Roger Wilco Jr wrote:CMDR Abil Midena wrote:Rules mandate that in 3 months time, you repost here on your thoughts of ED in VR at that time.
This is the honeymoon time, I'm interested to know what the opinions are when the honeymoon is over.
Thanks in advance.
Well, I've had this thing seven nights, so the honeymoon is over.
TL;DR - there is no going back!
I may be repeating myself, but this is my experience so far. I started with the default Ultra settings, and I kept those settings for three nights, hoping that would let me better appreciate any improvements. My first impressions in ED were that it looked pretty bad. It was blurry, shimmery, and aliased up the wazoo - but the 3D was awesome. Over those 3 nights, it got better each day. Partly this was me getting used to the look, but I was also learning to better use the HMD. I adjusted the straps each night, and went through the calibration procedure, until I knew I had it set up right.
Then, on the fourth night, I started playing with supersampling. With a setting of 1.5x, it made a huge improvement in the visual experience. I've been playing with settings ever since, and have used the Oculus debug tool to reduce supersampling to a 1.3x setting, along with High graphics settings. This is working well, but I'm still making adjustments.
Overall, the visuals can be stunning at times. The cockpit and canopy are clean and crisp - and 3D! Nearby objects are also rendered very nicely. Seriously, after coming from 2560x1440, I am very impressed with the resolution. Sure, it is still blurry around edges, and the text is legible, if not sharp, but I've learned to live with that and hardly notice it anymore. And when driving around in your SRV and looking at your own parked ship, it looks nice and high res.
I don't think I can adequately describe the feeling of being there. If you're willing to believe, you can actually feel that you are there. I thought head tracking on a monitor was nice, but now I realize how much I was sacrificing to reality. I had to restrict my head movements, and it was very easy to lose track of where I was looking, with my head tilted back and my eyes tilted down. But now I just look. My brain knows exactly where I'm looking in relation to my body an my ship. You can instantly look from a ship I am tracking, back to my HUD & sensors, and back to the ship. This was very hard to do with head tracking because of the exaggerated head movements.
And then there is the overall feeling of scale that you just can't get with a monitor. You need to experience sitting in your chair and looking at your canopy glass and knowing just how far away it is. And then you look to the hangar floor and you can feel how high you are. And then you look to the railings, or the door on the wall, and you can feel just how far away they are. And in combat, when I used to think I was too close or in danger of crashing into another ship, I can now see and feel how far away they really are. I can now get so much closer, and with the 1:1 head tracking, it is so much easier to keep them in range. I the past week, I have not experienced an NPC flying away, flipping 180 degrees, and then lining me up and pounding me.
I'm using a nice HOTAS setup, and have most controls bound, and I'm using Voice Attack, which really helps, but I still use the keyboard for some things. So far I haven't had any issues with the keyboard, but I haven't tried text chatting yet either - I haven't seen another commander in forever. The internal mic on the Rift also works great with Voice Attack.
The CV1 is incredibly light weight and I can wear it for hours w/o a thought. I do have a small fan blowing a gentle breeze at me, and I think that helps avoid fogging issues and may help calm queasiness. It also helps cool the top of the CV1, which gets quite warm when you start pushing the performance up, not that you feel it on your forehead.
There are still problems. Like I said, it is blurry around the edges. You can't just flick your eyes to look at things. Well, you can, but what you see will be blurry. But that's OK sometimes - I can still see my PIPs when they are blurry. However, you generally need to look directly at what you are looking at if you want it to be in focus. This is a similar trade-off to other tracking systems like Track IR and Tobii EyeX.
And there is no getting away from how crappy things can look when they are really far away. Like approaching a station, especially at "night", it just looks like shimmering, blurry, ball of crap. Once you get closer it looks a lot better, so you live with it. Inside stations can also be a little shimmery, but once you get close to your own landing pad and control tower, it looks a lot better. And ships in space don't look that great until you get up close and personal, but that's how I like to fight. If you like to hang back 1.5km with lasers, it won't look nearly as good as being one hundred meters away.
I also have a problem with the SRV HUD. It's projected several meters in front of you, and as you are driving around in hilly terrain, it can drop below or into the next mound, and I find myself going cross-eyed as I try to focus on the surface and the HUD at the same time. And if you I don't sacrifice some visual quality for a higher FPS, I can start to feel a little queasy if I'm flinging the SRV around. The in-game controls to fight this actually make it worse, especially if I'm attempting a back flip out of a crater. The solution is to just drive normally scanning for your materials, and look into the turns, where you want to be, and don't just stare straight ahead. Btw, I'm pretty sure that I can't ride a roller coaster anymore w/o feeling a little queasy.
And then there is the "screen door" effect. I think this has two meanings. Yes, you can see the pixels - especially of you are looking for them - but generally, I don't notice then. I think another meaning refers to the Moiré interference patterns. I think this may be what causes things to look bad at a distance, but I haven't noticed anything obvious up close.
I'm also not having much fun with the galaxy map. I'm using the HOTAS, but I just don't think I have it set up properly. But I really haven't given it much time yet, so I expect it will get much better with practice.
Finally, the FOV leaves a lot to be desired. This is the feeling you are looking through a scuba mask. It really feels closer to 80 degrees than the advertised 110 degrees. But it's so easy to move your head around, which you need to do anyway if you want things in focus, that you just ignore it after a while.
So to sum up, while there are issues with the current generation VR, the overall experience is mind-blowingly amazing. The feeling of being there, looking around and instantly judging distances and the scale of things, knowing exactly where you are looking in relation to your body - these are all things you just can't experience any other way. If you can afford it, you just need to get into VR now - you won't regret it (although, some apparently do). Compared to the cost of a new big monitor & head tracking, it's not really that expensive, and it's the biggest monitor and best head tracking experiences you can have.
I'm not much of a gamer, but this experience has me looking forward to new VR games, and I'm also looking forward to the Oculus Touch controllers, because I constantly want to reach out and touch something. I don't know if they can do much about the blurry edges - maybe curved or cupped panels? - but unless they get SLI/Crossfire working with VR, I really think it will take many years to get graphics cards the performance needed to push pixels with higher resolution displays. So overall, I'd expect it go actually get more expensive in the future, although it will be cheaper to experience the current generation VR, especially if you can get your hands on some used hardware.
I really don't expect my views to change in three months, other than for things to get even better (I'll hopefully have Touch controllers and 360 degree body tracking by then).
***edit***
Oh yeah, apparently there are Godrays - the flares coming off of bright objects in high contrast situations. Honestly, I don't notice them anymore. They don't really appear much where you are looking, but are more of a peripheral vision issue, so you might see some coming off of ship icons on the sensor panel if you glance with your eyes instead of tilting your head down. If they just got rid of all white on black, it would significantly reduce any problems. I generally only notice the Godrays during loading screens with the black backgrounds.
Good read.
Thanks Commander.
