Oculus Rift w/touch - £350 - Is now the time to buy?

i played robo recall, elite, assetto, p cars 1 and the lab stuff all fine obviously on low settings think steam set itself to 0.8 scaling iirc but it was all playable. :)
 
Andrew_McP said:
Reasons not to cave in to Black Friday 'bargain' impulse:

1) It's a first generation product! (The DKs don't count IMO).

2) I only have a 7950, albeit a well overclocked one which scrapes into the bottom of the VR tests.

3) I want it mainly for racing/flight sims, which will definitely require a new video card.

4) I was horribly motion sick in HL2 a decade ago and still remember how awful it was.

5) I usually don't get big chunks of time to escape into and do most of my gaming on a laptop.

6) I only have one decent eye so half the hardware is wasted on me. I wish there was an option to save some GPU power and turn one screen off, or at least lower the res considerably. The left side's all peripheral vision to me.

7) I'm living off savings and £60 a week while caring for Mum.

8) And lastly... if Mum's having a bad day and thinks I'm the devil incarnate keeping her prisoner, I won't see her sneaking up on me with a carving knife.

Reasons to ignore common sense:

1) Dementia teaches you to take nothing for granted. Especially tomorrow.

2) CV2 could be way off and totally unaffordable (in overall hardware requirement) for me.

3) Curiosity! I know I'll hate the resolution and will want to throw up, and sensor placement might be a pain. But I'm 54 and Tomorrow's World promised me hover cars, holidays on the Moon and a life of leisure by now... not Donald Trump, oceans full of plastic and Toblerones with hardly any Toblerone in them. Raymond Baxter and Maggie Philbin have a lot to answer for and a low res sniff of VR might be as good as it gets in my lifetime.

4) £50 of Rainforest vouchers soften the blow. Ok, they're supposed to be for my nephews at Christmas, but they're young... they'll get over it. Come on lads, we're off to Poundland for an adventure! Here's a quid each, make sure you bring me back the change.

5) I'm never happier than when wallowing in buyer's remorse. I'll let you know just how much remorse in a few days. :)

In the mean time I'll waste some more time researching GTX 1060s just in case the worst happens and I actually like owning the Rift enough to dip even further into my reserves.
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I cannot stress enough that you should find your VR legs before attempting racing in VR. Or at least choose a nice slow car. It took me a while and then something just clicked and the nausea disappeared.
 
Mr.Cookie said:
i played robo recall, elite, assetto, p cars 1 and the lab stuff all fine obviously on low settings
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Useful to know, thanks. Frankly I'll be impressed if it runs Google Earth VR to allow me to 'get out and about' while my wings are clipped. Anything else is a bonus.

Devrij said:
I cannot stress enough that you should find your VR legs before attempting racing in VR.
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Thanks for the warning. I've followed VR for long enough (especially back when I was on iRacing) to be very nervous about nausea, and it's one reason I had no intention of buying before I'd tried a headset. But all the advice seems to be that starting slowly and stopping as soon as you feel weird, then repeating regularly over days and weeks is the way to go, which isn't something you can do in a quick trial even if I knew anyone locally with a VR habit.

I'm kind of expecting to have a rough time, but at this stage I'm more concerned about the stuff that comes before that... the whole blinkered FOV/screen door/low res "what have I done?" thing. Time will tell! :)
 
Andrew_McP said:
Useful to know, thanks. Frankly I'll be impressed if it runs Google Earth VR to allow me to 'get out and about' while my wings are clipped. Anything else is a bonus.


Thanks for the warning. I've followed VR for long enough (especially back when I was on iRacing) to be very nervous about nausea, and it's one reason I had no intention of buying before I'd tried a headset. But all the advice seems to be that starting slowly and stopping as soon as you feel weird, then repeating regularly over days and weeks is the way to go, which isn't something you can do in a quick trial even if I knew anyone locally with a VR habit.

