I ordered one. Now I need to get a new 1000+ € Windows computer as well.
VR lust is insane. The money could be better spent, I'm not sure if I'll have much time to play with it anyway. I just can't help it -- this is the system I've been waiting for since I was 10 years old.
(To be fair, I have a personal company to which I can expense all sorts of gadgets and subtract the VAT, so the impulse buy treshold is much less. If I were an employee, I would have thought harder about it.)
The big problem with that strategy is that it's a really bad time to buy an expensive video card.
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of nVidia has stated that the next generation of video cards will be 10x as fast as current cards.[1] That's probably an extremely cherry picked example, but it is obvious that the next generation will be a lot faster. All of the following are lining up:
- 28nm -> 14/16nm node jump allows twice the transistors in the same space. For video cards, that basically means double the performance.
- 28nm -> 14/16nm promises a 65% increase in transistor switching speeds
- 28nm -> 14/16nm promises a 70% decrease in power consumption. The very high end cards are currently power-limited, and many are limited by cooling.
- HBM2 memory promises a 3x increase in memory throughput
- Vulkan / DX12 promise to reduce CPU bottlenecks, this is the first generation to be explicitly optimized for Vulkan & DX12.
- This generation of video cards is the first to receive explicit optimizations for VR
- Both AMD & nVidia are promising significant architectural improvements.
Both AMD & nVidia are aiming for summer releases so that they solidly nail the August/September buying season.
Waiting a few months will also give a chance for the reviews to roll in. Early indications are that the Vive is the one to buy, but that's early. Things can change quickly as games come out, and nobody's had a really good look at the PSVR, AFAICT.
If I had a proper video card, I'd be jumping in now on the Vive. But I don't, so I'm going to wait, as painful as that is.
i heard such claims before, you can safely ignore them. nobody is jumping even 2x in performance, not straight away, it's a stupid move from financial point of view and they never did it before so why start now.
extremely happy to be proven wrong in near future :)
Lots of historical precedence. The first few generations of 3D cards used to more than double in performance every generation. They'd get a process node bump, an architectural bump, a DRAM bandwidth bump and they'd often be bigger than previous generations.
You are not correct, there was NEVER 10x jump (apart from software render of same scene vs 3dfx one, which is not apples to apples).
True, initial first few generations were sometimes progressing fast, but only because architecture was clunky and everybody was just exploring new realm of chip & API design.
So, any outrageous 10x performance jumps in this industry IN LAST 15 YEARS? :)
Yup. I want a new machine but am holding off because of Pascal. Not sure what cheap card I can get as throwawayish to play The Division. Guess I'll have to go something else instead :)
Could it be better spent? I'm not an impulsive tech buyer (rocking a 3 year old iPhone at the moment) but I think that every so often, being an early adopter show-off is completely worth the early adopter premium, on top of the personal enjoyment of experiencing a polished breakthrough technology.
With the first gen iPhone, it was really delightful to show dozens of people the future. Likewise, I have a strong inkling that the friends/family I show VR to will have their minds blown in a way that will be great fun to watch, providing them and me a lot more pleasure than if we were to wait a few years.
People can wax lyrical all day about how there was nothing technically sophisticated about the phone, but the day the iPhone came out was the day the average user started caring about that sophistication.
early adopter != polished new technology. just one question - what games/software would you be using it after buying right now? usually bundled stuff last couple of days, max weeks
If it's a breakthrough, I'd argue that a good amount of polish is there. Going back to the 1G iPhone - Safari had its limitations, but was overall an incredibly fluid experience that would immediately sell everyone on the iPhone's utility.
There are a lot of games that sound intriguing (the Oculus Toybox and Eve Valkyrie sound like good intros), but what really sold me are reports that when asked to jump off of a 1,000 foot high precipice in Minecraft in the Rift, most people can't do it. I've never seen someone flinch doing the same in Assassin's Creed, with it's staggeringly detailed graphics. I'm excited to show people that and similar experiences that dramatically trip the brain's sense of presence.
Not a bad start for a technology that should have costed less. People complain that this is way too expensive, but every new thing costs a lot even if it is “just a bunch of sensors with a display”.
The more interesting question is if VR can fill more than some niches?
Nothing profound. Just a sense that there is no real impediment to the progression of technology from today's clunky form factor to something unobtrusive.
You don't have to look beyond the spread of the cell phone to see that there would be a huge demand for an "immersive iphone".
Google glasses failed not just for technological reasons. There are lots of people who are just not keen to wear glasses, or watches for that matter. I doubt we will see a future where everyone is walking with a giant cooking pot on their head.
I can see some common usage, like working in a plane. You can face a giant spreadsheet that you only can see. For 3d modelling this will be certainly useful.
