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The latest company to jump in the VR bandwagon is Modal VR, with Nolan Bushnell as co-founder who also happens to be the co-founder of Atari.

Unlike most VR gears around built for the consumer market, Modal VR is aimed at enterprises with practical applications ranging from arcades, exhibits to real estate development and education. "If a company has a great idea, we want to work with them," says Nolan Bushnell.

The newcomer in the newly found reality is advertised as fully portable, wireless and can track multiple users in areas up to 900,000 sq. ft. Full-body tracking suits have also been developed for the system.

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Despite aiming for a wider industry and still in the prototype stage, the prospect of bringing VR to a wider audience in unexpected fields and also the possible resurgence in arcade VR reminiscent of the past century - this time with current gen technology - is an interesting track for the technology altogether.

How long before we get a taste of the technology? Over on their website, the Modal VR team is saying that it'll ship developer editions "soon" and are taking applications for devs interested in buying a Modal VR Developer Edition. In the meantime, we can get a glimpse of it all via their introductory videos.

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SOURCE

 

[Enigma Hall]

X-man Someone?

 

[Bladexdsl]

great yet another damned vr device headed for the market as if it's not already over saturated!

 

[ElyosOfTheAbyss]

This is the next generation of weeb gaming.

(Danganronpa when?)

 

[FAST6191]

great yet another damned vr device headed for the market as if it's not already over saturated!

Are there good ones I can get?

 

[migles]

View attachment 65881

it's funny how windows 64 bits can't run 16 bit tasks. however you can run a 32x virtual machine which can run 16 bit software

 

[hobbledehoy899]

it's funny how windows 64 bits can't run 16 bit tasks.

Wine has more compatibility in that regard.

however you can run a 32x virtual machine which can run 16 bit software

I personally cannot be bothered to set that up and make it work.

 

[Veho]

We're seeing more and more of these wildly different VR solutions popping up, and that's not a good thing as they're not all cross-compatible. The market can become oversaturated very quickly, and the tech world has many examples of this. In order to be truly successful, the implementation of VR needs to be standardised

And it would be nice if it got standardized around something good and not some half-baked half-assed barely serviceable solution that got the upper hand because it was one cent per unit cheaper, or because it was the first to allow porn. The more (wildly different) solutions we have to choose from, the better the odds the one that gets accepted as the standard will be something good.

 

[Foxi4]

And it would be nice if it got standardized around something good and not some half-baked half-assed barely serviceable solution that got the upper hand because it was one cent per unit cheaper, or because it was the first to allow porn. The more (wildly different) solutions we have to choose from, the better the odds the one that gets accepted as the standard will be something good.

Love the VHS versus Betamax reference, but there was a little more to that format war than just "red" content.

 

[Xzi]

Are there good ones I can get?

Vive is the best of them, Oculus Rift a close second. PSVR is somewhere in the mid-range, and smartphone VR is the low-end.

I'm on a GTX 1070 and the Vive looks incredible for a first-gen product, especially with higher scaled resolutions. My main display for my PC is a 4K TV, so that's pretty crystal clear inside of the Vive too.

 

[Foxi4]

I wouldn't look at the hardware implementations themselves when judging which set is "the best", I'd focus on software support. All of the first-gen headsets will become obsolete the very moment 4K becomes a standard and the 8K race properly takes off, and that time is nigh as even low-end NVidia cards like the GF1060 pack 4+ teraflops of computational power and can run at 4K (2160p), albeit with spotty performance at high presets. The first generation hardware will become obsolete very quickly, but the infrastructure and the API's built around it will remain, and in that respect the Oculus is definitely leading the charge. Either way, we can only hope that VR will turn into Spaghetti Factory very quickly, as too many cooks will inevitably spoil the broth.

 

[FAST6191]

Spin it another way then. If the present companies are chasing their own tails and dreams of a vendor lock in, possibly with a side order of paying attention to customers without a clue, then what would be a good basis for a standard? I will assume strict full visual VR and not overlays or something like castAR.

Video is so much video standard and thus I don't really care as long as HDCP or its cousins do not make my life hard. Similar story for resolution and framerate, with and without proper motion blur really. I guess something for eye distance rendering would be needed but for something so basic (is it realistically going to need to be one more than one dimension, maybe two if vertical differences could be a factor?) then let them fail.
Even less to discuss with audio really, though I am slightly curious as to the latency discussion here.

