So @GratchSabbat got us an early Xmas present and sprung for a Vive. I just set it up last night on my rig. After a couple little weird quirks I got some of the games and stuff working. So far, I’m liking it. It does make me feel a little motion sickness but that might have been because I just today figured out how to expand the googles to accommodate my glasses. I haven’t done much with it so far but a couple of games are good. King Kaiju is you as a monster bashing on a simple city. Mindless destruction. But Hover Junkers looks neat as it solves a lot of the motion issues. You only have so much play space to use and using a controller to move and not actually moving is one of the things that attribute to motion sickness. They got around that by having a shooter where you are in a moving floating platform. That platform is defined by your play space. Then when you move, you’re moving the platform and it doesn’t feel so jarring. But you still have the ability to bob and weave within your platform.
Overall, I like it. It makes for an interesting gaming experience. I plan on moving my rig downstairs to the big screen for a while until I upgrade the HTPC to run VR too. The living room has much more space to move around in.
Anyone else play with it? Pro’s, con’s… recommendations for games or apps?
I feel like there’s going to be some neat stuff with VR, but I’m wondering if it’s going to end up like the Motion Control thing where there’s a lot of “Me Too!” apps that use VR, but really don’t take advantage, and provide a worse interface than conventional.
On the other hand, I think @Lee_Ars wrote a cool thing over at Ars about using it for one of the spaceship games that sounded like a good use of the tech, and I’m fascinated by the VR+Wooden Board “Save the cat” game I’ve seen in videos.
I’m kinda interested to see where this generation of VRG heads before it gets dropped. Or even if it gets dropped. So far I managed to make the Samsung salesman very unhappy when he visited to show off the new … thingamabob (I stopped listening properly when he mentioned the price) by asking if they included a special shield to protect your eyes from exploding S7s (is that a thing in the States yet? It is here!) and if the weird clip bit on the bottom was to attach a puke bag. I’ve only tried the Samsung and Sony offerings and of the two, yeah, no, Samsung, stop what you’re doing and focus on fixing Splodegate. Your headset suuuuucks.
The Sony headset? I couldn’t wear my glasses, but that didn’t matter because the damn things look good regardless of the slight blurring from my lazy lazy colourblind retinas. They have far, far less motion sickness, and I would actually consider playing GTA V in them since the one thing I hate the most about GTA is not being able to control viewpoint versus direction very well in FP mode. Also Portal 2. PORTAL 2. OMG I WANT TO PLAY PORTAL 2 IN VR. I will be sick, but it will be fun sick, like on a night out.
I’ve fired up all the games I got with the exception of the Zombie training simulator. I’ll fire it up soon I’m sure. Snagged the Pool Nation VR which is weird. I’m getting the hang of using the cue (also smacking beer bottles around) but I keep wanting to lean on the table. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet. Valve’s ‘The Lab’ is my favorite so far for quick games. And it hints that maybe they’ll do Portal sometime soon. I found a mod to let you play Minecraft with the headset but I haven’t fussed with it yet. The Oculus just came out with the Touch Controllers so I expect a lot more games to come through. The finger tracking is neat but I’ve seen people using a Leap Motion controller to do the same thing. I’m wondering how long until someone integrates a Kinect sensor for the body tracking.
Oh and NASA should use VR more. I know they plan on using it to train astronauts but I would love to be able to view space ships or tour launch pads from my own house. So … you know, give me all that stuff.
