wanting to be playing games on that computer, which led to me becoming quite good at figuring out how to get games to play even if the maker wasn't too fond of the way I wanted to play them.
Fast forward and modems and BBSs made it into my life. Still not the rich guy, I had to find a way to keep my bills, especially phone bills, low, and this led to learning a lot about hardware and signal modulation since, well, no internet and not exactly being the kind of information you can easily pick up from various official manuals.
And today I'm selling this, among other knowledge I picked up along the way, to customers that pay handsomely for it. I guess I never would have arrived here if it wasn't in the end that I wanted to play computer games...
But they could skin their knees! And in this time and age, an abuse accusation isn't far away if some teacher happens to find a bruise on your kid, if you don't keep your kids under the cheese cover 'til they're 18 you're asking for trouble!