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[alexandertnt]

Again, that takes some seconds of floundering around. If you don't believe me, try timing how long it take you to type a paragraph of text with your eyes closed using just your left hand, and then time yourself again with your eyes open. The difference might seem relatively small, but unless you're playing a turn-based game it'll make a world of difference.

It took me a bit longer to type looking at they keyboard, as it caused me to keep second-guessing where my fingers were.

[i2amroy]

Personally I think valve is gonna come out on top here by sheer virtue of the fact that they know how to make good games (as opposed to groups like Facebook) and they are taking other problems (like the puking one) seriously.

As for typing thing, the problem is also nonexistent if you use a trackpad instead of a mouse. Because the trackpad is always in the same place regardless of mouse position, I can simply move my right hand up to hit some keys in most cases, or in a worst case shoot my left hand across for most commonly used other keys. Timing myself shows that I'm well within my margin of error for having the same time in both methods, so I'd say that it's still totally possible.

[Frumple]

... I'm kinda' curious what you people are doing with your mouse that you can't find it again after taking your hand off to type, without looking at it. Like. It... it shouldn't be moving. And it's been seconds, probably. Even pretty terrible short-term memory should be able to manage that?

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Vilanat]

Personally I think valve is gonna come out on top here by sheer virtue of the fact that they know how to make good games (as opposed to groups like Facebook) and they are taking other problems (like the puking one) seriously.

Facebook can buy games just like Microsoft bought Minecraft and with all due respect to Valve, only a very small fraction is ever going to play TF2, SC:GO or DOTA2 (DOTA not even a small fraction) with a VR set. the device that will have the biggest install base will also attract the most and best developers. the Hardware manufacturers own ability to produce good games for launch is important but not crucial and it doesn't mean that even a company like Facebook can't make an App killer. Also, the same logic can be directed at the fact that Valve never produced a good gaming hardware while Microsoft and Sony are extremely experienced and successful with that.

Heck, facebook can just throw in a 50M USD and set up an indie fund that will attract thousands of talented developers which in turn will produce hundreds of quality games.

I personally think that augmented reality will win over virtual reality, except in dedicated entertainment facilities or hard gamers living rooms, at least until VR can be convenient enough. again, with all due respect to Valve, their gamers centric actions and efforts to make the players not puke, i don't see wearing a helmet as convenient at all. you just can't compete with a device that will be the size of glasses and will let you watch T.V/Movies/Play games practically on any white wall while still enabling you to watch your kid, pet your pet, drink your coffee or communicate with your spouse. Yeah, the games will probably be far more casual, but we are just a niche so casual will win the market.

I also don't think facebook bought Oculus so they could have a hardcore gaming device and i bet Oculus already branched out to augmented reality as well so Facebook is going to compete both in AR and VR.

Btw, in the AR market there is also "CastAR", which began within Valve until they decided to ditch AR for VR.

[miauw62]

Virtual reality sickness (also known as cybersickness) occurs when exposure to a virtual environment causes symptoms that are similar to motion sickness symptoms. The most common symptoms are general discomfort, headache, stomach awareness, nausea, vomiting, pallor, sweating, fatigue, drowsiness, disorientation, and apathy. Other symptoms include postural instability and retching. Virtual reality sickness is different from motion sickness in that it can be caused by the visually-induced perception of self-motion; real self-motion is not needed. It is also different from simulator sickness; non-virtual reality simulator sickness tends to be characterized by oculomotor disturbances, whereas virtual reality sickness tends to be characterized by disorientation.

Valve could actually be the winner because they're the only company taking the "games shouldn't make you puke and have diarrhea" issue seriously.

Whenever I see a new EA release I puke anyway, though, and they haven't even brought out a VR product yet!

[Tack]

Why aren't we doing direct-brain interfacing yet?

AFAIK judging by the ramblings of Dr Warwick:
The Human brain is really good at learning to process inputs, but gives hashy outputs which most computers can't handle unless it's an incredibly simple task (Mebe even calibrated per person.)

Problem is we'd need to learn to interpret the signals said console Throws at us both visually and audibly (Or even tactile...y Tactility. Whatever.)
I think brains are still hazy on that.

[LordBucket]

you misspelled voila.

Yes, I did. But I'm no longer an editor for a publishing firm, so I'm allows to make mistakes like that now.

I heard Cortona.

Is Clippy coming back with plastic surgery?

As someone who remembers Clippy, I'll acknowledge that Cortana is a different beast. I've spoken with her, and while I wouldn't say she's notably more spectacular than Android's Assistant, but she's not Clippy. Head to a microsoft store if you want to try her out.

