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JohnyDL

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  1. To be fair under GDPR that should be opt in by default not opt out but yeah I got it too. Unfortunately spam comes with the territory on forums Raz, not every incident can be stopped before it happens because there's money to be made by getting around spam filters and once an email is sent it generally can't be unsent so even if spam is later caught and cleaned up the damage is done when it's forwarded to emails. No HTC is not selling access or selling our email addresses. And while this message might not have been one you wanted or were delighted to receive in principle getting messages forwarded from people who want to talk to you to your email isn't something you need to threaten such action over. Especially over a single message. If it was more than a handful of messages and there was no way to turn it off you might have grievance but it's one message, you found the tools to turn it off and you turned it off, there's literally nothing more that HTC could have done. Other than like you say being opt in, which I'm sure it is now even if it wasn't when you signed up 3 years ago (before GDPR and it became standard to explicit opt in for notification emails) Come on if this is the first spam email you've had in 3 years, this response is way out of proportion.
  2. Wouldn't Reddit be a better place to have a VR games forum? (or rather find one of the many that already exist there) Let Vive/HTC keep their forum about their hardware and software rather than asking them to moderate a gaming community
  3. I often run my devices into the ground and will hold onto something far past when it seems worthless to most people, for example I'm still running a 2009 optiplex for most of my web surfing needs to prolong the life of my gaming machine. So if something can be patched or repaired I'd prefer to keep using it rather than sell it or upgrade it and throw it away when it isn't necessary. Like most modern mobile technologies the batteries are not strictly user serviceable in the Vive controllers so a battery that will not hold a charge is something I will have to deal with eventually. I appreciate that the most common answer is to suck it up, charge every time you leave VR or every night (depending on use) and ignore the e-waste and/or financial cost when these things need replacing, but neither of these options are particularly appetising on a $100 phone to me let alone a $1000 VR system. What I'm looking for is only what android devices already provide through apps, a best guess at future usage, my phone for example is at 84% and the battery app I use guesses the next time it will need to charge is in 4 days based on my previous usage, if I think my usage is going to be typical then I don't need to charge it at all and even as I plan to use it for audiobooks or video (not my normal usage pattern) when I go shopping today it will alert me at 30% so that I can stop using it and have enough battery for emergency phonecalls or an Uber. The equivalent is what I'd like from Vive controllers, the controllers are at some battery level (more accurate than 4 green dots and one angry flashing red dot), you'll get some hours worth of play out of them (based on previous use), and a charge level warning when they're getting low (to remind me to recharge them), the only difference is that I want the computer to remember the last battery level the controllers had when turned off and the computer to display this information since the controllers themselves don't have any screens to do that.
  4. I know what you mean but there is a cost to it long term, at least there used to be, for the health of the battery. I guess I'm kinda looking for software to over come my long ingrained habits. I struggle to be in VR for more than an hour at a time (though I can do 2-3 hours in one day with an hour break between sessions) but I don't charge anything unless it cries out for a charge, for my phone and controllers this is every 3 days or so, my tablet is once a week or less, I'm on week 6 of VR myself and I think in all that time I've only managed to preemptively charge the controllers twice. I'd use the power lights if my mind took the half a second to register them as I was exiting VR but I still don't look most of the time even though I've been trying to.
  5. "No, this is medical obviousness." Any medical professional will tell you being active standing up and doing things (even in VR) is better for you than sitting in a chair. "But can you imagine that for example, only fast-foods would be operating, only because majority thinks it is tasty, cheap and better" "No I can't, but I also wouldn't expect someone to open a gormet fried chicken restaurant next door to and serve the same food as the KFC next door just on a fancy plate and get away with charging 10 times the price." "As you can tell my English is far from being good, but this sentence has no meaning for me." no my English was bad and marred by dyslexia, sorry, I was using your own analogy, you were telling me it would be stupid if only fast food operates, I'm telling you it would be just as stupid for a classy restaurant to open next door to fast food and serve the exact same food as the fast food only for more money. In that situation normal PC gaming is fast food and VR with m+k is serving it on a fancy plate. It might look objectively nicer served like that but it's functionally the same thing and so it's cheaper and easier for the vast majority to not bother trying to do it in VR. And most companies trying to do that will take a substantial loss "You can say exactly the same about movies, music, books and many other aspects of our life. But there is always a choice." I can and often do say the same things about other things but I wasn't commenting about story because telling the same story in a new light can be done well and that's not the point I was making, if you're playing for story reasons the game play largely doesn't matter so long as it serves the story and gives the player agency to change the story. I was talking about mechanics. I'm saying that even the "most ambitious games" we have are mechanically the same as many others, comparing them to cars, it's like all car manufacturers were making different looking cars but they all use the same gearboxes and exhausts and engines that have been around for over a decade maybe with tuning them a little. And all the mechanics have been around long enough that almost every mix of them has been tried. No one is making formula one