I'm kind of expecting to have a rough time, but at this stage I'm more concerned about the stuff that comes before that... the whole blinkered FOV/screen door/low res "what have I done?" thing. Time will tell! :)
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I would be less concerned about those tbh. Yes the res will bug you, no it will not make you regret the purchase.
 
so far best card i've managed to find for space saving cases not slim form factor :( is the
Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB Mini
and cost looks to be Good price on OCUK


but i'm looking at possibly different requirements than Andrew_McP
although i would like to see a resonably prices SFF card thats mid range for VR..
 
Disclaimer: I am a bit of a wreck these days, emotionally. It's been a long time since I was in charge of my own sleep cycle and I've always been a bit 'emotionally incontinent' when it comes to movies and the like. So I am not a suitable benchmark for the emotional impact of VR.

Somehow I won the Black Friday delivery lottery and my Rift was ready for local collection at lunchtime. I have broken off the setup to post here and settle down. The setup made me shed a tear!

I think I've already had my £350's worth. It's science fiction made real.


Some time later: I hadn't even got to the proper setup 'room' and your little mate. It was pretty jaw dropping as an experience. Yes, the resolution is lower than ideal, but you do see 'through' it because of the experience. I found myself just sitting staring through the open rooflight, wondering what was out there. It's... everything the evangelists say. So fluid and 'real'.

Which is terrible, because it means I'm already justifying denting my savings again for a stupidly fast GPU. I've never paid more than £200 for a CPU or GPU, but... but... sigh. And of course the moment a high res Rift is out I'll be forced to sell a kidney!

Oh dear. I hope I'm horribly motion sick when I stop typing long enough to actually try something serious. Maybe that'll cure me of this nasty attack of enthusiasm.

Motion-wise my first oo-er moment was during the 'Transition' demo where the world rotates and my brain got left behind, but it was 'ok'. Then I loaded up Google VR and used a lot of swear words when I looked down and found rather a lot of vacuum staring back at me.

Whizzing around Google Earth gave me a proper taste of motion weirdness, but it is completely fascinating visiting the streetview sites with 360 degree viewpoints... especially the ones where you look down and find you're rather higher up than your brain's comfortable with.

So... so just buy it. Wall-E can go save the Universe from Donald Trump, David Attenborough can go fish the plastic out of the sea, and the Toblerone will have to be liquidised and fed through my drip. Excuse me, I have a pretend world to grin my way through!

At least until Mum discovers where I've hidden the carving knives. ;-)
 
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It was worth it at double the price to me. At less than a new gen games console, its a no brainer. This vr is going to be more memorable than my xbox, 360 ps2/3/4. More special gaming moments this past 12 months than the previous 10yrs put together.

About the nausea... This isnt so much a problem as it was. Dk2 days was a lot of learning or 2d games given vr makeovers. Many games gave sick feelings, but today the devs have learned a lot and I find most recent vr games to be light on the stomach.
 
I'm still unsure whether to get the rift or try the windows AR headset. I would have probably have gone for the Samsung odyssey (think it was 1600x1440 Res.) But they don't seem to sell in UK. I think the top AR headset we can get in UK is 1440x1440 Res. Is this a big enough difference over rift?

The tracking I am also worried slightly with on windows AR (with one benefit of one cable and no separate separate sensors to position) but no tracking behind.

Funnily enough the one game I really want to try is VR golf club and I don't know whether tracking would hold up with hands being behind visor during golf swing on windows AR.
 
SmokeKingGun said:
I'm still unsure whether to get the rift or try the windows AR headset. I would have probably have gone for the Samsung odyssey (think it was 1600x1440 Res.) But they don't seem to sell in UK. I think the top AR headset we can get in UK is 1440x1440 Res. Is this a big enough difference over rift?

The tracking I am also worried slightly with on windows AR (with one benefit of one cable and no separate separate sensors to position) but no tracking behind.

Funnily enough the one game I really want to try is VR golf club and I don't know whether tracking would hold up with hands being behind visor during golf swing on windows AR.
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From what i have been reading, the rift is better for gaming than the odyssey. I read impressions saying the visuals are slightly sharper but the tracking is a lot worse. Believe me, there is nothing more annoying in vr than dodgy tracking. Once the initial wow factor wears off... eg playstation vr seemed as good as rift etc at the start but after a few weeks it was clear the tracking wasn't up to par. I spend a lot of time in different vr forums and all the impressions have said they still prefer their rift.
 
