I'd say Red thingy did too. Steel.

And Boom Blox mebbe.

Yossarian wrote:

Does it use depth of field effects or is everything in focus at the same time?

50-50... For peripheral vision (the corner of your eye), if the FoV presented by a large screen is wide enough, then you'll naturally miss stuff outside of your standard range of vision in a foggy blur, but for the stuff that appears right in front of you, you'll need to emulate that, I'm sure. 

But to do that, you'd 'only' need to do what game artists currently do anyway. Chump will undoubtedly give a better answer than this.

Some spods' go at it:
https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2583

That's where I'd start if I were bovved'...

All this stuff about simply using it as a screen, why not just get one of the head mounted screens that already exist? They've been around for years.

If I wanted to fall over in my living room I'd just drink tequila.

b0r1s wrote:

As for graphics tablets, too niche innit?

Needs an appropriate game to show it off, is all.

If the pen's sensor would still track a few inches above the tablet, you'd have an aerial mouse with the ability to interface with in-game objects in the most accurate human manner. You could manually repair RTS units by redrawing their broken parts, say.

Or a game where you play as a War surgeon, navigating the battlefield, giving orders, and performing surgeries with your pen.

stonechalice wrote:

dynamiteReady wrote:

The best example ever of wavy shite was Wii Sports.

Yes. That and Wario.

There's nothing more to be done. A surprising novelty that lasted way longer than it should've.

No... Baseball, tennis and bowling alone were worthy of full on sequels.

Yeah but you've said it right there yourself: - sequels. They're doing nothing more with the formula, just releasing more content based on the same wavy stuff that, kinda worked in the first place. There have been no new games for wavy stuff that have been remotely successful. 

Skyward Sword is probably the only game outside the sports genre that used the 'tech' in any meaningful way.

Metroid Prime 3. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009-13. World of Goo. Resi 4. All used it to great effect.

Unfortunately few followed those examples. CoD and the Conduit games did learn from Metroid a bit. Goldeneye as well in its reimagined form.

Was Resi 4 on Wii an actual graphical update form the GC version or was it just the controls were adapted for the Wii?

Yossarian i don't know if you're trolling or you're missing the point so wildly i don't know how to bring you back TO the point. It's not depth of field (this is the effect where the aperture of a lens creates a focal plane upon which an image is clear, the fore and background being out of focus), it's depth perception, the sensation of there being genuine depth to the scene

I'll explain it again, and i'll have to remind that you really do have to try it to 'get' it and when you do it wont be what you expected and you'll get what i'm on about.

The optical effect means that you aren't looking at the display, you're looking at the objects on the display, where they would be if they were in actual physical space. So you're almost 100% of the time looking at points a meter or more behind the display. The display becomes what would be a window to another, literal, world/reality (depending on how the author of that space portrays it, re. it being up to developers) if it were a 3D tv that you can play games on.

3D tvs do not take it far enough, it's just little windows, you can easily separate it from its surroundings and go 'ohh neat' and thats it.

The OR, and HMDs based around it, go to efforts to use lenses and post effects to fill your vision with the display, so its not a window, it fills almost all of your vision, you're there, and with it tracking your head orientation, you can look around the place and you're there.

Imagine you're sitting in a room which you can recognise as real, put on a headset, and now find yourself in a completely new place that you recognise as real. You know your body is in the original room, but your eyes are telling you that you're in another place, you're existing in two places at the same time, perceptually (hence the name 'oculus rift' clever hey).

It's such an interesting thing because it plays completely on your sense of depth, it's how you know your vision is '3D' in normal every day life, and you dont know how profound it is to how your mind understands reality until it's artificially induced. The same experience can actually be had via hearing using a sound output meant for 5.1 surround converted to binaural stereo over headphones.

I'm not sure why I haven't already done this but I have a plugin for Unity that can generate binaural stereo from Unity's regular 3D sound and i've been using the Oculus SDK with unity for quite a while now so I really should be doing experiments with them, they're a no-brainer combination but I havent read anything about them being used together properly, which is silly when the big speakers for VR (Abrash etc) go on about 'presence' and immersion

Anyways.. it's nothing like looking at a display in front of your eyes, its so unlike the old virtuality things it's not worth a comparison, there have been HMDs that follow head orientation and have a display for years, Sony make fancy ones for a grand or so and have done for ages, the experience is not the same thing, it's like looking through your regular eyes in a regular way in a place but that place could not possibly exist - it's too pixelly and not realistic looking for a start, not that this distracts from the experience really, in fact it just leans your mind towards looking forward to completely un-normal things.