equivalent games in the PC space anymore, no-one really pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a game on the large scale. AAA titles are always safe bets, they're the same thing they made last year or last generation with a continuation of the story or a new story and a new slap of paint. You're buying the same car that you already own. You have the choice whether it's painted red this year or green but it's still the same game. If you venture outside of AAA games or even paid for games you start to get real innovation, take a look at the games that have come out of the ludum dare game jams, because there are so many constraints on the developers that take part that to stand out you have to do something innovative. There might well be a thousand copycat games, but its a wild west and so some astounding games come from a 72 hour long competition. They won't be 100+ hour long epics to play but that doesn't make them bad games. This is one of the reasons why flash games were so important during the 00s anyone could and often did write a flash game and so there were a tonne of games developed many were bad but the few that were really good had their mechanics added to the tools available for every developer to use. I think the point I was trying to get at is not books are bad because they're all paper with letters written on them, but no-one wants a movie where all you do is sit and read scrolling text. You've got a whole new medium and a new dimension why would you not use it? This is how I see HMD with k+m, you're using the hardware in the worst possible way, there may come a time when it's useful as a game mechanic, just as scrolling text was used as the introduction to Star Wars, or the way closed captions exist for deaf people but I don't think it's going to be the default VR experience, it'll be an accessibility experience for people who are wheelchair bound or don't have the mobility to enjoy VR the way the majority of us can and in most cases want to, and only used as part of a story very occasionally. "That explains a lot. We should end our discussion at this point. Thanks for your time. Enjoy your happy meal." I think your reaction to what I said says more about you than what I said does about me. I've tried a lot of games on PC while almost completely avoiding anything on the AAA list (at least I rarely bothered to buy them when they are new since I've rarely had top of the line hardware and I'd almost always choose to save for a new component rather than buy a $25+ game). There's a lot of choice in PC games out there, from web games to AAA, I have probably played 1000 or more different games for at least 30 seconds of each, the majority were bad (hell I've played over 200 different tower defence titles and a probably as many incremental games cause I quite like those genres and yes most of them were bad too) the average PC game is objectively bad, in all cases. There are millions of games and you can probably name every one that you'd give a 5 star rating to it may be 100 or 1000 but it's not going to be the majority of PC games, almost all PC games are going to be ones that are in genres you don't like or poor executions of things that you do. The worst games I've played in VR have largely not been what I'd really consider games but I've gone into them expecting games, they're places to stand or sit and enjoy things, experiences rather than something to interact with or a means to an end like a "game" that makes it comfy to sit and enjoy a movie with friends remotely or a "game" that's really a short film where you get to choose what bit of the scenes to focus on. And I've only played maybe 20 VR "games" in total, I've only been in VR for 70 or so hours compared to over 10k+ hours in PC games of various types, I haven't really had a chance to plumb the depths of bad VR games yet. And yet I thought it was still notable that I've not really had an experience I'd call bad among these 20, I've definitely had ones that weren't what I was expecting but nothing that I considered a waste of my time, money or efforts to explore. The question that springs to mind is If most PC games are bad why are most VR games passable or better? I'm obviously not blindly praising everything I've played, the bar I'm using is "passable", it's not all cheap fast food that satisfies the masses I'll admit there are things I like that others might not or that I dislike that others might enjoy. But that programming for VR takes more than the very basics of skills probably precludes the shockingly bad experiences from web games or flash games or unity games, while the default levels of immersion and interactivity can make even the simplest games that people choose to make come alive in a way that doesn't strictly happen with PC gaming.
  6. Almost every time I've needed to recharge my controllers it's happened because one has run out of battery mid game. I don't like over charging batteries either by leaving them on charge indefinitely or by charging them when they don't really need charging (90%-100%-90%-100% isn't great for batteries), that said when I'm jumping out of VR I always forget to check if my controllers will need charging and then put them on charge when they do Are there any utilities that will track my controller battery level and then alert me? It'd be really cool if there was something like "Your next session has a % chance of being halted by a controller battery, you should probably recharge them" as a windows notification where % is the percentile of the predicted battery time when compared to the data collected about uninterrupted play sessions 0% chance means that even if you play the longest you'd ever played in one go (with some margin of error) that the controllers will remain turned on without any problems 100% would mean that even if you have the shortest (not interrupted by controller battery failure) play session that the battery will run out I'm sure there are a bunch of other factors that could be accounted for, data trends, do certain days of the week have more play time, do certain games use more battery, are the batteries themselves degrading and so predicted failure time needs adjusting etc. that could be turned on and off but even the simplest warning would go a long way to stop some disappointingly short sessions.
  7. my bet is that they'll want to make sure whatever they recommend is good enough to solve the worries about Covid A mask between skin and the foam cover might not be enough, sweat can and will drip down foreheads through the foam and out the other side picking up contaminates on the way.
