Be Excellent To Each Other

Not Eve Online, Eve Valkyrie.

Vive is $200 more...

Bit spenny.

I'm the same, we have a couple of Rifts at work, they are used for looking a molecules, there has also been a lot of gaming and other none work stuff done on them as well

Can't use them from very long before I feel sick.

I found that the first time in VR (aside from a very quick try with Gazchaps rift) made me very headachey. But it got easier and now causes no problems.

They're both a bit spenny, but this seems better value considering you get the controllers and room sensors bundled. I'm just waiting on game support (iRacing in particular).

Seems that theres a bit of a difference in that the rift is more designed for desk use, while vive requires a room.

That requirement reminds me a bit of kinect, although with that you could at least see the table you were about to smack into.

The Vive has a front-facing camera. I suspect you'll be able to use it to see where your table is.

You'll be able to with the Vive as well apparently. They sensors will map the walls and objects in the room and they'll show up somehow in the game world so you don't walk into stuff. Apparently.

I think the Vive has the potential for more interesting experiences if you've got the room for it and the games are made well; but those are both iffy prospects for a lot of people. The Rift will suit most people better and probably require less revolutionary development idea be implemented so my gut feel is it'll be better supported. I have no concrete basis for any of this of course.

I'd probably go with the Rift, mainly because they've done far more research into what makes for a good (and crucially, non vomit-inducing) VR experience, and their SDK is supposedly more advanced because of it.

Don't forget that the Vive is being developed with Steam integration in mind though, so that's a big plus.

What exactly do you mean by Steam integration? Any PC game released on Steam is technically integrated with it (which pretty much all Rift games will be) so what extra functionality are we talking about here?

Half-Life 3 Vive exclusive confirmed.

It's being developed in conjunction with Valve, so I'd just expect it to work better because of it. I mean obviously I don't have any concrete proof that it's the case, but it would make sense.

Only on SteamOS!

I'm still not sure what you mean here. Steam's essentially just a delivery platform so there's no 'working better' with it; your game either downloads, installs and runs or it doesn't, surely?

I dunno. I guess I'll find out when I press the Steam VR button in the client...

Not true, it has game-facing APIs like SteamCloud save syncing and Steam Controller support. Admittedly these are thin right now but you could see Vive support being baked into Steam. For example, I get one place inside Big Picture to do the (complex) configuration and calibration of my Vive, and then all games can just read the config from there instead of requiring me to go through it all again.

As you say with the cloud and contorller support though those are APIs so the amount of 'integration' a game brings depends on the developer implementing it, or not, at the software layer. Someone could still happily knock out a Vive game and not use any of that at all. The same as someone can write a non-Vive game that uses it to the hilt. The Vive hardware itself has nothing to do with it so I still don't see that as a bullet point in it's favour versus the Rift.

ETA: I take your point about the Vive config itself, though I had assumed the headset itself would come with some kind of config mechanism that could then be read by all the games even without a central broker like Steam. That could well just be naivety/ignorance on my part though.

But this way you get the best possible Vive experience for all the hundreds of millions of happy SteamOS user— fuck it couldn't deadpan that one.

Valve have a Vive bench-marking tool as a stand alone app on Steam using Portal related content to stress test your machine here. I haven't tried it because ahahahahahahaha.

R4 had a semi interesting bit about this sort of thing at about 0810 on the today program.

I'm leaning back towards the Oculus Rift again now. It's £139 cheaper, and when I ran the SteamVR test it said while my gfx card is 'capable' it's not fully in the green, so I'm nervous about a suboptimal performance from the HTC now. The Oculus test ran fine and it's perfectly happy with my setup.

Holy shit, you've just spent like £800 on a brand new PC and already the Vive's turning it's nose up at it? Man, fuck that noise.

£950, but yeah.

Despite my general enthusiasm for all the VR stuff the sheer hilarious cost of it is something I really wasn't prepared for. Despite the inevitability of it not being quite as effective the Playstation VR headset is currently the front-runner for my cash because there's no way it'll even be in the same league as the other two in terms of cost.

It's the first mass-market consumer one I think. The SteamVR and Oculus Rift are firmly in enthusiast territory right now.

I think the PSVR will fly off the shelves if it's priced around £250.

