VR or 4K?

[Roger Wilco Jr]

Damn, I was almost ready to place an order for a Rift. It was just sounding like the Rift was outperforming the Vive on ED. Given time, and assuming VR survives (unlike 3D TVs), I'd assume the Vive would get better. But then I read about the problems people with glasses were having with the Rift. So then I was flipping back to the Vive, hoping for eventual quality improvements. But then, unless I'm mistaken (there's a lot of misinformation out there), neither the Rift nor the Vive offer a focus adjustment nor a diopter adjustment, although the both offer an IPD adjustment. I'm so fed up with this crap that I think I'll just have to wait for generation 2 and hope that they offer all three eye adjustments so you don't need to wear glasses (assuming not having more serious eye issues) at all. And hopefully generation 2 VR will be higher resolution w/o the screendoor and other side effects.

So I think maybe I'll go to 4K resolution as a stop gap. Switching from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 was pretty amazing. Switching from 2560x1440 to 3480x2160 should be even more so. It's looking like 4K will require an GTX-1080 (or Ti), and a quick check of 32" monitors looks like they are going for $750 to $1000, so similar to a VR headset.

I think I'll do a little more research on 4K monitors and then put a couple on a watch list, along with a new video card. I may even be able to hold off on this upgrade for a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. So unless I hear much better performance improvements, or about better support for wearing glasses, for the VR headsets, I'll pull the trigger on 4K instead.

Damn.

[smartroad]

I'm going for VR. Just waiting for the GTX1080 and then getting the Vive

[TorTorden]

The new version of osvr HKDK2 (or whatever.)
http://www.osvr.org/hdk2.html

Is razer moving to consumers rather than just hackers.
They have now similar panels as the other two main hmd's and still aim for the price tag of $400.

Reason why I mentioned all that is they also have focus adjustment. And only hmd to have that atm.

I suspect this year will be a major push industry wise to get a lot of gamers off their 1080p screens and onto 4k monitors.

[AJH]

Depending on how bad your vision is, you may find that the Vive works fine without glasses anyway. It also fits glasses pretty comfortably, though at a cost of reduced FOV (but also less screen door effect, the reduction is fairly significant, but still quite usable). My wife used the Vive with her glasses and she had extremely bad eyesight prior to getting laser eye surgery a couple weeks ago. My mother, who uses glasses but not as badly as my wife used to need them, was able to use the Vive quite comfortably with no glasses.

It is true that they don't have focus adjustments, but that is because they are fixed focus due to the type of lenses they use. You could potentially get a diopter adjustment built in to one, but it would have a substantial impact on the image quality due to the trade off between a Fresnel lens (can't diopter) and a more conventional lens (which has a downside of being more blurry overall and having chromatic aberration issues.)

The aliasing issues with the engine is only really noticeable on text and it's still been perfectly playable. It's a bit annoying, but doesn't really impact the ability to play the game. I've been playing quite happily on a Vive for a few weeks now (in ED, I've had the Vive for over a month).

As far as between 4k and VR. That's a bit toss up. They are very different things and move in opposite directions from where you are experience wise. Both require similarly powerful hardware to run, however VR will be a drop in resolution (no matter what headset you get this, or probably even next generation) but a drastic increase in immersion, particularly if you are using a HOTAS setup. Elite Dangerous, even with the text render issues, has easily been my favorite Vive experience so far by a large margin. 4K on the other hand will be a very nice step up in resolution, but will not give you the immersion that VR can give you. There is nothing quite like being able to turn and see thing and having the cockpit come alive as you look around, but at the same time, 4k makes everything look quite pretty as well.

Either way I think you'll enjoy the purchase. If you can wait a bit, you may also be able to test out the Vive for yourself as they are constantly adding more stores with demos now that it is available in retail (not to mention the cheaper non-reference 1080s will start coming out).

[Roger Wilco Jr]

That OSVR HDK 2 looks new and interesting, but it's not available yet. I'll keep my eye on that and I'm on the list.

I have one "good" eye and one bad eye, and neither can focus at 1.3m or closer. The "good" eye is OK for TV watching, while the bad is blurry - but the brain ignores that. I think with VR that both eyes need to be in focus - that is, I don't think the brain can ignore/compensate for the blurry side. So I think that I'll need reading glasses, like I use for my monitor, or I'll need to get prescription glasses, which I really should do anyway. Or maybe the OSVR with dual focus & diopter adjustments, with no glasses, is the way to go, even if there are certain tradeoffs. I just wish there was more current information out there that wasn't contradictory.

