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[JEMC]

More fuel into the fire of Steam's own VR helmet:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=776513

Hi! I’m Feep, and yesterday, I went into Valve’s offices in Seattle because we’re like totally bros now. The primary reason for the visit was to try their fancy VR prototype, which will not be for sale anywhere ever for reasons I can only assume involve them already possessing approximately 3% of the national GDP.

I own an Oculus Rift dev kit, and I also did a writeup awhile back on VRCade, one of the first solutions to have positional tracking. I haven’t tried Crystal Cove or Sony’s solution (dear Sony: invite me to try this at GDC so I can write a hype thread for you too), but I hear Crystal Cove is only *slightly* behind Valve’s solution in terms of fidelity.

Technology

Valve’s solution is lightyears ahead of the original Oculus Dev Kit. Resolution, while not at “retina” level perfection, was no longer really a significant issue. The screen door effect was almost completely negligible, thanks to a shiny 1080p display. (Not actually shiny, shiny like in Firefly.)

Just as fantastic was their low-persistance display tech. The display ran at a blistering 95 Hz, and the pixels only flash for approximately 20% of that 10.52 ms refresh time. You don’t notice any flickering or lack of brightness, and the plus side is that ghosting and smearing were drastically reduced. Not *completely* eliminated, mind you.

Latency? Low. Approximately 25ms. Not noticeable.

Positional tracking is an absolute must for any VR set, as lack of said tracking is the biggest cause of motion sickness, the one thing that could kill VR in its tracks. Valve’s solution was, as expected, extremely accurate. It involved sticking QR Code-like papers on the walls (so anyone visiting your home, without prior knowledge, would instantly assume you were a crazy person) so that a camera mounted on the headset could get an optical read on its own position. There was a downside (literally), though…because there were no QR codes littering the floor, looking straight down caused the system to lose its positional tracking.

There was, unfortunately, still a tether attached to the set. This never seems to be talked about with VR, but still concerns me greatly, especially after messing with VRCade’s wireless backpack system. I didn’t feel as free to roam or jump or twist as I did at VRCade, and presumably the wireless transmission back and forth to a base computer would add at least a few milliseconds of latency, but that’s a trade I would gladly make.

Okay? Cool. Now to the fun part.

Go to Neogaf to see the fun part .

 

I'll be honest here, all this talk about VR reminds me a bit of the talk about 3D. Everybody is working on it and everybody says it's amazing and the future, but God only knows how it will end. And when.