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by matt_m 3674 days ago
The important costs though for the current wave of VR are hundreds of millions of dollars for OLED display manufacturing lines, and an additional many millions of dollars of engineer time from Nvidia / AMD / HTC etc for custom drivers, low persistence hardware etc. It's very, very, likely that previous $80,000 or even $200,000 systems are not up to par with current mass-market hardware regarding key metrics relevant to motion-sickness, or even that the military bidding process would even specify those metrics considering that their importance was only discovered recently through user testing on hardware that was not previously available.

One other interesting thing to note (at least on the HTC Vive) is the majority of the content for the platform is focused on standing / walking with motion in real life matching 1-1 with motion in VR. Which both stops a major source of motion sickness and rules out entire categories of software like flight simulators, which seems to be his entire work history.
2 comments
aab0 3674 days ago
Computer software and hardware are an interesting case where often, the more expensive something is, the worse it is; the best stuff is often quite cheap. This comes from the high upfront costs meeting very low marginal costs. A cutting-edge chip fab will cost $10b+ all told right now, but can produce millions of chips a year at trivial costs.

I knew as soon as he mentioned military VR results that his case was going to be based on ancient and inferior hardware and outdated results, and include no actual results or even first-hand experience with a Vive. (At the most generous reading of the article, he worked with a DK1 a while ago.)

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agildehaus 3674 days ago
1-to-1 motion certainly seems to eliminate motion sickness. I can't remember a single instance of getting nauseous with a room-scale Vive experience and I've been in that headset for numerous hours.

I've tried a couple seated flight-sims. You simply can't see distant objects as well as you'd expect due to the low resolution of the panels, which is far more important in flight sims than with most other things. I can't say I got sick, but it didn't feel real to me, and I can see how others might get sick.

4K and, later, 8K VR should solve a lot of that.

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