Wistrel tries Oculus Rift DK2 with Elite Dangerous

Well don't want to go too overboard but thought I'd make a few notes on this.

So starting with some history, I first tried a Rift DK1 at GameCity 8 last year. This was very much a "someone else did all the work" and handed over the handset for us puplic to play on. At the time I got to try the Dragon flying game, Left for Dead and Portal. My experiences of left for dead and to a large degree too Portal were pretty bad. L4D was just a mess really the action was too fast for me to really be able to see what was going on when being attacked and it was generally pretty horrible. Portal did convey the tremendous sense of scale of those test chambers which, in itself, made it a worth while test but otherwise it wasn't that nice. The Dragon game was designed for the rift and really was SOOO much better. Here you sit on a dragon that flies about and you control direction by moving your head. Sounds odd but it really works very very well. Somehow they'd got the interface just right where by you control direction with your head but can also look around without it messing up the control mechanics. The game is just a few minutes long and essentially involves you flying towards targets (eggs iirc) to collect them.

Thoughts on the early experience then were that it was ace fun and very immersive. I wondered what "playing for half an hour" would be like upon emerging from the virtual world. I suspect it might be quite a reality jarr. Sickness wise, I didn't really have any. I had one slight stomach lurch when pulling out of a sharp dive on the dragon but if anything that was more "part of the fun" than a problem. The only other issues I had were some problems with balance as I actually fell off the bar stool at one point. I held on after. Resolution was well, as you've surely heard, not great. They talk a lot of this screen door thing which yes, was present. Reading text was ok in the Dragon Demo score table but only cause they made sure it was big enough.

Final conclusion on DK1: tracking amazing and the whole thing shows a lot of potential.

So fast forward a year exactly to a few of us trying out my friend's DK2 last night. First of all setup. OK I should admit I stood back and let them get on with it and only chipped in advice when asked. Main points are that there are a lot of cables although only one "strand" coming directly out of the rift which was something. Setup options... urgh yeh. This is where I can say this is FAR from a commercial product yet. As I said, I wasn't directly hands on but watching my friends trying to puzzle through issues with modes, extended screens, rotated screens, 3D versions so on and so forth made me realise that your average Jo is going to struggle unless they can streamline this a bit. I suspect the problem here is that so far computers have not been designed to take "screens" that are anything more than "a screen". A floating headset doesn't quite fit the model.

We actually struggled with Elite to start with and ended up falling back on the well known Tuscany demo just as a first step. I mention this because it is interesting to compare the two in terms of resolution. Tuscany is bright and airy and you can see off to the mountains in the distance which have blurry edges against the sky and you can see pixels everywhere. It reminded me of being a kid and holding my face to a CRT to look at the RGB stripes. If I were being really really really mean I'd say it is a little like looking at the world through a stocking. Essentially a little like there is a constant lattice you can see. The resolution though WAS a lot better than the DK1.... how to put it in practical terms that compare to something we are familiar with? hmmm, like the first one was very much only a proof of concept demo and the DK2 was more like a final product that just wasn't high enough resolution. Taking a look to the future, maybe I could compare a DK1 to those bubble-like CRT's from the 60's, a DK2 to an 80's or 90's computer screen resolution (VGA or less) and FUTURE RIFT will be like a modern flat panel 1080p screen* (I hope). I should note though that the "Screen Door" problem had gone however text reading was still "a bit" (read a lot) of an issue.

Anyway having at least got the thing working we turned our attention back to Elite and were this time successful. As I said, I wasn't directly involved in the configuration (too many cooks) but suffice to say "they managed it" with the slight caveat that the onlookers couldn't see what the "Rifter" was doing although this actually proved to be really rather amusing!

So first thing of note about Elite is that the problems I mentioned of the pixels/staring through a stocking effect were largely gone in Elite on account of space being, well, mostly black. In short it really is very very good. You get a very real sense of being in a small cockpit and feel like you can reach out and touch the glass and the handles and various other things that can be found around the cockpit. In fact I regularly did reach out to try and touch things where upon a) I couldn't of course, b) realised I had no arms and c) punched my friend's monitor!. In fact, unusually I DID have arms and even a body however the body remained still in the flight chair and the arms only moved in response to joystick control.