  8. "Try to convince a guy that is driving on a highway in the middle of the summer wearing black leather suit and full heavy motorcycle helmet that you don't recommend it" Motor cycle helmet is not a fair comparison. 1 a motorcycle helmet is more evenly distributed weight and while riding partially supported by the collarbone. 2 it's a safety item not a toy. 3 It doesn't actively blast your eyeballs with heat. instead they're effectively cooled by the apparent wind of riding even without fans which most modern helmets have. How about this analogy? A welder uses 3600 watts, so for every hour you spend in VR is equivalent to looking into a welding arc for 5 seconds with no face shield. "But it is much more comfortable and practical, at least for the purpose I described above." That is just subjective opinion of yours. "and games not as good as you would expected?" Are you kidding? Even the worst games I've played in VR are better than the average not VR games I've played. "The HTC set price is actually quite good, especially compering to the rest of the PC hardware these days." You can buy 2 "good enough" PCs for the vast majority of games to be playable for the price of most PC VR headsets. Your PC might cost more than that, but the average player's PC looks like this: Windows 10, 3GHz intel CPU, 8GB Ram, GTX1060 6GB VRAM, you will get better fidelity games on more expensive hardware but you don't need it. A PC even a dedicated gaming PC isn't going to do just gaming for it's whole life, you'll get 2 years out of it, and then you might upgrade parts or do a whole refresh, and the old parts will (if you're like me) end up in other computers or even as an intact second computer to watch videos on or do office work with. Or give to some kid in your family who wants to play games but doesn't need a $2000 rig. You don't have to justify the cost of any single component against just a handful of games, getting into PC VR is almost like buying a games console, it has it's own ecosystem, most of the games you own won't play on it so you'll have to buy new ones, and the hardware will only be used for games for it's whole life and more likely than not you won't try to sell it or pass it on because when you're upgrading it you'll be doing it because either it's broken or the whole ecosystem is having a refresh to updated hardware. In that context a VR headset is like buying both an Xbox and a Play Station brand new, at their launches PS4 was $400 and Xbox One X was $500 while the original Vive was $800. "And if it was more customizable on the software level I wouldn't even hesitate." You can always program your own software for it, it's just another PC component. "But can you imagine that for example, only fast-foods would be operating, only because majority thinks it is tasty, cheap and better" No I can't, but I also wouldn't expect someone to open a gormet fried chicken restaurant next door to a, serve the same KFC chicken from next door just on a fancy plate and get away with charging 10 times the price. "I think the gaming community is extremely guilty of stagnation - PC and console gamers often want the exact same thing year over year" This is exactly right, it's got to the point where there's whole gaming industries based on being copycat games. Everything from Call of Duty to Minecraft, Tetris to Bejewelled, Firewatch to Starcraft, Sim City to Theme Park World, DOTA to Cookie Clicker have spawned clones or sequels that don't fundamentally change the essence of the underlying game they just reskin the mechanics with a new story or new graphics. Almost all of the best PC games that exist right now are from a handful of concepts that have been remixed or are sequels. Fallout 3 was a sequel and everything in new vagas, 4 and 76 were iterative, deus ex is fundamentally a Final Fantasy game with a new skin, Fable 3, Call of Duty Warzone, Grand Theft Auto, Terraria, Animal Crossing, Doom Eternal, God of War, Portal 2, Overwatch, Dark Souls, Planet Coaster, Factorio. Even minecraft that's stand out one of the most original games of this millennium is essentially Lego. "but still you need to swiftly move your avatar in a comfortable for your body way" Yeah we have that, on the Vive controllers there's a track pad that depending on the game and exactly how limited you are in your ability to roam can be uses as a teleporter or a joystick to glide yourself around the environment. The cosmos controllers and valve index have actual joysticks for each thumb, you can choose to sit down in some games and move only via those methods and continue using the controller like a gun even in that same hand that controls character movement. Any and all games that want you to have more space to play in than you literally have in your play space need to solve this and so it has been done. I haven't (yet) but I theoretically could play Half Life Alyx from a chair (I might go for story mode though since ducking from things flying at my face would be uncomfortable in a chair) "I hope they realize that PC gamers like to have a choice and that we won't be neglected just because being smaller market" Every PC VR player is a PC gamer first. It is Steam VR, to participate you need an above average PC. And VR has a lot of choice, BeatSaber, Half Life Alyx, Blade and Sorcery, Creed Rise to Glory, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, Super Hot, VR Kanojo, Abode, Hot Dogs Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, Rick and Morty Virtual Rickality, Job Simulator, Google Earth VR, Universe Sandbox VR, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes VR, Table Top Simulator, Star Trek Bridge Crew, Kittypocolypse, Lucid and more each of these is a different genre and each is a piece of VR software that will satisfy some gamer's itch it's just that none of them offer the HDM+k+m that you want. You don't want "more choice", you want YOUR choice. Almost every title I've listed is a valid way to be a PC or VR Gamer and just like you not liking say minecraft or Portal 2 doesn't make you "not a PC gamer" you can't exclude all the people who do like playing all these PC games that you "would not play those games even if i could control them with my mind" from being a PC gamer too. PC gamers is such a big market that no singular experience can be marketed to people with that title, the smaller market is you and the people who want the HMD+k+m experience and you are a small fraction of PC gamers, you don't own the title of PC gamer, maybe to get recognition you need a separate title so developers can know who you are and what you want and if you get organised you can even look like a big enough group to cater to. How about KVM-Gamers? "SteamVR saw upwards of 2 million + connected headsets in April 2020 and that's just one VR ecosystem." That's so cool I hadn't realised we'd broken even a million already xD That's 10% of Steam Concurrent's as of March or 2% of xbox sales, I still think of VR as an uncommon thing, I know or know of only a handful of people who have VR in some form or another through offline connections maybe this will become more noticeable going forward.
