Virtual Reality

My Rift was sent today.

Ditto, my co-workers was sent yesterday. Now I just need these new video cards to be available so I can actually build a system to use it /sigh.

velk_sl said:

The game situation is better though - Luckey's Tale and Blazerush were good fun, and the 3d effect adds a lot more than you'd think. Eve valkyrie is graphically super impressive but I didn't get much out of it - it might be because I suck horribly at it, but endless random multiplayer deathmatches aren't really my thing. Elite I liked a lot more, although I am even more terrible at that than Eve. I don't know what they think a tutorial is, but I spent the first 10 minutes of the 'introduction to vr' tutorial trying to work out how the fuck to take off, and then immediately spun out of control and crashed into several other ships and the dock. Things didn't really improve from there ;p I think it's safe to say it has a somewhat steep learning curve.

Don't know that I'd recommend rift as a whole to anyone who didn't have cash to throw away though. I'll see how the vive goes, showing up next week ( yes, I am an idiot and wasting money ;p )

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Ok, as an update - Project Cars is really good with rift, and I don't normally get much out of racing games. If you are a fan of racing games already I can see that being a pretty big draw.

As for the vive -

Cons :
Setting it up is pretty damn painful - Rift was plug it in and point the camera at your face. Vive means planning out where to put the basestations, being aware they need to be high up and have to have power running to them. This was pretty damn annoying. On the bright side, the dire warnings about how they have to be solidly mounted and within 15ft of each other seem to be wildly overblown. To try it out I just dumped one of them on the back of my couch, and the other one 15m away on a dresser, and the tracking was perfectly fine for everything I tried. So you don't really have to wall mount them or anything.

The setup with the headphones is just needlessly stupid in comparison to the rift ones - even with the earbuds it's quite complicated to get the cords hanging correctly to be able to put them on while wearing the headset, and if you try to put them on beforehand, you run the risk of getting the cord trapped under the headstraps. Much fumbling around, probably the worst thing about it.

Speaking of cords - the cord to attach the vive is like 5x as big as the rift one, it's a significant annoyance. It also needs another power plug for the breakout box, although this one you'd locate close to the pc anyway so isn't really an annoyance by comparison.

Comfort wise it's pretty much a wash for me, with a minor loss to the vive for giving me sweaty face. That probably has more to do with all the walking around than pure design quality though.

Pros :
Display wise the two are pretty much the same, although the Vive is significantly brighter and doesn't have the 'god-rays' that people have complained about a lot on reddit ( basically in a high contrast scene like white text on a black background, the text will look like it's got a light shining through it - moving your head around will move it, it's kind of like lens flare. ). For what it's worth they didn't really annoy me on the rift, your mileage may vary.

The room-scale experience basically blows the rift right out of the water. The rift games are mostly cool with 3d but not really anything that is all that different to what you'd have run across before. It adds an extra element, like color tv vs black and white I guess, but the basics aren't all that different. In comparison the vive room scale stuff are just vastly more immersive and unlike anything I've run across previously.

There's a lot of talk about how rift will do the same kind of stuff when the touch controllers are available, but color me pretty skeptical - the cords to everything are just way too short to try anything similar. They seem to be hardwired into the headset itself too, so even if they extend it with a powered breakout box like the vive, you'd be dragging it all over the floor behind you, and I have no idea how'd you manage to get cameras on either side of a room with the tiny cords on the camera - you'd have to have the pc in the middle for a start, which obviously wouldn't work.

Ironically, placement flexibility is actually waaay better than on the rift, despite the hassle in setup. This is mostly due to something I hadn't thought of with the rift setup before running into it - because the tracking is coming from the constellation camera, it needs to be able to see your face, this means if you want to move to a different location ( in my case it was onto a couch instead of at my computer desk ), not only will you have to move the camera too ( see previous complaint about shortness of cord ), but the 'front' facing for the vr environment will now be in a totally different spot so you'll have to recenter everything or you get stuck trying to turn your neck in improbable angles to try and see the oculus home menus. With the vive the base stations are in fixed locations anyway so you can go sit wherever the fuck you like within range of the really long cord without worrying about it.