There might be something to discuss with regards to how they approach the VR equivalents of viewport rendering (rendering only what you see) and backface culling (removing things from behind other objects).

Head tracking? It is not vital for all uses here but leaving it out of this spec discussion is not going to fly.10 different and mutually incompatible apis is not cool so this would probably be the big one. Some do external, some do internal, either way it is all going to end up as points in space so I am not so bothered there.

Hand tracking? I know I left out castAR but if I can't do some minority report style nonsense then I am going to be upset. Less silly many things do augument things with other peripherals.

Orientation? Part of head tracking perhaps but beyond movement I imagine there will be some kind of tilt/direction sensor for various purposes.

I am missing some things but call it a start. At the risk of having idiots poison the well I would be willing to let software devs shoulder much of the burden, though if the companies wanted to get together and make some kind of basic vetting board for the software then that would not be a bad thing.

 

[Xzi]

I wouldn't look at the hardware implementations themselves when judging which set is "the best", I'd focus on software support. All of the first-gen headsets will become obsolete the very moment 4K becomes a standard and the 8K race properly takes off, and that time is nigh as even low-end NVidia cards like the GF1060 pack 4+ teraflops of computational power and can run at 4K (2160p), albeit with spotty performance at high presets. The first generation hardware will become obsolete very quickly, but the infrastructure and the API's built around it will remain, and in that respect the Oculus is definitely leading the charge. Either way, we can only hope that VR will turn into Spaghetti Factory very quickly, as too many cooks will inevitably spoil the broth.

I wouldn't say that the first-gen Rift and Vive headsets will become "outdated" or otherwise invalidated for quite a while. You can already push 4K through the headset lenses and just scale it. The graphics side of VR isn't what's holding it back at this point, game devs just have to be willing to take a loss on developing games while the user base grows larger and the price of the hardware drops. I think most people would gladly take a $400 first-gen HMD over an $800 second-gen set.

As far as software goes, Oculus certainly isn't setting the standard. OSVR and SteamVR are far more open, more devs are naturally gravitating toward them. Oculus is paying for timed exclusives, so it's just optics where that's concerned.

 

[Foxi4]

I wouldn't say that the first-gen Rift and Vive headsets will become "outdated" or otherwise invalidated for quite a while. You can already push 4K through the headset lenses and just scale it. The graphics side of VR isn't what's holding it back at this point, game devs just have to be willing to take a loss on developing games while the user base grows larger and the price of the hardware drops. I think most people would gladly take a $400 first-gen HMD over an $800 second-gen set.

As far as software goes, Oculus certainly isn't setting the standard. OSVR and SteamVR are far more open, more devs are naturally gravitating toward them. Oculus is paying for timed exclusives, so it's just optics where that's concerned.

The graphics side of things is absolutely what's holding back triple-A titles from becoming VR-ready - in order to make a game VR-compatible you necessarily need to sacrifice either 50% of your framerate or 50% of your geometry, in fact, it's probably more than 50% as you still have to post-process the frames which also takes a considerable amount of horsepower at 60FPS and above. There's a reason why VR games look like dogshit compared to their non-VR counterparts.

 

[Veho]

The graphics side of things is absolutely what's holding back triple-A titles from becoming VR-ready - in order to make a game VR-compatible you necessarily need to sacrifice either 50% of your framerate or 50% of your geometry, in fact, it's probably more than 50% as you still have to post-process the frames which also takes a considerable amount of horsepower at 60FPS and above. There's a reason why VR games look like dogshit compared to their non-VR counterparts.

So graphics hardware can barely keep up with the current generation hedsets, and you're saying VR headsets should increase their resolution because they will become obsolete when 4K comes? And if 4K time is "nigh" and even low-end graphics cards can now run it, how come they can't handle two ~HD screens of the current headsets? What am I missing here?

 

[Foxi4]

So graphics hardware can barely keep up with the current generation hedsets, and you're saying VR headsets should increase their resolution because they will become obsolete when 4K comes? And if 4K time is "nigh" and even low-end graphics cards can now run it, how come they can't handle two ~HD screens of the current headsets? What am I missing here?

You missed my point entirely. Software is always a year or two behind hardware because it's coded for the common denominator, the common denominator being 1080p or slightly above, and thus also barely VR-capable, at least right now. This is going to change soon though, and consequently first-gen VR headsets will become obsolete sooner than we expect them to. As such, the headsets that are still in development should account for this and feature more future-proof matrices, otherwise the lifespan of the headset is questionable. There's nothing stopping people from running 2x1080p on 2x2K or 2x4K screens, but once 4K becomes the standard and 8K will be considered mid-to-high-end, which will happen within 2-or-so years, the smaller matrices will be the bottleneck. Does that explain my point of view?

