Virtual Reality is worth investing in.

[Overmind One]

Virtual Reality headsets are changing everything. Since receiving my Oculus Rift S, I have played hours of games, had adventures in dark forests, been a sniper and also a soldier, battled aliens and zombies. All in the comfort of my own home. But it feels and looks SO REAL! If you were to look up from your computer monitor around your room, how you see that room is how things look in VR. All 3D and solid looking.

What I did not expect, was the application of using virtual reality to tour places around the globe. With Google Earth VR, you can do that. Everything is true 3D, and you can go down to street level and in some places you can move around on the ground by walking the streets. There are also tours within buildings like the Louvre, many other museums, cathedrals of Europe, ancient sites and even your own neighborhood. I walked through a few English castles. Then there are VR spacewalks taken by the ISS astronauts, underwater dives, and POV flights in planes, hot air balloons and hang gliders. People are shooting 360 VR videos all the time.

 

[Lord Ba'al]

You forgot to mention porn.

 

[Overmind One]

You forgot to mention porn.

Well, without becoming too graphic, VR porn is quite realistic. You are literally in the room with your sex partner, but to me the drawback is that when you look down at yourself you are not like the guy you are represented by in the video. Im there having sex with a woman, but the guy I am in the video is a different body type, age and skin color than I am. You cannot interact like you can in games.

I should mention some differences in VR media while I am at it here. The biggest difference between VR traveling and games is INTERACTION. In all the games, you can not only move around in the 3D environment, you can also interact with it. This means you can open doors, drive vehicles, fight and shoot at things and they react. The controllers vibrate, and many games give feedback when you bump into furniture or people, when you touch things or are riding in vehicles. I notice a very low key constant vibration when riding rollercoasters or driving cars in VR. Very realistic. When you tour real world places, there is very little if any interaction with anything you see.

 

[Overmind One]

I am at work right now, and I decided to put on the Oculus Quest VR that has been provided, and I am still not impressed. I do love the fact that it is wireless, but it's too heavy on the face and so limited in terms of games and availability of VR games which will play on it (nowhere near a lot as compared to the Oculus Rift S or other PCVR headsets). It's already been put back in it's box. I will wait for the real deal when I get home.

 

[Lord Ba'al]

Would you say the Quest would be more suitable if you wanted to say stand in the middle of your living room and play more active games, as in body movement wise, like a Wii?

 

[Overmind One]

Would you say the Quest would be more suitable if you wanted to say stand in the middle of your living room and play more active games, as in body movement wise, like a Wii?

MORE suitable? No. You can do that with the Rift S too. The Quest is best used in an environment where there is no gaming computer to tether to. Gaming computers can be expensive. Just the graphics card can cost as much as the Quest which costs $399 for the 64gb or $499 for the 128gb. So, you can enjoy the Quest without any computer. But if you do have a gaming computer, then the Rift S at $399 is the hands down winner. I do think that the 15' cord which comes with the Rift S should be 20ft, but a DVI and USB3.0 extension works well with the Rift S to make that more like 30-50ft. The Quest and the Rift use different technologies too, and the Rift S delivers better performance. That means that many games you can play on the Rift S cannot be played on the Quest.

 

[Overmind One]

A big plus for the Quest over any other VR headset is it's independence from a computer. You can take it anywhere, and if you don't have a gaming computer or are traveling, the Quest can go where you go. You will still need some form of internet like your phone or a public hotspot or other wireless, but you are still basically independent with it. The biggest negative is it's lack of power relative to a tethered headset. The processor is just not fast enough to handle many of the most popular games in VR.

I think the Quest is going to do more to sell VR to the mainstream than any other device to date. It has enough appeal to casual users of PCs and Macs and can be taken around to share with friends and family without needing a fancy computer.

 

[Lord Ba'al]

So isn't the cable on the rift restrictive in relation to things like arm movement and tripping over it?

Could you hook up a cable to the Quest to achieve similar functionality to the rift?

 

[Overmind One]

So isn't the cable on the rift restrictive in relation to things like arm movement and tripping over it?

It is possible to trip over the cable if you get too animated. Turning around in VR or making a huge play area for your guardian, or using room scale could do that. But the cable is sturdy and lays on the ground because it is heavily insulated. I bought extensions so I am not having that problem at all.

Could you hook up a cable to the Quest to achieve similar functionality to the rift?

Unfortunately, no. The Quest is fully standalone, and the technology is closer to the phone based Google Cardboard than a PCVR headset like the Rift S and PS4 VR and other tethered PCVR headsets. You cannot hook it up to a PC. Even so, the functionality is similar enough to a tethered headset to give it a thumbs up for buying it. Like I said, the Quest will probably sell more units because it does not need an expensive gaming computer to work. Here are the requirements for the Rift S. My computer exceeds the recommended requirements.