I'd really rather experience good VR, even at lower resolutions, than going to a 4K monitor.

[TorTorden]

Well I have been using prescription glasses since I was seven years old but their fairly even in correction.
And with the vive I am kind of prepared to have a go at contacts again for the best possible result.

I have so far only the gear vr to compare with but vr is something different.
It's a whole new ball game and that's partially why it's so exciting.

It's almost like the birth of cinema or moving pictures not seen the 1890's.
So yeah vr is really early its life cycle and there are a lot of interesting stuff going to happen. And the 3d experience is completely different from the abysmal 3d blueray.

In fact most of that is the brain uses a lot more than just a stereoscopic image to create depth perception, near and far field focus (yet to be used in current gen vr), but also Parallax where an object closer moves differently from objects further away, and this mostly rely on 1:1 headtracking to be done right and not just stereoscopy, it's positively freaky how much just 1:1 headtracking does to make stuff come alive. In fact the world doesn't become instantly 2d just because you close one eye.

Well I'm so far all in on getting the vive. I might (fingers crossed) get mine this week but probably not before the next.

Anyhow I don't think theres a rush to pre order hmd's the sure like to hype but soon these will be eventual be found all over. If you have real issues with eye sight like you seem to have I woul recommend waiting to actually test a device before splurging on what is truly a fledgling piece of tech.

[AJH]

I just wish there was more current information out there that wasn't contradictory.

Generally speaking, the information isn't contradictory, but it is sometimes confusing because a lot of the details of the things are new kinds of stuff that make it unclear what is actually being talked about. I'm very up to speed on all of the technology. I have had a long term interest in VR (20+ years), have a lot of optics knowledge (professional photographer with college education) and a software developer that also studied graphics and gaming (I did a dual major) from a high ranked technical university in the US. I keep up to date on all the major VR platforms and own both a Gear VR and the Vive and have used a DK2 in the past.

VR shouldn't have any particular dependency on both eyes seeing in focus any more than normal vision, but that said, the OSVR might allow you to get them both to focus properly. I'd still try to do a trial of the Vive first to see how it works out as it should have far more support than the OSVR is likely to have given the lack of formal commercial backing that platform has, but if the Vive doesn't work well for you, then it is likely to be your best bet, even with the likely software and optics issues, simply because of what it will let you adjust.

OSVR certainly isn't a bad piece of kit, but the amount of backing it has to make sure it gets updated is questionable. It could get the most ,since it's truely open source, or it could fail to generate sufficient interest and never get an update.

[AJH]

Well I'm so far all in on getting the vive. I might (fingers crossed) get mine this week but probably not before the next.

Anyhow I don't think theres a rush to pre order hmd's the sure like to hype but soon these will be eventual be found all over. If you have real issues with eye sight like you seem to have I woul recommend waiting to actually test a device before splurging on what is truly a fledgling piece of tech.

If you've ordered it yet you should. They are at the point of shipping within 3 business days of placing an order now and they generally 2 day ship it, though it can vary a bit by region. And yes, they are already in stores and will continue to show up in more and more stores. Gamestop is moving it in to 100 stores, I forget how many Microsoft Stores and Microcenter's are going to be carrying them, but it's going to be a lot of retail locations very shortly.

[GlobusDiablo]

I'm going for VR. Just waiting for the GTX1080 and then getting the Vive

Amen. Has to be the MSI GTX1080 Gaming X though. What a card. FD tweeted somewhere that they are hard at work on ironing out the bugs related to VR in the Vive, so I'm scraping pennies and hoping to dive within a month or two.

[smartroad]

Amen. Has to be the MSI GTX1080 Gaming X though. What a card. FD tweeted somewhere that they are hard at work on ironing out the bugs related to VR in the Vive, so I'm scraping pennies and hoping to dive within a month or two.

I have been looking at the Gigabyte Gaming card. Had some MSI parts in the past and caused me nothing my problems. But that said any of the factory OC'd cards seem to be amazing.

With the 1080 being so overclockable, add in a water cooler and could be getting up to 2GHz which should be awesome for both 4K and VR. Which ever technology people want to play with the future is looking exciting