Consumer VR, which is still a bit away, seems set to blow a lot of misgivings placed by the DK1 (low res crappy screen, terrible latency) away, with the res being 2.5k by something with a frame rate of 90 fps seen as an expected standard for software to adhere to.

I agree with the sentiment stated above about VR somehow meaning you must do what humans do in the possibilities given by the medium, saying 'be a human' seems incredibly small really? The head translation detection in the DK2 and onwards isn't meant to track your movement around a room, it's meant to track your head movements based on a seated or stood on one spot position (or sure, laid down), the receiver vid above shows how nicely this was done even with a DK1 nevermind PROPER head tracking.

Finally, again with above comment about being laid down, i have to echo this, the way you play (or i play and i cant see the trend going much against this) VR stuff is almost an opposite aspect of how you play games regularly. You're not looking at a display, so you're not sat forward, looking at a screen, poised towards it, being in this position is just pointless and uncomfortable when you dont have to be. I tend to find i'm sat back, in as relaxed a position as possible, real world movement is a distraction, if possible i WILL lay on my back or at least be as reclined as possible while allowing proper head movement.

As much as you would like to say you get it, you dont, and you wont until you try it, and you'll go 'i wasnt expecting that'. Thats what ive heard from most people. Its not good or bad, its a good thing i think but its perfectly possible for it to be horrible, like having loud noise blaring into your ears is bad, doesnt make speakers a bad thing. What it turns out to offer will be down to developers, it wont be a mainstream thing until, like i say, augmented reality hardware is a ubiquitous lifestyle accessory akin to (and married with) smartphones, but until then, for the people with an interest in or time for spending time in places that arent the real world it will be a much pursued interest

It won't, that's the developers job. And though cuckoo makes a sound point about 3D being substantively different than on a telly or theatre. We're still looking at a situation where we will have the whole depth in focus at all times. Sounds stupid but if replicating vision is what we want them well need pupil tracking included, and then visually dithering certain depths according to pupil size. But this only makes a generalisation of where people are focused. I'm sure it could be zeroed for individuals, or maybe I'm just talking gubbins.

I think until we've all had a stab at OR, we should just reserve judgement. Yoss you haven't used it so you can't see the potential. People and industry experts that have used it say it's an obvious leap forward in terms of VR, and it is an exciting prospect. I can imagine games that relish in giving the player an immersive experience will benefit most from it, and I can't wait to see what will spring up from the tech.  

Have some imagination at least.

cockbeard wrote:

It won't, that's the developers job. And though cuckoo makes a sound point about 3D being substantively different than on a telly or theatre. We're still looking at a situation where we will have the whole depth in focus at all times. Sounds stupid but if replicating vision is what we want them well need pupil tracking included, and then visually dithering certain depths according to pupil size. But this only makes a generalisation of where people are focused. I'm sure it could be zeroed for individuals, or maybe I'm just talking gubbins.

You don't need pupil tracking because one of the principal design goals of a VR HMD is to fill your field of vision, so wherever you look, things will be where you expect them to be. The whole thing in focus you'd think was a point until yeah.. you try it, and it just doesnt occur to you, i guess out of the things your brain cares about in vision and what it doesnt care about, the focus plane (the depth of field as mentioned) is actually not that important, whereas your eye convergence (depth perception) is quite fundamental, in fact in nauseating and spooky situations ive been messing with the settings of the VR driver during a game while looking at the stuff in the game and people ended up seeming absolutely enormous, like the size of planets, while taking up the same amount of space on screen as they would when being people sized, and its just as weird going too far the other way too

Don't mess around with those kind of settings too much should you be given them i'd say, it can be quite unpleasant

That makes sense, I guess I have strong peripheral vision, and the sharpness of stuff I wasn't looking at was distracting. I only used it probably three four hours over a few weeks. I found myself looking at stuff I didn't want to far too often. Probably why I'm thinking about dithering (wrong word but I think it conveys my thought) would make it easier to focus. Which conversely gives you the developer the chance to draw the user's focus by fucking with peripheral

I'm a big fan of level design, in my opinion that's how a developer tells his story. I also adore horror films. So the potential for fast movement off centre, actual sub conscious attention grabbing sounds brilliant

And cocko you might want to look up accounts of the new Alien game, Isolation being played on the OR, it's apparently absolutely terrifying, and i'm not remotely bothered by horror games (Okay I admit Amnesia creeped me out a fair bit) but I can imagine exactly what it would be like and being killed would stay being unpleasant, no matter how many times it happened, so long as it let you move your head freely during the experience

Interestingly I can imagine the game being quite mundane on a regular monitor, or at least the capacity for annoyance, meh-ness and boredom at the disconnected repeated dying at the jawed tongue of an inconsistent AI become overly apparent

I should call this the Dear Esther effect