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Saturday, December 7, 2013

Team OR Continues to Try To Strangle the VR Baby In It's Crib



and now we have an Austrian Version, a Russian Version,  a couple of American Imitators and Testimonials Daily similar to this one, great job guys marketing a 20 year old concept that's dismissed out of hand by serious engineers.
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Tried an Oculus Rift Today.

After mentioning it for weeks, my company's CTO brought in a dev version of the rift for me to try during some downtime today. Now, I'm no VR expert, but not a stranger either. I played VR Wolfenstein in Vegas back in 95 and VR Pacman in 99, but haven't played any VR since. Needless to say, after 14 years I was excited.

Upon putting on the headset, I was greeted by a split up, jumbled Finder screen(was on a Mac). My first impression was that it does not handle non 3D content well at all. Soon enough, a demo was loaded up. In this one, you are a chicken running around a field. The immersive effect was excellent compared to how I remember previous VR tech. Unfortunately, it was marred by low pixel density that caused a very screen door like effect, and a blurry depth of field. Neither the CTO nor I could find a way to effectively adjust the focus. Pulling or pushing the front of the mask did a little bit but that was it. It was never very sharp except certain things drawn closer to me. (Note: 20/20 vision when last tested)

Next was a sort of 3D Pong meets Arkanoid that used head tracking to move the paddle. It was pretty cool but the bluriness made it kinda odd, and sometimes it would lag and stutter when turning which would really mess with the senses. I started feeling kinda strange during that one. I spent the next few minutes playing a demo where you walked around some spooky wooded area at night with head tracking controlling the view, aim/turn controlled by where you point the flashlight with the mouse, and your standard WASD controls to move around.

After a short time, I had to stop. 15-20 minutes of wearing this thing and I felt completely seasick. The screen door effect, poor focus, and visual lag during head movements just sent way too many mixed messages from the senses to the brain. The sickness lasted a good hour and a half after stopping my use of the rift. This made my job coding quite uncomfortable during that time.

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