  9. I don't mean I'm looking to be lazy or implying you do, just that I understand the value of being able to enjoy media without getting up The experience in VR is very different, A HMD can draw as much as 5 watts of power, it doesn't seem like a lot but it can get to being radiator strapped to your face after just an hour. The same seals that keep the outside world away from VR lock the heat to your face. I get the appeal of enjoying 16 hours of Computer time without much of a break, a HMD is not comparable. I'm not saying this as as challenge I'm saying it because I don't want you to buy into VR with that 5-6 hours at a time expectation, hurt yourself and blame VR for it. Like I said those were the two I can directly compare between VR and PC. I used them as points of reference not suggestions. I get the TPP vs FPP argument but you can do that without strapping a monitor to your face. There are games that you can play FPP without VR, adding VR to them is more than simply adjusting the field of view and resolution. I do get what you're saying though. I for the longest time didn't see the point in upgrading to HDMI from SVGA, there was nothing that a small bump in resolution could add to the imersiveness of the games I played. I get too that you don't need to have FPP or VR for imeresiveness, Factorio is a 2.5D game that's so ridiculously addictive and sucks you in that many players have experiences where they start playing in the evening and then blink check the clock and realise it's 4AM and they've been playing for 8 hours. I even get what you mean with cinemas, I wouldn't go XD, I enjoy 3D but it's not a necessity, I've watched things in "4D" where they spray water or air at you or tilt the seats and I don't see the point of that at all. I'll go so far as to say I find Cartoons are generally more immersive for me than live action stuff. Being realistic is not the same as immersive. I understand that. But what is the immersive draw of VR? Being in the world? Yes but being in the world to many VR players and developers means your touch and movements having direct impact on the world, using k+m when there's this more visceral option is less than ideal. I know on one level I'm holding a controller and pulling the trigger when I pick up say a piece of paper, but it really feels like I'm holding it not because my hand feels the same as if I were holding a real piece of paper but because I can feel that my arm is positioned the same as my character's and that any little movements I could make with my arm are directly translated to the virtual piece of paper, I can without learning any special commands bring it to my face to have a closer look, turn it over or upside down, look at it from an oblique angle or anything I can imagine doing with a real sheet of paper, Even tear it, fold it or screw it up in some VR games. Like I say there may be ways to do all this with a keyboard and mouse, but it's so much more intuitive and natural in VR that having to learn these controls for a VR game actually breaks immersion. If you play on a screen then VR is an upgrade, if you play in VR bringing the k+m factor to the game is so much of a downgrade from all the other games that implement VR with controllers that those HMD+k+m games for me would be like trying to play while handcuffed, almost by definition an unwelcome handicap and less fun. So why are there none of these really ambitious games in VR yet? Is it because there's no audience? No, you clearly exist. But it might be because it's not worth making a game like that right now because the audience potential is too small. Right now there's (a minimum of) 30k ish people who own VR (based on the number of people who've reviewed beat saber on steam it might be 2x that or 10x that but 30k seems like a good number to work with) the vast majority of them play VR games that interact with the game world by picking things up, by walking or teleporting around, a set of common controls like WASD that are so instinctive that you don't need to even learn them you do them automatically within minutes of being in VR. It wouldn't take much effort to imagine that few VR players can sit at a desk and type while blindfolded or be able to reach for their mouse without glancing at it. VR controllers can be embodied as part of the game world by looking like your character's hands or something they're holding, your chair and keyboard and mouse can not. So for the vast majority of these players VR with k+m is not a game they would buy, some might but it'd be a small fraction. On the other side you have all the people who play those ambitious games with a normal screen, asking them to leap to VR by taking away the screen option while keeping k+m controls is like adding $1000 to the price tag of the game. If you're an ambitious AAA title that's almost suicide, Valve have done it with Half Life Alyx, but they also don't force you to use k+m controls. So adding even limited VR support for the game is almost exclusively going to lose you money, it costs money (lets say 1000 hours at $50 per hour) for it to be added, tested and all the bugs ironed out, but you don't really add any appeal to your game on the whole, the people who would buy the VR to play it would probably buy it without VR support, and the people with VR who might buy it is too small a pool of players to add such features. To pay for it you require at the bare minimum 10% of players who already have VR already to want to buy it when they wouldn't have without VR support which is a ridiculous notion. I think the only reason why there is the one big game, Half Life Alyx, is because for valve it's a loss leader, they can use it to get more people into Steam VR and sell them more VR games, all of which adds to their bottom line, even if they only make 10% back on the cost of the game through game sales they'll make much more through selling the index and licencing to HTC for the Cosmos and Vive pro, and there'll be a dozen game sales for each sold console over the next year too making up for it. What you're asking for isn't going to be around until VR has over a million players unless people like you passion project it yourselves. Every game that exists right now is either aimed at mass market appeal (beat saber, blade and sorcery, rick and morty virtual rickality, superhot, horseshoes hotdogs and hand grenades), test projects that're very small on the scale of the companies making them and designed to lose money while giving that company's developers the chance to expand their skills into VR for future projects (google earth VR, autodesk VR), passion projects by independent developers (Hyperbolica by Coding Parade (coming soon), Non-Euclidean Virtual Reality by Sabetta Matsumoto, Avatar the last Airbender game by Elca, Stage9 or Orville by messy desk interactive and many more) or they're hyper niche but expensive for what they are (VR Kanojo). I can see your point that you don't need the fancy hand controls to be immersive or to game but right now, to me, VR is the whole package, it's not your head in a screen it's all the controller stuff too. Anything you can play like that can be played without the need of VR at all.
