VR the champions of the world?

[Skybird]

I would not call it a flop, it jjst turns out not to be the self-running coin-milking super-business that the industry has hoped it would become easily and quickly. Second generaiton devices have been released already. Its a niche for most players, but one that is alive and slowly growing, as far as gaming in concerned. Beyond games, it still is a niche maybe, but a faster growing one.


I am still with it, and I have not regretted it one day. Racign without VR has become impossible for me to imagine.



It defintiely does better than 3D TVs a couple of years ago. Now that were fast-dying fireworks.

[JU_88]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I would not call it a flop, it jjst turns out not to be the self-running coin-milking super-business that the industry has hoped it would become easily and quickly. Second generaiton devices have been released already. Its a niche for most players, but one that is alive and slowly growing, as far as gaming in concerned. Beyond games, it still is a niche maybe, but a faster growing one.


I am still with it, and I have not regretted it one day. Racign without VR has become impossible for me to imagine.



It defintiely does better than 3D TVs a couple of years ago. Now that were fast-dying fireworks.

Oh Ive tried it (a Vive) an its pretty damn amazing. But for now, i can wait.

[Skybird]

While I am familiar with using virtual cinemainterfaces like Cmoar VR or Skybox VR for playing web- and PC-based media files in VR (Mp4 for exmaple), for whatever the reason is I have so far not tried that for playing a DVD movie that way.



In principle, playing a movie in one fo these virtual cinema ambiences, is a great experience, it reallyis pleasant and I like it a lot even if the movie is not as crispy in picture quality as it would be on the real screen or on a TV screen. My parents like to watrch my bicycle videos that way. Virtually, you have a very huge screen before your eyes, mind you. And that adds tremendously to the immersion. The static theatre ambience around the screen helps to relax the eyes.



I now tried that with a DVD movie, yesterday, and found it to be problem-ridden at first. Skybox VR, one of my two favourite movie interfaces in VR, does not recognize disc-based film formats. Cmoar Vr showed the film, but did not allow to alter language and picture aspect ratio, so it was 4:3 and in English. Not nice. Cine VR, the advertised social virtual cinema, did not play disc-based movies at all.



The way to go was via a workaround. I started the movie in ordinary VLC media player, and launched Virtual Desktop for Oculus as well, for which i have a cinemaxx scenery mod installed. From there I maximised VLC player so that it filled all the virtual movie screen that usually shows the desktop. Et voila, I had my nice virtual movie theatre and full screen movie on the virtual screen.



What should I say - its overwhelming again. I tried it with the opening scenes of Avatar. Yes, on my TV at full HD reoslution the image is sharper, of course, crispier - but here in the VR cinema, the pictures are BIGGER. And you always have that feeliing of being in a cinema. The reuslting impresison is extremely stunning. The spaceshiop falling into orb it aroudn Pandora, the sequnce when the shuttle sdeparates, and the mothership almpost flies out of the screen and into your mouth, then the scenry on the ground - iot doe snot compare to a normal TV setup.


I highly rfeocmmend to try this out, evben more so since you may not be as conservative as me and have any stremamign service for movies yourself (I have not), making it much easier for you to play a movie from your virtual cinema interface of choice.



I love my Oculus VR. I will tomorrow look staker again, afetr many years in whcih I have not - and enjoy the mood of sitting in a real small, dark program cinema in West-Berlin again in the mid-80s when I saw it the first time and experienced how it influenced and somewhat changed my life (its hard to overestimate the impression it made on me). And then Blade Runner, of course. I loved to visit cinemas back then, but today there is so much crap filmn stuff in there, and so many cinemas are gone, its a depressing shame.


As usual, using a vent at a comfortable distance is recommended for such long VR sessions.

[Skybird]

Not truely VR-related, but since I got VR mainly for sim-racing two years ago, this news: I am finally complete with my hardware migration. Yesterday, after the other Fanatec stuff that I already have since two years, I finally got the manual shifter as well. Last shifter I had was the G27, as I said: two years ago. In these years: paddle-shifting even in cars with manual gear boxes - Bäääh!

That now delivers the full sim racing hardcore experience. And no, I will not get a motion rig. No space. No cockpit frame or cabin construction - beside the space problem again, why would I? I am racing with a VR mask on my face. Fancy wheel rims or cabin constructions are of no visual use to me.



https://i.postimg.cc/T10YMbL1/IMG-20191111-141027.jpg

Good stuff, this Fanatec gear, btw. Can only recommend it. The shifter is full metal construction inside and outside, easy to switch between sequential and H-pattern (an issue of seconds), and the mechanism can be set from super-light to very hard. It also has serious weight. And a clever mounting that does not need as many screw holes in the outer casing as one would expect, still sits rocksolid.