 

[Veho]

You missed my point entirely.

One good turn deserves another

Software is always a year or two behind hardware because it's coded for the common denominator, the common denominator being non-4K and thus also barely VR-capable, at least right now. This is going to change soon though, and consequently first-gen VR headsets will become obsolete sooner than we expect them to. As such, the headsets that are still in development should account for this and feature more future-ready matrices. There's nothing stopping people from running 2x1080p on 2x2K or 2x4K screens, but once 4K becomes the standard and 8K will be considered mid-to-high-end, which will happen within 2-or-so years, the smaller matrices will be the bottleneck. Does that explain my point of view?

No.

By "software", do you mean games, or the API / framework on the VR system side?
And you're still calling for increased resolution in VR, while at the same time saying the current graphics hardware can't handle the current headsets. If the graphics hardware and the VR screen resolution keep advancing in parallel (as is the case), the image quality will remain shit forever. It's better to have smooth HD than choppy and vomit-inducing 4K.

 

[Foxi4]

One good turn deserves another


No.

By "software", do you mean games, or the API / framework on the VR system side?
And you're still calling for increased resolution in VR, while at the same time saying the current graphics hardware can't handle the current headsets. If the graphics hardware and the VR screen resolution keep advancing in parallel (as is the case), the image quality will remain shit forever. It's better to have smooth HD than choppy and vomit-inducing 4K.

I expect my accessories to have at least 5 years of juice in them. The newest low-end cards are basically capable of 4K with details tweaked to mid, it's not unreasonable for me to expect the headsets to remain relevant in the high-end spectrum for more than a month. Before you buy a 4K GPU, you invest in a 4K monitor that can take advantage of it - it'd be utterly pointless to do it the other way around. Since 4K will inevitably become the new standard within the foreseeable future and 8K will be high-end just as soon, it's not unreasonable for me to expect the headsets to be capable of more than just 2x1080p. Hardware should never be designed for "today", it's designed with "tomorrow" in mind.

 

[Xzi]

Does that explain my point of view?

It does, but I disagree, specifically because of this:

once 4K becomes the standard and 8K will be considered mid-to-high-end, which will happen within 2-or-so years

I don't even think there will be a market for 8K displays within two years, most people barely even care to upgrade from 1080p. If we're talking 8K across two miniaturized screens in two years, the cost would be astronomical. Well beyond even enthusiast consumers' budgets for what will still be a developing user base two years from now. Consoles are just now introducing people to the concept of 4K for the first time, and performance is so degraded there it's barely even relevant. So you think technology essentially doubles in power/halves in price in the next two years, and I just don't see it moving that fast right now. Especially demand. Rift and Vive only sold 50k units each on release, the market would be way smaller for a more expensive VR set.

Two years is the minimum length I expect of generational hardware on the high-end of VR, and if it is that short, improvements will be incremental at best.

 

[Foxi4]

It does, but I disagree, specifically because of this:

I don't even think there will be a market for 8K displays within two years, most people barely even care to upgrade from 1080p. If we're talking 8K across two miniaturized screens in two years, the cost would be astronomical. Well beyond even enthusiast consumers' budgets for what will still be a developing user base two years from now. Consoles are just now introducing people to the concept of 4K for the first time, and performance is so degraded there it's barely even relevant. So you think technology essentially doubles in power/halves in price in the next two years, and I just don't see it moving that fast right now. Especially demand. Rift and Vive only sold 50k units each on release, the market would be way smaller for a more expensive VR set.

Oh no, I didn't mean 2x8K, but I can see 2x2K being a thing on a high-end SLI build today, or even a single GPU build in the very near future. I definitely wouldn't put my money down on 2x1080p staying relevant for a long time.

 

[Xzi]

Oh no, I didn't mean 2x8K, but I can see 2x2K being a thing on a high-end SLI build today, or even a single GPU build in the very near future.

No I understood, I meant 2Kx4K spanning both displays. That's essentially 2x supersampling on the Vive right now, and even the newest Titan will struggle with that in some games. You have to push 90 FPS. Re-projection can do some of the work, but it still causes motion sickness in a lot of people. I just don't see it being mainstream, let alone even affordable or in-demand within the next two years.