  10. Oh they have three modes, sitting, standing and room-scale, but even so the games aren't designed for keyboards. And the games that are designed for keyboards don't always port well to VR. There are ways to pass through your screen to the HMD but the resolution is reduced and like with an IRL screen there's boundaries. I'm 300lb on a good day so I hope too that there will be more sedentary VR games in the future but right now I wouldn't want to be in VR for more than 90 minutes at a time anyway, the HMD can start to strain my neck so I need to decompress a bit, and I know it gets hot even sitting down and floating through google earth VR so I need a drink at least that often. There's no way that you'll be in VR for 5-6 hours at a time that's an unrealistic expectation with the current technology, it might be how you're used to enjoying some titles but not VR. That said I expect the more chilled out games to come from console not PC, there the motion controllers are entirely optional so the game makers will plan to make games that work with a HMD and only a normal controller and the developers might make those cames from the couch controller paradigm they're used to. PSVR therefore might actually be a better way to look for the more sit down VR games. I am a PC gamer, the only console I ever owned was a second hand Wii that I got mainly to try hacking the Wiimotes. I have played minecraft and factorio for thousands of hours each and I like the more Puzzly FPS games like Portal and Antichamber, but I've played fallout and fable, Civ and so on too. I waited a long while from first trying the Oculus dev kit in 2014 to believing VR was ready for me to play with. I completely understand the desire to want to play all your favourite games in VR for the immersion aspect alone, the two games I can directly compare between PC and VR are minecraft and Portal 2. Both are better in VR but I wouldn't play them in VR if I couldn't interact with the world using the controllers, if I'm using a k+m setup then I'd rather just use a screen because I've already been taken out of the world. I thought something very similar to the way you're thinking about VR when thinking about buying a projector a few years ago, and don't get me wrong I loved having my projector for films but I stopped use if for gaming at all after the novelty ran out, it's more immersive in many respects but It was a pain to get set up and again it rans hot, but the biggest barrier to play was that my computer chair was always closer and more comfy than my couch. You might think a mouse and keyboard offers you all the freedoms you could want but in VR it doesn't, a mouse has 3 dimensions of freedom, forward/backward, left/right and the scroll wheel, and the keyboard only has 2, W/S and A/D yes using all of them together you can have full freedom to move and manipulate your character or an object and with buttons you can switch what you're controlling and how, console controllers manage the same even without the scroll wheel. But VR offers you instantly 18 different dimensions of freedom for you to see and manipulate the world, your head and each hand can move left/right, forward/backward, up/down, and each can twist/turn on each of those axis independently. So while you may be down on buttons to press cause you're down to 2 types of click per hand and a track pad you end up in more control of your character and environment. So long as there's reasonable mapping for inventory access you won't long for keyboard controls for long either. For the vast majority of PC games you'll play with only 4-10 buttons, 123 for quick access to specific things, q to drop something e for inventory, space to jump, shift to sneak, then left and right click for different actions depending on your held item, all of these can be mapped to controllers. That said I rather hope that we can move to other ways to access inventory items than menus though, Half Life Alyx puts Ammo in her backpack by putting a controller over either shoulder, i'd almost be happy with that as an access and retrieval point for items and if I could say the name of an item I want (since I can't feel around in my bag) to bring that item to hand would be fantastic. You don't need, and I wouldn't recommend going really excessive with walking or running rigs you really don't need that at all, it might be cool technology for VR Parlours but it's not necessary for any VR game. The hand-waving and body moving stuffs that make a huge difference for immersion aren't the big shouty things, I mean the simple things like being able to pick up a piece of VR debris from a table and study and manipulate it as though it's real, no matter what you do or how clever you map the controls you can't emulate that feeling of "this item is actually in my hand" with k+m, and it's not a big wave your arms about movement it's a simple natural gesture. A great look at what I mean by this is the game Rick and Morty: Virtual Rickality you can wave your hands about in the air like a mad person but the controls are such that you don't need to walk around much if at all, you could probably play the game from a spinning chair with your elbows glued to the armrests, yet there's a million small things you can do that would be flattened by a k+m setup.
  11. I'm sorry to tell you You still need some tracking even for a face mounted monitor, unless you're very very lucky you'll experience motion sickness while moving your head and not seeing movement in a HMD To a certain degree you'd probably want the headset to control where you look, and maybe the mouse to do fine control for shooting, while using yet more controls for turning which way your player is facing (so you can strafe and turn with one hand). But really even if the headset could offer what you're asking for the games aren't set up for those inputs. I don't think there are many if any titles that support VR and m+k that support both simultaneously. You'll also probably be disappointed by the step-down in resolution in some respects if you're treating VR like a monitor replacement, VR really isn't there yet for a number of reasons. Your best bet would probably be the basic cosmos though -> no lighthouses and facing your desk there'll be plenty of things to track, but I really fear that you won't really be buying the experience you're after, and maybe having controllers and options to move around would bring you "to the dark side" since one of the most immersive aspects of VR is interacting with things using the hand-waving and body moving stuffs.