I used to think in past years that the asking prices for this kind of gadgets is not worth it, is exotic, and too ga-ga. Lets face it, for the costs of these input devices alone other people will buy two ordinary household laptops or one to three ordinary household tower PC. But it makes a difference, really. I allowed myself to change my mind and get convinced. And the wheelbase is not even at the high end of the price index. Their new direct drive bases cost 3-4 times as much as this one.

[Skybird]

I paste and copy my posting here. If you have VR and Wreckfest, you should try this!!!

But before I start: a shifter with hard spring settings is so wonderful in this game. There is some animalitsic satisfaction to be gained from slamming in with raw power the next gear of my new Fanatec SQ 1.5 while bumping into somebody else or accelerating with all the dust and car pieces flying around you. It feels brutal. It feels dirty. It feels fitting perfectly well. Its like letting a fist fly and it lands right in the face of the guy in front of you. It feels like fresh meat before your feet, and the club still dripping with blood in your hand. It feels goooaaad! Note to myself: "Wreckfest. Shifter. Nobrainer. "

----

As we all know, Wreckfest has no VR support.

BUT:

If you have a beefy system (means: strong enough that it can handle both VR running AND Wreckfest running), try to run the game in a virtual cinema mode. I mean launch VR, and start a software like Virtual Desktop. Maybe it also works with the Virtual Desktop of the Oculus app, I have not tried that. I run Virtual Desktop with a Cineplexx cinema mod. And that means: the monitor screen is mirrored on the movie screen, at the (virtual) size of a cineplexx megascreen.

Now: you do not get stereoscopic 3D view that way, of course not but you get the game running in much bigger picture scale than on a monitor. It jumps into your face, so to speak. I can tell you: it is the second best thing to real stereoscopic 3D. It works excellent, and reveals an ammount of beauty in Wreckfest's world that so far had escaped my eyes on a single screen. The wetaher and lighting also worksd out so much better. I am shocked I did not do this earlier.

Why I have not tried that earlier? Because not every game works well this way, on a virtual movie screen. I tried it with The Hunter before, but the hopping movement, the shaking of the view from side to side whenever I walked, gave me VR sickness, although I am usually invulnerable to that. So I had not tried other non-VR games this way, The Hunter was my first and my last experience in "pseudo-VR". So, it depends on the game. Wreckfest works magnificent this way, I did three races á 5 laps each, and I am still alive and well, and stunned by what I just saw!

Try it, its worth it. I will never play Wreckfest on screen again. This is like Wreckfest 2.0 for me.



I will try a few other games in this mode, too, games that maybe promise to be not susceptible to creating VR sickness when played in thsi way. I assume walking simulötors, first person shooters might not be the best choice.

[Skybird]

Hm. I just checked and realised that I have run out of games that could qualify for this cinema screen trick and do not already include a native stereoscopic 3D real virtual reality option. The Hunter and Call of the Wild were the only ones installed that could make sense to be tried.

[Skybird]

When FB renamed itself to Meta some weeks , soon after that they seem to have announced (I missed it) that they want to get rid of the enforced FB account for Oculus users. In Germany, several lawcases are runnign against them due to several violations of German and European laws that forbid doing so, the EU also runs two cases against FB over this issue. I mean against Meta. Hach, to hell with it, its Facebook no matter how much psychobabble and glossy advert-talking they do.

That is nice news if true, it may happen early next year and would allow me to stay with my Rift beyond end of next year. My system now is four years old and by the end of next year would be five years, and actually I am not craving for anything new and more powerful performance, it still runs smooth and stable and gets all done that I throw at it. I have just invested in a midlife extension update and migrated my secondary HD with all the games on it via Macrium rEflect to a new HD twice as big and being new, and I would not oppose the idea to stay with this system for several more years to come. When I finally one day get a new one, Windows 11 birthing issues hopefully have been dealt with, and the more serious later-coming issues already have shown up to make my boring life more interesting again.

Still, will not recommend never again no more to buy no Oculus not. Technically they might be good and I was satisfied with my Rift (until recently the earphones stopped working and I must use external ones), but I absolutely dispise the Zuckerberg corporation and its customer hostile policies.

[Skybird]

Holla die Waldfee, that really makes a difference! I connected the G2 today, and different to so many others I had no problems and my rig recognizes it nicely. I needed no cable replacement and had no issues. Thje cable is 6m by default, btw.

The image is - I had not expected this, it is really very good, very sharp, and no recognizable mosquito mesh/screendoor effect, its really very impressive. Colours are nice, too, so is the sound. It wears more comfortable than the Oculus Rift, not that the Rift was bad, but this one wears better. The controllers are not as good, do not look as sturdy, and I so far fail to get them work properly with Google Earth VR.