Now, before I get to the really cool bit I should say a little on nausea and movement. To be honest I have to admit, I didn't really "play" the game as such and only flew the ship around a little so I could look at various different things through the glass canopy (a station, a sun, the milky way, a planet, some other space ships etc). The only thing that made me feel odd was throwing the ship into a full speed sideways roll but to be fair, I think that would make me feel sick even in real life! Perhaps the biggest issue I had here was that I wasn't actually spinning upside down IRL. Maybe if somehow my chair had the ability to move some in response to such actions they would have felt better. In short though, this wasn't really an issue.

Right now, the REALLY cool bit was doing the thing you are not meant to do. In other words, get out of your seat, stand up and start walking round the cockpit! Seriously if you get a chance, before doing anything else, try this. It is GREAT fun and REALLY works. As you may or may not know, the DK2 has a tracking camera that you place on your computer monitor and while ever you are facing it, it does a pretty reasonable job of tracking where you are, including to a limited degree allowing you to stand up and walk round you seat. I can't rave enough about actually being able to walk with my real feet and having the game move me in the virtual world too. It was quite simply awesome and also a hoot to watch for any onlookers. We all ended up spending quite a bit of time doing daft things like trying to poke our heads out of the spaceship roof or crawling around on the floor looking at the various details to be found in the cockpit (watch out for furniture though! I smacked my head on the desk!). One moment that sticks with me is being crouched down on the floor behind and to the side of the pilot chair. I felt like a little kid watching their father fly a spaceship!

So, conclusions. Right the tracking on the DK2 really is good when it is working but a number of times (normally when our backs were to the camera of course) tracking was lost and then there would be this sudden jerk while it reset you to your correct position. This sometimes happened with "standing up from the seat" too which was a little weird cause you'd stand up and the cockpit would "come with you" only to ping back where it was a moment later. I hear this can be fixed by better positioning of the camera. First observations though are that, having been given forward facing movement tracking you want 360 degrees immediately. Thankfully though it looks like they are introducing rear LEDs in the next version so this should be fixed next time around.

As for the image quality. Sadly, this is where my biggest concerns now lie. Initially we had a lot of graphics issues with colours solarising (black turning green) randomly however these were sorted with a restart and space suddenly looked a HELL of a lot better. The resolution is what concerns me though for the future. As I mentioned, the DK2 feels less like a prototype and more like a low res final product but I should note that it is running at the same resolution as a standard 1080p monitor. This concerns me because currently computer games tend to run on such monitors and rendering "much higher" is currently not something your average PC will be able to do... certainly not at 60 frames per second anyway.

When it comes to the Rift. The experience is so different from a "flat panel" game it is almost like something else entirely however I still can't decide how I would feel about spending more than a 5 to 10 mins Rifting in a world where I can see all the pixels and struggle to read text on Elite's holographically displayed computer screens. My feeling now is that, in order for VR to be something you want to spend a lot of time in, we are going to need to AT LEAST double the pixel density up to 4k and go even higher. This introduces not only a screen technology barrier but a cost barrier and, perhaps most importantly, a computer/graphics processing barrier. Now, I know all these things will be fixed in time but my main downer on all this is that they won't be fixed by the end of next year. Still, it isn't all bad news though. PC tech has always thrived on a challenge and lately the need for graphics horsepower has become something of a secondary priority to decent game play or an engaging storyline. With an inevitable super high-res Rift maybe a couple of years away, I think the gates are now open for people to start upgrading their graphics cards again.

Wistrel

*Obviously I don't mean actual resolutions here, more a sort of comparison of usefulness/clarity of display was intended.

 

Incidentally. I'm hoping to borrow my friend's Rift to try Entropia at some stage in the not too distant future. I'm not expecting raves though. Because:

- we all know what Entropia's frame rate performance is like on even the best computers (and mine certainly isn't a "best" computer)
- CE2 isn't designed for Rift, it will just be a converter hack
- I noticed Elite alters the locations of different component colours of pixels as a function of their distance from the centre of the screen. My friend tells me this is to account for the wavelengths of different colours being refracted differently through lenses. Any input to the rift therefore that *doesn't* do this is likely to have coloured halo's around things that are off to the edge of the screen.