  12. Yeah I don't do that, my VR machine is an always on thing but if you touch your finger to the base stations you can feel the motors whirring on the insides and since that's the big thing that will wear out over time I expected them to turn off once I enabled power management (even if it takes 30 extra seconds to turn on I wouldn't mind that) I may have to think about hard powering down the base stations
  13. For some reason I can't get this to show/work I have the BT enabled but no sleep setting .
  14. methanol/Ethanol will be fine, isopropranol can dissolve some plastics. Something you could do to help protect participants -> there are removable pads on the inside of the HMD, these quickly get sweaty and would be unsanitary, you could change these out with every participant and use one (or several) person's session to bath and dry the pads a previous user used. For the harder parts of the HMD soap and water would be just as effective, so something like babywipes will be fine for the hardware. You need to be aware that no-matter what you do that these precautions will not be 100% guarantee to prevent cross contamination and to stop the spread of diseases that can be transmitted by contact. And that if you're specifically doing this because of one disease that's currently on everyone's mind then you should make sure your users are aware this is only a precaution and not a guarantee and they should make the decision for themselves whether to take the risk anyway. If I were to take my VR to share I'd be doing all this as much as I can anyway regardless of the extra diseases currently in the population I've had Conjunctivitis once and I wouldn't want to get it again or be responsible for spreading it. See https://www.healthline.com/health/infected-eye
  15. I bet you could play Pixelmon in VR -> Minecraft + Pokemon + Vivecraft don't know if there are any recreations of the maps but it might be worth a look
  16. You're welcome I do think there will be a lot of upgrades coming in software and hardware too but right now the lighthouses are a clear winner, each station has a 120 degrees of view both virtically and horisontally, the reason they suggest setting them up in the corners is because with that FOV they should see the whole playspace and more, there's less things that can obstruct the laser lights and when you can't be seen by one you can be seen by the others. You actually have it a little backward because Inside out Tracking is a lot closer to the kinect and the limitations of that. The lighthouse tracking system is actually more like the Wiimote tracking system (which was flawed since it only worked when pointing the Wiimote at the TV), I don't know if you had a Wii original but rather than the boxes looking out and trying to track points of your body or on a device each device looks for the lighthouses. In WiiMotes there were two constantly flashing IR LEDs on a strip you placed under or above the TV while the controllers had IR cameras installed the position was worked out by where the two dots appeared, how far apart, which LED flashed first and the angles is enough to determine the location of the camera, while in VR the light houses send out Laser scan lines both Virtically and Horrisontally all the seeing is done by the sensors on the controllers and headset, all the working out of where the device is can be found from just timing how long after the start of each sweep the sensor sees the vertical or horizontal laser pings, this locates the sensor to it's exact point in space with 20 or so sensors on each controller and the face plates that works out position and orientation of everything pretty accurately. I've only completed up to chapter 2 of Alyx I never played the original halflife before so I'm taking it slowly and enjoying the story. I'm going to be getting StarTrek Bridge Crew and the DLC soon so I can play that with some friends, but I'm liking that there are other things that I already owned that in VR are amazing Universe Sandbox and Table Top Simulator which I can play in VR while people with out VR can join in through more traditional PC gaming. I think there's now enough players 30K (just beat saber reviewers on steam) that we're now a market that's worth tapping into. If you can get just 10% people with the device to buy a game at $30 each that's $100k game it's not an AAA budget but it's still a respectable game budget, and if the game already exists and it's just porting and adjusting controller options I think we've seen that's enough to make it something that VR players who like that genre anyway will opt into trying, worst case they get a passable sit down at a keyboard game.
  17. I've looked into it a little. I'm not sure if anything I've found would get you standard models but Google Tilt Brush -> Exports to Poly.google.com (and maybe as other files too) Autodesk -> has VR features suppoted I think including Maya LT (video 1) Mind Desk -> Though features I don't know too much about Make VR -> Seems to be free, been thinking about trying it myself (video 2)
  18. I've not bumped anything apart from my legs only so far I went silicon just cause I expect it to be a lot grippier than gels or the plastic, my problem is definitely throwing them rather than hitting things. I had to make the choice between 3D printing and my other tech toys a few times, some how it never seemed to get to the head of the queue, partly because a new phone, computer, or accessory always seemed more important, and partly because I suck at CAD, I really can't visualise building something without pixels/voxels. Have you had a play with any VR CAD stuff yet and printed things you've made that way? My brief experience in tilt brush makes me think it might be a lot more intuitive than traditional CAD.