GearVR is really good, as I think I wrote upstream, and it comes free with this year's Galaxy flagships. That's going to be a lot of units.

The s7s? Cool.

Hmm. That's still quite a hunk of change. If it that much it is unlikely I would consider getting one. £150 would be lovely, £200 wold need a month of nagging. £250 is buying another console..
A peripheral should probably be no more that half the cost of the main equipment if it is going to do well, I would have thought.

It's only free with pre-orders isn't it? I'm not sure on the likely figures there but it's not going to be anywhere near the full sales figures for the handset. I'm still not convinced how well that platform's going to do in the long run given the requirements of only running on certain handsets by a single company. The PlayStation VR definitely has far and away the best chance of being successful given the various factors involved.

But it's more like a monitor/TV replacement though isn't it?

You might spend considerably more than £250 on a TV

A peripheral should be whatever the 'value' of the functionality it adds; trying to come up with some rule based on the cost of the console itself is nonsense.

I wouldn't have thought so from a commercial pricing point of view. At £250 you're effectively doubling the cost of the console. I'd find it tricky to believe that a significant number would pay again for a headset.

You're right. It should cost £100 but only have the motion sensors and body tracking but no headset oh shit that's Kinect

Which was excellent.

I doubt they're expecting half the people who have a PS4 to get one or anything. Lots of people buy racing wheels or £300 graphics cards for their PCs, there's loads of people into games with enough disposable income that £250 is not really much money.

The technology was pretty good, I agree. What was the killer app though? Software support was pretty much shovelware and it was soon dropped from the Xbox One entirely.

Oh I don't disagree for a moment that there is the hobbyist market there. But, if it were to be become properly mainstream, selling g it for the same price as the console isn't the way to get it there.

To summarise: For mainstream users, I think price point possibly too high given current cost of console.

Going from the price of the others I'd imagine that they're selling them for not a lot more than they cost to make. I don't think £250 is a barrier to something become fairly mainstream, it just depends how much people end up wanting it.

Kinect Sports 1 and 2 were excellent fun. I was sad to see it die, although I knew it would - maybe not so much because of software support but because of the size of room you need to use it.

Ah, is it? OK, fair enough.

Consider that Samsung sold about 45 million S6s in 2015, but lifetime sales of the PS4 are 36 million ish. GalaxyVR could come to dominate the other platforms in install count, by sheer force of numbers of the host platform.

Also: don't underestimate how cool it is for your VR headset not to be tethered to anything. Lands End, the VR game from ustwo (who made Monument Valley), wouldn't work on a Rift; you have to turn back and forth too far.

And in a twist no one saw coming, site dies on its arse.

Yes. There's probably 5 price point boxes to consider which are £50 increments. Games sit in the lowest 0-50 quid and the console sits in the highest 200-250. Controllers and stuff seem to sit in 50 to 100. I'd say higher end peripherals would probably do best in the 100 to 199 range. You could probably then divide it into two boxes, 100 to 150 and 150 to 200. As demand increase as cost falls, you would keep that in mind when thinking about where a VR doidah would sit. You probably would not want it in the top box of 200 to 250 as that makes your console not king of the hill. You need to keep that brand value there. So you drop down a level into high end peripherals and sell it at 199. This allows you to drop to 179 every now and again to drive sales. So, that's why I think 250 isn't great. It'll sell but it is better positioned lower down.

Is Samsung GearVR just a nice cardboard, or does it do other stuff?

I decided to take a punt, so we'll at least know whether it was the wrong choice.


Pc is at least up to the task.

If I'd had the same results as you I'd be going for the Vive as well.

I think so; your post above was actually the first time I'd heard of this at all but from Googling it I could only turn up chat about a pre-order giveaway.



Hmmmm, yeah, but the difference there is the potential interest level of the userbase. Every single person with a high spec PC or PS4 is someone who's interested in gaming and, by extension, VR stuff by definition. A good chunk of S7 owners won't give the slightest shit about VR past an initial fiddle with it; they just wanted a new phone but Samsung chucked a plastic helmet at them as well. I've no idea what difference that will make of course, but I genuinely don't think you can do a straight comparison here.

The downside of course is that it's pretty uncool when your VR headset packs in because the battery's run out. And now your mobile phone needs charging as well.

No, that's OK, because you probably need an anti-nausea break anyway