Oculus Rift (VR Headset)

[Alex W.]

Lemme use an analogy: in current FPSes you are a plastic army guy. You can rotate your whole body to look around and aim but that's it.

Oculus should work by letting you move your neck. You still move your whole body to aim your gun and turn but you can peer around and up and down to a neck-limited degree away from that aiming direction.

[Nicky]

theres bound to be a few options until its apparent what's best for most people. look at the control options in Goldeneye for example. not only did they have 4-5 standard control methods, they also had wacky things like domino with 2 controllers for one person. so it'll no doubt take a few years of tracking what settings users apply over a host of options, to see what becomes the norm.

[Alex W.]

Anyone who chooses to aim with their neck is a fool though.

[Sprite Machine]

Yeah, in a racing game, you wouldn't steer the car with your head, so I don't see why you'd steer a person with your head either. It'd be unnatural and impractical.

[DocG]

Yeah, in a racing game, you wouldn't steer the car with your head, so I don't see why you'd steer a person with your head either. It'd be unnatural and impractical.

And tiring, I reckon. Think of all the small twitch movements you make to track a moving target -- movements you naturally do with your eyes, rather than by moving your whole head, but until Rift v2 has gaze tracking it'd force you to move your entire head. I think that'd get old fast.

[Alex W.]

Gaze tracking is right out. The place your eyes are pointing at any given time is not where your attention is placed, unless you're staring. Normally you're glancing all over the place to construct and maintain a mental model of the scene.

[Fry Crayola]

Suppose you look right with the headset. You see a guy. You use the hand controls to turn your "body" towards him and simultaneously turn your head back to "straight on" with the headset. Perfectly natural.

Yup. I think if the Rift is good as it should hopeful be, then it'll be trivial to simply keep your gaze on some virtual object (such as your target) whilst manipulating the pad. You'd do it without thinking.

[b00dles]

Did anyone ever use the VFX1? They had them in Cyberia when I worked there in '95 and you moved your head independently and used a circular accelerometer powered disc which you held in your hand and tilted left, right forward and back to move your mans and shoot.

We had it working with the Quake demo, Dark Forces and something else I can't remember but once you got used to it, it was fine. It helped of course that those games were generally made for your view being fixed to your gun (so you couldn't really get that confused with where you were meant to shoot - almost always 'forwards') but after a while you could quite easily run away from people facing forward but shooting behind you.

Admittedly it did have that old VR problem of cables, wherebby you could get a bit tangled if you turned the same direction too many times but it worked very well I thought.

Again though, primarily there wasn't much 'verticality' back then so the up/ down thing wasn't too important but iirc, it had a wiimote style 'lock' button if you needed to look up and down or point more accurately with the crosshair (Dark Forces had crosshairs and yes, although I understand the arguments, it still worked as a reference point of what was forward.

They will have to start putting bodies in though, because it's even more strange looking down with a VR hat on and not seeing anything...

[hub2]

The guy in the video made a good point about height as well... there may need to be a setting to adjust the 'avatar's' height in the game to that of the player.?

[Alex W.]

Why would it suddenly be an issue with a headset? Not seen the video.

[hub2]

Well, he gave the specific example of Doom... when you are in the Doom game you get the impression your avatar is 4 feet tall, you then adjust for that, say increase it to 6 feet, and you then realise that all the doors in the game are 5 feet tall!

His main point being that developers have to consider new things like this when designing and developing VR ready games, that they have not had to up to now.

I guess it's something that is better understood if you use OR... not that I have, but the way he explained it made sense.

[Alex W.]

Oh, right. Not so much an issue of having to adjust to the player's height, but Oculus' tendency to reveal how unrealistic game environments are.

[Slartibartfast]

After reading the Verge 'Best in Show' description, I couldn't resist the temptation any longer (helps that I run an IT company so we have purchased it for 'research', although I'm not quite sure how it will help with IT support lol!!!). Anyway, I've been fascinated by the idea of VR for a very long time, and every 6 months or so will always wonder 'why didn't it come back with improved technology', and here it is. The Verge gush that forced my hand was:

"The Oculus Rift changed my life. No, seriously. My childhood (at least the formative years) was spent reading novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and poring over stories about a future promised by Mondo 2000 and Wired. Virtual reality has long been the ultimate promise of technology — the magic mandala, a doorway to the infinite. But the thing is: it never happened. We got touchscreens, motion sensors, the tablet revolution, body-hacking… but we never got our cyberdecks. Until now. The Oculus Rift actually delivers on the promise, and then some. It’s really, really amazing. Truly and honestly a revelation, a trip, a rabbit hole. And I’m going in. Forever. Goodbye universe. Hello universe."

Oh well, now the long wait until the developer kit arrives, and then will have to source a decent gaming PC from somewhere it get it running as all my gaming is normally done on consoles. But I want to go into the rabbit hole and have a good look around! See you on the other side.

[hub2]

Just thinking about non-gaming potential again for a moment, I was thinking of using a 360 camera attached to something like the Vgo robot?

http://www.vgocom.com/

It allow people to virtually visit anywhere (as long as it had a flat floor )

[Mr. Gerbik]

The guy in the video made a good point about height as well... there may need to be a setting to adjust the 'avatar's' height in the game to that of the player.?

I hope you can indeed adjust the height according to country or player then, us Dutchies would still feel like we're playing as midgets if they went with the size of the average American male

[Pistol]

No Oddjob.