If microsoft is smart, rather than simply porting her unchanged from phones, they'll integrate her with the interface completely so you can simply tell her to do things and they'll happen. "Cortana, would you install open office for me?" "Of course, Dave. Though I'm sorry to hear you're not using MS office." (5 minutes later, open office has been downloaded and installed.)

Personally I think that the whole thing will flop on the market. I've had opportunity to use Oculus, and while it's cool and all it just can't stand up to the classic computer screen when it comes to competitive gaming.

I very much doubt that. I'm guessing VR is going to overwhelm and dominate the gaming industry. It will probably take a few years even for game developers to let go of old design models and adapt to the new hardware. Lots of industry staples, even like menus aren't going to work as well. It will probably take a few years. But give it time and I think 2d gaming will be like gaming without a mouse. Yes, you can do it, some games don't require it...but it's definitely the norm for a PC game to use a mouse.

I'm pretty sure there's already a mod to make Minecraft Rift-compatible.

Yes, Minecrift

And you can't really use a keyboard well enough if you can't see it at all

[Citation needed]

It's a problem many people have reported with the rift, and it's actually two problems. The first is mechanical difficulty. When you're "not looking" at your keyboard, you nevertheless have tactile feedback. Put one of your fingers on F1 and you know exactly where F5 is. You can close your eyes and push it with no difficulty. But now take your fingers off the keyboard completely and ses if you can press F5. Oh, maybe you still can because of peripheral vision? Now try it with yoru eyes closed. And now that your eyes are closed left click your mouse button. You have to find the mouse before tactile feedback can give you a sense for where everything is. With the rift alone and no third party hardware, there's no peripheral vision of the keyboard and mouse at all. You're seeing completely different space. And you can't see your hands. And what you see doesn't necessarily correspond at all to the physical layout you have in front of you. You might "see" a flightstick or steering wheel, for example. And your keyboard, mouse and desk bear no relationship at all to that.

The second problem is the immersion breaking that results from this. When you see a flickstick but your hands are touching a keyboard, and you see the flightstick move, but you can't see your hands moving it...that breaks the suspension of disbelief. Which is not a deal breaker, but a number of people have reported that when things are just right in VR, they genuinely feel like they're "actually there" rather than playing a game. Losing that is unfortunate.

There are solutions to these problems, custom hardware, Nimble Sense, etc. But it is a problem people have had.

Virtual reality sickness

Might as well add rectal prolapse, abdominal bleeding and death to the list. Some infectious diseases are more benign than this.

With Rift, people on reddit generally report that after they use it for enough days or weeks, they do get used to it so it eventually stops being a problem. But yes, there's a lot to be said for Valve's hardware simply not having that problem at all. I haven't read any complaints about this with the Hololense either, but that's because it's AR rather than VR. You still have the physical world to look at, which makes it a relatively niche device in terms of gaming. But immensely more practical for non-gaming use. Being able to walk down the street and see data overlays on top of the real world has a lot of application. See prices in stores, have people's names appear next to them, visually flag people who are giving subtle physical cues of attraction to you, have driving directions appear direction in your view, etc.

Valve could actually be the winner because they're the only company taking the "games shouldn't make you puke and have diarrhea" issue seriously.

I think facebook/rift is taking it seriously, but there are conceptual problems to their setup that are difficult to solve visually. Motion sickness is a thing even in real life. Lots of people get motion sick belowdeck on boats, for example, because it's natural to perceive the boat as a stationary frame of reference, and all the jostling around they're feeling from the waves doesn't match what their eyes are telling them. Rift's "sit in one place while you walk around" method has the same problem. I'm not sure how they can fix it. It's a biology problem not a hardware problem.

But, people can and do adapt to being on boats. Presumably they can adapt to the rift too. But it's a legimite question. Why would anyone want to go through all that when Valve's alternative doesn't have that problem?

... I'm kinda' curious what you people are doing with your mouse that you can't find it again after taking your hand off to type, without looking at it. Like. It... it shouldn't be moving. And it's been seconds, probably. Even pretty terrible short-term memory should be able to manage that?

As mentioned above, the problem is worse with the rift because your entire visual space is filled with data that is a mismatch to what's physically on your desk. Put a finger on one key, close your eyes and you can easily find another key without hunting for it. But now replace your vision with an entirely different view of the inside of a spaceship such that where you know there's a desk, instead you see an empty cargo hold, apparently it's not as easy to cope with the visual/tactile mismatch.

