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I've seen it everyone. The future of the Gaming medium that once felt so far away is actually in my hands two-fold now, and I can firmly say that I am a true believer in the technology and future that is Virtual Reality.

Over the past couple weeks I have dabbled with my newly purchased Oculus Rift, demo'd the HTC Vive, and just bought the PlayStation VR headset only hours ago. I have seen many new worlds, many new experiences both gimmicky and extraordinary, and ive only gotten motion sickness from one truly awfully built indie game on the Oculus market.

When we look at VR from the outside, we see a big dumb block strapped to someones face. It looks off putting, silly, and almost ineffective in creating an immersive experience. It is so utterly difficult to truly put into words what putting on the headset does to your brain. How it tricks you and makes you feel bigger, smaller, more fearful, more cautious, more prone to reaction as if your body is truly there in that experience. But I'm here to tell you, from my own experiences that VR is truly astounding.

We are only in the first stages, and these first stages are crucial to the growth and development of new wondrous types of experiences. Things are clunky right now, much like the first generation of games were. This is a new generational leap that we have to be patient, understanding, and excited about. But I promise you, it is so worth getting excited about.

I can promise that I will personally be reviewing a multitude of VR titles beginning now in order to share what it's like and try to put into words the different style of entertainment VR brings. It's going to be a weird awkward journey, and it's going to change the way I think about writing things as well, but excites me just as much.

I wanted to make this post to also open it up to any questions that anyone would like to ask about both headsets, which I will compile into an answer block here on this front page post. I feel like people still have so many things they want to know that they don't get the answers to through simple YouTube videos, and I'd love to try and help convince you, or even settle your opinion on what you think about VR.

Feel free to ask me absolutely anything, and look forward to seeing some reviews on stuff! I may even try to review the Headsets themselves considering I've never forayed into hardware reviews before!

Q. Hows Oculus compared to PSVR in terms of visual quality?

I can safely say so far, that the PS VR is a very nice system and has some cool experiences right out of the gate, but it does look very inferior to the Oculus in terms of visual quality. It's not a large gap, but it is a noticeable gap. Almost akin to Wii games compared to 360/PS3 games but not as bad as that. Images are sometimes blurry, and text is almost never sharp and easy to read which can be a hassle. Text on the Oculus looks a little cloudy but it's nowhere near as bad as the visual quality of the PSVR text. The plus side is that although the quality of images takes a slight hit, the framerate is stable, and i've noticed no chopping or stuttering in any experiences I've demo'd so far.

Q. How do glasses feel with the unit?
I actually wear glasses myself so I know your fear. I can wear my glasses in BOTH headsets comfortably for the most part. I've found that the Oculus easily overlays my glasses and does not shove them against my face or put pressure near my ears and is incredibly comfortable.

The PSVR is a slightly different story. When I wear my glasses with it, my frames are pretty much shoved up against the lenses which is slightly irritating at times. There is no way to adjust the focal point of the lenses like you can on the Oculus, so there is no easy means of adjusting for this slight discomfort. I can play relatively well with my glasses on in PSVR but do find myself readjusting every now and again to try and refocus my vision for better clarity with my glasses on.

I've never experienced any fogging of the lenses in the time I've had both headsets on, and I feel I get enough airflow coming through the, "mask," of the headset when I am using it.

 

[anhminh]

What do you think about VR games and its potential? And how long do you think you can play with VR on? Hours? Less?

I still think VR are gimmick feature like 3D on 3DS which no one really use anyway. It sound to me like it only work with handful of 3D FPS and puzzle, not something I think anyone could spend hours with.

 

[Xzi]

One I've been wrestling with for a while - What do you think about Hololens, and other efforts to improve augmented reality? Do you think it could play nicely alongside VR (indeed there's a lot of similar technology, especially in the realm of sensors), and even if not, which do you think might be better for gaming in the long-run and why?

I think for the time being, AR just isn't even in a consumer-ready state yet, so it's not really a factor. HoloLens is $3000 for a developer prototype, and it's got big issues such as a narrow FoV. Fast-forward maybe 10-12 years and I think the prevalent devices will be those that can dim your surroundings to give you a completely VR world, or can also be used to project things onto the existing reality, IE AR. They'll exist in the same spaces and will have two different use cases.

What do you think about VR games and its potential? And how long do you think you can play with VR on? Hours? Less?

I still think VR are gimmick feature like 3D on 3DS which no one really use anyway. It sound to me like it only work with handful of 3D FPS and puzzle, not something I think anyone could spend hours with.

My average play time for a session in VR is about three hours. I wear glasses and they are anti-glare, so my eyes never feel any more strained from Vive than they are with a normal monitor. The only reason I have to stop after three hours is that I've usually moved on to the more physically-demanding games by then, and those tend to be way more intense than even DDR was back in the day.

VR is vastly different from your standard 3D, which is just a flat image popping out from a flat screen. It's hard to describe how exactly it does this without having experienced it for yourself, but it gives a sense of depth to the space you're in. You can judge distance and speed as if you were standing inside of whatever game it is you're playing. So it's less like the 3DS, more like standing inside a Wii game with perfect 1:1 motion controllers, and front-to-back motion now matters just as much as side-to-side. Objects and creatures can be viewed from any and every angle.

This might give you a better idea of what I mean, it's my first drawing in Tiltbrush (essentially Google's MSPaint for VR):

http://i.imgur.com/ft9yxvc.gifv

You can see how some of the red lines tilt inward at the top and bottom, because of the natural motion of my arm as I was painting them. Every axis is available to you inside of VR, just as it is IRL. I had to go down to the ground and swirl my paintbrush in upward circles to create the pot holding the green goop. Full immersive VR like this is not a gimmick, it's absolutely everything I dreamed it would be growing up in the 90s. It's actually far better than I expected for a gen1 product.

