I bought the original Gear VR with very limited expectations and was surprised how well it worked.
The reason it works so well is the GearVR platform is comprised effectively of three things:
a) Lenses to make for comfortable, adjustable viewing.
b) A touchpad for input.
c) A ton of high quality / high fidelity sensors like Accelerator, Gyrometer, Geomagnetic, Proximity (1)
Since most VR functionality is driven through sensor fusion it's a very elegant solution to develop a one-size-fits-all headset that gives devs a way to build/test/deploy against one set of sensors vs a phone-by-phone approach.
Take that plus the fact that the DK2 screen is an overclocked Galaxy 3 screen (2) and it makes complete sense.
From OC2, but semi-offtopic - What did people think about the Michael Abrash lecture "These are the good old days"? For me it was one of the most inspiring lectures on engineering solutions for HCI solutions. The cool part was that it positions Oculus as a technology company supporting senses far beyond vision.
Inspiring, yes - but it's also disheartening with respect to how far away we are from highly-convincing VR.
It's not even a matter of engineering the solutions; we have yet to fully understand so many of the problems, and we'll need years (decades?) of research before beginning to think about some of the solutions. That's not to say it can't be an overall positive technology/experience in the meantime, but it'll likely be many years before it's free of certain side effects (e.g., nausea, discomfort) that bother people.
In a few months you'll be able to easily try the consumer Rift, the HTC Vive and see for yourself how convincing the VR is. I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
While the road toward "perfect" VR is just getting started, these first-gen consumer sets have crossed the starting line, and are qualitatively different from earlier VR experiences.
(BTW, while comfort isn't a totally solved problem, for 1:1 motion, these sets (and PSVR) are pretty good and I think for most people, won't make them sick.)
Not making me vomit is definitely on my checklist for new tech. Glad we're at that milestone. I am still not sure how we best deal with the desire to move around in physical space without bumping into things, in this way the augmented reality route feels like it will be more useful. Having watched the space for the last 30+ years I heartily agree these are good old times :)
I've had a chance to actually test this device and I can say it was comfortable, and the VR experience felt smooth and responsive. I was skeptical since it was powered by a phone, but I was definitely surprised.
The phone has a big part in content delivery and processing too. The screen resolution on Galaxy Note devices (GearVR needs one of those) is 2.5k. That is divided between both eyes. But the thing is that Oculus itself uses the screen yanked out of a Galaxy Note. So screen quality and resolution should be top notch.
The phone is the screen(s) they also do some image processing on the phone, and use the accelerometers and audio out, and potentially in the future other sensors (e.g. Bluetooth LE to measure distance from beacons, the camera for AR (can't be done in current Samsung VR headsets) etc.)
It seems that VR heavily depends on high quality screens, with very high resolution, and low latency and persistence. However this works with a screen that isn't optimised for those attributes.
$99 may be good, but it seems likely that it will be much worse than the Oculus Rift, I think is targeting ~$400-500, and could be far better. Is it worth it?
I've tried most VR systems and I think the benefits of Gear FAR outweigh what you lose.
The biggest one is that it's wireless so you don't have to worry about the cord at all.
You do lose processing power, but quite frankly I think that is fine because it forces developers to really focus on making the UX/UI experience really tight.
From the Performance aspect the CV1 is much better and has better interactivity/presence abilities but if the goal is to get MM of people using VR, this is the way to do it. Everyone can thank cardboard for paving the way for this type of implementation.
Actually Palmer worked on a research project in university that was using 3d printed goggles and cheap off the shelf lenses which you could snap an iPhone into. See http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/vr2go/
I don't know if it was his idea or how involved he really was, just that he said he worked on it. The point is that cardboard was based on this.
That it is. DK1 resolution was comparatively pretty awful. Even DK2 isn't great.
Crescent Bay and Gear VR felt fairly similar at GDC (rendering capabilities aside), so I'm really curious how much better the Rift CV1 is going to feel.
My time with Vive was very short, and felt so good I kinda forgot to look for flaws, but I hear CV1 is roughly the same (aka AWESOME!).