 

[Overmind One]

More and more, I am seeing the value of virtual reality. It has allowed me to travel to places all over the world. I have been looking into getting a 360 VR camera (they are not that expensive at all!). I see a time coming where people will share their lives in two-way VR. I even see VR being integrated into cellphones via 360 VR capability utilizing the front and rear cameras.

 

[Atlantis]

They seem like a waste to me apart from game interaction I don't see any benefit from them.

 

[Overmind One]

They seem like a waste to me apart from game interaction I don't see any benefit from them.

Don't knock it til you try it! I would never have thought to buy a VR headset until my employer made one available to us for lunch breaks, 15min breaks, etc. I would never have imagined how engaging it would be. It isn't like those old fashioned 3D viewers. It is an interactive experience.

 

[Atlantis]

Don't knock it til you try it! I would never have thought to buy a VR headset until my employer made one available to us for lunch breaks, 15min breaks, etc. I would never have imagined how engaging it would be. It isn't like those old fashioned 3D viewers. It is an interactive experience.

I have tried them man. One of my work colleagues brought them into work and I used them. It was a roller coaster ride one and you connect your phone to the actual device.

 

[Overmind One]

I have tried them man. One of my work colleagues brought them into work and I used them. It was a roller coaster ride one and you connect your phone to the actual device.

If a phone is involved, then it isn't really the real thing unless the phone is just being used for wireless. If your colleague brought it to work, then it was not a real purpose built VR headset. I agree that the phone based VR experience is meh. No controllers, no way to interact with the VR environment, grainy graphics, uncomfortable clunky thing on your face, etc. A purpose built PC VR headset experience is nothing like the phone VR which is what I had before. I have the Google Cardboard, and also a phone based VR headset, but those are not even comparable to a real VR headset. The Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S and HTC Vive and other similar devices give you an immersive experience you can't get any other way. Once you experience VR like that, it sells itself.

 

[Overmind One]

999USD?

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/valve-index-vr-headset-controllers,6205.html

NEXT! I'll wit until it's 10 usd.

The Valve is allegedly not as good a value as the Rift S or the HTC Vive (the two best selling PCVR headsets) according to this article:

https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-index-preview-dslr-oculus-rift-s-point-and-shoot/

The experience is allegedly more premium in some ways. but at almost three times the cost of the Rift S and marginally better or equal performance, I am not interested. Yet. For a guy like you, getting a decent VR headset might be the ticket you need to stress relief. My second favorite VR app is Guided Meditation:


You are transported to simply beautiful surroundings where you can relax and listen to music, or just the waves or the wind, while you enjoy natural sounds that bring it alive.

 

[Joelist]

Not sure I can run VR at full speed off of my laptop. I know some Dell XPS models support Oculus Rift but need to check mine.

 

[Overmind One]

Not sure I can run VR at full speed off of my laptop. I know some Dell XPS models support Oculus Rift but need to check mine.

The Rift S uses only DisplayPort, where the Rift used HDMI. That appears to be the biggest difference. You can get a deal on a used Rift CV1 (with the sensor towers) if you really want to try this with your XPS. It should work fine as long as you have a fast i5 or an i7 at around 8 to 16gb of RAM.

https://www.ebay.com/b/Oculus-Rift-CV1-VR-Headsets/183068/bn_73246293

The Rift CV1 is still an awesome VR headset! For the prices they are asking, it is worth it. It has been discontinued though.

Check this one out!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Oculus-Rift-VR-Headset/273918487659?hash=item3fc6d06c6b:g:4CIAAOSwTUZdIKjX

 

[Overmind One]

I stopped caring about possessing materialistic objects.

The whole point of virtual reality is being able to take a vacation from reality and relax and play in a way that does not burn gas, require you to wait in a line or pay tickets or worry about the weather or time of day. It's nice to come home from work and be able to float slowly over the floor of a forest while being guided through a meditation. It's cool to be able to ride rollercoasters or explore places without leaving home. It sure beats feeling stressed and depressed.

 

[Overmind One]

A great application I would never have thought of: a presentation simulator to get past the fear of speaking before an audience of people. I just got this, and it's free. You can choose anything from small conference room meetings to large audiences in a hall. If you have a fear of speaking before audiences, this can help a whole lot.


There are others out there like this. But the point is that you can use VR simulations to do lots of stuff you might not be able to practice on your own. You can actually become a better ping pong or tennis player with VR, and you can simulate working with equipment without having it there. You can learn the layout of a cockpit of an aircraft, and use the same sort of training in VR that the military has been using for a while now.

 

[Overmind One]

It is amazingly disappointing to notice just how ineffectively VR experiences are able to be illustrated in 2D online. I look at the VR gameplay videos, and programs in VR like the one above with the presentation simulator, and it is just not conveying the experience at all. It's almost like you can't really explain it to anyone, they have to experience it themselves in VR.

If any of you get a VR headset, please let me know! I need to have somebody I know to interact with in VR. We could have a lot of fun in there! Besides that, it is probably the closest thing we have to a holodeck in existence at the moment.