[Spacehost]

I don't get all the issues people think this will cause. The visor thingie basically provides you a way to freelook away from the main direction of travel like you can in a helicopter sim, without using your hands. If you can cope with a copter sim, where you can view around the cockpit, move laterally and rotate the body of the aircraft around, I think you can cope with this.

[RubberJohnny]

I don't get all the issues people think this will cause. The visor thingie basically provides you a way to freelook away from the main direction of travel like you can in a helicopter sim, without using your hands. If you can cope with a copter sim, where you can view around the cockpit, move laterally and rotate the body of the aircraft around, I think you can cope with this.

It gets a bit more confusing when you consider third person games though - usually the camera is focused on the player avatar, but if its bound to look then can you make it look away from them? What happens when the camera view snaps out of its normal context and starts going on level flybys?

[robdood]

Falls apart when you need to go beyond the ~180degree field of view. you'd either need a zone towards your vision boundaries which act as a quick rotate, or a "shift" like button where you can quickly press to use the mouse to quickly engage a flick of a look.

Eh, there isn't a 180 field of view. The fov they like to use for the goggles is about 110. There is no limit to how far you can turn round. You just have to use your shoulders.

Its going to be fine with existing fps controls, I've just realised.

It gets a bit more confusing when you consider third person games though - usually the camera is focused on the player avatar, but if its bound to look then can you make it look away from them? What happens when the camera view snaps out of its normal context and starts going on level flybys?

VR doesn't really work or is intended for third person experiences though?

[hub2]

Nunchuck & Wiimote / Move control would be perfect for this.

[Spacehost]

It gets a bit more confusing when you consider third person games though - usually the camera is focused on the player avatar, but if its bound to look then can you make it look away from them? What happens when the camera view snaps out of its normal context and starts going on level flybys?

The former, I'd use the Occulus to provide an adjustment to the viewing angle of the camera, while the thumbstick controls the character aiming. Pretty much like a first-person camera. When the cam isn't in "aim mode" and returns to the standard arcball method of rotating around the avatar (see every game where you can holster a gun ever, like Mass Effect), it provides the ability to look around while the stick controls the arcball cam.

The latter, give the player plenty of camera adjustment control through the Occulus. Make it like they're strapped to the bottom of a boom camera.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of things to look at, but frankly you can just use the Occulus as a "view modifier".

[RubberJohnny]

VR doesn't really work or is intended for third person experiences though?

Well then it's shit.

[Spacehost]

VR doesn't really work or is intended for third person experiences though?

Away and shite. Pretty much every in-game camera in videogames could be replicated using a VR system. The complicated bit is transforming the motion of the headset into appropriate camera rotations and adjustments, which is just a bit of maths and some trial-and-error.

[Asura]

Here's the way it's got to be:

The keyboard and mouse moves and turns your gun through the environment. There's a person attached by implication but we can ignore that. Same as it ever was. The way you are aiming is soley decided by where your mouse and keyboard tell the gun to point.

The headset moves your view around but with a 1:1 mapping. If you're looking forward in your chair you're always looking at where the gun is pointing. It's easy to find the crosshair. Small deviations in where you are looking act as a real world analogue to view bobbing but don't change your aim.

Suppose you look right with the headset. You see a guy. You use the hand controls to turn your "body" towards him and simultaneously turn your head back to "straight on" with the headset. Perfectly natural.

In theory, yes - but a lot of early "realistic" FPS titles, like the original Operation Flashpoint, or Vietcong did this - where you could move your "arms" a little bit independently of where you moved your "head". It didn't catch on.

Admittedly though, this was in 2D on a flat screen with no headset. It might be inherently better in something like the Rift.

[SaintM]

Whatever the perceived limitations of this may be, we'll cope. Keyboard and mouse/controller are hardly natural fits to movement and direction adjustment in a 3d environment, but they feel natural now because we're all so used to them.

This will be the same in time and I can't wait!

[Dimahoo]

Imagine arcade Darius!

But seriously all you'd need is (like me) a swivel chair and flying the M. Falcon will just be utterly amazing!

[robdood]

Away and shite. Pretty much every in-game camera in videogames could be replicated using a VR system. The complicated bit is transforming the motion of the headset into appropriate camera rotations and adjustments, which is just a bit of maths and some trial-and-error.

Bah well my phone swallowed my post in reply to RJ, but OBVIOUSLY you can make it work with other camera systems.

It'll just be the most intuitive, immersive and awesome in first person IMO.

[bcofn]

Reading this topic makes me think there is some epidemic of people that have trouble moving their heads independently from their body.

Nunchuck & Wiimote / Move control would be perfect for this.

This really. It's not a replacement control mechanism it's an additional one. I don't think i'd have any issue controlling my body movement with the nunchuck, gun/arm movement with the wiimote and then looking around with my head because I do that every day as it is and if anything it's less abstract than a keyboard and mouse. Third person isn't really any different other than the ability to fly and a degree of disembodiment but I don't think that would be that hard to get used to. If anything the issue might be seeing more people that can't disconnect between what they can do in and out of the computer.

[dataDave]

I want this now.

Seriously, I go nuts over everything 3D, however I'm worried about eye-strain with this thing. Isn't it a bit too close to the face for our eyes to focus naturally?

[Mr. Gerbik]

I was thinking just now, if it becomes more important with this technology to be able to look down and see your legs and feet instead of breaking immersion by being a floating camera, wouldn't a company like Starbreeze (or at least the old Starbreeze) be *the* perfect developer to make a first-person shooter/brawler got this tech. No other dev does a convincing first-person perspective with an actual body and, most importantly, convincing weight to all your movements like they do. The Further Adventures of Riddick: Oculus Edition anyone?