Anyone have any links to affordable PC's that are Rift ready? I have too many PC's as-is, I need another one like I need another hole in my head.

Wow, my Rift is only a three hour drive away. That was fast.

UGH, it's supposed to be here tomorrow, and I don't have a PC that can run it.

Lyrical_sl said:

affordable PC's that are Rift ready?

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This is a bit of an oxymoron since you need a pretty powerful comp to run a Rift. I would start by looking at Oculus's ownRift Ready PCspage and go from there.

Skanda_sl said:

This is a bit of an oxymoron since you need a pretty powerful comp to run a Rift. I would start by looking at Oculus's ownRift Ready PCspage and go from there.

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I'd like to not spend over $1k for a PC that I'll be using just for the Rift.

One of the ASUS PCs listed is just over 1k at their own store. Everything else I see at a glance is 1200 and above.

Uh, since $1k is about what you'd need for the just the gpu and cpu sans motherboard or ram... I think you're kind of fucked. But don't you have a ton of money anyhow? Why is this even an issue sir.

What's your best computer right now? Maybe we can bolt some upgrades into it.

Leadsalad_sl said:

Uh, since $1k is about what you'd need for the just the gpu and cpu sans motherboard or ram... I think you're kind of fucked. But don't you have a ton of money anyhow? Why is this even an issue sir.

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I'm really not feeling VR right now. My Samsung VR has barely been touched by anyone in the family in the last two months. I used to be really enthused about it, but I've gone from a 10/10 to 2/10 on VR. The novelty has just worn off. Also, I seem to only be able to tolerate 30 minutes of VR a day before I start feeling a little too uncomfortable. I'm afraid I'm going to spend 2k on this rig and have it collecting dust next to the Samsung VR.

I looked at a video of Project Cars and changed my mind. I got a decent PC off of Ebay for 850.

spronk_sl said:

unless you have dreamed of VR as a kid I honestly wouldn't bother, I've used my CV1 maybe 30 minutes in the past 2 weeks.

and yeah go donate all your old PCs, I used to hoard them too "just in case my main PC dies" but lets face it that never fucking happens and if it ever does, its way easier just going out and replacing it than trying to get a 3 year old PC to do anything useful

I am glad I upgraded my PC though, there are still some great PC only games like stellaris and GTA 5 looks phenomenal on it, esp with mods. I'll jump on the 1080 or 1080 ti train when I see a game that will demand it.

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I'm going to try it out on my ASUS to see if it works on that, with specs turned down. If not, the Rift ready PC will be here Monday.

Once I finally got everything mapped and set up for the driving rig to run Project Cars, it is pretty cool. They need to fix the audio issue though so we can all get our bass shakers to work when we are using VR.

Just got charged for my Apr 27th order! I'm putting my odds at 50/50 I see the unit tomorrow, it'd be great to have it before the long weekend but I'm not holding my breadth.

Tripamang_sl said:

Just got charged for my Apr 27th order! I'm putting my odds at 50/50 I see the unit tomorrow, it'd be great to have it before the long weekend but I'm not holding my breadth.

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Mine is still sitting at "Boxed for shipment" after nearly a week now. Their customer service finally emailed me the other day after the problem I had and confirmed that it would be shipping soon... days later, still waiting. Also the hold on my card has fallen off with no actual charge being made.

Skanda_sl said:

Mine is still sitting at "Boxed for shipment" after nearly a week now. Their customer service finally emailed me the other day after the problem I had and confirmed that it would be shipping soon... days later, still waiting. Also the hold on my card has fallen off with no actual charge being made.

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I got the email about a pending charge, and they never actually put the hold on my credit card just charged it today. Lots of people on reddit are reporting what you are and some of them end up having the unit show up and then days going by before they're finally charged for it. This whole thing has been a shit show really, digital river is looking like a really poor choice to do their fulfillment.

My Rift should be here in the next two hours. Too bad I don't have a PC that can run it yet. Every place in town that would sell a Rift ready PC is at least $1,500. I got the same one online for 850. It will be here Monday.