So far I am pleased. Raceroom worked fine. I have not yet tested the hardware killer applications like ACC and FS, possible that there I need to tune down things.

But the image quality for itself - very very good. No comparison when you come from a Rift.


For the prices you usually pay vor VR headsets with controllers, it also was cheap, 500 coins. Compare that to a HTC Vive.

[Skybird]

8000 coins, plus 1000 coins yearly subscription.

[Skybird]

One of the first and still most impressive VR experiences I made, was "Air Car". I came to experience it on the Oculus Rift, and for long time it was a Rift-only title. When I had chnaged my VR set last christmas for the G2 Reverb, I lost it - I thought.

I have meanwhile found that the title is no longer Rift-only, and is beign worked on, still. In the G2 with its higher resolution, it looks stunning! I like to have it back.

Its not a game, just an experience, a way to relax, you hover aorund in a futuristic Blade Runner-style city, in a Blade Runner-style flying car. And you look around and enjoy the sights and the experience and if your stomach is hard enough you do some fancy flying stunts. Thats it. There are many demonstrators like this for VR . What sets this apart is that while you do not "play" it often or all the time, you nevertheless keep coming back to it every couple of times. There have been clones who showed up, but none of them, as far as I saw them, came close to this one.

The Reverb'S handsticks had to be adapted via a mod, it took some mtime for me to found out.

G-Police, anyone...?

[Skybird]

I thought I start updates in loose sequence about the state of things with VR games, those titles that I know and that I think work reamrkably well. I do so by trying to find videos that by their format allow assessment of what to expect and whether VR compromises or enahces gameplay. Needless to say: its always the latter.

Starting with Eleven Table Tennis, I posted it yesterday in another thread and was off topic with it, so I put it here, for the sake of completeness.
The game has just seen a long-standing Beta now being turned into the new mandatory standard for everybody, with new physics, imo even better realism (would not have thought that possible), and a need to get used to a few new adaptations to resetting options. They plan more changes and new things to come, amongst them a nice new match arena. Eleven for me still is one of the best exmaples of how unbelievably well VR can work if matched with the right software projects. Allows SP and MP. Different to court tennis, table tennis allows you realostic runni8g movements in VR since you do noit nee a whole centreeocurt in your living room. That is why table tennis in VR stresses me physically almost identically to playing it in reality, I really jumpo and run a lot, do not just stand and return balls. But then, I am no good table tennis player at all, and never was. AI can now be set on a percentage scale, from boring to flak-firing challenger beast. Weaknessyes in physics model of the predecessing version, which most players did not notice anyway, have been left behind now.

Superb, excellent simulation.

[Skybird]

And the big cousin, First Person Tennis. It too is in slow but constant improvement, and has changed noticably over the past two years, and content got added. Like Eleven's developer, this one too cares for his baby. The gameplay obviously makes compromises, all leg work necessarily must be worked around by game mechanisms, since real tennis depends a lot on running the line up and down, and that is hard to do in a living room. The method by which FPT does it, works surprisingly well, but gets a little bit used to. Since you do not swing a real racket with real mass and weight, swinging the VR grip feels differently and needs more discipline in beign precise in holding it to correctly appaly Topspin and Slice as you wish to see. A real racket stabilises your strike by its mass, a VR grip is more instabile since it is so light in weight.

You can run this as a relaxed ball-returning entertainment game, but if you want to play competitive, you need the force and speed in your strikes, and that means you need to apply according power to your swings, and then it indeed becomes sweat-producing. Also your foot positioning to the ball when striking, is as important as it is in reality. I use to have a small round tile laying on the centrespot of my playing space that I can search for and easly find with my foot to recentre myself after every ball exchange - else I would be in serious danger of bashing my living room into tiny pieces. Youtube videos usually show guys just standing there and do slight, almost desinterested movements with their right arm. Believe me, if you want to powerserve and play with force, that is not enough, you really must put power into your moves, seriously. And then it changes into a completely different ballgame. The legwork is not there (the computer slides you instead, the alternative is a sudden zoom to a new position but I find that disorientating), but arms and shoulders, hands and muscle in your sides copy quite some of what the real sports would see in needs and efforts. Also you must quickly jump into the correct stand according to what you play next: Backhand or Forehand. I tend to follow runnign the same drills like I did in real tennis 30 years ago - the sim is easily good enough to reward that by noticable raises in precision of your strikes. No complete replacement for the real sports, though, but still - impressive enough if you play it seriously. You sweat, you need to train your precision and discipline, and it is superb fun. Not for those who want maximum success easily after just learning for 30 minutes.




For comparison: this is first person footage from a real tennis player with a GoPro on his chest or head. It looks quite similiar in perspective.