Sc00p007 said:
Believe me, there is nothing more annoying in vr than dodgy tracking.
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My setup location isn't ideal, and I didn't spend too much time optimising things, but in the small area I'm sat in the Rift works flawlessly. The apparent lag-free tracking, even when I turn round 180 degrees, is freakily convincing. I had two versions of TrackIR in the past and they were always excellent right up to the point where they weren't... which was every few seconds for me unless I kept very still! More trouble than they were worth in the end. But the Rift is excellent. Being able to lean in to read labels and gauges, or to peer out over the edge of a Google VR canyon is impossible to convey in words. It's just life-like.

While I'm at it, I didn't expect to be at all fussed about the controllers, but it makes me grin to see my virtual hands modelled with 'zero' lag as well, and the way buttons etc are labelled in 3D space for tutorials is excellent.

Sc00p007 said:
At less than a new gen games console, its a no brainer.
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I paid about the same money for my PS4 at launch (I was high on The Last of Us at the time) and to be honest I mostly play Resogun on that. Or at least I did until this time last year when it stopped handshaking with my LG TV after an update. Wouldn't mind but I was only halfway through Uncharted 4. The PS4's working but I can't see it, resists all attempts to be reset, and seems set to remain a useless lump until I get a new TV.

In comparison to that my Rift is already way ahead as an experience. I haven't had chance to set up SteamVR yet for a 'proper' gaming test, but that looked promising until my 'day job' got in the way. Hopefully things will settle down a bit soon and I can get back to it.

While I was out trailing Mum on her latest excursion to find someone who died before I was born, it occurred to me that it's been years since I got excited about anything on my PC. Upgrades were pretty pointless ([email protected] here, still), games were just more of the same (The Last of Us being a notable exception for me), and the fun had gone out of this hobby. I barely even turned on my desktop machine any more unless I fancied a few laps of the Nordschleife in Assetto Corsa. But VR is the 3Dfx of the 21st century; it takes the experience to another level and gives you a reason to be paying attention again.

Says the man who's had about an hour in the helmet so far. By tomorrow I could be back to miserable old cynic, but for now I'm enjoying being enthusiastic about something after a pretty miserable couple of years. You can't put a price on that really.
 
Reppyboyo said:
I also caved.

Any /must have/ games for this then?
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Yes, what are the must-haves?

I must admit that scrolling through those available on Steam has me wavering a little... Many look like the novelty tech demos I had initially rejected VR for...

Which games will set me right? :)
 
I have just managed to bluff my way through SteamVR to get into Project Cars 1. Watching the startup movie set out in cinema mode ahead of me was way more impressive than I expected. Definitely a big screen experience. Then I hit start for my default solo race and...

OMFG! I'm in a car! This can't be happening. It is freakily real despite the smearovision. I loved my three screen setup for sims, but this -- as so many have said before me -- is in a different league. I wanted to reach out and fiddle with the buttons on the wheel. Just looking round is a delight. It's a low res cartoon version of reality, but my brain says it's fine, thanks.

I can't comment on motion as I still have it configured for my G27, which is at the back of the wardrobe. Probably not for long though!
 
My must have game is Superhot VR, played the non VR version to death and the VR version is fantastic.

The Climb is another of mine. Find I get really immersed into it.
 
Lone echo
Superhot vr
Killing floor incursion
Rec room (the quests especially)
Robo recall
Google earth VR
Project cars 2
Eve valkyrie
Elevens table tennis (scarily realistic, my tech demo for newbies coming to try).
Alien isolation vr mod (scariest ever!!!!)
Medium or tilt brush for creativity
Arktika.1
From other suns
The mages tale
Arizona sunshine
Space pirate trainer
Dead and buried
Payday 2
Pavlov VR
Yooka-Laylee VR mod
 
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