 

I don't know narfi. I didn't get a chance to test yet and probably won't till next year now. I am also not sure the program I was thinking of trying will work with DK2. There is another one though I think may do the trick.

Thanks for the info on Trinus. I had not heard of that before! My friend has one of those cardboard things you put your phone in with lenses. Maybe I could try that with Entropia!

 

btw anyone tried Elite yet? My friends who own it said they are holding off for a few days as they suspect the Elite equivalent of "vu day hunting" for the first few days

 

OK so I tried out Trinus Gyre too. Alas my experience wasn't ideal. Closer to far from it but I did feel the project had real potential and was pretty good going for a one man band!

So I tried it on my mobile first which is was £50 job from Huawei (1 year ago). Alas it told me I didn't have all the sensors needed so no go there. I know the phone lacks a magnetometer so I think that will be it.

Next I tried it on my tablet which was more costly but is older and now rather out of date and of course rules out any chance of face holding for a hacked VR experience. This time the app told me I didn't have "fused sensors" so it wouldn't work too well. It worked. However only enough to get a rough sense of direct control via moving the screen and then only if I was careful or it would go all over the shop. In short the gyro/accel/magnet readings just weren't being used right so control was a bit of a mess.

The video quality was good although I'd say the lag was too much to be a good VR experience. I'm guessing about a 1/4 second. This was on the usb connection option which was easy to set up. However I couldn't get "over the network" connections to work - so no wireless. The program on the phone would display a 10 second time out immediately (ie not after 10 seconds) which makes me wonder if there there was an android permission that wasn't being approved or something.

One thing I did try though was the fake 3d and going cross eyed. This seemed to give a rudimentary effect that seemed reasonable.

I'll have to get someone with a good android phone and my friend's google cardboard in one place and try again... this might take some doing!

 

I saw some interesting research on that recently. They had a big room and cameras everywhere to track people + some fairy impressive wireless display tech for the VR headsets.

The main focus of the research was in seeing how much they could deviate the VR world from the real world in terms of orientation of the player. The main aim here is to create the effect of an infinitely sized room.

The tricks they used were things like slowly rotating the VR world so players walked in a circle rather than a straight line (but they think they are going straight). Another one was, when a player makes a turn, they again adjust things so the number of degrees turned in the real world doesn't quite match up with the degrees in the virtual world.

Really interesting stuff!

Wistrel

 

Ooohhh

How is the display? Can you read the text in things like Elite Dangerous? That was the issue we had with DK2. It was getting there but we felt it wouldn't feel truly good till the display was around 4k preferably 8k

 

And there is an Elite Dangerous Demo "out" now (I am not sure if it is official). Works great though! I have it on much the same 2 joystick setup as I use for Entropia and it handles fantastic. The sound is Epic!

Anyhow I made a small video

 

I yes I remember your posts. I don't know if the DKII works with the software that you used for Entropia.

 

Small update. A friend brought round his Track IR the other day to try out. The only thing we had handy to test that supported TrackIR was Evochron Mercenary. It worked pretty well though.

I was quite surprised that head tracking would be useful in a game because of the whole "looking away from the screen" thing but actually it does just about do the job.

The arse is that it requires quite a bit of fiddling to get it "right" for personal preference. You don't realise till you start trying it out but there are a lot of ways to set something like this up.

I won't bore with details but the short version is that you want a set up that allow you to look about maybe 300 degrees without moving your head too far away from the screen, perhapse 90 degrees. This can lead to movement being far too fast or it "being hard to hold your (virtual) head still". You can put in dead zones or use exponential movement or even use different speed slopes (ie small movements in the centre area but larger as you turn your head more). Each has some advantages and disadvantages.

In short, if you are going to get into the world of head tracking to look about in games without a rift, expect it to work well and even be kinda cool as well as useful/advantageous to game play.

Also expect to spend a fair bit of time faffing with settings to find something that is "comfortable" for you.

Wist