I heard at a VR conference that the CV1 is likely to use the Note 4 screen, but that's hearsay. I had stronger confirmation that it will at least be the same resolution... the Note 4, S6, etc all are 2560 x 1440; we were hoping for 4k but it's not gonna happen this cycle. CV2, perhaps?
(And there are no guarantees, so this could be wrong... but probably not.)
That is true, but the CV1 (consumer version) headset will have 2 separate screens that can be moved independently, which is something you can't get with a phone attached to a headset.
Not sure that feature will justify a $200+ price difference for most people. Plus, you will upgrade your phone every year or two anyway and get all the benefits (faster, better screen, improved features, etc) associated with that, while the CV1 will require a separate purchase to get new features.
"Plus, you will upgrade your phone every year or two"
Do normal people actually upgrade their phone yearly? I've kept my last several phones for about 3 years each, and I tend to think that'd be overkill for most folks (admittedly, I tend to buy higher end phones, with large storage, so they last a little longer; and I never buy on contract, so I'm paying full price, so I don't want to do it often).
The average lifetime of a smartphone increased last year from 18 months to slightly over 24. Analysts expect carrier and Apple leasing options to drive this back below 2 years.
My family has been on contract for last 10 years and so has most people I met in America. The subsidy means flag ship phones at ~$200 with 2 year contract, or a cheaper phone for free. The other part is that AT&T and Verizon had much more reliable signal so it wasn't worth going to another provider.
If this is the case, then I'm not sure Oculus was worth the money Facebook paid for them - Samsung seems to own all the relevant IP and it's not clear what Oculus provides that couldn't be replicated by another company in short order. If Oculus Gear takes off as a product, it seems like Chinese manufacturers would start churning out knockoffs and commoditize the product space.
The screen is only a small piece of the puzzle. Most of the value of the Oculus products comes from the insane software optimizations that have been done at all levels of the stack to bring down the latency.
Oculus owns a lot of the IP, and more importantly know-how. Evidently the Gear VR was the result of extremely tight integration between Samsung and Oculus engineering, with Oculus providing the bulk of the VR-specific knowledge. Samsung provided screens and phones.
Late in the game, the Oculus engineers pushed for major changes to the architecture to allow the phone to communicate with the sensors in the headset in a very low latency way -- something nearly bare metal. Evidently it took a lot of convincing.
(A friend heard this from Carmack in person, for what it's worth.)
Just because I've never done it and want to double check. How does one get content to the phone-VR system?
I currently develop my toy VR applications with Unity and only target PC/Mac. I'm assuming I can just publish to Android from Unity and be set (never done it, just know this exists)? That is I target Android and can use the phone-VR setup?
Pretty solid coincidence that I'm currently in the market for a new phone as well. I tihnk I'll go with this and then skip the regular Oculus and get a Morpheus instead since I own a PS4 but the only machine suitable for smooth VR is at work (and I surely want to play around at home, too) :D
That guy's pretty outspoken. (And yes, he's referring to live action content; I presume mobile VR will be tilted more toward video streaming etc than gaming, but I could be wrong.)
I'm not a sports person, but your "live action content" made me wonder how awesome it would be to be a sports fan who could view 'the game' from the sideline, or an aerial cam, and to be able to turn and zoom a camera or to switch cameras – as desired! Better yet, to be able 'be the athlete'. Cameras aren't there yet, but imagine being able to watch the scenery as an Olympic down-hill skier as flying downhill - AWESOME possibilities!
Also, OTOY is talking about live streaming. That said, I have spoken with more than one startup that wants to put cameras on athlete's heads/helmets. Dunno how practical it is, but I guess it'll happen eventually.
With VR, the question is (and has always been) "when". As in, "man, that's awesome, when will it actually happen?" Because everything is possible in VR, and that's part of the problem.
Cameras are here, the software is here too, I've actually toyed around with some implementations and they're definitely good enough.
The big problem that scares me is sports licensing and all the legal stuff attached.
VR will allow lots of cool stuff like that :) . One possibility I was thinking about was putting the cameras on the referees instead of the players themselves (for sports such as soccer).
But I think it'll happen as soon as there's a critical mass of people buying VR headsets.
No, unless the athlete is doing power lifting or something trivial.