Is it going to change significantly our way of life like mobile phones did? I can't see how.
You're likely to look back with a bit of a chuckle about not having seen it coming. Just my guess of course, i've been wrong before.
Google glasses were still way too clunky; ubiquity may not happen in earnest until the technology comes as contact lenses. That's still science fiction, but far from impossible. And many of us wear glasses already, so wearing something discrete that doesn't look as ridiculous as google glasses did, would already be embraced.
There is a huge opportunity for such tech to change our life as much as the cell phone. Discrete heads up display with instructions for new objects, forgotten names, dates, places etc.. Beautiful, personalized artwork and decor at the office and home. The list is endless.
If you look back through the history people have always said that.
People were saying headphones will never become a thing because no one likes to put something clunky like that on their head and ears. Now it has become a fashion item too.
I wonder how many headsets they will sell in the first year, but seeing how much interest there is, I won't be surprised if they sell more than 1 million.
Doubly impressive given that lots of people seemed to be reporting the same problems as I had with orders not going through due to messages of being sold out or payment being declined. I eventually got my order to go through after about half an hour of trying.
I hope they can sell more but the technology is still too new for ordinary consumer. Developers may need to find out more possibilities and functions for it first.
What else do we need to use a VR device? Do they cost a lot?
e.g. Film Cameras were not expensive but films were. PS4 is not expensive but the games are. (to me)
Otherwise, lots of free room if you want to enjoy room scale VR.
If you want to really enjoy driving games, you want a good steering wheel. If you want to enjoy flying games, you need a good stick. Those two can get up to $200 each.
You will need a full computer with at least a GTX 970 (or an AMD r9 290) and at least an i5-4950 (or maybe an AMD FX 8350). Here's [1] a good guide, but roughly $800 for just the machine.
Then you need keyboard, mouse, monitor, internet, power...
Then you need Windows 10 (roughly $100).
Then you need games, which you will probably get through Steam [2] or through Oculus [3].
That's on top of the ~ $600 for an Oculus Rift, or ~ $800 for an HTC Vive.
I'm not really interested in this technology, but I hope HTC manages to stay afloat. And make a true successor of HTC One M7, which I still use to this day.
Are headsets the only path to VR right now? I could see this vastly altering the gaming market, where very few experiences are shared unless a network is involved. But I don't see VR being a paradigm shift on the order of the smartphone unless you can easily share the experience with someone who walks in the room and asks what you're doing. These bulky headsets don't afford that.
I own a developer kit (DK2) Rift and AFAIK all games mirror what the wearer is seeing onto the primary monitor. Which is good for sharing an individual's experience, but doesn't do much for group experiences.
I'm pretty excited for more asymmetrical games and experiences along the lines of http://www.keeptalkinggame.com/ (which is hilariously fun). I don't own a WiiU, but I've heard it has some pretty good asymmetrical examples as well.
The SDKs are starting to support "Direct Mode," which puts the contents only on the HMD, not mirrored onto the primary. That may or may not be optional, and may or may not have a performance hit if you turn it off.
I think something like livestreaming to a Chromecast would be cool.
Among other things (books spring to mind), the web was quite a paradigm shift well before it constituted an experience you'd quite want to share with anybody (heavily text driven sites that loaded at a snail's pace). Yet unfettered access to an intoxicating amount of information in one's home was a potent/addictive experience. Likewise, if the VR experience of "presence" is successful at giving people exciting/intoxicating new experiences at home, it won't have trouble catching on and making a cultural impact.
Besides,here are a lot of ways to "share" an experience - playing an intense game of VR ping pong with a friend across the country sounds like an addictive shared experience to me. I don't imagine that it's lost on Facebook/Valve/all of the gaming companies that multi-player gaming will be a huge hook for VR's adoption. And many of the VR movies are shorts that are bite sized enough to pass back and forth and bask in an experience with a small group, albeit not simultaneously.
There's no reason why the game couldn't also be output to a TV, so the other person could see what was going on. Also smartphones are far more convenient at the moment sure, but as the VR tech gets better, smaller, lighter and cheaper over the years there's no reason why it couldn't become just as big too.
Are they still available in the same shipping window? I read of some people no longer seeing "Ships in April", but May. I have not seen any confirmation of this from anywhere credible.
I'm curious about that too. The first 4 hours / day seems like a more relevant metric. I was ready when the countdown hit 0, and it took 55 minutes before I could manage to pre-order one.
VR lust is insane. The money could be better spent, I'm not sure if I'll have much time to play with it anyway. I just can't help it -- this is the system I've been waiting for since I was 10 years old.
(To be fair, I have a personal company to which I can expense all sorts of gadgets and subtract the VAT, so the impulse buy treshold is much less. If I were an employee, I would have thought harder about it.)