  19. I don't know about the Vive Pro Eye but I have a Cosmos Elite and I've on occasions covered my headset from view from the trackers and it fades to grey void, I imagine at least when playing Steam VR games this is default behaviour to stop you getting extra motion sick if you're basically clawing at your eyes to get the HMD off your head. For this reason I think that having at least one light house might be a necessity. You don't know how even a fraction of a second delay for what people see will effect them and if they're going for their face to get out of VR you might be better off with those sorts of safety features active. I would like to have a play with Pass though myself though I've got front facing and side cameras on the Cosmos Elite, so it'd be fun to do some mixed reality stuff. If you have a program in mind (and it's free) I could try it for you and turn off my base stations and tell you the results
  20. After some umming and ahhhing I went for one red and one blue of these for the wands to match beat sabre, going to take a little while to get here but I can live with that. Hope you find something that suits you Darkfyrealgoma
  21. You can't really have a space too small for light house set up, your limitation really comes on where you can mount the hardware, if you have the room for standing VR and plan to box or beat sabre you have enough room for lighthouses. The play space can be much smaller than the space where you mount the lighthouses, I mounted one of mine above my desk with a stand and another behind my couch, the boxes are about as far away from each other as they can be and I have a 1.5m square I can play in if I'm too lazy to move my couch into my kitchen. I didn't do the best job of mounting my lighthouse at first (it fell and broke, entirely my fault) but that did lead me to running with only one lighthouse for a little while and the setups can be a lot more flexible than just overhead and in the corners, for beatsaber at least, one lighthouse mounted directly in front of where you're swinging gives great tracking, you won't be able to play games in all directions but there's solid tracking with setups that're not the recommended ones. The boxes also have a great FOV so you can be right on top of them or under them and still use them for tracking in many cases. I have no doubt that if I put my 2 boxes at the corners of my 1.5m square I'd be able to track inside it (though the only way I could do that is by mounting to the ceiling something my landlord doesn't want me to do -> so one wall mount and one stand. I can't stress how good Google Earth VR is, it's entirely free and if you want the good bits of a good long walk outside without having to go outside I would recommend it. My goal to feel like money well spent is 200 played hours to cover the purchase of the hardware as a good deal, I'm well on course for that within 5 months. Though if I get to share it with friends eventually that hour target may get a lot lower. I don't know how you value your time, but with VR I want it to be better value for money than going to the cinema. This has long been my standard for buying upgrades, it's a stupid target in many respects, after all the cinema is a rip off compared to say streaming or buying the DVD of a film but it's still what I think of as the gold standard of entertainment, it's kinda like how spending money on seats to be in a sports ball stadium is so much less than watching it on TV in a pub where you have commentary and unlimited access to food and beer and comradery yet going to the stadium is still the gold standard for many on how to enjoy sports ball, "Go Team. Go Sport!" xD You if you're going to use it as a pseudo swimming then maybe that should be your measuring stick, how much does swimming cost you per hour? how many hours of VR do you need to get out of a VR headset, do you think it'll be a yearly purchase or something every two or three years as technology evolves? For me I expect my gaming computer to get a full or near full replacement every 2-3 years and any year I do that I can't upgrade anything else big and computer related so my VR plan might be that it should alternate with the upgrade cycle on the rest of my computer. If you're a graphic designer I'd also point you to the art and 3D cad programs many of which are free or free with Vive Port Infinity, I find them a lot more intuitive than 2D software although my skill with using either is still near zero. You might not find them being perfect but I'm kinda looking forward to the future of these technologies where VR+2D design can be used in tandem or swapping between them is easy. I hesitated for years before buying VR, I looked at the Oculus Dev Kit, the Rift, the Vive, Vive Pro, Cosmos and Index when each came out and I waited to see what the reviews were like and what the experience was like for users. Until steam VR it was a hard no for me, I wanted something I could jump into and enjoy not design and program for myself, and VR didn't really seem mature on Steam for a while. There was only really Beatsaber that interested me for a good while too, but I put some money aside anyway because I knew VR was getting closer to being a ready for me experience. Then this lockdown happened, I had the money and Alyx was released all at almost the same time and it seemed that more serious VR games were on the horizon, and that there were going to be shortages of all tech over the next year or maybe two and all that combined to me deciding now was the time. Manufacture is going to be short a lot of things for a while, supply is going to be low so prices won't get better, new designs will take longer than planned to come to market, basically what was the best thing available in march 2020 is going to be the best thing available in september 2020 and looking at all the options the future flexibility of the Cosmos was what sold me, I brought the lighthouse version because that's a combination of what I could afford and what worked best for the setup I planned to have for the next year or two, but if I ever bite the bullet and buy something portable with the horses to run VR I can do the "upgrade" of buying the inside out tracking stuff later. The reverse of what you're doing in effect.
  22. I have the elite and I've only had it a month but I love it, almost all the issues I've experienced were either created by me or were solved with software, there are some outlier cases of games requiring nvidia GPUs when I have RX570 but I imagine there will be some issues with not having Radeon sooner or later. I can't say much for the upgrade path other than right now it doesn't exist, as far as I can tell the upgrade path is entirely theoretical, you could get the light houses and controllers but the face plates as far as I can tell aren't sold separately. I can't say anything about the inside out experience either but the lighthouse one is fantastic, and I still go into things and experience the novelty of VR over and over. I've racked up some 36 ish hours (averaging more than an hour a day) in just beat sabre. What I'd say though is if you're going to buy into VR have a use and a role for it don't rely on the novelty aspect to keep you engaged and coming back. My use for it is Exercise. I'm really bad at that I always have been and VR has had me working out everyday really for the first time it was the push I needed to do more than sit at a computer screen 12 hours a day even if I VR is still staring at screens it's not the same. Your reasons doesn't have to be an every day thing it can be once a week or once a month but make the time to use it and have fun with it and have something that VR fills that you're needing. I have friends who brought into VR and recommended me against it (although lightly) because to them it's a toy that they don't get the use of very often because of their busy lives and just how time consuming initiating VR can be. If you have a console or something else that would divide your time VR might not suit you because VR will always take a little extra effort to set up and get started and then you're going to build up a sweat even doing light gaming and want to shower afterwards, where you might spend 2-3 hours console gaming you'll lose maybe 20-30 minutes just to clearing your VR space getting into VR and then putting everything back after, Suddenly because of this lost time all those other options will seem a lot more inviting when you're deciding what games to play. If you end up loving VR like me you'll be frustrated by all the games you can't play in VR and gaming without VR might become a little dull in comparison (for a while). Only you'll know if that's how things might turn out for you.