It's possible an athlete already accustomed to encumbrance wouldn't mind more -- like a few cameras on a football helmet -- but keep in mind that even a GoPro is ~80g, and you need about 3-4 of those to get 360 (mono). Stereo is actually super important, and that requires a lot more cameras.
Personally, I put this in one of those 'future, maybe' categories.
Now, a VR view from courtside seats... well, that's literally already happening. Just look up NextVR, among others (that I'm probably not allowed to talk about).
The GearVR actually has a fair amount higher resolution (and arc-resolution) than the first-gen wired headsets. It also has a bit more SDE and lower FOV so there's a trade-off.
In terms of rendering pipeline, even w/ the latest Gameworks VR / Liquid VR drivers and WDDM 2.0, the GearVR may still beat out the PC's latency - Carmack's OC keynote from last year is worth watching for some of those details. Since the GearVR has both a direct kernel driver for the sensors and front-buffer access to the GPU, he quoted something eyepopping, like 4ms M2P latency.
IMO, the killer app for GearVR is watching movies on long trips, and the really compelling 360 photo/video content that's starting to get made. If you're getting an Android phone anyway, the extra $99 seems like a no-brainer and is a compelling reason to buy a Samsung device over the competition.
It is pretty effective. I think most people dismiss it as just a fancier google cardboard, which it isn't. With it's own IMU and impressive display the GearVR is a great entry level device.
Also, the Samsung S6 has a higher res screen than CV1 (the consumer version of the Rift coming out next year).
Phone screens on top-end phones are high enough quality to manage (and are higher resolution than most PC monitors anyway). They also have the added benefit of being able to render graphics internally as opposed to being attached to a PC by a cord. Yeah, the graphics may not be quite as good, but the gap in perceived graphics quality between a $1000 PC and a flagship cell phone is rapidly closing.
I think the Rift will be the choice of the "PC Master Race", but a solution like this is much more mass-market friendly. There's no reason a headset like this should cost more than $30 once mass-produced - and that's low enough to be an impulse purchase for a lot of people.
The key overlooked point for VR - a point that Carmack had enough pull to persuade Samsung to address - is latency. http://oculusrift-blog.com/john-carmacks-message-of-latency/... The system must render "motion-to-photons" the image in less than 20ms to avoid discernible (& disorienting) lag. That's fast enough that the graphics system doesn't have time to buffer the image (which would cut available render time by a large percentage); Carmack was able to convince Samsung of the importance of "unbuffered display" in a market where otherwise nobody cares about such minute timings.
If you take a look at games like Deus Ex the Fall which was also ported to PC (with mobile assets even though they could have just taken the high res assets from Human Revolution) you'll see that it's not even close.
You may not notice it on a tiny screen but on a monitor or a HMD it's absolutely terrible. It looks like a game from 8 years ago.
The trend lines showed a year ago that a high end smartphone in about 3 years from now (mid-way through the PS4's lifetime) will have higher paper specs than a PS4 (paper specs, not necessarily as well-utilized).
An Nvidia Shield tablet is on paper roughly equivalent to an XBox360. The Shield set top box is double that. A few more doublings and the prediction will play out.
You may need a smartphone, though that's debatable, but you don't need a high-end expensive one. And those wont't have paper specs anywhere near PS4-level anytime soon.
I had the chance to use the first generation of this setup together with a variety of other VR headsets a few weeks ago at a VR film festival. It was fun and worked pretty well, but non of the screen that I got to try had the needed pixel density. I was able to see the pixels on all of them, because the screen is so close to your eyes.
If VR is going to matter for movies and tv it's only going to be on devices like this that everyone can participate on economically. Streaming game services will also close the gap between this and an expensive dedicated gaming rig per headset.
Streaming games have far too much latency for VR applications. Latency requirements for VR are much lower than console games because too much latency on head tracking can cause nausea and breaks the "immersion" effect.
But yeah, I agree that when VR blows up big, it'll be something like this rather than the PC-based Oculus. That solution has always felt clunky and more like a development kit than a consumer product.
The screen differences aren't that far off between Gear and Rift CV1, but the biggest difference (aside from processing power) is positional tracking. You only get directional tracking of the user's head on the Gear, but games/experiences can be designed around current limitations.