[Reelya]

That's where we might disagree. You see VR as something everyone's going to jump onto as the norm for gaming. But it's a solo pursuit by it's nature, so it's for basement dwellers to be honest.

And you see AR as a niche thing, whereas I look at that Reascape game in development for the iPhone which turns your real world into a 3D action shooter ... that one has the very real advantage that you can actually run around and interact in 3D with it. That's where I'd put the money, rather than an 80's view of what VR would be, which is what "pure" VR is.

This looks hell of a lot more fun that sitting down and sticking a helmet on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzvAu-QiZo4

[Sergarr]

That's where we might disagree. You see VR as something everyone's going to jump onto as the norm for gaming. But it's a solo pursuit by it's nature, so it's for basement dwellers to be honest.

And you see AR as a niche thing, whereas I look at that Reascape game in development for the iPhone which turns your real world into a 3D action shooter ... that one has the very real advantage that you can actually run around and interact in 3D with it. That's where I'd put the money, rather than an 80's view of what VR would be, which is what "pure" VR is.

This looks hell of a lot more fun that sitting down and sticking a helmet on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzvAu-QiZo4

I'd imagine something like that can be very useful for LARPers that want to use magic without having to throw crap at people.

[Frumple]

... that looks intensely awkward and an incredibly easy way to lose a phone. I'll, uh. I'll take the helmet and sitting down or whatev'.

[LordBucket]

VR

it's a solo pursuit by it's nature

Why? An online multiplayer game in VR is still online and multiplayer regardless of the interface change.

You see VR as something everyone's going to jump onto as the norm for gaming

Will probably make great headway in porn and video too.

you see AR as a niche thing

That may be my own personal bias. I would put it in a similar category as mobile gaming. I wouldn't call the guy who plays farmville on his phone a gamer. And yet when I check, it seems that the mobile gaming market is larger tha the console gaming market in terms of revenue, and vastly more so in terms of number of users.

So maybe calling it "niche" isn't fair of me.

whereas I look at that Reascape game in development for the iPhone which turns your real world into a 3D action shooter ... that one has the very real advantage that you can actually run around and interact in 3D with it. That's where I'd put the money, rather than an 80's view of what VR would be, which is what "pure" VR is.

Ok, but I notice that a third of the comments on that video are saying how much better it woudl be if it were VR, and when I go the company's website, they're partnering with Oculus.

This looks hell of a lot more fun that sitting down and sticking a helmet on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzvAu-QiZo4

...if that's the alternative, yeah, I'll take the helmet. To me that looks like a cute little office game you play a couple times with coworkers during lunch, then forget about after a few weeks. That said, looking at the genre you're referring to in general, I do see how that could become very common. Even people who aren't really gamers could very easily be caught up in games where every time you see a red car you flag it and get a point. And compete with your friends for most red cars seen in a week. Mobile gaming seems to target the average person with regular logon, and pay-to-reduce timer gimmicks. That sort of thing could translate very well into an AR headset that people wear as part of their daily lives.

Long term, I suspect it may depend on how good ultrasonic haptics gets and how convenient/essential Ar devices become in daily life. Add 5 years of development to valve's arrangement, plus a really good ultrasonic haptic interface, and you basically have a holodeck. I don't see how little AR phone games can possibly compete with the ability to completely immerse yourself into an environment of your choice that you can fully interact with. But that comparison might not be fair. Mobile gaming is what it is because everyone has a phone. In 5-10 years from now everybody is wearing augmented reality contact lenses through all their waking hours, that could become a socially accepted norm detached from the stigma of a basement dweller hiding from reality in his virtual world.

[Sergarr]

To me that looks like a cute little office game you play a couple times with coworkers during lunch, then forget about after a few weeks.

But that's where the Real Money™ comes from. Office games. Three in a row and all that.

[Flying Dice]

To me that looks like a cute little office game you play a couple times with coworkers during lunch, then forget about after a few weeks.

But that's where the Real Money™ comes from. Office games. Three in a row and all that.

That example in particular looks like it could be developed to eat into the paintball/airsoft market, actually. Assuming it can handle environments that aren't as neat as cubicle-laden offices.

[Putnam]

Morpheus is destined to fail, mostly because, unlike Rift or Vive, a game that runs with Morpheus must be built entirely to run with Morpheus, with that taken into account from the beginning due to the way games are optimized for consoles in general. On the other hand, Rift and Vive support can be added to a game like any other peripheral, with only "you need a beefy computer" as instruction.