  23. No the faceplate on the Elite has cameras, I've been looking at getting some skins too ... beatsaber has got to the point I struggle to hold the plastic while I play so I'm thinking of doing the same, I don't know how much if at all the cameras are used but if you buy Vive covers you'll block them.
  24. you should be fine, but there's the current global thing going on there's no-longer a thing called Guaranteed Shipping, there are a lot of people who're not being delivery drivers or post workers because of restrictions to leaving the house, if you need VR by friday you need to be the delivery person and probably buy it in person. If this fails you may be able to cobble something together from second hand instead but then you're gonna be putting by your eyes and nose something that's not necessarily as sterile as from the factory. But if it were me? I'd have placed the order 8 hours ago instead of making a post to be as close to the front of the shipping queue as possible and hope there are no delays. If I really need it as in life or death need it and have the money then I'd also order the microsoft one as well and double the odds that one will arrive on time and then return the microsoft one if both arrive before friday and the unopened one of the pair if they didn't.
  25. The HP is 2 x 2160 x 2160 9 million Pixels but doesn't say any refresh rate on their own website, Amazon claims 90 Hz but I don't see how that's possible given that's nearly two times the data rate of the other options on the market. the displays are also square which in some respects sucks because your eyes naturally have a wider range in focus than tall so either things will be scaled so your width is accomodated perfectly and then you have a mass of height pixels you'll never see, or the height is perfect and you'll be wishing for width, or some combination of the two shortfalls, paying for rarely used pixels. It's also not Steam VR compatible again from the website, it seems to only be officially supported by "Virtual Reality Solutions Overview" it also only has 2 sensors so the tracking must work entirely differently to everything else The Vrgineers Xtal is 2 x 2560 x 1440 7 Million Pixels at 70Hz refresh rate on their own website. It also looks a lot heavier than the Cosmos but seems to be comparable to the one I own except it requires an extra 1lb counterweight as part of the strap which the Cosmos doesn't, it probably needs this because the weight while comparable to the Cosmos is further from the face and so will feel heavier even if it's about the same. The 180 range of vision is also massively overkill, you're paying for pixels you won't see the vast majority of the time and you're either going to be letterboxed on height comparatively or the pixels near the centre of your vision are going to be taller. The Cosmos is 2 x 1440 x 1700 5 million pixels at 90Hz refresh rate. from personal experience there is pixelation but on the whole I'm either too busy to notice or twice as many pixels wouldn't really help, I'd need an order of magnitude more pixels to make things work. The Vive Pro has the exact same specs as the cosmos for the screen The Valve Index which many consider the best on the market is 2 x 1440 x 1600 4.5 Million Pixels at 120 Refresh rate, an even lower resolution to enable the refresh rate trade off. 4K is 2 x 4096 x 2160 that's some 18 Million Pixels, which is double the highest contender in HP. That's not to mention I think going forward there might be a push for a combination of better tracking and better refresh rates, at least that's the vibe I get from Steam's recent push, so to be a contender you not only have to push out 4K you'd have to do so at 120Hz or 144Hz which are DP2.0 resolutions. Or that for something to be considered really pro now it needs HDR and out of the box calibration, which adds another 20% to the amount of data being put through the same cable. And this is assuming you can send it uncompressed at all. So it might be possible with a DP2.0 whenever that happens but right now I don't think it's possible both the RTX 2080 from Nvidia and RX5800XE from AMD have only DP1.4a at the moment. Theoretically you could theoretically use 2 cards and 2 Display Ports one working for each eye but if they desync or one displays things while the other stutters for any reason you'd have massive nausea problems. And that's not to mention the amount of heat these devices already output, cramming in more elecronics and more stuff is going to make them warm 4K displays put out a lot of heat, to have that near your face you either need to do some active cooling or have more technology improvements. Take the sony xperia z5 mobile phone as an example of a 4K screen that's about the twice the size needed for VR headsets, it had a massive overheating problem that I'm sure is in part due to the display used. We're years away from being able to realistically replace even standard monitor resolutions with VR because all those display sizes I list cover about the same area of your vision as a 50inch TV at arms length, to replace a standard monitor you probably need the display density to be about that of a 22 inch monitor some maybe half as far away again. which is like I mentioned an order of magnitude increase in the number of pixels, 16K or more maybe per eye so that there's no more pixelisation at the perceived distance my computer screen normally sits than my same screen running 1960x1080. And again that assumes the tracking and refresh rate are good enough that even my breathing doesn't move those pixels around in a way that's uncomfortable, cause if you're looking at details that small on a display that's attached to your face and you breath and your eyes track where you expect the display to stay motionless and the pixels lag in anyway again you'll have horrible nausea.
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