The other frustrating limitation to the current generation of headsets is field of view, but FOV is fairly similar between the two as well.
IMO the value of each of these platforms is going to come down to content.
The screen is literally the same as what you get in a DK2. Oculus couldn't get any manufacturer to make them a screen that qualified all their requirements. Then they discovered that if they pry out the screen from a Galaxy Note, it is nearly the best they can hope for. So every DK2 right now just uses a screen that they literally tore out of a normal Galaxy Note.
I owned the Note 4 Innovator Edition. Its better than you'd think. Very low latency, excellent tracking, solid design. But a noticeable Screen Door Effect is a downside, more so than resolution IMO. You may not get full presence, but undoubtably its worth a mere $99.
Screens on these phones are pretty advanced. Even the Oculus Rift is just using screens designed for phones. From what John Carmack has said in the past, mobile platforms are easier to control for latency and lag than PCs.
Interesting. I would get one if I could hack it for other devices. It is kind of amusing that even when Microsoft has started making cross platform compatible hardware [1], Samsung is stuck on a page from the old MS playbook. Hardware that is only compatible with Samsung devices and not even other Androids. [2]
Does anyone know (preferably with a source) whether the visual correction in the new Gear VR will cover the same range (particularly, the near-sighted range) as the existing Gear VR?
Does anyone else think there is going to be some crazy additional Star Wars release tie in after the Facebook thing today to boost sales? I wouldn't be surprised if a VR version for Gear came out once a good bootleg was out.
My only question is have they fixed the whole driver problem yet?
The Oculus Rift DK2 was a complete disaster. I understand it's a "dev kit" but if they are to release it for general use they will need to drastically change the way the driver installs, the way it communicates error messages and issues with the connection.
It took me several hours to release I needed to move the Oculus Rift "monitor" to the right. And it's working "fine" on my desktop - but I can't get it working on a laptop (and current Oculus Rift statements suggest they will never support it on laptops...).
The latest Oculus SDK (0.7.0.0) on Windows _absolutely_ fixes this mess. I have nothing but praise for the latest software and this is coming from someone who couldn't use his Rift since around November last year when the AMD drivers and the Rift's extended mode stopped working together.
Basically now the Rift is considered a proper HMD as a category of its' own and not a bastardized monitor. There is no more extended mode. Everything compiled with Oculus SDK 0.6.0.0 and above now works in Direct Mode only. The latency is noticeably better. With the latest AMD/Nvidia drivers, you just plug the headset in and there's no monitor-type configuration at all.
Note this is with Windows 10; I don't have first-hand experience with 8.1 but think it'd be much the same. It really is that much better.
Also, if you haven't checked out the latest VR Desktop (http://www.vrdesktop.net), you need to do this too. In addition to giving you a giant screen to see your desktop on, you can now play full-screen games in it, watch YouTube 360 videos properly in it and watch 3D movies encoded in side-by-side or top/bottom encoding. It's really really awesome :)
> The latest Oculus SDK (0.7.0.0) on Windows _absolutely_ fixes this mess.
Tried to use that to show it off to a friend on his desktop running Windows 10. Didn't work. The demo desk worked - but nothing else did. Also - didn't I read something where .7 is not backwards compatible with apps compiled for .6?
> AMD drivers and the Rift's extended mode stopped working together.
I find extended mode only works for me on my AMD card. And I think this is part of the problem - there appears to be a number of "it works for me"/"it doesn't work for me" threads all over the Oculus Rift forum from people with varying builds including threads of "if you follow this incantation and sacrifice a chicken while modifying your registry - this will make the Oculus Rift work"
> Also, if you haven't checked out the latest VR Desktop
I tried that out - but it crashed for me almost every time I tried using it.
For me the Oculus Rift has pretty much been a fail - I couldn't tell if the fail has been on my end (ie my desktop) or Oculus Rift's end. Though I really think if they hope to get a market share is to hire the guy(s) who has been working on JanusVR and make that a bundled "app". Right now that is the only reason why I don't just put it in a box and forget about it. Yes - I understand this is a "development kit" but I would like to know that it's functional before I develop for it. If people have to read out of the Necronomicon to use it - there is no point in developing for it. I feel like others share this opinion because I think Elite Dangerous implemented support but said that they won't update it until the Oculus Rift has a non-dev kit version.