 

[gudenau]

I loved the Vive demo at a M$ store! I would love to have my own headset.

I can not afford such a device at the moment, or the required computational power.

 

[osaka35]

definitely did better than the Kinect 2.0 is doing now, it's not getting nearly enough love.

I'm still bothered the skyrim update isn't going to have voice commands.

What do you think about VR games and its potential? And how long do you think you can play with VR on? Hours? Less?

I still think VR are gimmick feature like 3D on 3DS which no one really use anyway. It sound to me like it only work with handful of 3D FPS and puzzle, not something I think anyone could spend hours with.

It definitely feels like an experience. less of being absorbed by an experience and more feeling like you're actually interacting with the experience. But the visuals still need a lot of work. I'm looking forward to the 4k per-eye versions.

 

[KingVamp]

Spoiler: Big Post

I actually believe that neural interfacing is the way forward. If an entire environment involving all senses could be artificially created and 'projected' directly into the player's sensory cortex, they could experience every single sensation which the simulation provided, and could cater for all senses. Measuring the player's responses using the same interface would allow for neural interfacing as a controller. As far as the player experience was concerned, you'd have not only VR in the visual sense, but motion, tactile and haptic controls (because you'd feel that you were actually there using your body in the environment) plus smell, taste, even pain.

I think we're at least a few decades away from this, but you only have to look at some of the recent advances in neural interfacing to know that this is almost definitely going to happen.

Of course they would have to find away to do this reliability and without putting things peoples heads. I think we will eventually do everything with the mind, but we aren't nowhere near that.

Let's not get carried away, now. Let's just agree that gaming peaked when we were kids, and every new development since is a gimmicky fad that will never catch on.

I don't agree, so... yeah. Would help, if some people wasn't so quick to shoot new things down, especially if they haven't even used it.

It's a shame the PSVR doesn't have more of an "environment" to it when playing non-VR games, you'd think that'd be something they'd try to focus on since there's so little VR content around. Ah well.

True. I tried out some Android apps that actually had this feature. It really should have that feature and do it better. Yes, the backgrounds were static and no background sound, but much better than just plan black all the time. Static as in not animated, I can look around.

Almost felt like this as I was going through backgrounds.

I think for the time being, AR just isn't even in a consumer-ready state yet, so it's not really a factor. HoloLens is $3000 for a developer prototype, and it's got big issues such as a narrow FoV. Fast-forward maybe 10-12 years and I think the prevalent devices will be those that can dim your surroundings to give you a completely VR world, or can also be used to project things onto the existing reality, IE AR. They'll exist in the same spaces and will have two different use cases.

I don't think AR is that far behind as being said here, but do think they will eventually become one as both decrease in size and weight.

I don't think remotes are the future when it comes to VR - the future is gloves. If someone designed a glove with proper actuators that would both transfer movement accurately into the system *and* provide resistance to simulate touch and shapes, the necessity of a physical controller would vanish altogether and you could manipulate huds and virtual controllers with much higher accuracy than with the Kinect.

I agree that gloves are the short term future, but movement is the big problem.



Vive trying to do something like that.

I thought use the mind, but not sure many want to use crude facial expressions for movement.

 

[RandomUser]

This is the reason why Nintendo does not want the NX to be capable of VR:

Spoiler: Nintendo avoiding VR for this very reason.

That was a rush job, so yeah, does not look perfect, but you get the idea.

 

[Xzi]

This is the reason why Nintendo does not want the NX to be capable of VR:

Lol. Well it's not like the NX won't be capable of normal porn with whatever browser they throw on there.

It would've been pretty difficult to get a VR-ready GPU in a mobile console without jacking up the price...VR-ready laptops are like $2000 - $3000 at the moment.

 

[RandomUser]

Lol. Well it's not like the NX won't be capable of normal porn with whatever browser they throw on there.

It would've been pretty difficult to get a VR-ready GPU in a mobile console without jacking up the price...VR-ready laptops are like $2000 - $3000 at the moment.

Yeah, it was meant to be a joke. Due to Reggie stating it isn't about specs or something along those line, so perhaps Nintendo may never reach VR potential.
Also I think I should have added something along the line "that moment when you choose a female character to play as."
While VR is in it's infancy, however hopefully Nintendo will incorporate VR on their next gen system (beyond the NX of course) and when VR are cheaper. That is if VR remains a viable option and does not die out too soon, and hopefully I won't be too old and feeble to experience Nintendo titles in VR. Imagine what would it be like if you choose Rosalina as the character to play as. Would the screen for the right eye cease to function and thus further robbing you of your dept perception or would you still be able to see right through her bang?
Also as you can see in the pictures, that VR is years ahead, I mean, even the characters speaks the exact same thing the user says and without external controls, although using an already existing Oculus head set.
Time will tell how this mobile device the NX will pan out, I will most likely buy it, because I like Nintendo titles, although they seem to be slacking lately, mostly rehashes of old titles, except for Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros series. Those are usually instant buys, as they seem to add a touch of something new to them. The battle mode however sucks though in MK8.

 

[tbb043]

Does VR excite you at all about the future of games?

VR won't excite me until it's holodecks or plugs directly into the brain matrix style.

 

[Xzi]

VR won't excite me until it's holodecks or plugs directly into the brain matrix style.

That's the point at which it should probably scare you.

 

[KingVamp]

That's the point at which it should probably scare you.

Yeah, that is pretty scary, but as long as you can easily get out and there's no mind hacking, it fine.