
Zero Latency, the Future of Immersive Gaming - prawn
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/08/this-is-zero-latency-the-future-of-immersive-gaming/
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sciguy77
Guys, please don't go to Zero Latency. When I was in Melbourne I coughed up
the 80 bucks and went, and it was truly a horrendous experience. They had the
worst tracking I've ever seen in VR. The gun's rotation was off by 40 degrees,
even after switching it out and resetting it. There was constant stuttering,
and severe frame drops were the norm, not the exception. And to top it off the
game itself had crap graphics, embarrassingly bad AI, and glitched like crazy.

At a VR meetup I talked to several people who had went, and not a single
person had a good experience. I am amazed and baffled by all the good press
they're getting.

And for context I've tried the Rift DK2, the Gear VR IE, and the HTC Vive.

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csimpson
That's genuinely interesting to hear, because I had such a good experience --
I'm the guy that wrote the story, by the way. It definitely has bad graphics,
but I thought the head and gun tracking was _excellent_. It's the best I've
ever tried, and I've used DK2, Vive, Playstation VR and the newest Gear VR
(with a Note 5).

I reckon they must have been having some software issues on the day, because
that's extremely different to my experience. If I was running that I would
have given you a refund.

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sciguy77
Wow, so weird to hear you actually had a good experience. You mean to say that
the rifle's orientation in game matched its orientation IRL (i.e. you could
hold it like a real rifle and not hipfire it with the laser)? What about the
frame rate drops? IIRC they were constant and impossible to ignore.

I don't mean to contest your experience, I believe you of course, I'm just
shocked to hear someone actually enjoyed themselves at Zero Latency.

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exodust
Advertisement?

Apparently it's okay to call low latency "Zero Latency", just use title case
and fire at will.

Zero Latency is mentioned only 35 times in the article.

Tickets on sale now for 88 MPH.

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sp332
And it's "Powered by Alienware", which isn't even made of real aliens!

Yes, of course you can call anything any name, unless it infringes trademark
because someone else in your field thought of it first.

Instead of being an ad for ZL, I think the repetition is more likely to
increase Gizmodo's page rank for this article.

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mrob
"Alienware" isn't misleading, because nobody sane would think it was genuine
alien technology. When I saw "Zero Latency" I was briefly very excited because
I thought it actually meant "zero latency". Maybe they had tapped directly
into the brain to get access to eye/muscle movement signals before normal
sensors could, early enough to compensate for the unavoidable latency of
rendering and simulation. This would be a real breakthrough in man-machine
interfaces, and it could be fairly described as "zero latency" because it
really could be zero as measured with respect to conventional sensors.

But no, it's just typical marketing lies.

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charlieflowers
I'd love to hear from an individual (not a magazine or a writer who reps a
magazine) who has tried all 3 vr headsets coming out soon (the Rift, the Sony
and the HTC).

Is there a clear and obvious winner? Do you think any of them truly live up to
the hype?

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alexqgb
Content dev. here, with no connection to any particular platform. Haven't
demo'd PSVR, but based on its wand-style controller I'm comfortable saying
that the Rift + Touch is the best, and for reasons that the other platforms
may have a very difficult time competing against.

As far as resolution, tracking, field of view, and general comfort go, the
Rift CV1 and the Vive are closely matched, incredibly good, and - if you can
believe this - underhyped. Though PSVR is said to be not _quite_ as good, the
technical bar is so high that Sony can come in slightly under and still
deliver an awesomely good experience, and probably a more popular one once you
factor in value for money.

That said, I still think Oculus has a fundamental advantage due to the
approach they've taken with Touch. Unlike the wand-style controllers used by
HTC and Sony, Touch allows you to point and grab, which turns out to have a
major effect on the sense of Presence, as well as level of dexterity you can
bring to your interactions with the environment. It also reflects what your
hands are actually doing in social apps, which has value that becomes
immediately clear once you're in one.

Indeed, the combination of social + the manipulation of near-field objects is
(at least to my mind) the very core of VR. This wasn't something I'd
anticipated, but having experienced it, I cannot imagine developing content
that didn't put their combination at the center of the experience, since doing
so would put you at a serious competitive disadvantage to people who did see
them as fundamental, and had worked from there.

I should say that I've seen some very clever interaction strategies in the
Vive that do a good job in working around this limit, but there's no denying
that they're making virtues of necessity. Ultimately, the Touch gives
developers far more to work with, and I think that's going to be the decisive
feature, especially now that the Rift also supports Vive-style room-scale
tracking. Once devs. start to really understand and master the potential of
Touch + social, I suspect the most engaging content ideas will gravitate to
the Rift. As hardware fades into the background and content comes to the
foreground, I suspect this advantage will pull the entire Oculus platform
ahead.

Of course, it may be possible for Sony, HTC, and any other entrants to abandon
wands and mimic the Touch's design in much the same way that traditional game
controllers have all converged on the same basic form. If this happens, all
bets are off. But until it does, I'd put my money on Oculus.

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prawn
Saw this tried on Good Game, a gaming show on Australian TV so looked it up.

It looked a bit tame, but I wanted to submit the story and see if people
thought there was potential/future in this approach to gaming, even if these
guys aren't there yet. Also, if anyone else around the world is trying
something similar?

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ShakataGaNai
Please please please have something like this come to San Francisco. It's like
Qzar...but... better.

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nsxwolf
Qzar... I just have bad memories of everyone being an expert that would
contort their bodies in strange ways to block all the sensors.

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z3t4
In our city fiber network we have less then 1ms (ping) latency ...