I'm just frazzled because I purchased this $300 device expecting it to be somewhat stable - and it seems like something I would get out of a kickstarter.
The GearVR never had these issues, what they shipped was way more polished than DK2.
As for DK2, have you tried .7 release yet? They completely removed the "extend my desktop" piece you had issues with. It's way less fungible than earlier releases, but feels much more polished / simple.
This is excellent. I know many people for whom this would be cheap enough to just add on to their next phone contract, who otherwise wouldn't have dipped their toes in it.
As an aside, I really wish Google and Oculus could get together and work out how to allow Cardboard apps to take advantage of the extra hardware from the Gear VR if it's available. Using a Gear VR and then trying Cardboard shows how woefully inadequate Cardboard is; but there are some cool Cardboard apps that I'd really love to be able to try with the much much better tracking of my Gear VR.
1) How long can you use it with say an S6 before the battery is drained if I don't use the micro USB cable that they offer (especially with something like a game running on it)
2) What about storage. A modern 3d game requires quite a bit of space. Sure you could load a couple of them onto the phone but AFAIK the S6 doesn't even support SD cards...how is this handled? USB OTG? I read that the Gear has a microSD...can I really store all stuff on this or is there a requirement to leave some Gear apps etc. on the actual phone?
Is there any reason this is getting a lot of press now? I've seen it all over twitter. This thing has been out for a WHILE. I used one a Toms store in Portland. It was neat but I'd much prefer something with a higher resolution. VR is all about resolution imo.
This is a new version and the first non-"Innovator Edition" (read: enthusiasts/devs) - the big deal I think is that presumably as a true consumer product, it'll be getting a lot more distribution, and moving forward will probably a big part of Samsung's pitch for differentiation of their flagship mobile products.
More resolution would be nice, but it's not everything. The biggest issue for VR geeks is probably the lack of positional tracking. A close second (or first, depending on how sensitive you are) is the relatively low refresh rate (60Hz) causes noticeable strobing for a lot of people. At that refresh rate you don't get the temporal super-resolution bonuses you get at higher rates. Fill factor is as important (if not moreso) for screen-door effect - the CV1 and Vive screens are lower-res, but look much better. AFAIK, the S6/N5 screens don't support global refresh (although there is direct front-buffer access). Lack of physical IPD adjustment is a big deal, and it's hard to solve w/ a single screen w/o sacrifices. Oh, and of course, running the devices comfortably w/o overheating.
I picked up a Homido VR cheaply and it is quite nice and fits all phones I have. The downside is that it starts to hurt after a while but it is enough to do VR experiments on my S5. I would recommend if you have an older phone and you can pick it up cheaply.
there are other really great headsets you can buy that would work. For example I bought a freeflyvr http://www.freeflyvr.com/. Really works well, but do your own research. There are a lot of factors like FOV, adjustable lens and size. etc.
No, it's significantly better. The headset has MEMS sensors running at 1 KHz (the Note 4 runs at 100 Hz IIRC), which means the head-tracking is perceptually flawless.
Add to that the quality of the optics, the high quality screen, the wide field of view, and the difference is substantial; if you haven't tried both, just trust me. They're not even in the same category.
Now, the Zeiss headset, that thing is just a high end Google Cardboard.
The reason it works so well is the GearVR platform is comprised effectively of three things:
a) Lenses to make for comfortable, adjustable viewing.
b) A touchpad for input.
c) A ton of high quality / high fidelity sensors like Accelerator, Gyrometer, Geomagnetic, Proximity (1)
Since most VR functionality is driven through sensor fusion it's a very elegant solution to develop a one-size-fits-all headset that gives devs a way to build/test/deploy against one set of sensors vs a phone-by-phone approach.
Take that plus the fact that the DK2 screen is an overclocked Galaxy 3 screen (2) and it makes complete sense.
(1) via http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/gearvr/gearvr_specs....
(2) http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/oculus-rift-dk2-gets-torn-a...